Jung's Medicine
I won’t deny it, I am a pretty big fan of the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung, and his theories on psyche. As an intuitive, his perspective has deeply resonated with me. Much of his philosophy profoundly inform my life.
When I was first introduced to Jung at surface, I strongly protested against his originality. I thought his concepts to be tritely stolen from Eastern and Indigenous philosophies wrapped in Western designations. To this day, I still find myself wrestling with criticisms I have of the man, despite his legend. But as I delve deeper and deeper, I cannot deny his genius and the extraordinary body of work he amassed with the support of his devotees, many whom were women that created their own theories and paths of individuation.
During a period in my life in which I was stuck and searching for meaning, I decided to undergo Jungian analysis and experienced a mysterious unfolding of powerful dreams that connected me back to the depths of my soul and the value of relating to the symbolic nature of psyche. I came to understand the healing potential in considering the poison as the elixir.
Notions of the collective unconscious, individuation, synchronicity, archetype, anima and animus, persona, shadow, self, dreamwork, and typology came alive for me and have contained me in a very special way since.
As Freud’s once protege and later nemesis, Jung had to forge a path that led him to trust his mystical convictions about the nature of psyche and dive into the unconscious to ferret out its truths. My sensing his triteness, was perhaps after all, a man connecting to the universality of esoteric practices, myth, ritual, and symbol and giving them credence for the western world to take note.
I certainly have, and while various schools of thought and practices have informed my path of integrating the insight I gain from the Jungian perspective, I hope to share what I know now as lived experience of numinous phenomenon while remaining at home with our humanness.
