INTRODUCTION: The Unconscious and its Language
Waking Up to the Unconscious:
A lot of times you drive yourself home, with no recollection of how you got there, all you can remember is the adventure you were imagining. And other times, you find yourself yelling at someone with rage, when the situation wasn’t even that serious.
The unconscious is a marvelous universe of unseen energies, forces, forms of intelligence—even distinct personalities—that live within us. It is a much larger realm than most of us realize, one that has a complete life of its own running parallel to the ordinary life we live day to day. The unconscious is the secret source of much of our thought, feeling, and behavior. It influences us in ways that are all the more powerful because unsuspected.
Sometimes these hidden personalities are embarrassing or violent, and we are humiliated when they show themselves. At other times we wake up to strengths and fine qualities within ourselves that we never knew were there.
The unconscious manifests itself through a language of symbols. It is not only in our involuntary or compulsive behavior that we can see the unconscious. It has two natural pathways for bridging the gap and speaking to the conscious mind: One is by dreams; the other is through the imagination.
Most people, however, do not approach the unconscious voluntarily. They only become aware of the unconscious when they get into trouble with it. We modern people are so out of touch with the inner world that we encounter it mostly through psychological distress.
Jung’s studies and work led him to conclude that the unconscious is the real source of all our human consciousness. It is the source of our human capacity for orderly thought, reasoning, human awareness, and feeling. The unconscious is the Original Mind of humankind, the primal matrix out of which our species has evolved a conscious mind and then developed it over the millennia to the extent and the refinement that it has today. Every capacity, every feature of our functioning consciousness, was first contained in the unconscious and then found its way from there up to the conscious level.
Jung believed that every mortal has an individual role to play in this evolution. For just as our collective human capacity for consciousness evolved out of the unconscious psyche, so it does in each individual. Each of us must, in an individual lifetime, recapitulate the evolution of the human race, and each of us must be an individual container in which the evolution of consciousness is carried forward. Each of us is a microcosm in which the universal process actualizes itself.
Ego, in Latin, simply means “I.” Freud and Jung referred to the conscious mind as the ego because this is the part of the psyche that calls itself “I,” that is “self-conscious”—aware of itself as a being, as a field of energy that is independent and distinct from others. When we say “I” we are referring to only that small sector of ourselves of which we are aware.
The ego-mind is not aware that the total “I” is much larger, more extensive than the ego, that the part of the psyche that is hidden in the unconscious is much greater than the conscious mind and much more powerful.
The purpose of learning to work with the unconscious is not just to resolve our conflicts or deal with our neuroses. We find there a deep source of renewal, growth, strength, and wisdom. We connect with the source of our evolving character; we cooperate with the process whereby we bring the total self together; we learn to tap that rich lode of energy and intelligence that waits within.
THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION
Individuation is the term Jung used to refer to the lifelong process of becoming the complete human beings we were born to be. Individuation is our waking up to our total selves, allowing our conscious personalities to develop until they include all the basic elements that are inherent in each of us at the preconscious level.
Why should this be called “individuation”? Because this process of actualizing oneself and becoming more complete also reveals one’s special, individual structure. It shows how the universal human traits and possibilities are combined in each individual in a way that is unlike anyone else.
Seeking the Unconscious
The purpose of this book is to provide a practical, step-by-step approach to doing your own inner work. Specifically, you will find a four-step method for both dream work and Active Imagination. As part of our exploration we will also touch on the uses of ceremony and fantasy as avenues into the unconscious.
Many people are aware that the unconscious communicates to our conscious minds through dreams. Many have learned theories about how to interpret dreams. But most of us become paralyzed when we try to work with our own specific dreams.
ACTIVE IMAGINATION: THE CONSCIOUS USE OF THE IMAGINATIVE FACULTY:
At first glance, Active Imagination may seem too simple or naive to be taken seriously as a psychological technique: It consists in going to the images that rise up in one’s imagination and making a dialogue with them. It involves an encounter with the images. The conscious ego-mind actually enters into the imagination and takes part in it. This often means a spoken conversation with the figures who present themselves, but it also involves entering into the action, the adventure or conflict that is spinning its story out in one’s imagination.
It is this awareness, this conscious participation in the imaginal event, that transforms it from mere passive fantasy to Active Imagination. The coming together of conscious mind and unconscious mind on the common ground of the imaginal plane gives us an opportunity to break down some of the barriers that separate the ego from the unconscious, to set up a genuine flow of communication between the two levels of the psyche, to resolve some of our neurotic conflicts with the unconscious, and thus to learn more about who we are as individuals.
The Archetypes and the Unconscious:
Jung became aware of the existence of the archetypes when he observed that the symbols that arise in people’s dreams often correspond exactly to images that have appeared in ancient myths, art, and religion, from times and places of which the dreamer could not possibly have known. He began to sense that there are certain primordial symbols, and certain universal meanings that attach to them in the human unconscious, that spontaneously burst forth from the unconscious in any time or place without needing cultural transmission.
Not all the images that appear in dreams are archetypes. We should begin by observing that the unconscious is composed of energy, and that it forms itself into distinct energy systems—or what we might call “energy forms.” These energy forms can be feelings, attitudes, value systems, or entire personalities that live inside us. Actually, all of us have many distinct personalities coexisting within us at the unconscious level. It is these inner “personalities” that appear to us in our dreams as “persons.”
Among these energy forms that present themselves as images in our dreams, there are archetypes. But the greater number are not archetypes, do not correspond to universal patterns; they are merely personal energy systems of the dreamer. People often become confused when they first hear of the archetypes and wake up to some of the awesome symbols in which the archetypes appear. They may think that every image that appears in a dream represents an archetype. Or they may get the impression that there is a set list, somewhere, of all the archetypes, and that one could interpret all dream symbols by taking the most likely archetype from the list and applying it to the dream symbol.
Neither of these ideas is accurate. There is probably an infinite number of archetypes, as there are innumerable traits and character patterns that exist universally among humans. Identifying an archetype is a matter of sensing that one is keyed into a universal human energy system, seeing a powerful symbol that springs from deep within our collective human nature; it is not a matter of working from a list of types that someone has made. In this area we have not only the right but the duty to draw on our own creative imagination.
Jung discovered that what people called the “soul” in religious language actually has a psychological counterpart, a specific and objective part of the inner psyche that acts like the “soul” of religion and poetry and performs the same functions that have been described. In men the soul appears in dreams as a feminine presence. In women, it usually appears as a masculine figure. To distinguish this objective psychological entity from the religious notion, Jung called the feminine figure the anima and called the masculine figure in women’s dreams the animus. These two words mean “soul” and “spirit,” respectively, in Latin.
Jungians usually find their names for the archetypes in myths and ancient religions, because that is where the images first appeared, often in their most dramatic and memorable form. For example, the archetype of the heroic journey in which one is tested by fate is often called an “odyssey” because its greatest image is the journey of Odysseus. But all such names are to some extent arbitrary. We are all free to use our own judgment, feelings, and imagination in deciding whether we are dealing with an archetype, and we are free to use the names for them that are most meaningful to us.