Jungian Analysis and Psychotherapy

Complexes       

Jung began his empirical work in Switzerland analyzing, researching, and writing about feeling-toned complexes. Complexes are formed through developmental traumas that split off bits of the personality and mobilize psychic infections that may proliferate into mental disorders. To be depleted of their negative emotional charges they need to be transformed through reductive and constructive methods of therapy, fantasy-thinking and the symbolic life. Working with affect-complexes at an emotional, relational and imaginal level is a primary task of Jungian psychotherapy and Jungian analysis. Once the complexes that have made the personality sick and dysfunctional patterns of relationship and behavior have been reduced—to their causal origins in adolescence, childhood, and/or early infancy—what emerges in the course of the analysis, if all goes well, is the natural outgrowth of personality through the summons from the inner voice to live out one's life's meanings. Often this comes as a surprise to the patient through a mutual understanding with the psychotherapist.  

Jungian Analysis 

What is Jungian analysis and how does it work? Why should I go to see a Jungian psychotherapist? What do Jungian analysts have to offer that other mental health practitioners typically do not provide? What makes analytical psychotherapy unique among the mental health professions—psychiatry, clinical psychology, social work, marriage and family therapy, and spiritual, or religious counseling? The difference is the central focus we place upon understanding what dreams mean and how they can function as channels for the Self’s emergence. The Self is Jung’s master concept for the central archetype of unity in the personality and we place a focus on the development of the whole person. One of the primary channels for the Self's manifestations are vocational archetypes. These are goal-directed structures for the instincts to realize themselves through symbolic imagery and human action in service of one's full potential. One of the basic principles of Jungian analysis is that neurosis is a defense against the creative urge or will to create. Therefore, helping patients become more creative and motivated in their life is a primary goal of treatment. I look at problems from an in-depth point of view by focusing on the inner voice, the calling, or vocation. I work with issues of personal and professional relationships, job dissatisfaction, loss, aging, and bereavement. I bring to my practice a focus on typical mental health and emotional disorders from childhood to full maturity and into old age. 

Growth and Development of the Personality       

Nurturing the natural growth of personality from its organic seed in the unconscious is the Jungian psychotherapist’s primary concern. This is not only a therapy. It is a creative incubation that aims towards a new birth of the Self. Jungian psychotherapists and Jungian analysts sometimes help to parent the birth of the Self in the interpersonal relationship. The primary way to this birthing of the Self is through dream analysis, understanding what dreams mean, followed by active imagination, art work, the journal method, or sandplay.  The method of dream interpretation and active visioning are not typically taught in mental health institutions, yet, this is a primary way dysfunctional patterns of behavior and interaction may be outgrown through encounter and dialogue. Active visioning leads to an enlargement of the personality, whereby the personal complexes (emotionally-toned, or feeling-toned complexes) can be depleted of their negative charges, lessened in their intensity, and may be outgrown, as an inner authority emerges and begins to make its presence felt in one's fuller maturity. 

Dream Work  

Helping patient's find out what dreams mean across the course of an analysis is key to my work. Oftentimes the discovery of a patient's dream language requires the careful keeping of a dream journal. Dreams tend towards a goal. Sometimes their meaning may be vocationally oriented. By paying frequent attention to dreams across many months, a patient may become better attuned to the messages of their authentic Self. Keeping a daily dream log is a way to live a symbolic existence in the Now. A symbolic life forms a central way on our path towards wholeness. When we live a symbolic life the meaninglessness of existence may be transformed into meaning, neurotic symptoms may be significantly minimized, and one may begin to experience true joy and increased relatedness. As a Jungian analyst, I recommend the keeping a dream journal, as reflecting on the meaning of dreams is a way psychological complexes and conflicts can be made conscious in a way that a rational analysis sometimes can't reach. Understanding a patient’s dream language can be a vehicle for better understanding career conflicts and interpersonal problems in relationships, whether in adolescence, early adulthood or at mid-life and beyond. 

Couples Therapy

Are you looking to achieve better communication in your relationship? Are you wondering why you can no longer speak effectively with the person you fell in love with? Would you like to outgrow dysfunctional patterns of communication and make room for change? If you are seeking to understand why your relationships no longer work and want to learn how to create lasting friendship, I may be of assistance to you. I am a Jungian analyst who has been helping couples create more satisfying relationships and discover meaning in life. Improving communication patterns solves many of life’s problems. I assist couples in achieving better communication skills to arrive at a better understanding of who each person is and how to be more fully oneself. As a psychotherapist, I explore with patients the underlying psychodynamic issues that are causing problems in arriving at mutual understanding. Being better understood means being open to the meaning of complicated emotional patterns, or affect-complexes, which stem from one’s family of origin and can cause emotional or physical suffering. Jungian Marriage and Couples psychotherapy is a clinical method that is used by practitioners world-wide who utilize Jungian or post-Jungian concepts to guide their analytical practices. Jungian analysts have an ear for affect-attunement and affect-mis-attunements and the aim of the analyst is to listen to and identify emotional tones in the relational communication patterns between the couple, married pair, or partnership, and trace the health or illness of these styles of communication back to their emotional sources in the family of origin, in light of the current relational conflicts. Once couples can see how they are attempting either to master or perpetuate old styles of relating arising from their families of origin, sometimes going back beyond the parents to the grandparents, they can begin to let go of dysfunctional ways of relating to one another in the interests of the larger needs for individual transformation in each person. The most commonly used technique in couples work is the teaching of active listening skills, which increases emotional intelligence, and the therapist’s use of him or herself as a witness to help change dysfunctional cognitive, behavioral, and emotional patterns. Often this requires a stripping away of defenses and a painful sacrifice of the heroic ego through the therapist’s confrontation of neurotic styles of relating in the couple. By returning patients in treatment to childhood through regressive work, patients may be enabled to allow personal complexes to surface along with creative patterns of destiny, which have been neglected, or split off from the Self’s total functioning, and this may happen through the therapist’s directing the patients to keep a careful record of their dreams. As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), I provide a compassionate and respectful attitude to dyadic work and a safe container for difficult issues to be communicated and confronted for therapeutic change to occur.   

Midlife Transformation

       Midlife can be a time of tumultuous transformations with unexpected reversals of fortune, vocational indecision, and new emerging life paths that can make their sudden demands upon the ego to heed the Self’s callings to wholeness. Having a Jungian psychotherapist or Jungian analyst to work with in-depth during this period of personal grief and loss of one's former persona can lead to a recognition and inner acceptance of the destiny one is meant to be living. During this muddled midlife state of affairs, big dreams of destiny may emerge. During this time the inner voice may come forth to do its work of helping to re-connect a person to their greatest life’s meaning and path towards wholeness. Jungian analysis and dream work can help facilitate this process. Heeding vocational dreams and outer synchronistic events during this period of change can help to heal a person from meaninglessness existence and neurosis and fill one with a new sense of significance. As an archetype of destiny, the vocational archetype may lead a patient to experience rapid inspirations and creative renewals. Relief may come at the recognition that one has found a way to stay connected to the Self; by opening up new possibilities of relationships and purposeful channels of sacred work, heeding the call can turn existential crises into spiritual metamorphosis. Transformation at midlife involves a change from a career-orientation to a vocational-orientation, where the aim is no longer placed upon the ego and its limited needs, but upon ever-increasing Self-knowledge, which springs from one’s deepest sense of joy and being. Once the call to wholeness is heard and surrendered to, it may bring with it a sense of renewed energy and lessening of past hurts and traumas. Vocational dreams can provide new insights into the way ahead and help steer the ship of one’s destiny towards newly achieved shores of peace. Neurotic symptoms such as anxiety and depression may begin to dissolve as the ego lets go of disordered emotions and allows the Self to take a lead in the establishment of an ordered symbolic life in accordance with the harmonious plan of Nature. Understanding the relationship between dreams with vocational significance and meaningful chance, or what Jung called synchronicity, can be of great benefit during the passage from disorder to temporary order during midlife’s transformations.