WELCOME TO Module 3

This Jungian Life @ www.thisjungianlife.com

 

          Lisa Marchiano, Jungian Analyst, Philadelphia, PennsylvaniA

Joseph Lee, Jungian Analyst, Virginia Beach, Virginia

          Deborah Stewart, Jungian Analyst, Cape Cod, Massachusetts

­­­­­­­­­                  __________________________________________________

 

Module 3: Understanding Jung’s Structure of the Psyche

         THIS JUNGIAN LIFE DREAM SCHOOL EDITED TRANSCRIPT

 

Deb: In this module we’re going to provide an overview of Jung’s ideas about how psyche is structured. There are more concise and organized summaries of these concepts in the notes, and also a diagram of the structure of the psyche. First, we’ll give a brief exposition of some of these major components of the psyche according to Jung.

Joseph: As we delineate the system of the psyche, it reminds me of creating a cosmology. There’s a feeling of in the beginning was this. As life progressed, various other categories and functions concretized and separated out. When we are in utero, and when we first emerge as infants, we are in a state of oneness with all of our psychological potentials. Jung sometimes called this the masa confusa. All the unconscious dynamisms and potentials are there, in a big mishmash, and it’s through the process of life that things separate out. One thing that separates out early is the ego–the sense of “I.”

Deb: The ego is actually a more complicated concept than at first it might seem. We see the ego emerge very typically in a two-year-old–the so-called “terrible twos.” The first sense of “I” emerges as no, as in, “no jacket or hat.” But it’s the center of consciousness–that continuous sense of self we’ve had ever since our earliest awareness of ourselves. It’s where we can exercise our will and is our subjective sense of identity: who I am, what I feel, and what I want.

Joseph: Jung had an idea that as an infant’s hand hits the side of a crib, it creates a core sensory memory of something other than himself. Through repeated experiences of “I” and “not I,” a boundary begins to build in the psyche, creating a sense of individual separateness—“I.”

Lisa: The ego is that part of us that incarnates in a particular time and space, if you will. This is also related to Jung’s experience of his personality one and personality two. Personality one was similar to what we think of as the ego, the person who moves in the world and deals with the realities of the outer world. Personality two is something much more timeless that we’ll talk about in a minute when we speak of the Self. I also want to lift up the idea that the ego has to relate to both the outer world and the inner world. The ego is that part of the personality that mediates these two things.

Joseph: In the simplest sense, suppose you’re at a party and someone is unfiltered. He blurts out anything he’s feeling in a radical and obvious way. We might say that person’s ego doesn’t seem very structured because if it was really on the mark, it would be mediating between instinctive surges and choosing what to say.

Lisa: Psychologically, the ego is that part of us which is capable of self-reflection…

Joseph: …and frustration. Jung felt that the ego builds from earliest days through frustration, like those experiences during the “terrible twos.” The child is moving in a particular direction and either the environment or the parents say no. And then the child is left to his own devices to churn with his feelings, energy and power inside. And it’s the ego that has to develop a muscle to hold that frustration as his own.

Lisa: Other psychoanalysts have also talked about this. Winnicott talked about optimal frustration, and other object relations psychologists talked about this in a similar way. It’s in those experiences of being met by the not I and having our desires frustrated that consciousness sort of coagulates. Jung is very much in agreement with these other thinkers.

Deb: We have collisions with both the outer environment and our inner environment. For example, I really want to go to the party tonight and I have a big exam in school tomorrow. How do I manage those conflicting desires between the immediate gratification of the party and the gratification of doing well on the exam? It’s a constant process of becoming more conscious and taking things into ourselves rather than projecting them out into the external world. How do I self-regulate so I can have will and judgment? How do I develop reality testing in the outer world and a realistic understanding of how I function in the inner world?

Lisa: In dream interpretation, we often talk about the dream ego, the “I” in the dream. If I dreamed I was at a conference talking to a friend, the “I” in the dream would be my dream ego and it would stand in roughly for my conscious “I.”

Joseph: The dream ego is a derivative of the waking ego, which explains why you’ll often believe things in a dream that would be absurd in your waking life, like a dream of sitting in a room and an elephant floats through the air. It seems perfectly reasonable in the dream, showing that the ego can change its capacity for reality testing. Reality testing is an important process, especially in childhood when we learn what is in the external environment versus what is in the internal environment. We go through this when we’re afraid there are monsters under the bed–or we’ve had a bad dream and imagine that the dream figure is actually pursuing us in the outer world, so mom and dad have to soothe us. But mom and dad also have to instruct us in the difference between the imaginal world and the outer world. Maintaining those levels is very important to properly adapt to world and be functional. In extraordinary states like schizophrenia, those levels of reality start to blend again and people can become very frightened and act very irrationally. A good, functioning ego keeps the levels separate in a way that is defined.

Lisa: There’s both sturdiness and flexibility in good ego functioning. Joseph, you used a word that I think is really important – adapting. I think that is exactly what a healthy ego allows us to do. It helps us to adapt to our external and internal environments.

Deb: I’m going to go back to what you said, Joseph, about the dream ego being derivative of our waking life ego. It’s the “I” when we write a dream down or tell it to somebody. We say, I was in this place, and then I was at the conference, and then I did this. Sometimes the dream ego is congruent with the waking ego and it feels like yes–that’s the way I would act. But sometimes the dream ego is incongruent with a given situation. For example, I was driving down the highway going very fast, even though the highway was on a steep mountainside with hairpin turns. That would not be congruent with the waking life ego–or so we hope! What the dream ego perceives and how it perceives it in the dream is an important part of understanding a dream.

Joseph: Another function of the ego is to create a sense of continuity over time. Some ego functions are so automatic that it’s hard to define them, like a fish taking water for granted. We take for granted that when we wake up in the morning, we don’t feel like a radically different person from the day before. We’ve all had the experience of waking up for a minute, turning the alarm clock off, and having a dream that could be four minutes long but felt like it encompassed a month or a year. In the unconscious, time is mutable and continuity over time is extremely flexible. But in order to relate to the outer world, continuity of time is essential, and our egos do that for us.

Lisa: Related to the ego but a little different is the idea of persona, which we discussed in a podcast. The word persona comes from the Greek word for mask.

Deb: Persona is our role, the way we like to be perceived in the social world. We say about someone, “She has a bubbly personality, or “He’s really quiet but once you get to know him, you’ll see that he has a lot of ideas.” We’re referring to persona, or presentation, a lot of the time.

Lisa: Also, we might appear to be slightly different people when we’re hanging out at our college reunion versus when we go to work, or have dinner with an aunt and uncle. We might show a slightly different part of ourselves, and be more regulated in some environments than others. We can put on and take off masks that are appropriate to different roles at different times.

Joseph: This mask—persona–serves us. It often functions as the more ideal aspects of ourselves and reflects what is valued in a given culture or subculture.

Deb: Most of us don’t identify with our personas. We know we show different aspects of ourselves when we’re having dinner with an aunt and uncle versus hanging out with friends. We know that these are aspects of ourselves but not our totality.

Lisa: But also, as we know, some people get identified with a particular role in life, and that can be a source of symptoms. In dreams persona is often represented by clothing. For example, if someone in a dream is choosing clothes in a store, clothing might relate to persona, because clothing is something you put on and take off.

Deb: All kinds of coverings can be related to the idea of the mask: clothing, hairstyle, house, even a car. All those things show up in dreams.

Joseph: Lest we undervalue this, the persona is highly valuable to functioning in the world, particularly for people who are more extroverted. They really need persona as a way of finding a pleasing and positive way to engage with the world. We also know people who have really poor personas or perhaps no persona–these can be very unfiltered people in the world. They may walk into a party and say or do things that make us cringe. We might say they really “tell it like it is,” but there is a tremendous cost to being shocking or rubbing people the wrong way.

Lisa: So persona is absolutely necessary and adaptive.

Joseph: Yes, we need it, although it can also be suffocating. When the persona gets too rigid, the unlived life starts to activate in the unconscious and we can become symptomatic.

Lisa: One of the things Jung said is that the persona is often an idealized version of ourselves. It’s rather like your Instagram self, the curated image that you want the world to see. What compensates the persona is shadow, which is a very significant part of Jung’s model of the psyche.

Deb: I’m thinking of this as a sandwich with the ego in the middle. The persona is on top– the curated, “Instagram” image we show to the world–and the shadow is underneath, all that we don’t want the world to see. Shadow makes us squirm with discomfort—it’s our weaknesses, greed, aggression, and other aspects of ourselves that we want to keep under wraps. So the persona and the shadow compensate for one another. The persona puts a gloss on things and wants to obfuscate shadow, not only so the world doesn’t see it, but so we ourselves can avoid it. But shadow is very valuable, and it shows up every night in our dreams. It shows us parts of ourselves that we really need to know about, because that’s where wholeness and healing come from. Shadow is like the lotus that grows in the mud.

Lisa: That’s a great image. There’s a developmental component to shadow as well. We normally think that shadow develops in the course of growth and development, as we learn from our parents, teachers and culture what parts of us are unacceptable. We relegate these parts to the shadow. We have to “disappear” them. Some common things relegated to shadow might be sexuality, greed or aggression, but shadow is also many kinds of values in families that for one reason or another are not accepted, so a child learns to hide them. For some families that value practicality and work, creativity might be in the shadow.

Joseph: Extending your example, Lisa, let’s say you’re raised in a very pragmatic home, and the child says, I want to be an architect. The family says, That’s ridiculous. Everyone in this family works in the family plumbing and heating business. There can be a sense that the creative and aspirational has to be divorced in order to be loved and accepted. But when it goes underground, it churns. It could take many years but shadow aspects of ourselves begin to press upon us later on, wanting to be admitted into consciousness.

Deb: The way we often see our shadow in dreams is in the characters that the ego doesn’t like or has a conflict with. There might be a beggar who’s dirty and lying in a gutter, or someone who’s drunk. It might be an authoritarian policeman or an over-dressed woman putting on airs. Our reaction to these figures is usually pretty much aligned with both the dream ego and our waking egos: That’s not me. I’m not like that at all.

Lisa: Shadow also shows up in dreams as frightening images, so if we’ve disallowed something in the psyche that is threatening to our ego attitude, it often gets pictured in a dream in a threatening way. We’ll give more examples of this in the module on shadow, but for now we want to give a little taste of how shadow might show up. It’s a major component in many dreams.

Joseph: Shadow is also a major component in how we think of healing in Jungian work. Here’s how I think about shadow: the ego lives in an “urban environment” in the psyche,  whereas shadow has been banished to the wilderness. Anything in the wilderness becomes more and more uncivilized and wild. So when a shadow content finally comes back and starts pounding on ego’s “city door,” it can seem ferocious and out of control, as if it’s covered with hair and has claws…

Lisa: ..like it’s untamed…

Joseph: …because it hasn’t had the benefit of “civil society.” Often when our shadow has finally had enough and demands acceptance, it actually has become rather uncivilized due to being banished.

Lisa: Yes, and now it actually is threatening to the ego’s attitude, because ego’s defensive stance is being challenged by the shadow content.

Deb: People dream of wild animals, they dream of monsters, and they dream of space aliens. There are all kinds of bathroom dreams where people lose control of their bowels or their bladders in a social situation. The feelings that come up are often fear and shame…

Joseph: …and anxiety. That’s one of the ways we can be kept away from approaching a part of our shadow, which is generally established through parental controls or institutional punishments that we receive for exhibiting shadow deemed socially unacceptable.

Deb: The big clue around shadow is feeling. When we are feeling especially repulsed or ashamed or scared, or in some way intensely uncomfortable, that is often a clue that there’s a shadow element that has been banished into the psychic wilderness.

Lisa: One of the great things about dream work is that it can help us get in touch with shadow. Jung once famously said that 99% of the shadow is pure gold. So whatever we banished into the psychic woodlands contains a lot of energy, and it’s energy that can be used for the growth of the personality if it’s reclaimed, restored, and related to consciously. Dream work gives us a wonderful opportunity to know these contents better and begin to relate to them.

Joseph: We’re being gifted with symbolic images to relate to those forces in ourselves, and those images of shadow are usually titrated to help the ego drink in a little bit of shadow– not so much that we get crushed by it, but enough that we can be affected by it.

Deb: When the concept of shadow is first introduced, I think people are often a little bit fearful that they’ll be overwhelmed–that something will come roaring out of that psychic forest you described, Joseph, and attack them. But dream images are by and large titrated, and present themselves when we are ready to receive them.

Lisa: We’ve lifted up some of the positive aspects of shadow, and that its approach to us is scaled to what we are ready to receive. Now I want to take a little pivot and talk about the personal unconscious, so let’s define it.

Deb: The personal unconscious, especially as it appears in dreams, usually relates to people, places and situations that we recognize. It’s that bully we encountered in the third grade, or the friend across the street.

Lisa: Yes–it’s things we’ve known and have either repressed or forgotten.

Joseph: Sometimes it’s called the non-conscious level of the psyche, because it could be conscious, but at the moment it’s not. That’s also a just a part of being alive in the world. There are a lot of thoughts and events in the course of the week, and if we tended to all of them at a conscious level, they would be overwhelming.

Lisa: Exactly. None of us could do that, so our nervous system filters out what we don’t need to worry about in the moment–but it all still registers and is in there somewhere.

Joseph: It’s kind of like an index: non-conscious but could be conscious.

Deb: We recognize this in dream images of people and situations we can relate to: That’s my brother-in-law, or Wow! I haven’t seen that person since I was ten. But they’re familiar, not foreign or totally other.

Lisa: This shows how the shadow is related to experiences stored in the personal unconscious. Underneath the personal unconscious, there is something vast that Jung called the collective unconscious—it’s a uniquely Jungian concept.

Joseph: The collective unconscious is hard to describe, because by definition we are not able to be conscious of it—we can never make it conscious. We begin to hypothesize its contents and influence by the wake it leaves behind.

Deb: According to Jung the collective unconscious is part of the great repository of human experience over millennia. It consists of symbols and figures that are part of every mythology, like the hero, the witch, the father–it goes on and on. Or symbols like towers, crossroads, and many other familiar things around the world. These symbols are part of our common human psychic heritage.

Lisa: There’s a universality to these concepts that are not images per se but are more like inherent patterns. Jung compared this to the crystalline lattice structure of a crystal. Even when it’s in liquid form, that pattern is an inherent possibility. Given the right conditions, it will crystallize out and create a particular, predictable structure. That was one of Jung’s metaphors for how these energies exist.

Joseph: In my own quest to get some kind of conceptual grasp on the collective unconscious, I stumbled upon the idea of contextual parameters from quantum physics. It was a study of the contexts that need to be present in order for certain phenomena to spontaneously emerge. For instance, if we were curious about how to make snow, we might build a box that had a power source with dials around it. One might be for temperature, one might be for humidity, and one might be for air speed or wind. We would set the dials in a particular way to make snow, and turn it on. When we open the box, it’s slush, which isn’t what we were aiming for. We would dump the slush out and keep refining the settings on the dials until we got them just right. When the temperature, wind, and humidity were all exactly right, we would open the box and snow would have been spontaneously created. If we sit with that for a second, theoretical physicists might say that “snow flakeness” as a universal is omnipresent, just waiting for certain conditions to become visible. Under the right conditions, or contexts, snow could happen anywhere. Then we would have to ask how we imagine those potentials existing. I think this is what Jung was reaching for and trying to identify. An archetype is the context that the physicists were talking about. Heidegger called it an affordance, a possibility that’s waiting for the right conditions to spontaneously activate and become manifest.

Lisa: We have moved into talking about archetypes, the contents of the collective unconscious—those inherent patterns prior to experience that are activated, or constellated, under the right conditions. Such patterns manifest in certain universal ways in the outer world—it’s very mysterious.

Deb: The collective unconscious is the home of the archetypes, and given the right conditions in an individual’s life, some image or idea, a symbol or an experience, will take place, much as snowflakes would materialize in your magic box, Joseph. We have experiences of deeply felt universal patterns—the archetype of the hero or witch comes alive in us as we read about King Arthur or if we are severely scolded. Archetypal images appear in dreams as well.

Lisa: Absolutely–archetypal images are common in dreams and they always carry a huge amount of energy and affect. One of the ways we know that we had an archetypal dream is the presence of an element that is unrealistic in terms of the ordinary world. Something might look supernatural, or unnatural–like a talking giraffe–and then we know we’re in the archetypal realm. I want to add, though, that archetypal contents can also manifest in the collective, as Jung’s work with UFOs shows. Lots of people were reporting UFO sightings, and Jung became interested and wanted to explore them as archetypal phenomena. What was manifesting the collective that made UFO sightings a relatively common experience?

Joseph: As Jung tried to analyze these sightings, trying to hypothesize the pattern organizing those experiences, he began to think that this was fairly universal. People have been looking up in the skies and seeing numinous phenomena forever. Maybe back in 1250, people would look up in the sky and swear that they’d seen an angel. UFOs carry a similar valance, but now it’s clothed in modern images.

Lisa: These sightings would, then, be an example of the activation of an archetype.

Joseph: Coming back to the idea of the collective unconscious, Jung and many systems of mysticism posit a place where these patterns reside. This universal womb of potential seems to connect all human beings, perhaps even all manifest life, and influences it.

Deb: The experience of these phenomena is other. They’re filled with wonder and awe–a not me feeling. The example of UFOs is like having a dream in the world, but unlike a nighttime dream, the experience is this happened outside me. We’re deeply affected by these images that don’t feel like they’re from our own memories or personal psychology. The feeling is I didn’t create this. This experience came to me or through me but it’s not of me or from me.

Lisa: Yes, and now we’re edging into the idea of the Self, but let’s save that for last and talk now about complexes and anima and animus.

Joseph: Since we’re talking about functional components of the psyche that people can identify in their dreams, let’s talk about anima and animus first, because those seem to be universal.

Lisa: Anima and animus is a big topic and an important one, because this is an image that frequently shows up in dreams. Understanding anima and animus can help us understand dreams better.

Joseph: In a traditional or classic Jungian sense, a man’s psyche would experience a dream image of a beloved female figure around which there was great desire for connection and relationship. Psychologically, when a man’s psyche came into right rapport with this inner image, the waking life would benefit in a number of ways. Most important, perhaps, is that the ego would gain access to the collective unconscious, which brings up the idea of the psychopomp, a Greek word that means guide of souls.

Deb: These anima/animus images also have a negative side. The anima can be the guide of souls and appear in beneficent form, and it can appear in its negative aspect as a witch or something like that. It’s the contra-sexual, the opposite. It appears as the feminine in a man’s psyche, and the masculine in a woman’s psyche. It has a bipolar structure–positive and negative–but it’s always powerful and has a fascinating or intriguing quality.

Lisa: Yes, because the anima, for example, is both a functional complex and an archetype. And all archetypes, which we forgot to say a minute ago, have a bipolar nature. There’s a positive aspect of an archetype and a negative aspect. That’s an important point.

Deb: That’s why the anima and animus are considered the bridge to the collective unconscious, kind of like a twilight zone between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. How do we gain access to the collective unconscious? Through images that have archetypal properties and are personified in our dreams as a witch or an angel or…

Joseph: …a prophet.

Deb: Yes. Images of the collective unconscious, like anima and animus, have a numinous quality clothed in a specific, known image that we can relate to.

Lisa: I often find that when I’m sitting with someone and they bring in a dream with an important contra-sexual figure in it, like a person of the opposite sex, I wonder if this could be an anima or animus figure. It’s not always the case, but considering anima/animus can often provide a productive road to what that figure might mean in a dream. I don’t often find that this content shows up like a witch or a wizard or something unusual, but more in a more ordinary way, like an ex-boyfriend that a woman still thinks about. Could that be an image of the inner masculine that this woman wants to reconnect with?

Joseph: When we experience a kind of loving relationship with this inner figure, the waking life is enhanced. Sticking to cultural characteristics of Jung’s time and work, men were expected to be unemotional and rather gruff and intellectual. Gentleness was fairly disallowed, so it was often projected onto women and could coalesce in the psyche as a female figure. It’s interesting that even though a man might be disallowed those qualities, in his dream life he might encounter a beloved figure with those qualities, and feel an intense need to connect with that figure. This is the drive for wholeness. I suspect that in a man’s psyche, what the anima looks like is probably based on cultural norms. And in a women’s psyche, regardless of how much we try to abandon gender norms, most of us were raised in cultures where we were expected to accommodate them. So those parts of a woman that were not supported and allowed outward expression constellate in a woman’s psyche as male figures because they are parts of her. She finds it deeply compelling to be connected to that figure, and when that happens on an imaginal level, people generally feel a great sense of relief and completion.

Lisa: What I see with a lot of women is that an animus figure in a dream often relates to her creativity and ability to bring projects to fruition.

Deb: To add a contrarian position, what about the vampire in the collective as an animus figure? It’s fascinating, it attracts us, it’s hard to look away, and it’s also very negative. The animus is not only a positive kind of psychic energy. The overall characteristic of the animus or anima is that it attracts us. It fascinates us, whereas we usually tend to find shadow repellent: I’m not like that. We can’t look away from the other more numinous imagery of the animus or anima, even if it’s imaged as a vampire.

Joseph: I’m going to pivot, and return to the general idea of the anima/animus as a guide of souls. That gives us a very sobering idea of Jung’s work. The collective unconscious, which he would sometimes compare metaphorically to the world of the gods, was dangerous for the ego to muck around in. Many myths and fairytales relate the danger of a human getting too close to a god–something bad would happen. Today, we may talk to friends who have had intense experiences with psychedelics. Drugs plunge the ego into the collective unconscious where it can experience overwhelming states of euphoria or horror. If we were to allow that to unfold naturally, those encounters would be titrated by the inner figures of the anima/animus, and be more useful to the waking life.

Lisa: Instead of overwhelming and blowing away all of our psychic structure, it would be something that could be related to and integrated into consciousness.

Joseph: The last of what we call functional complexes, structures common to all human beings, is the idea of the Self. It’s a very difficult thing to talk about, because by its nature it transcends anything the conscious mind can contain.

Lisa: It starts to sound very mystical. Jung talked about it being both the center and the circumference of the psyche, and said that it might be called the god within.

Deb: The Self is Jung’s term for the god-image and it is essentially mysterious. As parts, we can’t comprehend or describe the whole.

Lisa: In terms of lived and observed experience the Self is implicit when we sense that things are unfolding according to a plan. We may not know it consciously, but some part of us has an inkling of rightness. The Self is that which prods us from within to follow the unfolding for which we were intended. We’ve talked about this in connection with individuation.

Joseph: When we’re born, any sense of “I,” or ego, is merged with the total potential of our personality, in both the inner and outer worlds. All the range of feelings, all the potential talents are there. And the ego, like a seed, separates out from the totality over the course of life. Throughout the course of life, this huge amount of potential is constantly pressing upon the seed, the ego, to manifest just a little more in this direction or a little more in that direction. And since the Self is enormous, we can’t bring everything forward. But the Self is relentless, and sometimes we feel that as a kind of divine discontent. Every time we achieve something, we may rest on our laurels for a little while, but then this inner engine starts to kick up again.

Lisa: Sometimes we’ve achieved something great in the outer world. We have a family and a job and security, but something within us is discontented. It’s not that this is wrong or we have to blow our life apart and do something else–it’s more about not bringing forward something important in us. So when someone comes in and expresses this kind of discontent, I will say, “Perhaps the question is what wants to come into the world through you? That is very much the kind of question that gets at the Self.

Deb: There’s a developmental trajectory, and I think we’re all familiar with it: the progression from walking to talking, falling in love, marriage and childbearing. But there’s also a psychological trajectory of development that usually–according to Jung–appears in the second half of life. That part of our life journey takes us into ourselves and has the element of discontent because the psyche wants to go somewhere. There’s an internal trajectory of development and purpose. Telos, what psychic energy is moving toward, is a subtle aspect of development, particularly in the second half of life. It’s not as discreet as learning to walk or talk but we’re pulled toward it.

Joseph: I would say that sometimes when the Self activates, people have a feeling like OMG, I’ve been on the wrong track for twenty years. Usually, if we let go of some of the extreme feelings, it’s not that we’ve been doing something wrong for twenty years, it’s that the next stage is appearing. There’s an invitation, perhaps an urgency, to make a transition. We may go through many transitions. It may be that somebody will have three well-developed careers, and leave the last one not because it was a mistake but because the Self has lost interest–the person has absorbed or actualized what was required. Given health, or time and resources, the Self can say let’s move into the next stage.

Lisa: The nature of the relationship of the conscious personality to the Self is always one of being in relationship to something much bigger than we are. A famous quote from Jung about this is, “A victory for the Self is a defeat for the ego.” We have our ego plans and our ego perspectives, and when we come in contact with the Self, it can be rather devastating. I think this is important when we think about how the Self shows up in dreams, because a dream that references the Self will be numinous. It might be incredibly beautiful and awe-inspiring or frightening, but it’s always going to have that quality of something greater. It has a light and a dark side, but there is a quality of wholeness that makes it numinous. The story of Job from the Bible is an example of the Self that was very powerful.

Deb: After his encounter with what was greater, Job was changed. He was no longer only ego-oriented, demanding to know why his life had turned out badly. Job had a numinous, albeit frightening experience of the greater—Yahweh, the Self, God–that didn’t make sense from the perspective of the ego, yet resolved his inner conflict. It went beyond words, rationality and even morality.

Joseph: If we know that this is possible–perhaps we’ve been reading Jung, and thinking about this–we may be able to listen for this quality that demands growth from us. We could tell the “garden” of ourselves to make way for the demand of the Self. It does not have to be devastating or traumatic—we could adopt a willingness to accommodate and surrender to a higher power, which is a spiritual corrective. It shows up in AA, for example—and by the way, Jung had a part in the development of AA as well as other spiritual paths. When the ego turns to the Self and says I’m listening, you matter, and I’m not going to fight, much may still be required. That can be a willing sacrifice if the ego has decided to yield. But if the Self has to tear it out of your hands because the ego is unprepared, then it can be traumatic.

Deb: One way or the other, it is a defeat for the ego–except that it’s also a victory. When we do a module on dreams in which the Self appears, we’ll really be able to see this. But now we have one more important concept to talk about: complexes. A complex is a network of personal memories and associations that connect to an archetypal core, so they always have a strong emotional tone.

Joseph: One way of thinking about complexes is that as we go through life as individuals, we have millions of memories of everything under the sun. Our memories are not evenly distributed in our psychic life or we’d be constantly disorganized.

Lisa: So we naturally and unconsciously systematize them.

Joseph: Well, we don’t do it but something does. We notice this not only in dream life, but in how we function as human beings. Jung posited an organizing force and referred to it as an archetype. For instance, we have thousands of memories of father–not only of our personal father, but fathers we’ve seen on TV, friends’ fathers, fathers we’ve read about, or father-like figures…

Lisa: …including institutions and governments.

Joseph: Yes–anything that begins to gather under the umbrella of the father archetype. These elements have a shared meaning we recognize as fatherness. But the archetype is also a kind of a battery, or nuclear reactor, so more than pulling these elements together, it adds psychological energy that’s heated.

Lisa: So we have all kinds of powerful feelings about father and many other things. Complexes are characterized by strong feeling and bodily sensation. People say things like the hair on the back of my neck rose. Complexes are associated with our personal experiences and our memories…

Deb: …and our personal experiences are connected to a great core of archetypal energy. Fatherness is filtered down, I like to think, through an imaginary funnel from the archetypal realm down to the personal father–so one’s own father carries archetypal energy.

Lisa: Yes–you have a father complex and I have a father complex, but our father complexes are very different because we have different human fathers. We will be affected differently. Our fathers influence how we personally move through the world, have relationships and so on.

Deb: Also, complexes are autonomous. They tend to have us more than we have them. Something happens and it sets us off.

Lisa: It’s the notion of being triggered that’s used in popular culture. Suddenly you’re in a different emotional space where things actually look different. If you get into a space where you feel very downtrodden, convinced that things won’t work out, and get into catastrophic thinking, you’re probably in a complex. When you’re not in that space, your attitude is different. A complex is a big wave of emotion that comes over you, that’s part of a web of associations and memories, and is also connected to an archetypal core.

Joseph: This can have either a painful or a pleasurable effect, depending on the general content of memories. If a person has had very positive or pleasurable experiences of the father, the father complex will light us up. We might find ourselves compromising the way we think or feel in order to be pleasing to the father who pleases us. If the father complex is frightening because of negative experiences with father figures, when the father complex lights up inside, we might find that every male seems threatening.

Deb: We can tell that we are in a complex when our felt reactions and bodily reactions are out of proportion to what has actually happened in the external world. To stay with the example of the father complex, let’s say there’s a male supervisor who comes by and says something like that report is late. I told you I wanted it last week. If you go into a real tailspin of emotion, being scared, rebelling, or justifying the lateness, you may realize later that you were in a complex: I really overreacted. If your father was a stern authoritarian figure, you might be able to trace your powerful feelings with your boss back to that.

Lisa: Complexes are especially important when it comes to dreams. Jung said “the complex is the architect of the dream.” So these feeling states and webs of associations will show up as people or elements in our dreams. That’s something always to keep in mind when looking at dreams.

Deb: And the feeling tone of a dream lets us know when we’re in the territory of a complex.

Joseph: We’re often concerned in a healing context with complexes that disturb or distort the way we normally function. For example, in terms of a father complex, when I’m at home with my friends and family, I’m happy, relaxed, and accommodating. Then I go for an interview with somebody who reminds me of my dad, perhaps very subtly. I find myself feeling angry and rigid–perhaps frightened. Part of the realization is I don’t recognize myself right now. When the negative complex gets activated and comes into the proximity of ego, it will temporarily distort areas of feeling, thinking, intuition or sensation–or a combination of them. As we reel ourselves back to our base level, we can appreciate the power of the complex. If we misunderstand it, we might think it’s all about this fellow who interviewed me. That SOB! I’ll never interview there again. But through dream work, we can begin to realize this complex is in me. It’s got me. And it’s painting my problematic issues onto the environment. I need to understand this because it’s costing me.

Deb: This is another way that dreams help us crack the code.

Joseph: I’d like to add that complexes can be benign. We don’t generally talk about benign complexes because they aren’t causing problems. Over the course of our lives, we have memories of everything. If you don’t have a memory of something, you don’t know what it is–you have to figure that out to develop a memory. For example, when you’re born, you don’t know what something as ubiquitous as a table is. By the time you’re 20, you have many memories of tables. They’re clustered in your psyche around the archetype of table, so every time you see a table, you have a thread of benign memories. Complexes are one of the ways we’re able to interpret the world in a congruent way.

Deb: We’re basically organized with all kinds of complexes–categories and groupings around mother, father, table, school, work, everything. Complexes are the landscape of our psyche and if there’s a powerful complex and we get triggered, then we know something is asking us to pay attention to it and reflect on it. We can decode it and recognize where it lives in us instead of projecting it out into the world–onto our boss, for example.

Joseph: Dreams are helpful because complexes can masquerade as outer world circumstances and causes, but dreams gift us with an image. Because it’s internal, that can begin a conscious relationship to this problematic psychic phenomenon. It’s a gift because a dream offers a first step, a place to begin.

Lisa: This has been an overview of some of the key components in Jung’s model of the psyche. Jung had a unique vision of how the psyche was structured and how its components interact with each other dynamically. A basic understanding of Jung’s model of the psyche will be important as we begin to explore his views on dreams. We’ll hear more about all of these concepts in the upcoming modules, and you’ll also see examples of how they show up in dreams. For now, we hope to have provided you with a basic vocabulary of these structural Jungian concepts.

© This Jungian Life 2021 all rights reserved throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised.

DOWNLOAD  HERE

Lisa
Psychology as a discipline never appealed to me before I found Jung. I was, of course, familiar with the popularized version of Freud’s ideas. I understood him to have suggested that we have hidden impulses that are too shameful to be known and therefore we must hide them from ourselves. These ideas didn’t strike me with the force of truth. They didn’t seem entirely wrong, but in my opinion, they emphasized what was ignoble or debasing in human nature. For this reason, they were unappealing, but they also seemed to be missing some vital element, according to my naïve and incomplete understanding of the matter. My other exposures to psychology also left me cold and uninspired.

When I read Jung, however, I was immediately gripped. One of Jung’s key ideas is that the unconscious is like the ocean – eternally generative, infinitely abundant, the source of life itself. According to Jung, the unconscious is a repository for that which is repressed or forgotten, just as Freud said. But Jung went further. He believed that the unconscious is that part of us from which new, creative impulses originate. The unconscious can be ugly and frightening, but it can also be mysterious and beautiful. This view of the psyche seemed both true and ennobling. It focused me on my inner world, and I began an exploration of its terrain with excitement and fascination.

Jung’s structure of the psyche became a guide for me in this journey. Animus, complexes, shadow, persona, and Self – I could find these structures within myself, and this way of understanding my psyche gave me an enlarged and nuanced way to make sense of my experience. Coming to realize that I was made up of many parts – some of which were alien and unfathomable – was oddly comforting and enlivening.

Jung’s structure of the psyche was especially helpful to me as I became curious about my dreams. My dreams were populated by strangers, friends, and old forgotten acquaintances. I now understood these denizens of my dreams to be mysterious aspects of myself that were visiting at night to bring me a perspective unknown to my waking awareness. This was a strange way of looking at dreams but it was one that impressed upon me the boundless generosity of the inner world. Understanding Jung’s model of the psyche was my entry into a fascinating and ongoing inner adventure.

A basic principle of Jungian dream interpretation is that all elements of the dream are an aspect of the dreamer’s psyche. (We’ll talk more about this in an upcoming module.) Integrating this insight with Jung’s model of the psyche yields rich rewards when trying to understand a dream. While we need to resist the urge to make an interpretation according to a static formula, knowing to look for structures such as shadow, anima, and archetype can give us a starting point when analyzing our dreams.

Deb
When I entered a graduate social work program as my path to becoming a therapist, I was schooled in the biopsychosocial model of mental health. This model encouraged us to consider clients’ physical health, family, and environmental situations as well as their individual psychologies. Although external-world realities certainly matter, the biopsychosocial model didn’t allow me to feel I was really meeting the core needs of my clients. Purportedly holistic, this model did not enable me to understand or treat clients in a way that felt whole.

So after I graduated I enrolled in training to become a Gestalt therapy practitioner. Just as I will always be a social worker, I will always be a Gestalt therapist. This training helped me become more effectively interactive, valued a relational stance, and built awareness—for me as well as my clients. I was immersed in human dynamics and could work from a more solid foundation.

But this was still not enough—I wasn’t enough—for clients with trauma histories, who had shocked me into realizing the extent and effects of childhood trauma. Despite reading books by experts, I had questions I couldn’t even voice until Jungian analyst Donald Kalsched taught a seminar I attended. We were assigned his book, The Inner World of Trauma—and I was introduced to the Jungian understanding I didn’t know I needed. The Jungian world had me hooked.

I was subsequently introduced to Jung’s model of the psyche and experienced another ‘aha’ over finding exactly what I needed: a road map that named and oriented me to the aspects of psyche I met daily in the consulting room: shadow, archetypal imagery, persona, complexes and more. Relief, excitement, and possibility dawned.

Jung’s understanding of the structure of the psyche is a framework for the inner world. Our dreams and unconscious actions in waking life, if understood, make us more spacious, conscious and present. Jung’s understanding of psyche is essential to achieving the wholeness I first sought many years ago through social work.

 Joseph

Jung’s structure of the psyche is like a cosmology. Cosmology reflects the instinct to order our outer world, and in a similar vein, Jung ordered our inner world. Through an ordering process, we recognize patterns that allow us to relate our sensory experiences to archetypal forces. Although we aspire to know these primary forces directly, they are out of reach, knowable only through images, experiences, and especially discernable patterns. We need patterns to create meaning; without them our inner and outer world would be a chaotic jumble. The order of the universe was first recognized in the cyclic patterns of stars. Psyche then clothed them in anthropomorphic forms and generated images of the first gods, thus relating our inner and outer worlds to one another. As the alchemists said, “As above, so below.”

The ‘cosmological’ ordering process also happens in inner space, and is evident in dreams. Consider each character in our dreams as a transpersonal force–a kind of star– mediated by living memories that make it unique and personal as well as universal. The familiar faces we see each night in our dreams are avatars: they access our library of memories, don familiar garb, and embody specific characteristics in order to communicate with us. As Jung analyzed the dreams of his patients, he discerned a recognizable pattern: the psyche was like a repertory theater company in which the same group of actors performed different characters over a lifetime. He named these core characters and their functions as ego, shadow, anima/animus, collective unconscious, and the Self. The complex, which Jung called the architect of the dream, is the central theme of the ‘play.’ Occasionally a guest artist steps in to perform a cameo – these are the archetypal images.

As we deepen our understanding of the main actors, their primary qualities, and thematic       effects, we gain the ability to translate the literal dream into a psychological hypothesis. When this strikes home, specific psychological forces become more active, their impact becomes more significant, and the corrective effect of the dream more likely to exert its balancing effect on the waking personality.

“The dream is a theater in which the dreamer is himself, the scene, the player,

the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.” C.G. Jung

Let’s take a glance at the main actors.

The Dream Ego
In your dreams you have a derivative sense of yourself that we call the dream ego. It’s not your full waking personality because your sense of reality is compromised. For example, in the dream you’ll accept and do things that you would not while awake. This sense of ‘I’ is most often the object of the dream. Despite feeling that ‘you’ are moving things along, the dream maker has created the drama to act upon you – to impact and change you in some way. This may be subtle, or it may take a form the dream ego perceives as adverse. Try to frame each element in the dream, including the dream ego, as a psychological force asking you to see something differently, change or grow–often in a way that you may resist in your waking life. For example, if the dream ego is pursued by something it perceives as menacing, be curious about what it might be, its message for the dream (and waking) ego, and where or how that feeling and dynamic take place in your daytime life. Notice how you feel at the beginning of the dream then at the end – what changed?

The Shadow
We are born with a full circle of capacities. As we interact with our environments through caregivers, peers, school, and the wider culture, we discover that certain aspects of our personality are disallowed. These qualities are instinctively split off and sent into an unconscious wilderness. Because they are then exiled from the benefits of civilized (conscious) life, they become feral, and when they return as a dream image the dream ego feels they are dangerous or disgusting. So when you meet an inner figure that you dislike or fear be very curious. Try to be objective and discern what qualities you find difficult. Seek out correlates in your waking personality, be courageously honest with yourself—and then look deeper. Every difficult quality can be useful in the right circumstance and in right measure. See if you can imagine it harnessed to a useful end.

Anima & Animus
We can all remember a dream where an irresistible opposite-sex figure came to us. Perhaps this person evoked great sexual passion or joyous eros. At times he or she comes as a mystical brother or sister, companioning us on a mission or championing us in a difficult situation. If we watch carefully and use a symbolic lens, we may discern that this figure is connecting us to powerful forces and experiences that we could not access alone. The anima/animus is, at heart, a linking function. What it links us to is often powerful. When a figure like this appears in a dream, pay careful attention to how you relate to it. Are you shy? Does the figure keep you at bay until you learn something? Do you embrace—or flee? How you relate to this figure can be translated into how you relate to a deeper layer of inner life.

The Self
The Self is the true center of the personality. It is like the bulb of a lotus buried deep in the bottom of a pond, while the blossom above is like the ego, visible in the outer world. Most significantly, they need each other. The bulb holds the pattern of the flower, sending it upward and providing it with nutrients and water. The flower and leaves harvest energy from the sun, and send it down to the bulb to feed the ongoing source of its life. The Self holds the full and authentic pattern of your personality. It blossoms you, and continues to hold the archetypal pattern for your personal unfolding. Your waking personality, in turn, metabolizes lived experiences and stores them in the Self. In your dreams the Self may present as a wise old man or woman, a sacred natural force, or a numinous experience. Pay careful attention to these dream images and what they evoke in the dream ego. They offer important clues to what is emerging in your psychological life.

The Collective Unconscious
Jung discovered synchronicities between certain events that could not be explained as cause and effect. One of his early patients described a particular vision of the sun: a tube extending downward created the wind. Jung later found the same description in a recently translated ancient papyrus—which this uneducated man would not have known about. We have all suddenly thought of a friend, only to receive an email or call from that person moments later. To explain these synchronicities Jung theorized that we participate in a unified field that connects all points in space – inner and outer – and it influences us in sometimes subtle, but profound ways. This limitless frame around our inner landscape has its own unpredictable intelligence and allows dream figures to emerge and retreat. As you examine the landscapes of your dreams, imagine they are infused with a consciousness that is acting on you. Try to relate to it poetically, as a mood or mystery to be accommodated.

The Archetypes
As Jung studied comparative mythology, folk tales, and fairy tales he noticed similar themes and images in cultures that could not have influenced each other directly due to distance or time. He surmised the presence of universal patterns that gave rise to religious and mythological figures in all cultures. He called these patterns archetypes – the denizens of the collective unconscious. If we imagine that life emerges from the subtle to the gross – from the inner to outer manifestation, then the archetypes underlie all objects psychologically and physically. When archetypes are active in the psyche they can show up as forces capable of destroying and rebuilding. Archetypal healing happens when current complexes or attitudes are powerfully dissolved, returning their charge to the collective unconscious. When archetypal images show up in dreams, it’s often a lesson in reverence. Notice how the dream ego reacts. If it becomes inflated, you’ve identified with the force and failed the test. Let’s hope the dream ego is humbled, welcomes the lesson, and accepts its transformative message.

The Complex

Jung said that the complex is the architect of the dream. The unconscious psyche is structured around complexes, the basic ‘landscape’ of the unconscious. Because they have an archetypal core shaped by personal experiences and associations, complexes are the organizers of experience. Complexes are bipolar—that is, they have an aspect that the ego (and dream ego) perceive as positive, and one that is perceived as negative. All this means that in dreams, as in waking life, complexes operate autonomously, carry feeling tones, and evoke bodily reactions. A complex is usually incompatible with the usual attitudes of consciousness and can grow oversize due to trauma and moral conflict. See if you can identify the complex your dream is trying to bring into better balance.

 As your understanding of the inner landscape grows, you’ll discover more structures than those listed above. Eventually, you’ll discover an entire personal cosmology that will unlock a new level of dream interpretation.

Copyright © 2021 This Jungian Life. All rights reserved in all domains.

Pick one of your recent dreams in which you appear. Write a paragraph or two about the differences between your waking personality and the dream ego as it appears in this dream. Share your ideas with fellow students on the forum!

Then, using the following dream, try to identify different structural elements such as shadow, animus, complexes, ego, archetype.

Dreamer is a 28 yo female

My partner (let’s call him Ollie) and I are in a room with this older woman who is in charge of the tour we are on. A very thin, younger girl arrived and the older woman doted on her. Ollie and I did not really integrate with her. Then, I look up and Ollie is helping her take off her dress, and her thin body is exposed. She then helps him take off his clothes to change. I walk away but they don’t seem to care. I’m upset but question if I should be. We get on the tour bus and end up at my best friend from childhood’s house. I’m in her bedroom upstairs packing up my things and crying, expecting Ollie to come in. I go to the railing and find him sitting downstairs with the girl, hanging out. I tell him that he knows that was not okay what happened. He replies, saying, “You know, it has not been okay for a long time.” I go back to my room, and a cousin from my dad’s side arrives. I try hiding my tears because I’m not sure if we are broken up. Then my aunt, mom’s sister, arrives and I can’t stop crying. I feel we have broken up and I did not have a choice. Eventually, I realize I’m dreaming and wake myself up.

 I was in a wood shop class in a school. A person- though seemed to have a almost demon like quality- was following me and taking my hand and slicing my fingers with a razor. It was very painful and I was bleeding quite a bit. The person looked down and almost had feeling of being one of the bad people from the bird box movie. I politely and calmly asked the people around me in the class if they could please help stop the person from hurting me. Then I woke up.

Main feelings in the dream: Physical pain. Avoidance of the person cutting me. Feeling almost boiling trying to remain calm.

Context and associations: I have felt a lot of lack of power in my life over the last year or two after some traumatic events.

Feeling stumped by some image in the dream? Maybe we had a thought about it. See if your own surmisings matched up with ours.

 I was in a wood shop class in a school. A person- though seemed to have a almost demon like quality- was following me and taking my hand and slicing my fingers with a razor. It was very painful and I was bleeding quite a bit. The person looked down and almost had feeling of being one of the bad people from the bird box movie. I politely and calmly asked the people around me in the class if they could please help stop the person from hurting me. Then I woke up.

Main feelings in the dream: Physical pain. Avoidance of the person cutting me. Feeling almost boiling trying to remain calm.

Context and associations: I have felt a lot of lack of power in my life over the last year or two after some traumatic events.