Jung’s Psychology — Examining Myself
Along with other authors under his tutelage, Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols deals with the unconscious, the Self, symbols, the animus, the anima, synchronicity, shadow, and archetypes found in art and religion. Jungian analytical psychology criticizes Sigmund Freud’s idea that dreams are a means to communicate one’s suppressed desires and are associations in our waking life. For Jung, he believes that Freud’s analytic psychology of dreams should not manifest as an individual’s unfulfilled wish; instead, dreams manifest the unconscious and are symbolic of the Self. Jung believes that analyzing one’s dreams would push an individual to recognize his true Self. Jung proposed the critical term “the process of individualization,” wherein an individual’s developmental process would distinguish oneself from a collective.
I think applying Jungian psychology is crucial to understanding myself and the pain I experienced towards achieving personal growth. Reading, writing in my journals were a means to understand myself and my mental turmoil. In many ways, my process of self-development is relative to Jung’s process of individualization. The many years I suffered from my mental illness brought me to understand my shadow or the dark aspect of my character. I am impulsive, obsessive, and unwittingly self-indulgent. My tendency to brood over my ideas or thoughts primarily compensated for the emptiness I felt inside me. I felt a deep loneliness and emptiness that I can’t quickly fill, and I tried in many ways to fill that gaping hole. Writing and reading were crucial to understanding the torture I felt in my mind. The road to knowing myself or developing my sense of self became the most difficult path to accepting who I am.
For Jung, the unconscious is symbolic of an individual’s natural animal-like instinct that does not possess any inhibition, unlike the conscious part of oneself, logical and rational. Examining my unconscious, I found an aspect of myself that I used to suppress. I think the unconscious side of myself manifests when I am at my lowest points. I become excessively moody, prone to paranoia, and my realistic worldview shifts towards something more negative, irrational, and I suddenly see the world as a cruel place. As a female, the masculine side of my personality, as Jung calls the “animus” , shows itself when I become distant, cold, and highly self-sufficient. Since I don’t have a natural and healthy attachment towards a male-authority, a voice that lurks inside me, I would put myself down and tell myself, “why am I always trying if I’m just going to end up failing anyway?” or words like, “I’m tired of my thoughts and feelings that dwell in my mind and and reflectively become me, my body. The “I,” the prompter of my own actions, decisions, the very I that makes me think, I can no longer try and wish for it to be good or to associate it with life as it is once more, taking a toll on me. I’m sick.” I constantly feel like I am not a good person. It becomes difficult to shift this narrative I tell myself because it becomes a conversation between my mind and what I really want for myself. Thinking too much of whether I could achieve something makes it difficult to actually achieve something. Moreover, in my dreams or nightmares, a few dark figures I do not fully recognize appear whenever I have a mood shift. For instance, just recently, I had a strange dream that there was a man with a weirdly-shaped facial figure, sagging skin, and tiny horns that wore a sweater. The strange man appeared to be taunting me, but I could not fully understand what it was saying. The background of my dream appeared dazed and a bit pitch-blacked. If I analyze my own dream (but I can accept that it could be used for wider interpretation), it could mean that my unconscious is trying to taunt me with my views of myself. Maybe the strange man or my unconscious must appear to be telling me that I feel like I am a strange person, I am disgusting, or it’s a reflection of what I feel inside; deep down, I am a rotten and sick individual.
Additionally, another aspect Jung discusses is the idea of “synchronicity.” Jung believed that certain events that occur in an individual’s life have certain relations but are not completely causally connected. In my experience, this has happened a couple too many times. For instance, I have a thought in my mind and someone else decides to say it first before I do. Or just last night, I thought of eating ice cream, and suddenly my parents brought home a tub of ice cream. I would see numbers like 10:10, 11:11, 3:33, 12:12, 2:22 without fully being aware of it. Yet, I am still skeptical about angel numbers or astrology, or paranormal activity, but Jung’s idea of synchronicity is something I do not completely oppose with what has been occurring in the world around me. I am learning to accept that there are some things that logic or rationality can not fully explain. Jung’s analytical psychology is a crucial subject if I want to understand myself better and build a more stable sense of self which I felt I lacked growing up. The aspect of my unconscious is a deeper dive to accept my shadow, my animus, and other strange occurrences in my life to fully integrate my whole self.
