Psyche: Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland, the son of a pastor.  His mother too was interested in spiritual matters and this influenced Jung throughout his life.  He trained as a psychiatrist and worked at the Burghölzli hospital in Zürich, where he came across the work of Sigmund Freud.  The two men entered a period of correspondence and Jung eventually became a pupil of Freud’s collaborating with him on setting up and promotion of psychoanalysis.  However, the differences between their theories and indeed their personalities led to a split in 1913.  This severely affected Jung who entered a serious crisis during which he engaged creatively in self-exploration and discovery.  This work led to the development of his concepts of analytical psychology.

 Jung wrote copiously about his theories and there has been much written since and these can be explored elsewhere (see further reading below).  However, important elements of Jung’s theories for the Sesame Approach include:

• The idea that the psyche is a self-regulating system (like the body), it strives to maintain a balance between opposing qualities whilst also seeking its own development/wholeness.  The Sesame Approach works with this concept in that it speaks to the well person within each individual rather than focusing only on pathology.
• Jung’s theory of the Self is also important to Sesame.  He believed that it comprises the whole of the psyche, including all its potential.  It is the organising genius behind the personality and it seeks wholeness, the search being a process Jung called individuation.  The purpose of the search being to develop to the fullest potential.  Though rooted in biology, the Self is more far reaching.  It accesses an infinitely wide range of experience, indeed to the very depths of which all human beings are capable.  A Sesame session can be viewed in one way as a conversation with the Self.
• Jung, believed there were inherited modes of functioning within each of us which predispose us to approach life and experience it in certain ways.  These he called archetypes.  There are archetypal figures, such as mother, father, child, and archetypal images such as caves and forests and archetypal events such as birth and death.  These find their expression within the psyche most obviously in dreams and are outwardly expressed in myths and behaviour.  Only these images are capable of being known, the archetypes themselves are deeply unconscious.  The Sesame Approach works with the archetypes, especially when myths are used.
• Jung believed that in order to become more conscious one had to be able to bare conflict, for life is full of opposites both externally and within the psyche.  If the conflict between opposites can be borne then out of this something new and creative can grow – a symbol which honours both sides of the conflict and which offers new ways of being – a symbol emerging from the unconscious rather than the conscious.
• Jung believed that the symbol is not something that can be fully explained or rationalised, but it contains the qualities of both the unconscious and the conscious worlds.  They are the agents of change and transformation which bring about psychological development and leads to wholeness.  The Sesame Approach uses symbols, the language of the psyche, to engage in a conversation with the inner world and gently, at a pace the psyche can cope with, to integrate these symbols into everyday life.
• Jung also believed that the whole of an individual’s experience should be respected and included, and this included the ‘shadow’ aspects as well as spiritual longings and experiences.  The Sesame Approach too honours the whole of the individual, inviting people to do as much or as little as they feel able, and valuing all input from the individual.