Return to yourself

Each of us has his own history, his own destiny, his own view of the world and of himself in this world. But at the same time, we are all very similar: we cry from pain, laugh from joy, experience the delight of love and the torment of jealousy, feel tenderness for a newborn and fear of death. We are part of civilization, culture, experience of previous generations.

We are like leaves on the crown of a huge centuries-old tree: despite the dissimilarity of the individual pattern, we feed on juices from one root. What each of us experiences in our lives, people experienced and comprehended long before we were born. The memory of this is preserved in myths, legends, fairy tales and symbols — they reflect the universal experience of previous generations, which can help any of us cope with a personal problem.

The myth not only tells about a similar situation, it simultaneously shows how it can be resolved. So thought Carl Gustav Jung, an outstanding Swiss scientist and psychotherapist who created the method of analytic therapy.

Jung’s legacy

Carl Gustav Jung was a student of Sigmund Freud. However, after many years of working together, they experienced a painful breakup due to the fact that their views on psychoanalysis drastically diverged. Jung suggested that our personality consists of the Ego (the conscious part of the psyche), the personal unconscious, which contains repressed painful memories and feelings, and the collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious is the emotional reactions and stereotypes of behavior common to all, which manifest themselves in everyone in the form of archetypes. These universal patterns determine our thinking and behavior.

Jung agreed with Freud that the problems of some patients can only be solved by working with the personal unconscious — helping them become aware of repressed memories, fantasies, feelings associated with individual experience. But more often he had to deal with the fact that some scenario seems to hold a person captive and is reproduced in all areas of life: in communication with people, in work, in relation to oneself.

For example, the patient’s life is like a heroic path: to achieve the goal, he breaks through numerous obstacles, constantly wins (even in the most ordinary situations), each achievement is given to him thanks to hard work. In this case, one of the archetypes influences the person.

Jung realized that in such a situation it is necessary to help the client understand what archetype is holding him captive, to give him the opportunity to see him from the outside, to free himself from his influence. Otherwise, a person will not be able to enter the path of individuation (self-realization) and find his Self — to become himself, following his nature. Instead, he will unconsciously obey collective norms and stereotypes of behavior. At the same time, having freed himself from the influence of archetypes, a person will not lose touch with the collective unconscious, which can enrich him on the way to finding himself.

Jung proved that each of us has our own way of becoming a person: there are no general recipes for development, and our internal law is many times more important than public opinion, worship of authorities. Moving away from Freud, he painfully experienced their break. But this is what allowed him to create a new theory and a new method of psychotherapy.

Find the roots of the problem

28-year-old Ekaterina turned to a Jungian psychotherapist a year after her marriage. Her life was quite prosperous: a loving husband, an interesting job, friends. However, she felt depressed and empty. She completely melted into her husband and felt that as a person she ceased to exist.

During therapy, Ekaterina “remembered” that her relationship with her mother is also built: you have to guess her desires and do everything to be a “good girl”. Later it turned out that everything she has to do absorbs her: she continues to think about work in the evenings, constantly scrolls through conversations with people or work situations in her head and tries to mentally correct what did not work out.

The plot that unfolds in Catherine’s life reminded the therapist of the myth of Demeter and Persephone, and he retold it to her. Persephone was the daughter of the fertility goddess Demeter. At the beginning of the myth, she appears as a carefree girl who is completely dependent on her mother, and she does not even have her own name. Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnaps her and takes her as his wife. Demeter forces Zeus to return her daughter, who, however, can no longer fully belong to her mother: from now on, she must spend two-thirds of the year with her husband. As the queen of the underworld, she acquires her own name — Persephone.

This story, the symbolic language of the myth, allowed Catherine to see the nuances of her life, to understand that her experiences are associated with a strong unconscious dependence on her mother. That is why she is passive in relationships with other people, afraid to express herself, constantly analyzes how her actions will affect others. Her false «I», consisting of maternal prescriptions, did not allow her to become herself, to break through to the true «I» — the source of desires and pleasures.

Symbol — connection with the unconscious

It is hard to believe, but the internal conflicts that we experience, the situations in which we find ourselves, are reflected in many symbols and myths created long before we were born. In them, the experience of generations of our ancestors is preserved in a capacious form. And every modern person can see in them a story that is close to him.

Universal symbols: the cross, the butterfly, the tree, the bowl, the labyrinth, the star, etc., become an important tool in the work of the Jungian therapist if they are born by the client himself (for example, in a dream). After all, symbols express what we anticipate and are ready to realize.

Pavel is 36 years old, a successful top manager, he was unexpectedly demoted. Recognizing that the leadership’s decision was the right one, he felt hopeless and overwhelmed. In therapy, it turned out that every time Pavel achieved success, he lost interest in work and began to neglect his duties. Therefore, the authorities decided to change the situation.

The therapy lasted for several weeks, and at one of the meetings, Pavel spoke about his dream. He dreamed of a butterfly flying towards the fire and dying. At the request of the therapist, he began to give associations to the word «butterfly» — the first thing that comes to mind. It turned out that she flew in from a beautiful country where different animals live without conflicts and contradictions.

Every being can be itself — spontaneously and freely manifest itself. When a butterfly enters our world, it almost immediately burns up in a fire: free flight is fraught with danger and death. This symbolic image helped (both the therapist and the client) to see that Pavel was afraid to achieve success, which is associated with an unconscious fantasy that self-expression, any achievement must necessarily lead to death.

It took a long time to change this idea, and Paul saw how this fantasy was not true. Yes, on the path of growing up, achieving success, something needs to be parted, something dies in us or in relationships with people — for the sake of the birth of a new one. But success in real life does not lead to death. Thus, the butterfly symbol both showed the client’s problem and became a resource for solving it.

Personal therapy for a psychotherapist

Training in Jungian psychotherapy is a very lengthy process. In addition to theory and methodology, myths, fairy tales, traditions of different cultures of the world are studied in detail. Later, this knowledge allows the therapist to more accurately understand the client and makes it possible to see universal human plots in his problem.

One of the conditions of training is the passage of personal therapy. Jungians have the concept of a “wounded healer” — it means that the therapist faces the same problems in his life, with the same pain as his clients, but in the course of training and personal therapy he works out his complexes and conflicts and therefore can better understand other people.

According to Jung, a healthy person differs from a sick person in that he knows how to learn a positive lesson from his problems, get an impulse for further development, and a sick person gets stuck in conflicts. The goal of Jungian psychotherapy is not only to solve the client’s problems, but also to teach him to learn from overcoming obstacles, to show that this makes him stronger and leads him along the path of becoming a person.