Jung 102: Applied Jungian Psychology

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to this free introductory class which will introduce you to some of the key ideas involved in applying the ideas and theory of jungian psychology to actual on the ground depth psychology work this class is the introductory module to our full course jung 102 applied jungian psychology so this course will introduce you to some of the innovative techniques developed by carl jung for working with his clients and also for doing his own personal work and we'll see why that's important as we go along for everyone not just for young so what

we're going to do in this module is to look at the difference between theory and application in general we'll look at what we're trying to achieve through the application of union techniques we're not just randomly using these techniques we have a goal in mind and we'll also look at jung's approach to achieving these goals this specific uh step-by-step things we won't cover of course all of that in this class although we'll cover much of it in the subsequent modules of the course so and we're going to close this class with a brief overview of what

that course will entail the content of the upcoming eight module course jung 102 applied jungian psychology so this course is essentially a follow-up course or a part two we might say to our course jung 101 introduction to jungian psychology jung 101 is a foundational course as is this course and it provides an in-depth outline of the key concepts terms and dynamic processes of analytical psychology analytical psychology being the name that cj jung gave to his theory so although you're not required to take young 101 prior to taking this course this that is not a prerequisite

to this course however it is recommended it will be helpful uh in this course we'll review some of the terms and ideas that we discussed in young 101 however we will not go into these ideas in the kind of depth and detail that we did in the course young 101 so it'll be helpful to anyone taking this course to have some familiarity with jung's psychology and with the terms that he used uh as i said we'll review some of those but not all of them now if you're interested in taking this course and don't want

to take jung 101 and maybe you're still a little vague on some of jung's ideas a good way to brush up on young's psychology and on these terms and on these basic concepts will be to read the textbook that we used in jung101 which is murray stein's jungian analyst murray stein's book jung's map of the soul it's an excellent book and it will help you to follow uh this course uh much more readily without having to stop and look things up etc so both of these courses young 101 and your 102 as i've said are

foundational courses in our certification program in other words they're everything that we do after this in the program that proceeds that is subsequent to these classes everything is going to be based on these basic terms and these basic ideas of applying those core theoretical ideas the main difference between these two courses young 101 and young 102 is that young 101 is primarily a course on jung's theory while jung 102 is primarily a survey course on how jung applied his theory in other words there's a lot of different ways he applied it we're going to touch

on elements of each of those things and many of these subsequent courses go into great depth on each of these applied aspects of his work now all of this is going to be useful but without without some background without some general understanding of the basic terms it's easy to get lost so if you're not familiar with those things some kind of review of basic theory will be good for you will be helpful for you and also just you know take it slow step at a time as i said before jung's theory is not really that

difficult and much of his i his theory and much of many of his ideas have already been absorbed into culture he started way back at the turn of the 20th century uh the early parts of the 1900s and he was very radical and very way way way ahead of his time at that time and a lot of that has been picked up by other psychologists usually without referencing him unfortunately however his ideas have seeped into culture so some of these ideas you may know but they've also been changed in ways in which sometimes jung would

applaud other times jung would have been appalled by so we're going to try and stick to jung's core ideas and then as you absorb those core ideas you can go with them where you like if you like some of these innovations you can follow them where they may lead you so as i say jung102 is primarily a survey course of this theory now in anthropology and linguistics they use the terms synchronic and diachronic to describe different ways of studying a variety of phenomena now the word synchronic refers to looking at things from the point of

view of a particular point in time it's like you slice open the ongoing of time and you just look at how things are in that moment the word diacronic on the other hand refers to looking at things as they move and develop through times as they process so why why do you need to know that you don't need to know that but what i want to say is that jung 101 was essentially what we would call a synchronic look at jung's theory while jung 102 this course that this is an introductory lecture for is a

diachronic look at jung's theory that is to say this course young 102 is about process it looks in-depth at how jung worked with his patients in his consulting room as well as how he approached his own inner psycho psychological work on himself so it's about ongoing through time developing uh these theories integrating these theories into an ongoing process in one's life again uh the reason we just focus so much on theory in young 101 is because while it's not uh difficult it's complex there are a lot of moving parts in jung's theory once you each

little part is easy to absorb usually but uh when you try to get them all at once it can be a little overwhelming so we take things a little bit at a time tease them out and hopefully that makes it a little bit easier so interestingly although jung developed an innovative and dynamic theory of psychology as we covered in depth in jung 101 when actually working with people interpreting dreams encouraging them to do active imagination work etc he actually said that it was important to set theory aside to forget theory at one point he even

said that theory is the very devil this is largely because of the importance that jung gave to the unconscious itself if we rely too much on theory we have a tendency to not be paying close enough attention to the unconscious and that is not to say that he undervalued consciousness but rather that he felt he lived in a time when people had developed consciousness to such an extent that they had undervalued and ignored the unconscious in jung's view human culture has reached a point where it has become impossible for consciousness to develop any further without

integrating the unconscious in other words the way forward lies in paying more attention to that which has been neglected that is paying more attention to the unconscious so he always gave primacy to the unconscious in his work although he approached that work with a great deal of focused consciousness so it's not unconscious at the expense of the consciousness it's bringing consciousness to bear and into relationship with the unconscious so what is this to do with jung saying that theory is the very devil as i say jung felt that if theory was pressed too far if

theory was concentrated on too much then we run the danger that theory will actually repress the unconscious further rather than allowing the unconscious to speak to us to speak for itself and for the unconscious to emerge naturally this is what we want we want the unconscious to emerge naturally not unchecked not without consciousness in dialogue and measuring and making moral as we'll see moral judgments about whether we should follow the unconscious in this uh particular direction or not but we have a tendency in our culture now and certainly back a hundred years ago when jung

was starting out we have a tendency to just say uh what does the unconscious know and just go ahead with our conscious plans often very much to our detriment so as we'll see throughout this course all of jung's approaches to working with people in analysis involve encouraging people to dialogue with the unconscious to develop this relationship with the unconscious jung encouraged his patients to maintain a strong conscious stance in relation to the unconscious while at the same time he encouraged them to listen to the unconscious to encourage the unconscious to speak and to then negotiate

with the unconscious in such a way that the unconscious is respected and integrated into our conscious deliberations and into our daily lives so what does i keep saying the work we do the work we do what does this work entail well that's of course that's what the whole course is about so naturally there are many aspects to the work and to how the work might actually take place there i i hesitate to say infinite but almost infinite varieties and one of the reasons for this is that it's about finding out not not deciding who the

individual is but finding out letting the unconscious tell us or tell our client who this individual is and allowing ourselves and allowing the client to be that individual person in a way that fits naturally and hopefully in a life affirming way fits into the social group fits into the culture and helps the culture to thrive helps the family and the community and the culture at large to thrive so how does the work take place first we need to decide what kind of work we're going to do will this be doing self-analysis will i work alone

and just do my own inner work in the evenings or whatever when i have time to put some time aside to do some inner work will i be working with a therapist will i be doing work in a group will we be working with a 12-step group all of these and many more approaches are valid to doing the work depending on who we are where we are and where any individual is in their own process once we've decided what kind of work we're going to do there needs to be a specific boundarized space for this

work to take place this could be a therapist's office it could be a quiet place in our own home it could be a 12-step meeting place etc it's as we say there's many many possibilities then there's you know what do we do in this space is the actual step-by-step work that we do in the space that we allot for the work to take place for jung this work especially the second phase of this work and we'll get into exactly what i mean by the second phase uh always this work involves two basic categories either dream

work or active imagination and these sometimes are combined in a variety of ways as we'll see so however these two categories can be subdivided into many different approaches and many different ways of working whether jung was working with dreams or with active imagination the work itself the sort of the core certainly a first core first step of the work is always to identify dynamic symbols that emerge from the unconscious what are the dynamic symbols that are appearing in my fantasy work in my active imagination work whatever that may entail and we'll see that can be

a great variety of methods can be applied to active imagination and in my dreams what are the images the dominant images that arise from these dreams so we study our dreams the dreams of our clients and we study the results of the active imagination work and we try to identify dynamic symbols that emerge from the unconscious in these processes okay so we do that so then what what why why do that why bother and what comes next how do we understand and interpret these symbols that's going to be the next big question symbols very often

are as they say multivalent they have many many meanings many possible interpretations how do we approach that well this question brings us to what is essentially the heart and soul of jungi and his psychological work and what much of this course and some of the subsequent courses many of the subsequent courses in this program are going to deal with jung's theory claims that the central nervous system of all human beings generates patterns of energy that jung called archetypes of the collective unconscious these patterns emerge in the form of symbols they aren't the symbols are not

the archetypes themselves although we often say we we often refer to them that way even jung referred to them that way but when we get to the technical definition the symbol is not the archetype but it's a representation that the unconscious uses to communicate archetypal energies so these patterns that jung identified emerge in the form of symbols in our dream work in our fantasy work or our active imagination work because these patterns are common to all human beings they can be discerned in cultural patterns they have been deposited in cultural artifacts and what i mean

by cultural artifacts are things such as myths fairy tales religious forms and you may know jung spent a lot of time also discerning and studying the symbols that emerged in alchemy western particularly with all alchemy around the world but particularly western alchemy so we discussed archetypes and the collective unconscious in quite a lot of detail in young 101 however when doing so we only touched on how jung related them to myths fairy tales religious forms alchemy etc in this course we will spend much more time on exactly how jung used these cultural artifacts in order

to understand and interpret the symbols that emerged from the unconscious from his own unconscious from the unconscious of his clients and the people he worked with and in a broader sense he also used them to understand uh culture contemporary culture his contemporary culture and where culture is moving now and we'll look as we go through the course in uh in all of these different or many of these different manifestations of the meaning of symbols now jung's meta so this is an element of a particular method that jung used sigmund freud who jung worked with early

in his career used a technique when interpreting dreams and working with clients he used a technique called free association he used this technique when interpreting dreams and when working in his consulting room jung also used this technique he valued this technique to a certain extent and used it throughout his life however jung was aware that in general free association tends to lead the client farther and farther away from the central symbols of the dream jung was absolutely invested in focusing on the symbols not only because they were of interest in communicating meaning but they carried

a type of energy that he called numinous a charged numenocity which meant that the a lot of life energy was trapped in these symbols and understanding the symbols and how they operated in the psyche of an individual could help to free up that energy and make it available to the person in their work so free association did not focus on the symbols free association often would be oh this reminds me of this and that reminds me of that now those of you who are familiar with working in theory in therapy and those of you who

are who are familiar with freud's work will know that he talked about defense mechanisms projection is a defense mechanism various forms of repression are defense mechanisms and this can be a defense mechanism which means there's the reason something is unconscious is because it makes me uncomfortable it's charged it makes me emotional something about it and so if something is char if the symbol is charged it reminds me of maybe some trauma in my childhood i'm going to want to get far away from that because i'm afraid of that i'm afraid of that event i don't

want to remember that event so free association can sometimes take me farther and farther away and jung would always say let's get back to the dream what let's bring it back to the dream let's bring it back to the symbol when talking with someone and working on these things so for that reason he was not as fond of uh free association as freud he thought that another method was more important and he called the method that he used amplification and this is why he was interested in myths and fairy tales etc he would examine symbols

and patterns that emerged from the unconscious of his patients and he would look for parallel patterns that appeared in these cultural artifacts he would search myths and fairy tales and other cultural artifacts that is myths and all these things looking for similar symbols similar patterns that he saw in the dreams and fantasies of his patients young called this approach amplification or amplifying a symbol and he privileged this much more than the technique of free association although again he would use free association selectively because it could be enlightening to the life history of the patient etc

but he would always want to bring it back to the symbol now the reason unions are so interested in myths fairy tales alchemy religious forms etc is because of their great value in understanding the symbols that are generated by the unconscious jung was not simply interested in the exotic and esoteric in a random way he was deliberately and specifically looking for patterns and symbols that appeared in these cultural artifacts that could help to illuminate the meaning of the symbols that arise in dreams and fantasies just as there was a developmental phase in human history there

are also developmental faces in human beings and often the parallels could be seen developmental phase in human history would also parallel a developmental face in a particular individual it can provide clues to where that person is and exactly what needed to be integrated into the person's life so jung was looking for parallels between the mythic symbols between the mythic symbols that appear in culture and the symbols appearing in the dreams of his patients the use of amplification through the study of myths fairy tales and alchemy will be really the main focus of the jung 102

course now this naturally begs the question what is it that we're actually trying to achieve by looking at dreams by doing active imagination and by amplifying symbols like jung we're not simply curious about these things in any random or regressive way we're not trying to move back in time to be like ancient people were the reason we use these techniques when engaged in therapeutic work is to enable us and to empower us and our clients to be able to live an emotionally well balanced and dynamically engaged life when we ignore the unconscious when we try

to always compulsively direct activities in a particular way without consulting our own unconscious without being in touch with who we are and what our deeper thoughts and feelings are about these issues when we do that we live under the constant threat that the unconscious will rebel and invade our conscious space subvert our conscious intentions and create situations where we do and say things that we soon regret when this happens we have fallen under the compulsion of what jung called a complex and these intrusions of complexes with archetypal cores from the unconscious can wreak havoc in

our individual lives as well as in the broader culture as we see all the time but by deliberately turning and facing the unconscious and engaging with these energies consciously and directly our hope and often it's not it's painful but it's not impossible our hope is to integrate these energies into consciousness and make use of them by making them available for life affirming activities in the world now as i've said in addition to the personal individual benefits of this work there are important cultural aspects to the work as well and we'll cover many of the cultural

aspects of applied jungian psychology in our final two modules modules seven and eight ultimately what is at stake is what we would call cultural generativity each of us as mature human beings must learn how to transform narcissism into healthy self-esteem and with a sense of healthy self-esteem provide generative care for our families for our communities for our culture and for the planet from the union perspective such a transformation from narcissism to generativity cannot be accomplished without learning how to regulate the instinctive energies that emerge from the unconscious in junior terms that is to say that

we need to learn how to regulate archetypal energies as mature men and women so what do i mean when i say we need to learn how to regulate archetypal energies well this process of regulating archetypal energies and developing a mature conscious relationship with the unconscious is what jung called the process of individuation we covered a lot about the process of individuation in jung 101 in this course we'll be primarily looking at how to apply those theoretical ideas that we learned in jung101 applying those ideas through the use of various practical methods and techniques the goal

of course will be to achieve and maintain a working relationship a dialogue with the unconscious so before we get into too many details of we're just going to survey sort of the individuation process and review that and then look a little bit more about the details that we're going to talk about in the full course before we do that i want to just run through a list of different terms that we use in jungian psychology and that you will want to be familiar with if you're not already familiar with and some of them are common

terms but jung understood and used them in a specific particular way so first term is ego very common term means the we could say the center of consciousness then of course the ego is in direct relationship or opposition often to the unconscious for jung however there was not just the unconscious as a random idea he's categorized the unconscious into a personal unconscious which is the unconscious ideas behaviors memories things that happened in our own lives that have for one reason another fallen below the threshold of consciousness but then he also said there's a collective unconscious

which uh does not refer to anything metaphysical it refers to structures of the central nervous system just as we all have most of us at least have four fingers in the thumb on each hand we have a nose in the middle of the face we have two eyes two ears two legs etc there's a certain structure to our physical forms the structure of the kidney may look a little different but in everyone else everyone it functions in a similar way similarly for jung the collective unconscious also has a specific structure that functions in the same

way in all human beings everywhere now another term that jung coined and that he used is complexes and complexes are essentially a network of emotions and he one of the terms he used originally was a feeling toned complex there's a a feeling that goes with a certain memories certain ideas certain things that are in the unconscious the the uh are held together by this emotion and at the core is an archetype in other words whatever the trauma or whatever it is that that first initiated that complex is uh there's an archetypal core all human beings

have gone through these things at some time or other and so there's an archetypal pattern behind it now complexes are not all negative they're not all bad there's a father complex a mother complex you can have a father a positive father complex or a negative uh father complex there's the ego young said is a complex the persona is a complex and i'll talk about that in a second now again i'm not going to go into all the details of these uh murray steins book is a good place to look for definitions and of course jung's

own writings and jung 101 if you're interested in going back to that psychic energy uh freud called this libido said all psychic energy was sexual jung said no but he did uh a lot of work on the idea of the energy that moves through the psyche psychic does not mean uh like the 1 800 call the psychic it doesn't mean clairvoyant or mystical or anything like that it simply means of the psyche of the central nervous system the epi phenomena that comes from the brain and the central nervous system and all the subjective experience of

that jung called the psyche now the constituents of the personal unconscious are the complexes and the constituents of the collective unconscious are the archetypes some of the archetypes are the persona which is the face that we show to the world uh things that don't fit in the persona are repressed and fall into the shadow which is an unconscious complex that houses we could say things that are unacceptable to the ego and to the persona and again these are thumbnail descriptions says to go through these terms because they will come up over and over again in

this course anama and anonymous are contra sexual figures just as the shadow holds unconscious things that do not fit the persona if i'm identified with a hyper traditional masculine role then i'm going to have a traditional hyper feminine anima it's a feminine unconscious side a woman if she's identified with a hyper feminine traditional hyper feminine role then she will have a hyper masculine traditional masculine now i say traditional because today gender roles are very fluid if someone the main thing we want to understand is that whatever we identify in terms of gender in our conscious

persona roles the anim anonymous is going to be a complementary opposite complete opposite to that it's going to be things that we feel do not fit with our persona with our public sense of whatever our gender role is now the core archetype of all archetypes is the archetype of the self it's the organizing principle of the psyche again i'm not going to get into a lot of detail about that we have a nice little video from the deaf psychology alliance about an introduction to deaf psychology talks a little more about the self if you're not

familiar with that and again those other resources i mentioned are useful and finally what we've just been discussing is the process of individuation which is the process of integrating all these things so all of this psychic energy flows smoothly and is accessible and we can function in a way that helps us to achieve our highest life affirming goals in life so what i want to do now is kind of review and go through this idea of individuation just some nuances of jung's concept so individuation is the word that jung used to describe the differentiation of

the conscious ego from the unconscious self there's an early identification with the unconscious and as we separate and become the individual we are jung called that process individuation he says the aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and of the suggestive power of primordial images and by that he means archetypes the to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other hand now we could say

about individuation that there are essentially two types of individuation one is a natural process the other is an artificial process in other words jung did not invent individuation he simply observed some phenomena of how people develop and he gave a name to it that name was individuation for young individuation is essentially a natural developmental process that all living beings go through some organisms have adaptive processes and some simply develop along organic lines but they all become who and or what they are in other words a buddhist would say that the dog fulfills his dog nature

and the cat her cat nature and essentially we fulfill our nature our buddha nature ultimately hopefully a buddhist would say so for example human beings have developed the adaptive processes of religious practices that have historically helped the natural individuation process along as we developed and again i won't go into too much detail about this now but as we developed we became more and more dissociated from our natural processes and so to compensate for that we developed religious practices that keep us in touch with this deep archetypal core of the archetype of the self so the

process of religious practice and all that we would call a natural process it developed naturally and people did it uh really in a relatively unconscious way connecting with this deep core but an artificial process is the process that we actively what young would call actually yolanda jacoby called the artificial is the process that we actively consciously engage in through doing individual inner work or working with a therapist in individual or group settings we call this process artificial because of the proactive involvement of consciousness with the natural unconscious developmental processes problem being that over time human

beings stopped being enlivened by religious practices and so they stopped doing those things and the dissociation between consciousness and the unconscious became greater and greater and greater so it's easy to try to rush this artificial process along but much patience is required in the individuation process the art of individuation requires the patience to wait for the unconscious to act when it is ready again this is this privileging of the unconscious and allowing the unconscious to unfold in its own time and in its own way again this is a thumbnail sketch of individuation we'll talk much

more we did talk much more about it in um 101 and in those sources i mentioned you'll you'll find a lot more about it now in addition to two types of individuation there are also two essential stages to the process of individuation the first stage is the task of the first half of life and involves the natural development of personality social adaptation persona finding a mate developing a work path and finding one's place in society the second stage involves integrating the shadow and learning to regulate the energies of the collective unconscious and especially the energies

of the archetype of the self jung focused a great deal of his work and of his energy on studying this second phase this second stage of individuation much of ego psychology and the psychology that we see in mainstream therapies non-union therapies focus largely on this first phase of life and we'll see that jungians are often very focused on this second phase in the face of reconnecting with the unconscious so it's very important of course to know exactly which stage of the individuation process one is working on the tasks required for the first stage require building

a strong ego and a functional relationship with the outer world these tasks require a very different type of focus from the tasks of the second stage the second stage has more to do with developing a relationship with the objects of the inner world both are involved in what we call objects uh the first stages objects in the outer world the second phase is about objects i.e archetypes the objects of the inner world and negotiating the inner world it's also possible for someone to have work to do on both stages at the same time now jung

points to the myth of the hero as a way to illustrate the tendency of the ego to descend into the unconscious during this second stage of individuation we could call the heroes journey a myth of individuation as the jungian analyst eric neumann puts it in the process of realizing and assimilating and unconscious content the ego makes a descent from the conscious standpoint into the depths in order to raise up the treasure the treasure of course being the uh psychic energy the uh the ability to be enlivened and and be immersed in passionately in a task

that one previously might have felt they just didn't have the energy to approach it so jung in his book symbols of transformation and then later eric norman who i just quoted in his book the origins and history of consciousness and later joseph campbell in his book the hero with a thousand faces all of these individuals obviously inspired by jung but all talk about this idea of the hero's journey of the movement of the hero as a metaphor essentially for the individuation process or for one portion one cycle of the individuation process as we'll see the

individuation process really involves many many uh returns of the hero back to the underworld back going back cycling through these phases and this is a diagram just as a of a one of the typical ways of viewing the hero's journey that joseph campbell particularly discussed we start in the ordinary world and then some way or other there's a call to adventure there's a refusal of the call or a meeting of a mentor one way or another one falls into the deeps crosses the threshold is tested meets allies or enemies approaches the sort of hits rock

bottom as they say in 12-step programs and then from that point they are sort of pull themselves up and and find their way out through their allies and what have you go through an ordeal of death and rebirth find the reward take it back to the ordinary world and share that boon whatever that is the elixir of life or the treasure or some wisdom share that with their community with their family their community with their country with their world and bring some essentially consciousness to the world and then as we'll see this pattern actually repeats

now passing through this hero's journey is the process of differentiating remember jung said that differentiation for him is the key and differentiation of what well differentiating the ego from the deep unconscious the unconscious self now we see in these figures the first one the ego is completely identified with the self going through the hero's journey the ego evolves and pokes up just a little bit gets a little bit of consciousness differentiates a little bit cycling through that hero myth a little more the ego pokes up a little bit more and there's more differentiation now the

key and core to the individuation process is the development of what eric neumann called the ego self axis and we'll see uh edward ettinger another jungian analyst also used this term quite a lot in his book ego and archetype and the ego itself axis simply means the ongoing communication once the ego and the self are differentiated there's a sense of not being sort of possessed by the unconscious one has some consciousness but also realizes that all of the energy of life energy all the organism itself must include this energy from the unconscious so the ego

stays in touch through this connection this axis the ego is connected to the self and by dialoguing with the unconscious we maintain what they have called an ego self axis now the hero's journey as depicted by joseph campbell is what we'd call a metaphoric or mythological representation of a psychological fact now this is a diagram that edward edinger uses to sort of illustrate this now if we compare this to the hero's journey we see that the beginning of the journey is this sense of ego self-identity and there's a sense of inflation inflation simply means that

one thinks one is more than one is why is that because one is identified with an archetype and there's there's access to the archetypal energy but one's unconscious of where it's coming from and thinks oh that's my energy that's me and that works a little bit but at some point an inflated act happens uh maybe i uh run my car into a road or i try to do something that i simply can't do i stub my toe i get divorced i lose my job something happens through this state of inflation this state of ego inflation

grandiosity we call it a self-psychology through that state something happens where we experience rejection we experience an alienation from all those energies we previously had been identified with suddenly we're alienated from them we have no access to this energy we feel terrible we go through a period of wounding dismemberment until we reach the very rock bottom and we experience that a sacrificial attitude a sense of humility we realize that this energy is available to us but it's not me it's energy that i have access to if i'm humble and if i learn how to steward

this energy when i accept this fact i can reconnect with who i once was and i can bring again this energy back up to the world where i can serve uh my families and my community and my world and as i do that i begin to get a sense of who i am but then i'm in the danger of course of getting into that inflated state again we cycle back and forth through this and through this until we develop the skill of recognizing that if i stay in contact with the unconscious if i develop this

ego self-access then i will be safe and i will recognize that it's not me it's not my energy but it's energy i have access to and that i can steward if i'm humble and have some humility about it so the ongoing danger that we face when we do not learn how to manage our complexes when we do not learn how to dialogue with the archetypes of the unconscious the danger is twofold we risk either falling prey to identification with the archetypal energies which causes us to be inflated or to become ego driven or the other

side and and when you look at those of you who do um work in counseling if you're familiar with the diagnostical in a statistical manual identification with archetypal energies is uh parallel to the anxiety disorders or the manic disorders whereas when we're on the bottom side and we feel alienated from those archetypal energies we have no access to the energies this is the depressive pole this is the area where we have no energy and we just can't get out of bed we can't do anything because we just have no access to those energies however dialoguing

with and remaining in communication with the unconscious can help us to learn how to regulate and steward these powerful archetypal energies if we do not learn how to do so we may become identified with the energies and be inflated think we are in control of them when we're not or when we fail to be in control then we may become alienated from our own life energies and fall into a deep depression so it's this cycling back and forth through over and over by doing that if we can do that without killing ourselves or becoming alcoholics

or becoming addictive in some way or ruining our lives that we can do that and learn the skill to develop this ego self-access then we can differentiate the ego more and more maintain that connection and we will have access to these energies and we do this by developing a relationship with the archetypes a respect for the archetypes in ancient times we would pray to the archetypes we would have a religious practice where we recognize that we were at the mercy of the gods always at the mercy of the gods well we're still at the mercy

of the gods uh without getting into any metaphysics about what is in the uh realm beyond the psyche but simply in terms of the psyche we still need to be respectful of the archetypes of the collective unconscious however we may experience them so as you can see we've just really kind of flitted over the top of some of these basic ideas sort of the basics of jung's theory and the basics of how we would apply that theory now what i want to do is go into some details about what we're going to cover in the

course how we tease out the specifics of applying jung's theory in in different ways including working with dreams and active imagination all that and i'll do that by reviewing uh the different modules and the topics that we cover in jung102 but before we do that i want to just say a little bit about the course textbook so whether you're planning to take young 102 or not whether you're planning to take it in order to earn the course certificate or you simply want to audit the course any three of those categories in any case you'll really

benefit from reading the course textbook which is the book inner work using dreams and active imagination for personal growth it's written by union analyst robert johnson it's not as technical as uh our textbook for jung 101 it's uh we'll get into a lot of technical things in the course but he uses very conversational language very easy to read wonderful writer and but he's absolutely from the union perspective he is a union analyst he's written wonderful books he she and we you may have read by him if not i recommend them they're wonderful uh he but

his book inner work outlines a lot of uh the kinds of things we're going to be talking about in this course although we're going to be referring more to jung's work we will also refer to his book throughout as the title suggests inner work is a book focused on different approaches to doing what jung called inner work and that's what this course is about and that means maintaining this dialogue that we've been talking about with the unconscious he approaches individual communication with the unconscious through a jungian lens and although we will not follow his text

as closely as we followed the textbook in jung101 we will refer to it throughout and i think it will help to pad out the course and again even if you're not thinking of taking the course wonderful book uh to learn more about this idea of applying jungian psychology so the course is eight modules nine counting this introductory module the first module is called sacred space symbols patterns and amplification and in this first module we'll look at the main constituents of union work first there must be a place reserved for the work to take place as

we've already talked about not necessarily a physical location but a time and a commitment to making sure that the work is going on on a regular basis creating a container essential to the work that takes place in this space is an understanding of the nature of symbolic work and of the patterns that emerge from the study of the symbols produced by the unconscious as we've said the key technique is understanding the symbols and a way of doing that is through amplification and amplification is about understanding myths fairy tales alchemy etc and we'll go into great

detail with those in the other modules of this course now another important idea that we'll touch on in this first module is the idea of compensation that's part of jung's theory which we talked about in 101 but essential to jung's method is the understanding that the unconscious will compensate the conscious attitude in an attempt to bring the psychic system into balance and there's a lot more to say about that but that will be in that first module now in module two will focus on one of the real central methods that jung used and that is

dreamwork once we've established some key parameters in module one in module two we're going to look at jung's own approach to dreamwork as is common in most approaches to death psychology jung felt that dreams were a direct expression of the unconscious psychic activity that we experience and as such dreams can provide important clues as to what unconscious factors may be seeking expression in our lives need to be integrated and this is a great way to begin developing developing this ego self axis so in this module we'll look at the specifics of jung's techniques of dream

analysis and we'll also look at techniques and approaches used by and developed by later unions and later dream workers so module three we will look at jung's second and in many ways is most innovative and certainly uh something he valued intensely which is active imagination it's another approach to working with the unconscious and many of you may be familiar with jung's read book well his red book was a product of this technique that he used of active imagination so now whereas in dreamwork we are more or less passively allowing the unconscious to communicate with us

through dreams inactive imagination active the word active is the key word and inactive imagination we actively consciously and deliberately enter into dialogue with the images and symbols that have arisen from the unconscious we can work with images that arise from a dream that we don't understand or we can just simply as jung often did just close our eyes sink into a state or do various activities that will prompt the unconscious and when we see an image hear a sound make a movement whatever type of active imagination process we're using we then work with that image

ask questions of the image listen for a response and develop a dialogue in that way and this is another very very valuable way to begin to work with and develop and maintain this ego self-access so in this module we're going to go into a lot of detail about that technique of humes so having established jung's two primary methods dreams and active imagination looked at those in detail then we're gonna spend three modules looking at three specific areas that jung studied intensively in order to develop a sort of a lexicon an understanding a catalog of patterns

of myth images symbols and how they worked in human psyche throughout history and by understanding those things he was able to better understand the dreams and the active imagination symbols that arose so the first one we're going to look at in module 4 is working with mythology now of course there's much much much to say about jung and myth and we'll only get to some of it in module four but the aspect of myth that is essential for applied jungian psychology is the use of myth for the amplification of dream images and the figures encountered

in active imagination in this context we'll look for parallel images and symbols that seem to correspond to the images and symbols that arise in the psyche while doing inner work additionally however one must still have some understanding of the meaning of the myth if we are to extrapolate from the myth the meaning of the dream image so for that reason the more we know about myths the more we know about interpreting myths understanding myths and of course all these other cultural artifacts the better we're going to be able to apply them to the dreams uh

jung has said that myths are original revelations from the pre-conscious psyche involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings and because they're common to everyone throughout history to one degree or another uh they're very very valuable in understanding typical phases of human life that everyone goes through as such the meaning of a myth must be understood within the context of the group within which it first appeared so although it's meaningful for everyone the actual meaning of a myth i may hear a myth and think something specific about it but when we look at the myth in the

context of the people and the group within which it arose we we have a better sense of that likewise we will want to understand the symbols that arise from dreams and active imagination in the context of the life of the person we're talking about and and there's many many nuances to all of that and those are the kind of things we'll be exploring in module 4. now module 5 we could easily say that fairy tales are a subdivision of myth or really all of these other things could fall under that whether we're talking about alchemy

or fairy tales or talking about religious world religions and other religious practices we could put them all under the heading of myth but we break them down because each is a very very rich category so module 5 will be about working with fairy tales and like myths fairy tales provide an enormous amount of material for amplification and there's a difference though between cultural mythologies and fairy tales and the expert on jungian understandings of fairy tales many of you may know is the great and wonderful analyst marie louise von franz and i want to read a

quote to you from her what she heard from dr young she says dr young once said that it it is in fairy tales that one can best study the comparative anatomy of the psyche in myths or legends or any other more elaborate mythological material we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through a lot of cultural material but in fairy tales there is much less specific cultural conscious material and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly end of quote and what she means by that is and what jung means

by that is that myths tend to be part of a body of a religious canon or a body of a cultural canon of some type in which many many people have rewritten them they've they've repeated them through an oral tradition and they begin to take on it each time they're told each time they're written down they're changed a little bit they're redacted a little bit and they they fit and apply to more and more and more and more people whereas with fairy tales they are told by one person to a small group traditionally the the

old very old fairy tales which we often look for the oldest ones we can find and because of this and because they are so evocative and so ethereal they as she says they get right to the core uh to the anatomy to the sort of bare bones of the collective unconscious so they're very powerful um reading a lot if you ever read a lot of the really old fairy tales they can be quite uh they definitely will help to stimulate your dreams because they're very evocative of these archetypal patterns so myths can be helpful in

understanding broad cultural patterns for example i'm of primarily scots irish heritage scottish and irish mythologies are very helpful to me in understanding my own family dynamics and patterns personal uh history can often be seen parallel to that in the the histories of a particular ethnic group same mythologies might not have the same resonance for someone of the jewish or nordic or germanic background they might resonate more with myths from those cultures fairy tales on the other hand although they are adapted by different cultures usually have not been passed through a cultural filter in the same

way and are not modified over time in the same way to fit the broad public of a given culture in the same way that cultural myths have done fairy tales can often tell us more about the basic human structures of the psyche that transcend cultural differences than any myth can so in this module we'll discuss a number of different ways that fairy tales can be applied to jungian work and that's module five module six we'll look at one of the really this is if anything rivals fairy tales and being evocative and really fascinating and really

one of the reasons jung was so into alchemy is because it parallels our very scientifically oriented western mind and it's right at that liminal borderline place between mythology and scientific thinking and it's a fascinating area well we won't obviously touch on everything in alchemy we have a whole course on alchemy but module 6 will be about the parallels between alchemical processes and the individuation process so this module will enter into jung's most important discovery many would say he certainly felt so that the fantasies of the early alchemists were actually a myth of individuation for the

modern world not only that the myths and symbols of alchemy incorporate and integrate all of the major mythologies of the western world astrology fairy tales the holy grail this biblical imagery boasts both uh hebrew bible old testament imagery as well as new testament type imagery uh there's metallurgy there's myths of the earth and of the chemical elements from which all matter is constructed and much more it's just a mishmash it's just a fascinating collection of images and ideas and ways of encountering the physical world while still thinking in this pre uh you could say pre-modern

mythological way so all of these ideas were brought together in alchemy furthermore alchemy is not simply a system of static m images and symbols the whole point of alchemy is is the defining and describing a process of creating something the myths of alchemy describe a dynamic movement of energy that mirrors the activity of the psyche in the individuation process because in the individuation process we're also trying to create something we're trying to create a healthy dynamic well-balanced dynamic life that we can live in a an affirmative generative way so understanding the imagery of alchemy can

be enormously useful in understanding the imagery generated by the unconscious particularly in western people this is why jung focused on energy was because he felt that it was corresponded much more to the dreams of his clients who were european people primarily and so he focused on that rather than he had a great interest in eastern religion and eastern thought but he found that those myths did not parallel his the experiences of his clients in the western world as well as alchemy did so in module six we'll touch on many of the exciting aspects of alchemy

and how they can be applied to jungian work module seven we're going to begin our two module journey through understanding culture through a jungian lens and with module 7 we'll begin to look at some of the ways that we can use jungian theory to understand culture jung was intensely interested in applying his theory to understanding culture especially western culture and especially understanding the institutions of christianity my own interest in this area is in understanding how the lack of masculine initiation processes in our culture has led to a world of uninitiated boys running the world i

will discuss all these things including gender and other issues in this module and finally in module 8 i'm going to talk about culture in a broad spiritual sense talking about ancestry spiritual practice and ritual eldership and how these ideas of process of dream active imagination work and amplification can all be applied to understanding this we'll look at how individuals can move towards becoming stewards of the archetypal energies that we've been learning to process and to regulate and to work with and in the end the task of the hero or the heroine is to bring back

to the community the treasures that we have retrieved in the underworld if we are simply as some people would say naval gazers and not bringing something to bear into the real world we're not really doing jungian work even if we're an introvert our goal is to become to balance introversion and extroversion we'll talk about that a little bit as well so in this final module we'll look at the role of ancestry spiritual practice and ritual eldership in all of the integration of these energies so that is a complete introduction to an overview of young 102

applied jungian psychology i hope you've enjoyed this brief introduction to applied jungian psychology there's much much more to learn about the application of carl jung's innovative theory and if you're ready to learn more we hope that you will take the opportunity to sign up now for the full young 102 applied jungian psychology course thanks for spending this time with me do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Music] do you