Quotes from CG Jung
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness’s of other people.
When the doctor sits down with the patient, all theories must be forgotten and the doctor must learn the theory of the person in front of him or her
From Melanie Klein
Although psychology and pedagogy have always maintained the belief that a child is a happy being without any conflicts, and have assumed that the sufferings of adults are the results of the burdens and hardships of reality, it must be asserted that just the opposite is true. What we learn about the child and the adult through psychoanalysis shows that all the sufferings of later life are for the most part repetitions of these earlier ones, and that every child in the first years of life goes through an immeasurable degree of suffering.
From Simone Weil
We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.
From Anna Freud
A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.
I have been crafting my work as a psychotherapist for about 55 years: over a half century. And like all serious and complex arts and crafts, the work—truly a labour of love, curiosity, and excitement—that goes into becoming a knowledgeable and skilled therapist is endless: lifelong dedicated pursuit. And most importantly, I am convinced that such work is not a matter of acquiring a set of knowledge and skills that one can apply to clients. It is more about self-cultivation to become, for lack of a better word, let’s say, an optimally attuned practitioner. This cultivation is a never ending process. Even after 55 years in the field I am most happy to say that I know I still have a long path of possibilities ahead of me. With this understanding in mind, I have many emergent ideas I would like to share with you about just what the qualities are that lie behind being a consummate psychotherapist.
As CG Jung told us, “[T]he best way to be is to be yourself.” I understand this as the true self that you started out to be and that very likely was obscured, derailed, and distorted by the egoic structures you developed unconsciously in the service of surviving in the world. A highly attuned therapist will join with you in exploring how your life has come to be as it is, support you with re-initiating your growth, and collaborate with you to become closer and closer to your most authentic, core, and alive self.
I take C. G. Jung’s statement seriously, namely: “Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness’s of other people.” I certainly have spent a great deal of my time, energy, effort, and at times I have struggled badly to know what is hidden in my own darkness and in trying to become a ripened and generative aspect of my being. Assuredly, it is not easy to know your darkness, given that by definition such is out of your awareness. There are ways to catch what is in the Dark by investigating your day and night dreams, your own patterns in all dimensions, those fleeting moments that are just barely visible that I call flickers, your great and terrible thoughts, your body sensations, your relational encounters, and much more.
The term ‘unconscious’ often has a negative connotation in its common usage. To say that someone is unconscious about something is not exactly complementary or encouraging. But if we were to study the history of ideas and how the early theorists of human mind, such as Freud and C. G. Jung, theorized about the unconscious, we would come away with a substantially different understanding about the Shadow realm. For one thing, the unconscious doesn’t mean that whatever is unconscious is completely unknowable. The unknown presents opportunity to discover possibilities and tiger traps that exist in your inner world, and there are definitely ways to gain access to such not knowns. A most central point for this Field Note is C. G. Jung’s understanding that the unconscious was the ‘repository’ for everything unknown, including the human potential.
Jung’s view of the unconscious was a major point of disagreement between Jung and his mentor, Sigmund Freud. For Freud, the unconscious was the repository for disturbing, dangerous, and traumatic material. Jung believed that the unconscious held everything unknown, and particularly the human potential and possibilities. Fritz Perls, another student of Freud, and the founder of Gestalt Therapy held the view that what is out of your awareness—that is, your unconsciousness—is what is running your life. Jung, Perls, and others (notably, Arnold Mindell) developed ways of shining a light on the personal and collective unconscious and ways of working with it to release the potential that lies hidden in the unconscious. In my work as a psychotherapist, I have done my best to faithfully follow in the footsteps of these pioneers of the human unconscious and the growth of human consciousness and possibilities.
People tell me that they know themselves. What they will most frequently describe is behaviour, characteristics, reactions, their job, likes, and dislikes. This is indeed the self they know. When I ask, “Who ‘does’ the behavior? Who has this characteristic? Who is reacting as you describe?” The most likely answer is, “Me.” I explain that each of the experiences described has an identity, an egoic structure that has thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, a history, a family that helped create them as they have become, a cultural and historical context from which they emerged, and a dreamer self that has fantastic dream possibilities for their lives, and often those who come to see me do not have too much idea about what I am referring to in any of these realms.
The idea that there are unconscious dimensions and processes, and separate ego’s for these, is a foreign concept, at least in the multiplicity of details, to most people. Even those who have some sense of this tend to be limited in their understanding about this dimension of human beings in general and of themselves in particular. Certainly, this is understandable: we don’t learn these things at home or in school. Even most therapists don’t talk about it unless they happen to have had some training in depth and/or analytic schools of therapy.
The idea that these unknowns of the unconscious are dictating your life is a worthy and potentially fascinating exploration and a significant step onto the path of expanded consciousness and aliveness. As long as you are subject to the dictatorial and automated ways of your unconscious, you can’t help reacting to whatever comes along the way. Consequently, you tend to point to outside circumstances as the ‘cause’ of your reactive way of being. As I have previously mentioned in other Field Notes, reactivity is like a reflex. It just happens. It is automatic with roots deeply embedded in your unconscious.
In contrast to reactivity is responsiveness. This is a way of being that is not pre-programmed by your past conditioning that is stored in your unconscious. Responsiveness is attuned to the moment, the circumstance and context, your true Self, and if there is another person involved, their state of being and its manifestation in the moment. To become more responsive, a major shift needs to take place in you that is about being/becoming conscious of who you most authentically are and what impairs this emergence of You. This latter phenomenon is a sign that your inner fire is becoming more available and liberated.
If working with the unconscious is difficult to the client, it is not any easier for the therapist (who works with the unconscious). The main part of the difficulty has to do with the nature of the unconscious: that the unconscious is hidden and, of course, unknown. What I have attempted to convey so far in this note is some elucidation about the unconscious and its importance and its manifestations. Hypothetically speaking, an attuned therapist will have a highly developed ability to note the signals within themselves and that you are sending. As Arny Mindell told us, a highly trained and muti-dimensionally aware therapist will be able to pick up 400 – 500 signals in the moment, whereas the average person will pick up at best 30 – 40 signals. The skill and ability to know how to be and what to do with the ‘information’ gained from signal noticing in the micro-seconds of life and in the context of a person’s entire history and life trajectory are the realm of a highly attuned therapist.
I believe that such a therapist must be in a life-long pursuit of being a great and whole human being. This, as you may have surmised, is an ongoing quest—really a way of being and living. Those living in such a way do not have to force themselves to live this way. They embrace and are embraced by this style of life, this way of being.
Now I will share some characteristics and talents of a highly attuned therapist and I present the following in what I believe is a stark contrast to the usual essays on how to choose a therapist. Perhaps this describes the therapist of the 22nd century! I have put these ideas about psychotherapists in bullet points, a large and incomplete number:
Such a therapist:
- Comprehends and makes some sense of all the above occurrences, and in a way that helps you with your inner, relational, knowing of your own unconscious, and your life’s work.
- Shines a light on the path towards discovery of the hidden dimensions of yourself, understand the impact and hidden intent of your history, and facilitates understanding more of who you really are from this stuck point that is represented.
- Facilitates your identification of your in-the-moment experience in multiple dimensions and enhances your opportunity to embody the identity that arises from noticing and attending to whatever experience is available to your awareness.
- Models the experience and possibilities of being.
- Models, describes, and owns their stuck points, and describes how they are working with this and shares in the ‘right’ way the difficulties they have in the service of shining a light on their own process.
- Talks meaningfully about the challenges of a life that addresses ‘growing up’ at all stages of life and as an ongoing process.
- Is non-formulaic in their work with you; rather senses where you are and applies the way that suits you in the moment and within the context of your current life and your history.
- Does their own inner and relational work ongoing in the service of being able to show up as authentically as possible for their own growth, you, and your work.
- Demonstrates and helps you learn about three levels of disclosure (Yalom, 2001, The Gift of Therapy): i) in the moment awareness; ii) personal history; iii) process disclosure.
- Helps you cultivate your process of dreaming of all kinds, including high dreams, and how your dreaming is about the subject ofyour dreaming, understanding your inner world, developing your imaginative and creative abilities, and knowing that Self that dreams.
- Facilitates your understanding of how what happened to you in your early development and what didn’t happen to you has shaped and mis-shaped what you have become.
- Joins and collaborates with you in your search for and deepening of your understanding of the nature and discovery of your true and most authentic Self.
- Understands the nature and effect of their power with you, and particularly their ‘psychological’ power.
- Is finely attuned to you, themselves, and the relational field in the moment and overall.
- Is able to facilitate your self-empowerment and be supportive of you in the moments where your capacity falls short of what is needed and stands back at just the right distance when you are discovering something that is beyond your usual range.
- Gives you feedback that is optimally helpful and in the ways that are optimal for you to receive in the exact right moment for you to use to your advantage with your quest for your truest identity and way in each moment.
- Offers you a way to see and know what your experience actually is within a broader and deeper context.
- Talks to you about vulnerability and equally about awareness development regarding protection and defence, the need for both ways of being, and how to know which is required when, and to what extent.
- Supports you in your learning to perform your inner and relational work on your own.
- Assists you in learning a do-able contemplative/reflective practice. This is in the service of your inner research on meaning, purpose, your exploration of the big questions in life, to be increasingly at the appropriate level of ease, and the ongoing pursuit of whatever you consider to be your spiritual nature.
- Supports the emergence of your natural consciousness, your ‘knowing’ when and how to push out, pull in, allow, be still, turn, open, and close.
- Supports learning the difference between loneliness and solitude.
- Has an energy field that influences you in ways that are enhancing to your nature.
- Creates an environment that makes it most likely that you will come away from your session in an enhanced state of consciousness, a non-ordinary state, beyond consensus reality, and with an enhanced and awakened way of being in the moments of your life.
- Provides you ways of perspective shifting, widening, and clarifying.
- Exudes authenticity, honesty, integrity, and life-force energy.
- Is a companion along the Way.
- Add your own qualities. Perhaps note that these qualities are congruent with being fully human
Every time that I think I have gone far enough with this list some new qualities, ideas, and questions occur to me. I will stop here for now…
I suggest to you that a highly attuned therapist has a view that will facilitate your personal work from where you are towards where your optimal life resides, just beyond your personal edge and towards the ever moving far horizon. Such a therapist will be living a life that is in service of becoming as full an example of the human possibilities as they are able. You will be provided opportunity to see them as a process example of, and not a ‘concrete’ way of being. They will be supporting you to become the fullest version of you, not a copy of some idealized model of a human being. And if you are a therapist, you will be working on yourself to learn to move into all these realms and growing your ability to ‘follow’ yourself. Your very authentic therapist knows and exemplifies that the best method for living your life as fully as possible is to be immersed in the process of cultivating the emergence of that self you were always meant to be and is most aware that this is a lifelong process and that they are not perfected as yet…
With great appreciation for Heesoon for her support with this Note.
Shalom to you all,
Avraham
PS: I will take a break now from writing these Notes. The next Field Note will appear on February 1, 2025 and the guest author will be none other than Heesoon Bai.
So clear and useful, as always. Thank you! Do you think some of this works for parents, bosses, and regular people?
Thank you for your affirming comment!
If I understand your inquiry, I would say that this applies in any relational situation and is always best viewed/lived as an ongoing way of life…
Avraham