[ THE QUARTERLY, September 2002]
by Michelle Christides
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In the distant origin of Western medicine, Hippocrates
and the healing priesthood of the Asklepiades diagnosed illness by interpreting
"the healing dream". The Asklepiades were initiates of the Mystery religion
of Greece, which taught that the body grew from spirit and was not separate
from it. Consequently, the priests and priestesses were also healers of
both; and the temples were hospices extending the healthful way of life
to all who made the retreat to renew their spirit. Tax tributes were paid
by the city-states to sustain them. C. A. Meier, co-founder with C. G.
Jung of the Zurich Institute for Analytical Psychology, researched the
extant Ancient Greek literature on this method of healing and wrote about
it in Ancient Incubation and Modern Psychotherapy. The first generation of Jungian "lay analysts" relied heavily on their dreams while analyzing with C. G. Jung. Psychoanalysis, both Freudian and Jungian, was greeted on both sides of the Atlantic as the key to self-actualization for people who had already achieved success also to achieve wholeness and release from anxiety neuroses, even though it had not yet proven itself as the remedy for borderline cases and psychoses. Dream life unfolds a process of inner development that leads to self-actualization and away from debilitating complexes that drain psychic energy and stunt the growth of consciousness, which should continue throughout the life span. The key to this process is in the conceptual language of symbols, which penetrate to a spiritual and ethical quality of meaning and value as the healing force itself. Before moving exclusively into private practice, Jung had been a psychiatrist in the Burghosli Clinic of the University of Zurich, treating patients in residence. Jung discovered the healing power of the psyche occurs through a conceptual language of symbols -- one of deep meaning and value that moves Ithe soul to creative renewal. He also observed a spontaneous process of healing unfold in his patients, which he wrote about in his first work, Symbols of Transformation. It was through observing the symbols they described as appearing in their dreams, as well as in their psychotic fantasies, that Jung recognized the patients perceived symbols from cultures with which they had had no previous contact. He considered them common to all humanity and called them "archetypes", by which he meant universal forms that took on the contents of the historical experience of each culture. Jung died at the beginning of the decade, which saw the breakthrough, in 1969, for the new science of Genetics that was the discovery of the double-helical structure of the DNA molecule. I believe our genetic encoding appears to our consciousness as archetypal symbols and therefore our dreams are a healing process. As we develop through our life span, each of the endocrine centers of consciousness, called “chakras” in the East, ignites a new identity-forming process in a sequence of seven stages. Blockage in any passage between stages creates psychological symptoms that communicate in archetypal language, which is also the language of dreams. We heal ourselves by understanding what the unconscious tells us is a prescribed remedy to fulfill the meaning, values, purpose, and creativity of our life span. This is the process of Individuation, which Jungian analysis is all about. The classic method of Jungian analytical psychology takes the modern Westerner through individuation as a process equivalent to the Eastern practice of Yoga for enlightenment or spiritual liberation. However, in Eastern Civilization, it is the karmic result of your actions that determines your progress. It is the introverted Journey of the Mystic. The extroverted attitude of Western Civilization, on the other hand, is that of the Journey of the Hero. This transformation takes you through your personal dream symbols and life myths as they relate to your destiny as a citizen of Western society. Jung found that archetypes developed spontaneously through a healing process, which led the patient and the psychiatrist, who could listen and recognize it, to resolve the complexes of associations the patient had made that resulted in the symptoms of "illness." The most thorough-going clinical implementation of Analytical Psychology was made by Dr. Heinrich Fierz, who founded the Zurichberg as the only Jungian clinic in the world. Jung later found that Alchemy was "the missing link" between the living Western spiritual tradition that he considered to have died in our time (Modern Man in Search of a Soul) and his own work in psychology. The Alchemists had discovered this process and described it as “turning lead into gold", because it began in the blackness of depression. Jung inspired one of his analysands to found Alcoholics Anonymous, when he told him that he could do no more for him until he gave up the drink. He told this analysand that he was applying the old alchemical formula of spiritus contra spiritum, by pursuing a thirst for spirits as a spiritual thirst in a society that had nothing to quench it. The Twelve Steps are based on this process of Alchemy, which the Jungian analysis of our individuation is also based on. A. A. has reached over twenty million people around the world, but, like the Myers-Briggs typology, it is nonetheless a superficial application of Jung's work. The real gold is still to be mined by a civilization that has no means to value it other than the marketplace. The psyche, Jung hypothesized, has its own process to return to homeostasis -- the original condition of health. He approached the psyche as its own "reality", thereby according spirit the same status as the material world so that he could apply the scientific method to it. In so doing, Jung was going against the grain of the spirit of his time -- the collective unconscious of culture between the two world wars. Europe had produced an intellectual philosophy of "Existentialism", which accorded materialism preeminence over psychological reality with the famous dictum: "existence precedes essence". Since the Second World War, Western Civilization has shifted steadily toward materialism, valuing economically only the cultural and healing arts that can be made into business and replicated by technology into books, programs, and entertainment products. Our "mental health" has gone the way of modern medicine into technology, pharmacology, and managed care; and our self-actualization has gone the way of the entertainment industry. In keeping with this standard of value, we should ask: what is the use of self-actualization? Why should anyone want "personal growth" or "spiritual transformation"? In a society that has all the characteristics of a civilization in decline and fall, due to a consumerist culture that thrives by inculcating the narcissistic clinical pathology through advertising, why should we want more individualism in the form of "Individuation"? The answer is the same as for the question why anyone would want an education -- you don’t know what it is until you have it. Our civilization is in decline and fall for the same reason each civilization has come to, and failed to reach, a point of collective “self-actualization”. Civilization is defined by social excellence that affords each individual, as Greek philosopher Epictetus put it, "the full use of one's powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope". For Jung, individuation is to the human being as the full magnificence of the oak is to the acorn. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he describes an epiphany he experienced in Africa, when he came to a promontory overlooking a plain filled with a herd of bison that stretched to the horizon. He felt the palpable collective presence of this life form and knew intuitively that the evolution of consciousness was extending itself through eons to reach the next stage in truly human being. For Jung, individuation is not an end but the beginning When we have a qualitatively greater level of consciousness than the animal, we can no longer live by the survival of the fittest as our economic foundation. Our society is in deep schizophrenic denial of our danger from the giant immune response of the Earth to our way of living, which is destroying her biosphere. One of the symptoms of schizophrenia is failure to respond to danger. We are failing to respond to the planetary healing crisis because of the split between what we know as Science and what we deny in the wisdom of civilization. Jung's contribution to psychology has been the discovery of the healing power of the individual psyche through its archetypal language and myth-making (mythos is "meaning" in Greek). Science has changed our image of God, Nature itself, and the way of life through which we evolved, to such an extent that only a realignment of the ego-Self axis on a massive scale, through every medium of cultural transmission and education, can save us. Our own individual healing process is now being determined by our social destiny. Like Martin Luther King, each of us must reach deep within ourselves to dream a collective dream. Each of us has a life purpose that will help define the fate of our species in the Twenty-first Century -- born a year ago, as it were, this September 11th. Western Civilization has yet to achieve the Resurrection. The healing process is to integrate the Shadow of our Collective Unconscious into our cultural consciousness to see the truth and take action -- in our personal lives for health and wholeness, in reclaiming the creative product of our work from the addiction of consumerism, and in our social excellence for harmony and justice. The Greeks called it "Sophrosyne". ©2002 by Michelle Christides |