Why do people seek therapy and analysis?
In the most basis sense, people seek therapy because of psychic suffering - something within themselves or in their relationships is causing them pain. And so they are seeking relief from this suffering.
The first aim of Jungian analysis is to look at one's adaptation to life, or mis-adaptation to life, to find the source of the suffering. In other words, how has one's attitude towards life gotten off track or become one-sided, and is now causing trouble?
Our relationships bring out our best and our worst sides, and without sufficient consciousness, unresolved issues from our past and even childhood inevitably get activated and come alive in the present. And so life in relationship becomes difficult if not impossible, and those old patterns must be made conscious and understood.
Symptoms Have Meaning
Carl Jung, the great psychotherapist and psychiatrist of the 20th century, found that the psyche, our inner self, is purposeful. He saw that our psychological symptoms invariably have some meaning to them. In other words, our anxieties and phobias and compulsions and depressed states are messages from the unconscious, from the depths of our inner selves, that must be de-ciphered and understood. And specifically, it is their symbolic meaning that must be understood.
This does not mean that there is no biological or physiological aspect to our psychic suffering. Psyche and body are one, and Jung understood severe mental illness to include a physiological component.
Individuation
The second aim of Jungian analysis is to connect one's conscious life with one's unconscious, i.e., one's inner life. Jung understood that within each one of us is both an enormous reservoir of potential as well as a particular plan for becoming. Like an acorn that grows and becomes an oak, there is a seed of one's potential inside each of us that we must cultivate in our lifetimes. He called the process of becoming our true and complete selves as "individuation".
The unconscious is always with us - we experience it through our psychological symptoms, through our dreams and waking visions, through our creative enterprises, and through what Jung called synchronicity. Jungian analysis aims at relating to the unconscious in a way that is appropriate to the individual person, so that a living connection to inner life is established.
Related to a Larger Meaning
Finally, Jung found that without a connection to some higher or greater purpose, to some transcendent or transpersonal value, then life was ultimately meaningless. "The important question is - am I related to something infinite?"
Here, as the third aim, Jungian analysis attends to the religious instinct within the client. What am I related to spiritually that is my ultimate ground? Especially in the second half of life, the question of the meaning of one's life becomes most important.
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