The path to oneself is the main direction of movement of Jungian psychotherapy. On this path, the psychotherapist acts rather than as an attending physician, but as a partner of the client, a “companion on the path.” Together they work with the client’s symptoms, dreams, emotions, and behavior, understanding what the client’s unconscious reveals to them through them.
In accordance with the views of K. Jung, the unconscious of a person lives in balance and maintains itself in this state. The client’s problems are a consequence of the imbalance of his psyche, but in response to this, the psyche mobilizes its other parts (complexes). Complexes carry a certain emotional charge, usually unacceptable to consciousness and therefore repressed, but manifested in dreams, various symptoms, memories, emotions, instinctive impulses and fantasies, as well as in behavior. Jungian psychologists believe that by recognizing (with the help of the therapist) their complexes, making them conscious and establishing ego control over them, the client will get rid of his problems.
As in traditional psychoanalysis, in Jungianism much attention is paid to transference — the relationship between the therapist and the client, reflecting the client’s habitual ways of interacting with significant people for him. Projecting his ideas, values and problems onto the therapist, the client sees in him those qualities — positive and negative — that are known to him from the experience of relationships with parents, brothers and sisters, as well as with other significant people in his life, and which are incorporated by him into the form of complexes. By understanding the relationship the client sees and creates, the therapist helps the client begin to build healthier relationships.
In Jungian psychotherapy there is no definite scheme of the psychotherapeutic process, and it is impossible to predetermine the required number of sessions. Sometime there is an isolation, research and interpretation of complexes, at other times the client, together with the therapist, is trying to understand the purpose of the pathology and find the potential for growth. In the analysis of dreams, the focus is not so much on their intellectually satisfying interpretation, but on the experience of these dreams and their assimilation on an emotional plane.
Part of psychotherapy takes place outside the scheduled meetings of the psychotherapist with the client, outside the sessions. The client can do part of the work himself: writing down his dreams and reflecting on their content, draw pictures depicting images of his unconscious, create cultures and dances that reflect the life of his inner universe, talk with characters that he can discern in his inner world.
According to Jung, the goal of psychotherapy is not only the removal of the client’s problems and getting rid of his complexes, but the movement of the personality towards individuation, towards the continuous process of the client’s awareness of his uniqueness and the development of his creative abilities by the client.
The Jungian approach to psychotherapy is characterized by cooperation between the therapist and the client, as well as adaptation to the individual characteristics of each client. The therapist encourages manifestations of the client’s uniqueness, respecting his inner wisdom and his ability to find integrity. Jungian psychologists do not believe in the possibilities of the mind, relying more on feeling and inner wisdom. This is obviously a phenomenological and humanitarian approach, where there is no place for science and objective behavioral indicators.
The disadvantages of Jungian psychotherapy are mostly the flip side of its merits. Among them is its relative inefficiency in short-term use. Although there are cases where only a few sessions have achieved the desired changes, most clients still need long-term psychotherapy, which requires a significant investment of time and money.
Jungian psychotherapy, which focuses on personality transformation and individual development, is often inappropriate for individuals whose problems require quick action, such as in cases of addiction and domestic violence. For the same reason, Jungian psychotherapists often avoid working with children, couples, families, and other groups.
Attention to dreams and other figurative “products” sometimes turns into a negative side. The client may become so carried away by the play of the imagination that the problems of waking life recede into the background, and attention to inner reality may begin to destroy attention to outer reality.