Clinical Practice
“The labours of the doctor as well as the quest of the patient are directed towards that hidden and yet unmanifest “whole” man, who is at once the greater and future man. But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus.”
(“Psychology and Alchemy,” par 6. C.G. Jung)
“The true Physician does not stand outside his work but is always in the thick of it…”
Jung (Psychology and Alchemy par 5)
What is Jungian Analysis?
According to Jung, “There is in the psyche a process that seeks its own goal independently of external factors.” He believed that the really important things were within, and that “the unconscious” was a living force within us striving towards the realization of an inner balance, a higher consciousness and an enlargement of the personality.
For Jung, psychology is not something that comes out of books, but rather his psychology came out of his experience with his own psyche.
Thus, Jungian analysis is a process through which one learns directly from the psyche itself and how to work with it. If for instance, the unconscious gives you anxiety, then you learn from that, if it gives you anger, you learn from that too by asking yourself, “is there something in the emotion that I need to learn?” you let it teach you something. This is an “opus contra naturam” movement because one generally wants to run away from painful and uncomfortable emotions, “give me something quickly to get rid of this…” but it is through the capacity to hold the negatives and the positives together in one’s consciousness, through the capacity to bear the tension, without letting one destroy or repress the other, that a new third, a new attitude can emerge from the unconscious.
“Little can be achieved with will and good intentions if the unconscious does not lend a hand…”
Jung (Mysterium par 751)
“The ground work does not show… until one day”Anonymous
