Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology. was influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.
Jung, like Freud, comes under the psychodynamic approach to counselling. He worked a lot with archetypes – recurring images or patterns that represent a typical human experience.
Some archetypal patterns are unique to us, and some we all share, e.g. The Saboteur is the one we all share. It speaks to our fear of expressing ourselves authentically and spontaneously. When we are embarking on a new path, a creative project or a program of transformation, it’s often the last guardian at the gate, ready to throw a spanner in the works. It’s a deep unconscious pattern designed to keep us safe from change, from anything new or different. This dynamic is all about fear of the next step.
In the spring of 1957, at the age of 84, Jung set out to tell his life’s story. He embarked upon a series of conversations with his colleague and friend, Aniela Jaffe, which he used as the basis for the text. At times, so powerful was his drive for expression that he wrote entire chapters by hand. He continued to work on the manuscript until shortly before his death in 1961. The result was Memories, Dreams, Reflections - a peek behind the curtain of Jung’s mind, revealing his wisdom, experience, and self-reflection.
I share below quotes that have intrigued me from my - so far partial - reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
- Only what is interior has proved to have substance and a determining value. As a result, all memory of outer events has faded, and perhaps these outer experiences were never so essential anyway – Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p10-11
- It also became apparent to him that numerous neuroses spring from a disregard for this fundamental characteristic of the psyche [religion], especially during the second half of life – Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p12
- The way I am and the way I write are a unity. All my ideas and all my endeavours are myself – Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p14
- Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life – Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p17
- Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that lives above the ground lasts only a single summer....yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains – Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p19
- The feeling of strangeness which she conveyed, and yet of having known her always, was a characteristic of that figure which later came to symbolise for me the whole essence of womanhood – Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Flamingo edition 1989, p 19