Jung At Heart

The Red Book continues to gain a lot of attention, though publication is still a week or more away.  Here is a sampling:

NPR's On Point did a program on The Red Book featuring Sara Corbett, who wrote the NY Times story on it and David Oswald, a Jungian analyst. You can listen to the show from the link. The show is 43 minutes and worth listening to.

Early Word, a blog for librarians, tells us that The Red Book rose  to #4 on Amazon's best seller list -- though I see that today it is at #59, suggesting that the people who wanted it sight unseen put in their orders early. Interestingly, it ha also boosted the sales of Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

Reason's blog, Hit & Run  take on the book is what I would expect coming from Reason: When I hear the name "Jung" I generally back quickly toward the nearest exit, making a cross with two index fingers, taking the safety off my pistol and mixing myself a stiff drink all at once. Still, interesting that the book is deemed worthy of comment, even if snarky.

Blue to Blue and Dinah on ShrinkRap also consider the book and both raise something that I also think about. They each muse about what it might be like to vest belief in Jung as some do. 

I am a bit repelled by true believers. They nearly always activate in me a desire to take an opposite stance, to look for holes in their belief or arguments. Now certainly this is a function of my personal psychology and no more a virtue than is true belief. There have been times when I have been in gatherings of Jungians -- at conferences or seminars at one of the institutes where I felt like I was at a religious revival. Many times workshops would begin with introductions of participants which would include how each came to Jung, not unlike testimonials at tent revival meetings. There is within the Jungian community a tendency on the part of some to have an all but religious reverence for Jung and Jung's writings. I am not among them; in fact I find that kind of slavish devotion to Jung embarrassing to be around -- I know, I know, my shadow is probably a teenager all gaga over Jung. And it seems clear to me that this segment of the Jungian world does make it more difficult for Jungian thought to find a home in the academy or for it to be viewed positively in the mental health world. It occurs to me that part of the attraction of the Developmental wing of Jungian practice for me -- because it draws on psychoanalysis and object relations to enrich Jungian theory and practice. 

I received an email from a young girl this week asking me how to explain what depth psychotherapy is about. A very good question and not easy to answer in a way that a young person can readily grasp. But it made me think about this post by Stephen Diamond, a post I tucked away and somehow hadn't gotten back to. 

"The kind of psychotherapy I am describing here has less to do with the duration or cost of treatment than with how the psychotherapist views the nature and purpose of treatment itself. People have an innate need to ponder life's awesome mysteries. Real psychotherapy provides patients the opportunity, when needed, to grapple with these thorny questions--which are often closely, though unconsciously, related to their presenting problems. The goal of such therapy is to assist patients in finding their own philosophical or spiritual perspective in life, so as to be able to deal with future problems from a position of inner strength and stability. If psychotherapy continues to be viewed as a prescribed, predetermined, mechanistic cookbook recipe of techniques designed just to rapidly reduce or eliminate certain troublesome symptoms or behaviors, such topics will increasingly seem moot. Patients receiving such severely limited treatment today are tragically being deprived of a much-needed chance to consciously wrestle with what theologian Paul Tillich called "ultimate concerns" like the problem of evil, suffering, spirituality, meaning and mortality. We live today in a therapeutic culture that devalues talking or even thinking about such things. Today, psychotherapy patients are implicitly or explicitly discouraged to discuss or dwell on such soulful matters. But if psychotherapists and patients can recognize and respect the pragmatic therapeutic value, power and importance of addressing meaningful subjects such as beauty, God and death in treatment, then maybe psychotherapy--real psychotherapy--has some chance of surviving."

One of the reasons I have wanted to do the film series I posted about is to find a way to get at these questions about therapy and to open a discussion of what real psychotherapy is about.

Back when I was in graduate school in the late 60's, there was a distinction made between psychotherapy and counseling. Symptom focused, solution oriented work was considered counseling while the province of therapy was meaning, the psyche, suffering, dreams, the unconscious. Somewhere in the last few decades that distinction was lost and the expectation now is that therapy will be brief, behaviorally focused, and not concerned with matters of the unconscious and the psyche. Psychotherapy in this view is about feeling better. Consider how differently Jung viewed therapy:

"The principle aim of psychotherapy is not to transport one to an impossible state of happiness, but to help the patient acquire steadfastness and patience in the face of suffering. "

and

"My work as a psychoanalyst is to help patients recover their lost wholeness and to strengthen the psyche so it can resist future dismemberment." 

and

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity."

What is therapy about? It is about everything that is part of human life -- the good, the bad, the sacred and profane, beautiful and ugly. The basic instruction -- to say whatever comes to mind covers it. It is not limited to symptoms or problems. Whatever comes to mind.