“The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis” by C.G. Jung

“Initial dreams are often amazingly lucid and clear cut. But as the work of analysis progresses, the dreams tend to loser their clarity. If, by the way of exception, they keep it we can be sure that the analysis has not yet touched on some important layer of the personality. As a rule, dreams get more and more opaque and blurred soon after the beginning of the treatment, and this makes the interpretation increasingly difficult. A further difficulty is that a point may soon be reached where, if the truth be told, the doctor no longer understands the situation as a whole. That he does not understand is proved by the fact that the dreams become increasingly obscure, for we all know that their “obscurity” is a purely objective opinion of the doctor. To the understanding nothing is obscure; it is only when we do not understand that things appear unintelligible and muddled. In themselves dreams are naturally clear; that is, they are just what they must be under the given circumstances. If, from a later stage of treatment or from a distance of some years, we look back at these unintelligible dreams, we are often astounded at our own blindness.”

“Moreover, it is therapeutically very important for the doctor to admit his lack of understanding in time, for nothing is more unbearable to the patient than to be always understood. “

“To say that dreams add something important to our conscious knowledge, and that a dream which fails to do so has not been properly interpreted – that, too, is a theory. But I must make this hypothesis as well in order to explain to myself why I analyze dreams in the first place. All other hypothesis, however, about the function and the structure of dreams are merely rules of thumb and must be subjected to constant modification. In dream analysis we must never forget, even for a moment, that we move on treacherous ground where nothing is certain but uncertainty. “

“When we take up an obscure dream, our first task is not to understand and interpret, but to establish the context with minute care. By this I do not mean unlimited “free association” starting from any and every image in the dream, but a careful and conscious illumination of the interconnected associations objectively grouped round particular images. Many patients have first to be educated to this, for they resemble the doctor in their insuperable desire to understand and interpret offhand, especially when they have been primed by ill-digested reading or by a previous analysis that went wrong. They begin by associating in accordance with a theory, that is, they try to understand and interpret, and they nearly always get stuck. Like the doctor, they want to get behind the dream at once in the false belief that the dream is a mere facade concealing the true meaning. But the so called facade of most houses is by no means a fake or deceptive distortion; on the contrary, it follows the plan of the building and often betrays the interior arrangement. The “manifest” dream-picture is the dream itself and contains the whole meaning of the dream. When I find sugar in the urine, it is sugar and not just a facade for albumen. What Freud calls the “dream-facade” is the dream’s obscurity, and this is really only a projection of our own lack of understanding. We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it. We would do better to say that we are dealing with something like a text that is unintelligible not because it has a facade – a text has no facade – but simply because we can not read it. We do not have to get behind such a text, but must first learn to read it.

The best way to do this, as I have already remarked, is to establish the context. Free association will get me nowhere, any more than it would help me decipher a Hittite inscription. It will of course help me to uncover all of my own complexes, but for this purpose I have no need of a dream – I could just as well take a public notice or a sentence in a newspaper. Free association will bring out all my complexes , but hardly ever the meaning of the dream. To understand the dream’s meaning I must stick as close as possible to the dream images. When somebody dreams of a “deal table” it is not enough for him to associate it with his writing desk which does not happen to be made of deal. Supposing that nothing more occurs to the dreamer, this blocking has an objective meaning, for it indicates that a particular darkness reigns in the immediate neighborhood of the dream-image, and that is suspicious. We would expect him to have dozens of associations to a deal table, and the fact that there is apparently nothing is itself significant. In such cases I keep on returning to the image, and I usually say to my patient, “Suppose I had no idea what the words ‘deal table’ mean. Describe this object and give me its history in such a way that I cannot fail to understand what sort of a thing it is.”

In this way we manage to establish almost the whole context of dream-image. When we have done this for all the images in the dream we are ready for the venture of interpretation.

Every interpretation is an hypothesis, an attempt to read an unknown text. An obscure dream, taken in isolation, can hardly ever be interpreted with any certainty. For this reason I attach little importance to the interpretation of single dreams. A relative degree of certainty is reached only in the interpretation of a series of dreams, where the later dreams correct the mistakes we have made in handling those that went before. Also, the basic idea and themes can be recognized much better in a dream-series, and I therefore urge my patients to keep a careful record of their dreams and of the interpretations given. I also show them how to work out their dreams in the manner described, so that they can bring the dream and its context with them in writing to the consultation. As a later stage I get them to work out the interpretation as well. In this way the patient learns how to deal correctly with his unconscious without the doctor’s help.”

“No amount of skepticism and criticism has yet enabled me to regard dreams as negligible occurrences. Often enough they appear senseless, but it is obviously we who lack the sense and ingenuity to read the enigmatic message from the nocturnal realm of the psyche. Seeing that at least half our psychic existence is passed in that realm, and that consciousness acts upon our nightly life just as much as the unconscious overshadows our daily life, it would seem all the more incumbent on medical psychology to sharpen its sense by a systematic study of dreams. Nobody doubts the importance of conscious experience; why then should we doubt the significance of unconscious happenings? They also are part of our life, and sometimes more truly a part of it for weal or woe than any happenings of the day.

Since dreams provide information about the hidden inner life and reveal to the patient those components of his personality which, in his daily behavior, appear merely as neurotic symptoms, it follows that we cannot effectively treat him from the side of consciousness alone, but must bring about a change in and through the unconscious. In the light of our present knowledge, this can be achieved only by the thorough and conscious assimilation of unconscious contents. “

“The unconscious is not a demoniacal monster, but a natural entity which, as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste, and intellectual judgment go, is completely neutral. It only becomes dangerous when our conscious attitude to it is hopelessly wrong. To the degree that we repress it, its danger increases. But the moment the patient begins to assimilate contents that were previously unconscious, it danger diminishes. The dissociation of personality, the anxious division of the day-time and the nighttime sides of the psyche, case with progressive assimilation. “

“The fundamental mistake regarding the nature of the unconscious is probably this: it is commonly supposed that its contents have only one meaning and are marked with an unalterable plus or minus sign. In my humble opinion, this view is too naive. The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche. In this sense we can take the theory of compensation as a basic law of psychic behavior. Too little on one side results in too much on the other. Similarly, the relation between conscious and unconscious is compensatory. This is one of the best-proven rules of dream interpretation. When we set out to interpret a dream, it is always helpful to ask: What conscious attitude does this compensate?

Compensation is not as a rule merely an illusory fulfillment, but an actual fact that becomes still more actual the more we repress it. We do not stop feeling thirsty by repressing our thirst. In the same way, the dream-content is to be regarded with due seriousness as an actuality that has to be fitted into the conscious attitude as a co determining factor. If we fail to do this, we merely persist in that eccentric frame of mind which evoked the unconscious compensation in the first place. It is then difficult to see how we can ever arrive at a sane judgment or ourselves or at a balanced way of living.”

“For dream-contents to be assimilated, it is of overriding importance that no real values of the conscious personality should be damaged, much less destroyed, otherwise there is no one left to do the assimilating. The recognition of the unconscious is not a Bolshevist experiment which puts the lowest on top and thus re-establishes the very situation it intended to correct. We must see to it that the values of the conscious personality remain intact, for unconscious compensation is only effective when it co-operates with an integral consciousness. Assimilation is never a question of “this or that” but always of “this and that”.

Just as the interpretation of dreams require exact knowledge of the conscious status quo, so the treatment of dream symbolism demands that we take into account the dreamer’s philosophical, religious, and moral convictions. It is far wiser in practice not to regard dream-symbols semiotically, i.e., as expressions of a content not yet consciously recognized or conceptually formulated. In addition, they must be considered in relation to the dreamer’s immediate state of consciousness. I say that this procedure is advisable in practice because in theory relatively fixed symbols do exist whose meaning must on no account be referred to anything known and formulable as a concept. If there were no such relatively fixed symbols it would be impossible to determine the structure of the unconscious, for there would be nothing that could in any way be laid hold of or described.”

“East Coker” by T.S. Eliot

…
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
…
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And what you are is what you are not.

“For Your Own Good” by Alice Miller

“If we turn our backs on something because it is difficult to understand and indignantly refer to it as “inhuman,” we will never be able to learn anything about its nature. The risk will then be greater, when we next encounter it, of once again aiding and abetting it by our innocence and naivete.”

“If psychoanalysis could only free itself of its stubborn belief in the death instinct, it would be able to begin to answer the question of why wars occur, on the basis of material available on early childhood conditioning. Unfortunately, however, most psychoanalysts are not interested in what parents did to their children, leaving this question to family therapists. Since the latter in turn do not work with transference but concentrate primarily on modifying interactions among family members, they seldom gain the access to events of early childhood possible in a thoroughgoing analysis.”

“… for people would rather submit to the strictest laws, go to all kinds of trouble, achieve spectacular feats, and choose the most demanding careers than be expected to bring love and understanding to the helpless unhappy child they once were, whom they have subsequently banished forever.”

“And so, when a man comes along and talks like one’s own father and acts like him, even adults will forget their democratic rights or will not make use of them. They will submit to this man, will acclaim him, allow themselves to be manipulated by him, and put their trust in him, finally surrendering totally to him without even being aware of their enslavement. One is not normally aware of something that is a continuation of one’s own childhood. For those who become as dependent on someone as they once were as small children on their parents, there is no escape. A child cannot run away, and the citizen of a totalitarian regime cannot free himself or herself. The only outlet one has is in raising one’s own children. Thus, the citizens who were captives of the Third Reich had to rear their children to be captives as well, if they were to feel any trace of their own power.”

“If there is absolutely no possibility of reacting appropriately to hurt, humiliation, and coercion, then these experiences cannot be integrated into the personality; the feelings they evoke are repressed, and the need to articulate them remains unsatisfied, without any hope of being fulfilled. It is this lack of hope of ever being able to express repressed traumata by means of relevant feelings that most often causes severe psychological problems. We already know that neuroses are a result of repression, not of events themselves.
Because this process does not begin in adulthood but in the very first days of life as a result of the efforts of often well-meaning parents, in later life the individual cannot get to the roots of this repression without help. It is as though someone has had stamped on his back a mark that he will never be able to see without a mirror. One of the functions of psychotherapy is to provide the mirror.”

“For parents’ motives are the same today as they were then: in beating their children, they are struggling to regain the power they once lost to their own parents. For the firs time, they see the vulnerability of their own earliest years, which they are unable to recall, reflected in their children. Only now, when someone weaker than they is involved, do they finally fight back, often quite fiercely.”

“When terrorists take innocent women and children hostage in the service of a grand and idealistic cause, are they really doing anything different from what was once done to them? When they were little children full of vitality, their parents had offered them up as sacrifices to a grand pedagogic purpose, to lofty religious values, with the feeling of performing a great and good deed. Since these young people never were allowed to trust their own feelings, they continue to suppress them for ideological reasons. These intelligent and often very sensitive people, who had once been sacrificed to a “higher” morality, sacrifice themselves as adults to another – often opposite – ideology, in whose service they allow their inmost selves to be completely dominated, as had been the case in their childhood.”

“For how could someone whose inner development had been limited to learning to obey the commands of others be expected to live on his own without experiencing a sudden sense of inner emptiness?”

“A child cannot acknowledge the negative side of his or her father, and yet these are stored up somewhere in the child’s psyche, for the adult will then be attracted by precisely these negative, disavowed sides in the father substitutes he or she encounters. An outsider has trouble understanding this.”

“When a strict, inaccessible, and distant father condescends to speak with his child, this is certainly a festive occasion, and to earn this honor no sacrifice of self is too great. A properly raised child will never be able to detect it if this father – this big and mighty man – should happen to be power-hungry, dishonorable, or basically insecure. And so it goes; such a child can never gain any insight into this kind of situation because his or her ability to perceive has been blocked by the early enforcement of obedience and the suppression of feelings.”

“When someone suddenly gives vent to his or her own rage, it is usually an expression of deep despair, but the ideology of child beating and the belief that beating is not harmful serve the function of covering up the consequences of the act and making them unrecognizable. The result of a child becoming dulled to pain is that access to the truth about himself will be denied him all his life. Only consciously experienced feelings would be powerful enough to subdue the guard at the gates, but these are exactly what he is not allowed to have.”

“People with any sensitivity cannot be turned into mass murderers overnight. But the men and women who carried out “the final solution” did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feelings of their own but to experience their parents’ wishes as their own. These were people who, as children, had been proud of being tough and not crying, of carrying out all their duties “gladly,” of not being afraid – that is, at bottom of not having an inner life at all.”

“If an adult has not developed a mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem too threatening to him.”

“The longer I wrestle with these questions, the more I am inclined to see courage, integrity, and a capacity for love not as “virtues,” not as moral categories, but as the consequences of a benign fate.
Morality and performance of duty are artificial measures that become necessary when something essential is lacking. The more successfully a person has denied access to his or her feelings in childhood, the larger the arsenal of intellectual weapons and the supply of moral prostheses has to be, because morality and a sense of duty are not sources of strength or fruitful soil for genuine affection. Blood does now flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters. What was considered good yesterday can – depending on the decree of government or party – be considered evil and corrupt today, and vice versa. But those who have spontaneous feelings can only be themselves. They have no other choice if they want to remain true to themselves. Rejection, ostracism, loss of love, and name calling will not fail to affect them, but once they have found their authentic self they will not want to lose it. And when they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it. They simply cannot.”

“Every ideology offers its adherents the opportunity to discharge their pent-up affect collectively while retaining the idealized primary object, which is transferred to a new leader figures or to the group in order make up for the lack of a satisfying symbiosis with the mother. Idealization of a narcisistically cathected group guarantees collective grandiosity. Since every ideology provides a scapegoat outside the confines of its own splendid group, the weak and scorned child who is part of the total self but has been split off and never acknowledged can now be openly scorned and assailed in this scapegoat. “

“The pedagogical conviction that one must bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available object. The child’s great plasticit, flexibility, defenselessness, and availability make it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within can at last be hunted down on the outside.”

“The drug addict punishes himself for seeking his true self – certainly a justifiable and essential goal – by destroying his own spontaneous feelings, repeating the punishment that was inflicted on him in early childhood when he showed the first signs of vitality. Almost every heroin addict describes having initially experienced feelings of hitherto unknown intensity, with the result that he becomes even more conscious of the vapidity and emptiness of his usual emotional life.
He simply can’t imagine that this experience is possible without heroin, and he understandably begins to long for it to be repeated. For, in these out-of-the-ordinary moments, the young person discovers how he might have been; he has made contact with the self, and as might be expected, once this has happened, he can find no rest. He can no longer act as though his true self had never existed. Now he knows that it does exist, but he also knows that ever since early childhood this true self has not had a chance. And so he strikes a compromise with his fate: he will encounter his self from time to time without anyone finding out. Not even he will realize what is involved, for it is the “stuff” that produces the experience; the effect comes “from outside” and is difficult to bring about. It will never become an integrated part of his self, and he will never have to or be able to assume responsibility for these feelings. The intervals between one fix and the next – characterized by total apathy, lethargy, emptiness, or uneasiness and anxiety – bear this out: the fix is over like a dream that one can’t remember and that can have no effect on one’s life as a whole.”

“The abused inmates of a concentration camp cannot of course offer any resistance, cannot defend themselves against humiliation, but they are inwardly free to hate their persecutors. The opportunity to experience their feelings, even to share them with other inmates, prevents them from having to surrender their self. This opportunity does not exist for children. They must not hate their father – this, the message of the Fourth Commandment, has been drummed into them from early childhood; they cannot hate him either, if they must fear losing his love as a result; finally, they do not even want to hate him, because they love him. Thus, children, unlike concentration-camp inmates, are confronted by a tormenter they love, not one they hate, and this tragic complication will have a devastating influence on their entire subsequent life.”

“In any case, anorexia nervosa exhibits all the components of a strict upbringing; the ruthless, dictatorial methods, the excessive supervision and control, the lack of understanding and empathy for the child’s true needs. To this is added overwhelming affection alternating with rejection and abandonment (orgies of gluttony followed by vomiting). The first law of this police system is: any method is good if it makes you the way we want and need you to be, and only if you are this way can we love you. This is later reflected in anorexia’s reign of terror. Weight is monitored to the ounce, and the sinner is immediately punished if the boundary is overstepped.”

“Children are made anxious by secretiveness, by their parents hushing things up, by whatever touches upon their parents’ feelings of shame, guilt, or fear. An important way of dealing with these threats is by fantasizing and playing games. Using the parents’ props gives the adolescent a feeling of being able to participate in their past.”

“It is different for children whose fathers have outbursts of rage and can then, in between times, play good-naturedly with their children. In this case the child’s hatred cannot be cultivated in such a pure form. These children experience difficulties of another sort as adults; they seek out partners with a personality structure that, like their fathers’, tends towards extremes. They are bound to these partners by a thousand chains and cannot bring themselves to leave them, always living with the hope that the other person’s good side will finally win out; yet at every fresh outburst they are plunged into new despair. These sadomasochistic bonds, which go back to the equivocal and unpredictable nature of a parent, are stronger than a genuine love relationship; they are impossible to break, and signal permanent destruction of the self.”

“Now, it is precisely those events that have never been come to terms with that must seek an outlet in the repetition compulsion.”

“I have no doubt that behind every crime a personal tragedy lies hidden. If we were to investigate such events and their backgrounds more closely, we might be able to do more to prevent crimes than we do now with our indignation and moralizing.”

“We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized. To empathize with what a child is feeling when he or she is defenseless, hurt, or humiliated is like suddenly seeing in a mirror the suffering of one’s own childhood, something many people must ward off out of fear while others can accept it with mourning. People who have mourned in this way understand more about the dynamics of the psyche than they could ever have learned from books.”

“Children very often fantasize that they must save or rescue their mother so that she can finally be the mother to them whom they needed from the beginning. This can become a full-time occupation in later life. But since it is not possible for children to save their mothers, the compulsion to repeat this situation of powerlessness inevitably leads to failure or even to catastrophe if its underlying roots are not recognized and experienced.”

“The very thing that parents try to hide is what will preoccupy a child the most, especially if a major parental trauma is involved.”

“What happens to a child when he must repeatedly see the same mother who tells him of her love, who carefully prepares his meals and sings lovely songs to him, turn into a pillar of salt and look on without lifting a finger when this child is given a brutal beating by his father? How must he feel when time after time he hopes in vain that she will help him, will come to his rescue; how must he feel when in his suffering he waits in vain for her finally to use her power, which in his eyes is so great, on his behalf? The mother watches her child being humiliated, derided, and tormented without coming to his defense, without doing anything to save him. Through her silence she is in complicity with his persecutor; she is abandoning her child. Can we expect a child to understand this? Should we be surprised if his bitterness, although repressed, is also directed against the mother? Perhaps this child will love his mother dearly on a conscious level; later, in his relationships with other people, he will repeatedly have the feeling of being abandoned, sacrificed, and betrayed.”

“Statistical studies are hardly the thing to make disinterested jurists into emphatic and perceptive human beings.  And yet every crime, by virtue of being an enactment of a childhood drama, cries out for understanding.  The newspapers carry these stories every day, but unfortunately usually report only the last act.  Can knowledge of the underlying causes of a crime bring about a change in the way justice is administered?  Not as long as the primary concerns are to assign guilt and impose punishment.  But someday it may be possible to gain understanding for the fact that emerges so clearly in the case of Jurgen Bartsch: the accused never bears all the guilt bu himself but is a victim or a tragic chain of circumstances. “

from the writing of Jurgen Barthsch: “Did I find the whole thing peculiar?  It was the kind of feeling that wells up periodically for seconds or minutes and perhaps is close to breaking through, but it doesn’t quite come to the surface.  I felt it, but never directly.  I felt it only indirectly, if it’s even possible to feel something indirectly.”

“My very point is to refrain from moralizing and only show cause and effect; namely, that those children who are beaten will in turn give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, ant those whose souls are murdered will murder.”

“Someone who was not allowed to “be aware” of what was being done has no way of telling about it except to repeat it.”

“To attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child – well behaved and dutiful – of one’s own parents.  But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go undetected.”

“As I have repeatedly stressed, it is not the trauma itself that is the source of illness but the unconscious, repressed, hopeless despair over not being allowed to give expression to what one has suffered and the fact that one is not allowed to show and is unable to experience feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness.  This causes many people to commit suicide because life no longer seems worth living if they are totally unable to live out all these strong feelings that are part of their true self.”

“Pain over the frustration one has suffered is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is it harmful.  It is a natural, human reaction.”

“It is the tragedy of well-raised people that they are unaware as adults of what was done to them and they do themselves if they were not allowed to be aware as children.  Countless institutions in our society profit from this fact, and not least among them are totalitarian regimes.  In this age when almost anything is possible, psychology can provide devastating support for the conditioning of the individual, the family, and whole nations.  Conditioning and manipulation of others are always weapons and instruments in the hands of those in power even if these weapons are disguised with the terms education and therapeutic treatment.  Since one’s use and abuse of power over others usually have the function of holding one’s own feelings of helplessness in check – which means the exercise of power is often unconsciously motivated – rational arguments can do nothing to impede this process.”

“In the same decade in which writers are discovering the emotional importance of childhood and are unmasking the devastating consequences of the way power is secretly exercised under the disguise of child-rearing, students of psychology are spending four years at the universities learning to regard human beings as machines in order to gain a better understanding of how they function.  When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings. “

“For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.”

“Little Gidding” by T.S. Eliot

…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

“The Not-Yet-Transformed God” by Janet O. Dallett

“The words have a glorious ring to them but the reality, when the work is done right, is extremely demanding. It requires a person to face and take responsibility for everything she is, conscious and unconscious, while seeing and differentiating herself from everything she is not. This is painful, grinding, grungy, often depressing and lonely work. At the beginning of it, most of us know ourselves little, if at all, and are enmeshed with all kinds of people and ways of living that do not belong to us. We cling to flattering images of ourselves that honest and objective self-observation calls into question. Few people are able to move far enough beyond the initial state to achieve authentic psychological redemption.

Traditional religions claim that God can redeem us. The alchemists saw it the other way around, that it is our job to redeem God. Viewed psychologically, in terms of the God-image in the psyche, it is both. A unified Self provides the ground for a unified ego, but the help of a more or less intact ego is needed for the Self to become integrated. The paradox must simply be endured. It is not necessary to wait for the gift of wholeness before beginning the work that leads to it, for when the ego sincerely involves itself in its own redemption, the Self comes to meet and wrestle with it. Out of the struggle is born the “heavenly” advocate to which Jung alludes, the helpful transcendent factor in the psyche that makes it possible to go on walking in the nearly nonexistent space between opposites, suffering a virtual crucifixion on the conflicts between ego and Self, good and evil, inner and outer, spirit and nature, human and divine, matter and psyche, real and ideal. This is the individual religious path.”

“… our ideas about God reflect our own psychology. He is not talking about personal psychology, which is different for each individual, but about human psychology in general. We cannot say anything about God without saying something about ourselves. For instance, stories about how God created the world mirror certain aspects of human creativity.

It is a basic postulate of Jungian psychology that myths and religious stories are projections of material from the collective unconscious, a.k.a. the archetypal psyche, the part of ourselves that all human beings have in common. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, Jung’s intentions are not theological. Even though his choice of words does not always make this clear, he is not trying to say anything about the objective nature of God, only about what our images and ideas about God reveal about the human psyche.”

“When the dark side of the God within is repressed or ignored, it often turns into passive-aggressive martyrdom and self-denial, a door-mat syndrome that is likely sooner or later to turn into its opposite and step on someone else. The two manifestations of the God-image in the unconscious embodied by the persecutor and the victim are linked psychologically to a third, the rescuer. Taken together, the three form what has been called the rescue triangle. The power-motivated compulsion to rescue other people by taking care of their problems, whether or not help is wanted, is limited by the fact that rescuers who do too much for others without adequate compensation inevitably wind up feeling used and victimized by the people they have insisted on helping. Unless they can become conscious of what they are doing, rescuers get angry and eventually victimize the ones they are helping. Thus, in the attempt to recover what they have too freely given away, helpers easily become predators.

I see the rescue triangle as a shadow counterpart of the light Christian trinity.”

“When a person says yes to the call of the Self, the ensuing symbolic death grows out of the painful realization that something beyond the ego, with different intention and goals, is trying to lead the way. The necessary sacrifice of the ego’s demand for supremacy is like a death on the cross.”

“Return of the King” by J. R. R. Tolkien

“…the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take.”

“The Myth of Female Inferiority” by Erica Jong

The best slave
does not need to be beaten
She beats herself.
Not with a leather whip,
or with sticks or twigs,
not with a blackjack
or a billy club,
but with the fine whip
of her own tongue
& the subtle beating
of her mind against her mind.
For who can hate her half so well
as she hates herself?
and who can match the finesse
of her self-abuse?
Years of training
are required for this.
…

“Creating a life: Finding Your Individual Path” by James Hollis

“There may be no Self, but the Self is a useful fiction which helps us find an Archimedean point, a stance outside that of the ego, from which to question all other points.  Making fictions consciously is sanity and pragmatism; making fictions unconsciously, and being captivated by them, is madness.  Such madness is common to literalism, scientism, fundamentalism and most ego psychologies.”

“When Jung defined neurosis as a wounded god he meant to suggest that the symptomatology which we would so quickly suppress is a dynamic representation of the wounding of some deep part of one’s soul.”

“So what does one choose then, if one chooses to grow up?  As Shelley said in praising the necessity of the imaginative renewal, habit is a great deadener.  So is fear, and so is lethargy, the twin gremlins which sit at the foot of our bed each morning, each wishing to nibble away resolution and desire.”

“Anxiety rises in the face of uncertainty, open-endedness.  Ambiguity confounds the ego’s lust for security, to fix the world in a permanently knowable place.  Ambivalence, the fact that the opposites are always present, visible or not, obliges one to deal with the capacity for dialogue with that other.  This experience often obliges a confrontation with the shadow, where the values rejected bu the ego are not unlike exiles plotting to return home surreptitiously.”

“The chief antidote to banality is the willingness to accept the transformative suffering of depth.”

“According to Kazantzakis, the triumph of Jesus is not over death, as his followers believe, but his capacity to accept the fate, namely, to embrace the suffering he is called to live.”

“Meaning is not something found, or sought; it is something experienced along the way if one is fully flung into the matter.”

“Whoever has not attained a self-reflecting ego is at the mercy of complexes and remains in childhood, however powerful in outer life.”

“Paradoxically, the greatest achievement of ambition will be to attain enough ego-reflectivity to be able to relinquish ambition.  This paradox is analogous to the advice that one has to learn the rules and master the techniques, so as to transcend them in one’s practice, whatever that might be.  One must first have thoroughly learned the basics in order to rise to the realm of idiosyncratic process, which is where true creativity is found.”

“The hole left by inadequate parental mirroring may only be healed by a leap of faith toward the resources within oneself.  This faith, or trust in the healing powers of the unconscious, can lead to healing through the process of self-reflection.  The emptiness of the narcissistic psyche obsessively seeks to be compensated by coercing positive mirroring from family, friends and therapists. Yet the healing compensation for the missing other can only be found by connecting with the inner powers we were all born with.”

“Mature relationship will offer companionship, perhaps sexual intimacy, sometimes validation and support.  But the chief service of a mature relationship is to provide us with the dialectic of otherness which is requisite of personal growth.  That is, rather than be a clone of our values, making us feel good about our narrow vision of the world, the otherness of the other forces us to confront otherness.  Such a confrontation engenders a psychological dialectic which enlarges us through the experience of the opposites.”

“If one does not become the eccentric, unique, one-of-a-kind person he or she was meant to be, then a violation of some large purpose of the cosmos has occurred.  Individuation is not self-absorption, narcissism or self-interest.  On the contrary, individuation is a humbling task to serve what our deepest nature asks of us.  For some it will be a path which brings public recognition, for others suffering and public calumny, for others still, private epiphanies never seen by anyone else.  Any relationship which prevents or inhibits such a vocation is harmful and regressive.”

“The chief gift of relationship is the obligation to grow, which in turn serves the relationship by relieving it of the impossible demands of childhood.”

“We will find better relationships when we ask less of them.  We may even find them more comfortable as they become less predictable.”

“For any relationship to survive, one needs luck, grace and patient devotion to dialogue.  Luck because the world is replete with absurdities, variables, complexities, which have the power to destroy any of us anytime…Grace obliges the strength of character which enables us to forgive ourselves and others for stupidity, cruelty, ignorance, narcissism and inattentiveness…Patience means sticking something out because it is so important.”

“Too Scared to Cry” by Lenore Terr

“An overwhelmed child immediately feels during a traumatic event that he has no options. His response to this feeling is an awareness of utter helplessness. The child fears the loss of his family connections and, if he is old enough, the loss of his life. He quickly adopts the attitude that worse things will happen. The terror lingers even if the event is happily resolved.”

“Externally generated terror, or trauma, often continues to exert a specific, ongoing influence on attitudes and behaviors — sometimes for the remainder of the person’s life. One gathers this from listening to adult patients and by studying the biographies of artists who were traumatized as children. An artist’s old trauma may create a “theme”, permeating his lifetime actions as well as his creative product. Often, this artistic product will carry the tone of terror, even when the trauma is, by now, scarred over by years of living.”

“Being psychologically overwhelmed, the sensation of being “reduced to nothing”, as Naipaul would put it, is such a hideous feeling that the victim seeks never to experience that sensation again. Fear of further fear, as a matter of fact, keeps victims from trying to escape even when their chances seem good.”

“Psychic numbing may be a culturally accepted personality trait in geographical areas where dehumanizing events routinely take place. Recurrent floodings, famines, and mass deaths probably serve to create benumbed characteristics in an entire populace. For instance, the religious striving for nirvana, a state of mind in which no pain is felt and in which a blissful loss of individuality is experienced, may derive, in part, from countless, individual wished-for escapes into oblivion. A society that pursues oblivion as a goal may, indeed, be a repeatedly traumatized one. And this response in such a society may be a “healthy” response.

Psychic and physical numbing, thus, are normal protections for those who must endure pain, those who are dying, and those who must experience disaster upon disaster. Psychic numbing may explain some culturally built-in disregards for human life. It may explain, at least in part, how terrorists brought up in Palestinian refugee “camps” or how dictators, coming from neglected, abused segments of their societies, go about their bloody work.”

“Poe, the inventor of the mystery story and an early expert at the art of horror fiction, was a simultaneously bereaved and traumatized child. I doubt that he ever recovered from his mother’s death. Shock interfered with Poe’s mourning. The mourning interfered with his attempts to process the shock. The upshot was that Poe never escaped the effects of his beautiful mother’s death. As a young man in his late teens he wrote the following lines in a draft of a poem:

I cannot love except where Death was mingling his with Beauty’s breath – Or Hymen, Time, and Destiny were stalking between her and me. (From “Preface” 1829)

Poe’s mother was his eternal love. At the same time, she was his horror.”

“Shame comes from public exposure of one’s own vulnerability. Guilt, on the other hand, is private. It follows from a sense of failing to measure up to private, internal standards. When others “know” that you once were helpless, you tend to feel ashamed. They know. If, on the other hand, you feel you caused your own problems, you cease feeling so vulnerable and blame yourself, instead, for the shape of events. You know. But you are the only one.

Exchanges of guilt for shame begin to occur very early in life, too early, as a matter of fact, for a child to possess a fully formed conscience. But if a child has just finished the passage through infancy, the most vulnerable period of life, the youngster will hate having this vulnerability exposed. Rather than risking shame, the toddler will be able to create some guilt to cover over his humiliation. The new “convert” to autonomy, in other words, is the most adamant of converts. No person is more mortified by the loss of autonomy and personal control than is a traumatized three year old. And so, even the relatively young preschooler will make this trade-off – guilt for shame.”

“When a terrible event lasts a short time, for instance, an auto accident or a plane crash, durations tend to expand. A short disaster seems to last longer than the clock indicates. The event may actually be remembered in slow motion. If, on the other hand, an ordeal lasts for a long period, for example, a burial in a well or a day on a stuck elevator, time appears to contract, to race faster than the clock actually moves.”

“The chance of human survival goes down when a mental state of hopelessness is established. Time shortening puts off this kind of ultimate surrender.”

“For the ordinary kid temporal perspective resides in the present and future, not in the past. A child’s future stretches to infinity. Everything is either “today”, or it lurks ahead beyond the vanishing point. The past does not hold importance to most children. Kids will tell you about boys or girls they’ll marry someday or about terrific careers that await them. That boundless future out there looks stupendous and unstoppable. And those big ideas help a child cope with the small frustrations. That is, until trauma hits.

Psychic trauma destroys a child’s sense of the future. Big as the future once appeared, it disappears with trauma. Bang. The future is gone.”

“Dreams, when they are repeated, are not likely to be the usual, more internalized product.  Instead, they repeat terrifying experiences that derive from actual, outside events.”

“Dream associations, thoughts that come before or after telling a dream are the keys to its meaning.”

“Abused youngsters, because of their almost uniform attempts to keep their abuses secret, tend to dream many unremembered terror dreams.  These children are afraid to sleep alone in their rooms and they hate the dark.  Sometimes they have a “bad feeling” that they have dreamed.  But they cannot remember anything of the dream experience.  Occasionally a parent will hear such a youngster call out “Help” or “Leave me alone”.  But even if the parent asks the child about it the next day, the child cannot recall the content of the dream.  It appears that long-standing abuses encourage nonverbal qualities in children.  And nonverbal qualities, in turn, encourage unremembered terror dreams.”

“There is considerable psychological truth to the idea of dream prediction, but it is an internal truth, not an external one.  Our deep inner drives impel us to action – certainly to future action.  By giving our drives expression in dreams, Freud tells us, we do reveal something of our personal futures.  But these futures are internally derived destinies, not prefixed fates awaiting us outside of ourselves.”

“In childhood trauma, paranormal “powers” develop after, not before, the overwhelming events.  By virtue of time-skew and repetitive dreaming, traumatized children come to think that they are psychic.”

“But play does not stop easily when it is traumatically inspired. And it may not change much over time.  As opposed to ordinary child’s play, post-traumatic play is obsessively repeated.  It is grim.  Furthermore, it requires a certain set of conditions in order to proceed – a certain place, a certain assortment of dolls, certain playmates, or a certain routine.  It may go on for years.  It repeats parts of the trauma.  It occasionally includes a defense or two or a feeble attempt at a happy ending, but post-traumatic play is able to do very little to relieve anxiety.  It can be dangerous, too.  The problem is – post-traumatic play may create more terror than was consciously there when the game started.  And if it does dissipate some terror, this monotonous play does it so slowly that it might take more than a lifetime before the play would completely dissipate all the anxiety stirred-up by the trauma.”

“Putting off treatment for trauma is about the worst thing one can do.  Trauma does not ordinarily get “better” by itself.  It burrows down further and further under the child’s defenses and coping strategies.  Suppression, displacement, overgeneralization, identification with the aggressor, splitting, passive-into-active, undoing, and self-anesthesia take over.  The trauma may actually come to “look” better after all these coping and defense mechanisms go into operation.  But the trauma will continue to affect the child’s character, dreams, feelings about sex, trust, and attitudes about the future.  Count on that.  If the child is a genius, his trauma may come to be incorporated into a parade of thematically linked works.  But if the trauma had been effectively treated, the genius probably would have produced a more universal, more versatile kind of art.”

“The problem remained, however, once an interpretation was made, what to do next in the therapy.  A post-traumatic game might go on endlessly in psychodynamic therapy, even though several interpretations or clarifications had been offered.  It appeared that the psychiatrist would have to help the child to detach himself from the compulsive repetitions by enunciating the child’s feeling and then, somehow, by placing these feelings into context.  The terror, helplessness, rage, sadness, shame, and excitement had to be named and applied by both child and child therapist to the pieces of old experience that the child was playing.  The child might become overexcited or very anxious during this naming and applying process.  But this emotional response would afford release and relief.   Then the child would have to be led to some understanding of how this experience might fit in with the rest of his life and with the lives of others.

Today’s child psychiatrist often shows the child the connections between his repetitive play and his traumatic experience.  The psychiatrist works with the youngster’s dreams, fantasies, and behaviors alongside the play, showing the child what other previous or contemporary internal conflicts may have been worked into the traumatic mental representations.  The present-day child psychiatrist also shows the child what omens, reasons, turning points, misperceptions, and time-skews the child has affixed to his mental representations of the disaster in order to compensate for his original sense of helplessness.  Defenses that the child employs, such as overgeneralizations and displacements, are often pointed out, especially when they affect “transference” (the child’s feeling about the therapist).  The child’s relationships at home and behaviors at school are explored and interpreted.  New coping possibilities may also be demonstrated to the child during play.  New endings may be added.  The modern child psychiatrist, thus, attempts to integrate the trauma into a longer view of the child’s life.  The psychiatrist weaves rehabilitation and reward into the youngster’s play.  The child hopefully learns that although he was helpless in one particular situation, he will have other options in the future to avoid helplessness.   He will also learn, one hopes, that others, at other times and in other places, have also been helpless.  The traumatized child is not alone.

An entire treatment through play can be engineered by a child psychiatrist without ever stepping away from the metaphor of the “game”.  Overinterpretation may be more confusing and wasteful than play without much direct interpretation.  On the other hand, when applicable, any of the direct interpretative techniques that I have mentioned can be successful after childhood trauma.

More sophisticated modes of play may be employed today in therapy with traumatized adolescents.  As I have noted previously, traumatized youngsters indulge in play at older ages than do nontraumatized youngsters.  Therefore, multicolored magic markers, air-brush techniques, and computer graphics can be used to induce teenaged trauma victims to “play” in the therapeutic setting.  Audio or video recorders, poetry, and dramatic scenarios may also aid the older, and perhaps otherwise reluctant, traumatized adolescent to explore his inner life.  These probing, expressive techniques are often the techniques of choice in the intensive treatment of psychic trauma, whether the trauma is treated in groups, families, or individually.  Imaginative, play-like activities help break down previously rigid defense patterns.

Talking therapies, with or without play, also work in childhood trauma.  Talking, in fact, is a powerful technique.  If there are enough weeks or months to follow ideas through with a child, the talking therapies will help a child to abreact, to accept the world’s randomness, and to develop more flexible, more self-enhancing coping skills.  Concerns with the randomness of events, the sense of helplessness, the distrust in the future, and the ongoing distortion of perceptual and cognitive functions often respond to “talking it out” with a therapist.

If the psychiatrist couches his or her interpretations in metaphor, in the language of jokes, in childhood “tales”, or in dramatic “scenarios”, the traumatized child may achieve considerable relief.  The metaphor hits the child on two levels – on the “story” level and on his own, more internal level.  Highly visualized language, after all, is probably the real language of psychic trauma.  Trauma is perceived in pictures.  It is rerun later on visual “tapes”.  Metaphoric or descriptive language, therefore, is an excellent route of access to trauma.

The biggest, hardest job for the child psychiatrist, of course, is to turn around post-traumatic character change and reenactment.  The traumatized youngster must be made to feel uncomfortable with the character readjustments that he has made.  “Pranks” and “games” must become uncomfortable.  In order to accomplish this turnaround, the family must align with the psychiatrist on the side of more flexible, developmentally appropriate behaviors.  Reenactments must be seen as problems.  They must be referred back by the family, or even the foster family or institution, to the psychiatrist for future “talks” with the child.  The child needs to question his habitual modes of response, and then to change them.  He needs to take renewed chances with assertiveness in order to take renewed control of his world.  If a family or  an institution and a psychiatrist work “in sync” on the traumatized child’s characte, the child’s personality will most likely move eventually in a healthier direction.  Fixing these character realignments following traumatic maladjustments is probably the most significant contribution a child psychiatrist can make to the traumatized child’s future.  Reenactment feeds into character, character does not change after trauma unless an end is put to reenactment.

For the traumatized child, new problems will come up with new phases of development.  Adolescence, in particular, reawakens old conflicts concerning compromised autonomy.  A parent might consider bringing the previously treated traumatized child back to the psychiatrist once the child has entered a developmental sequence that has an important meaning related to the trauma (for instance, the physically abused preschooler might come back for a brief course of treatment once he makes the high school football team) .  One wonders how many traumatized children and/or ther parents would consider returning to treatment, however, once they have achieved relief.  Most traumatized people, as we have already seen, try almost beyond anything else to put the experience behind them.”

“One wonders why a person – a child, even – retains such a vivid, clear, positional sense in connection with a shock of terrible surprise.  Might this sense go back to our primitive origins?  In order to survive in the days of caves and of tree-top shelters, might we have needed instantaneously to be aware of where we stood.  If suddenly confronted by a woolly mammoth or a saber-toothed tiger, man would immediately have needed to know his routes of escape.  Man has moved very far from his origins in those caves and those trees.  But perhaps this immediate awareness of position during overwhelming events represents a vestigial trace from man’s earliest origins.  An extreme external emergency will slow time and create an extraordinary awareness of position.  Both emergency perceptions probably serve to preserve the self.”

“Positional sense – if used by a good therapist – may lead an amnesic patient back to a full memory of a forgotten childhood horror.  If one “took” a repeatedly traumatized child back to this “space” inside of his own mind, the child might eventually recover a memory of the entire experience.”

“First, both the grown-up geniuses and the traumatized children inject traumatic material into the most ordinary of projects.  Horror sat shockingly upon beds of plainness.”

“The artistic juxtapositions of plain and terrifying, mundane and mean, smooth and out-of-control – these juxtapositions mimic the sensations of real psychic trauma.  Trauma, after all, starts out on a plain, ordinary day.  Everything feels “as usual”.  Then all hell breaks loose and the terror takes hold.  The child is traumatized.  And his friends may pick up a bit of the trauma through their exposure.  A bit of trauma does not make a friend “traumatized”.  But the bit may enter the workings of a mind, and another, and another.”

“Many of us store memories that, if we could uncover them, visualize them, and compare them to what we now know as adults, we could beat.  We could lick those horrible memories because of our adult perspective.  The trouble is – sometimes the memories are too deep, too buried.  We’ve tried too hard to pretend the memories are not there at all.  And sometimes we never went on to compare our traumatic memories with what we have learned since.   In some cases, we have kept ourselves from learning much since. “

“We are improvising treatments today for childhood trauma.  And we are trying to improvise things for large populations of children exposed at a distance to horrifying events.  My guess is that the answers will lie in helping children achieve some sort of context in which to place their terrors.  The context must be emotionally meaningful, not just intellectual.  And it must be achieved by the child himself, not just by some friend or representative.”

“When the Spirits Come Back” by Janet O. Dallett

“The psychology of a creative woman is somewhat different, for the realm of the mothers is her most fundamental reality.  To fulfill her creative destiny a woman must become grounded in the divinity in whose image she was made — goddess, not god.  When she succeeds, she no longer asks the men in her life to be gods.  Then they cease to have the power to subvert her creative life, but are freed to live their own if they can overcome their fear.”

“This voice, sometimes called the animus, is self-righteous and rigid, bent on suppressing everything natural and spontaneous.  It speaks the words and feelings of the angry, witch-burning crowd, wears a patriarchal face and, just because we are women, accuses us of creating the irrationality, the raw emotion, the sexuality, that it fears. “

“Acknowledging the patient’s importance with an expression of simple human feeling usually reduces the sexual charge to bearable proportions.  If the participants are able to carry the residual tension humbly, without acting upon it, the sexual fire will fuel a process that transforms both.  If a sexual relationship is lived out, however, I have not yet seen an exception to the rule that the patient is harmed and the healing process subverted.  The fact that sex between therapists and their patients has become quite common today shows how far the temptation for therapists to play God has separated the profession from ordinary human feeling and good sense.”

“Perfection, not wholeness, is the explicit or implicit goal of many spiritual systems as well as most approaches to psychotherapy.  Work with the unconscious moves in quite different directions.  To reclaim the unconscious part of oneself, including what is unacceptable, serves wholeness rather than perfection.  A person may appear to darken as a result of this process, becoming less perfect but more real, more substantial and human.

Why would anyone want to look flawed?  The personal reason is that human beings are flawed, and denial does not change the facts.  On the contrary, trying to preserve an unreal image amounts to an identification with the gods that merely gives the shadow license to do its dirty work in hidden ways.  When we can see and claim the darkness that belongs to us instead of letting it affect the world around us unconsciously, we preserve the dignity of the human condition.

From a social perspective, whoever fails to carry her rightful portion of the psyche leaves it for someone else.  In a given environment, some people may look like paragons while others are unconsciously delegated to carry the shadow.  If you look closely at someone whose image is unusually bright, you may discover that he is surrounded by scapegoats, shadow carriers who appear to be responsible for the problems in his life.”

“Failing to understand that that the psyche is a person’s inner truth, the official attitude regards dreams as inherently dangerous and imagines that it is possible to strengthen the ego in artificial ways, without reference to the psyche to which it belongs.  The attempt to understand unconscious material is perceived as unsafe.”

“When we identify with our own fantasies of omnipotence or our patients’ wishes that we be savants or saviors, we sacrifice the capacity to be ordinary people living ordinary human lives and, paradoxically, lose the authentic relation to the gods that lies in becoming fully and deeply ourselves.

I imagine that myths originate in much the same way as rumors. Both arise to explain what is unknown, but instead of supplying outer-world facts, they give spontaneous, symbolic expression to psychological truths about the people or culture from which they spring.”

“The creative imagination, what Jung calls “the projection-making factor” in the psyche, spontaneously weaves the material of fantasy, dream and myth from a mix of past experience and archetypal/spiritual reality.  When it is not see for what it is and given its proper place, such material intrudes upon daily life and creates a disparity between events and what they are perceived to be.”

“Because he (Jung) finds it essential first to live one’s mistakes and then to understand them, he lives deeply and fully, but feels that “the only unbearable torture is the torture of not understanding.”

“In case I had forgotten, the dream reminded me that the traditional white, masculine analytical model can no longer carry the healing archetype for me, no matter how perfectly the work may be done, because it is too separated from the wounded one, too disidentified from the wildly irrational, creative, primitive psyche.  The doctor-patient archetype has two poles that are bound together in the healthy person.  The analyst who identifies too much with “doctor”, forgetting that he is also “patient”, fails to activate the self-healing power of the psyche in his outer-world patients because he unconsciously needs them to remain sick.”

“When a culture has, like ours, become so rational and “in control” that it is in fact insane, the totally natural and irrational may be our only sources of sanity.”

“Native people know that in telling our personal stories we become connected to the larger tale the spirits are trying to bring into the world.  Alone, each of us receives a small piece of the story, a piece essential to the whole.  By telling, and listening, and putting together the fragments we hear, we get inklings of something larger.  When we can live in conscious acceptance of the whole story, personal matters will find their proper perspective and we will be able to live with one another.  Then I imagine analysts will be obsolete.  We will all be able to activate the healing function in each other, as a natural and integral part of life.”