Inner Work Notes

English

Category: Jung & the Unconscious

  • I Can’t Do This, and That Is Where It Starts

    Twelve-step programmes, which people use to recover from addiction, talk about surrender. When people first hear the word used this way, most of them picture giving up: throwing up their hands, deciding they are finished, letting everything go. But what actually happens when a person surrenders is not an ending. It is where something new begins.

    One part of you insisting it runs all of you

    The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung describes a process in which the ego has to bow down before the Self and die. The ego is the part of you that you call “I”; the Self is the whole of you. But in all of us the ego is still very much alive. It is only a part, yet it has pushed the whole aside and is insisting that it is the one in charge.

    So the ego’s dying is not an instruction to get rid of yourself. It means that the ego, the part that has been acting as if it were in charge, steps down.

    Get through step one and nearly half the problem is solved

    The first of the twelve steps is admitting that you are powerless over your addiction and that your life has become unmanageable. At bottom, this step means denying yourself: saying no to the ego, the part of you that insists it is in charge and can deal with the addiction by itself. Without denying yourself, nothing new begins. Of all twelve steps, the one that matters most is step one. Someone who cannot get through step one gets nothing out of moving on to step two, while even someone who gets no further than step one has already solved nearly half the problem.

    Denying yourself is not an instruction to hate yourself. What is denied is not your existence — it is the belief that you can solve this yourself.

    His first time in counselling, and he had already taken step one

    A man who had been using cannabis came to see me. He had never had counselling in his life, yet he had already taken step one before he walked in. He had seen it for himself: this drug has wrecked me, and I cannot quit it. And if I cannot quit, my life will fall apart. In Korea, using cannabis is a crime. He went to the prosecutors, turned himself in with a written confession, told his parents everything and confessed to his wife. He had never once been caught. He did all this because he had realised that he could not stop by himself, and that if he did not stop, it would kill him. When he came to me, his sentence had not yet been decided, but he had made up his mind and was ready to go to prison.

    A nice man when he smoked, on edge when he didn’t

    By his own account, cannabis had been a real saviour to him: at first it gave him a brief glow, a sense of ease. It felt so good that he could not see why it should be forbidden, and he used a great deal of it. But the more he used, the more glazed his eyes became, and anyone looking at him could see that he was not right. He became like two different people: a really nice man while he was smoking, and, when he was not, irritable and extremely touchy. His family could not understand why he was like this.

    When a person admits, “I can’t do this”

    He had come to know this about himself: I am someone who cannot solve this. In confessing, he humbled himself before other people. His stance toward everyone was: I can’t do this. I just can’t. And it is when a person humbles himself like this that a new start actually happens.

    Step three: not “we turned our will and our lives over” but “we made a decision to”

    Skip ahead to step three, which reads: “We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over completely to the care of God as we came to understand him.” A commentary on the twelve steps, written in the voice of addicts themselves (“we”), opens its account of this step with something they had already done: they had turned their will and their lives over — to the addiction. The addiction ruled their will and their lives and drove them into utter despair. Only then did they go looking for another way.

    Look at the wording. The step does not say we turned our will and our lives over. It says we made a decision to turn them over. The commentary stresses exactly that: “It was not that someone decided for us; we decided.” It calls this the first decision addicts had made for their own sake since the addiction took hold, and adds that deciding requires action.

    The words that come with “God” matter too. The step does not simply say God. It says God “as we came to understand him”, which leaves it to each person to decide what that word means. The commentary says plainly that you do not have to be religious to take this step, and that you have the right to believe in God as you have come to understand him.

    Even after you decide, you may still be holding on to your will and your life

    Because deciding requires action, this step is not a matter of handing your life to somebody else and walking away. The commentary says that even after you have said you are turning your will and your life over, you may find they are still in your own hands — and you may even be angry that God has left them there. It also lists the questions that come up at first: “If I turn my life over, what on earth is going to happen? Will I become perfect?”

    The word to listen for is surrender

    Further on, the commentary states the step again, this time as something already done: “We turned our will and our lives over completely to the care of a God greater than ourselves.” It says that those who have truly practised this step will be grateful for the change, and that as their fear lessens and they learn what surrender really means, their faith begins to grow. Then it tells the reader: “Listen to the word surrender here.” The surrender it means is this turning over of your will and your life. And it goes on: “Little by little, we begin to climb out of the helpless despair that once seemed impossible to escape.”

    That climb out of despair begins when a person humbles himself and says, “I can’t do this.”

    Surrender is not giving up. A man who has given up does not write out a confession and hand it in to the prosecutors.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Small Wisdom Will Not Solve a Life

    The Bible says that when God created human beings, He shaped them out of clay and then breathed the breath of life into them. In this picture, the ego is the clay: the part of you that deals with everyday reality and weighs up profit and loss. The breath is what I will call the Self, with a capital S: God’s breath in you, and the source of the wisdom inside you. So the thing you call I is, at bottom, not the clay at all. It is the breath. The trouble starts when the clay claims to be the Self, and the ego starts acting as if it were the real you, running your life by its own will.

    This picture does not say that a human being is nothing but a lump of dirt. Nor is it simply telling you that there is something precious inside you. The question it raises is who is sitting in the place that belongs to the breath: who is actually running your life. What follows is what a life looks like when the clay has taken that place for itself.

    Growing up means learning to bow your head

    Becoming an adult is the ego meeting the Self. You can see that meeting in one thing: you bow your head. You grow humble before God, before life, before nature. Reaching that humility is what being a grown-up means. A child cannot do this yet. A child still tries to make life go the way it wants.

    Ignore life’s currents and anger is what is left

    Whoever cannot bow their head goes the opposite way. Life has its own enormous currents, far beyond anything we understand, and this person acts as if those currents did not exist. Their thinking goes: marriage has to come when I want it, a meal has to come when I want it, everything has to happen when I want it to. And when it does not go the way they wanted, the anger arrives. A great many adults live exactly like this, carrying anger and hatred and depression around with them.

    This shows what the ego is like. Until it bows its head, the ego thinks it is greater than God. So it sees no reason to turn to the Self. It never asks the Self anything and never tries to reach it; it goes on living by its own will, doing as it pleases. You may have caught this attitude in yourself, as resentment toward God: “Why did You make my life like this? Why did You give me a family like this?”

    “Live this way and you are a holy person”

    The ego has its own methods, and it keeps trying them. It tells itself: I will try living this way. No, I will try living that way. Religious life is no exception: do it like this and your faith is good; no, do it like that and your faith is good. Trace any of it back and you find that the ego has been in charge the whole time.

    There are people who live with great passion and work very hard, and they go about their faith the same way. And yet, living like that, by the ego’s methods, they are out of touch with the Self inside them. Being out of touch with the Self means being cut off from the wisdom inside you. Where that wisdom should be, the ego’s ideas move in: live this way and you are the right kind of person, live this way and you are a holy person. That is what the law is, in the religious sense of the word: the rules you keep so that you will count as right and holy. Keep what the world taught you, the thinking goes, and you will shine, you will be impressive, you will be holy.

    For a while, it seems to work

    The ego’s actual job is dealing with everyday reality, so running your life the ego’s way does seem to work, up to a point. It feels as if you are getting somewhere. But in the end it does not hold. You keep stumbling and falling.

    You slide back into old ways, you fall, and it all happens again. You did not want to live like this, and the same situation keeps turning up (Your Life Script: Why You Keep Repeating the Same Ending). You tried to get better. You tried to have better faith, tried to live a holy life, and again it did not work. You can throw yourself into living that way as hard as you like, and still you never find real freedom inside yourself.

    Small wisdom and big wisdom

    In addiction recovery programmes, the very first step is a confession: I was powerless over the addiction, and there was nothing I could do about it. What that confession says is that the ego’s resources have run out. Its own ways of running your life have all been tried and used up.

    Sooner or later, you hit a wall in your life. You have tried to live by what you can work out for yourself, and things will not come untangled. The weariness of living, the problems that will not go away: human wisdom cannot sort them out. Human thinking only ever sees pieces, and it is extremely narrow. What we manage to put together inside that narrowness, thrashing about just trying to survive, is small wisdom. Only big wisdom can untangle a life. Small wisdom cannot. Big wisdom is the wisdom the Self gives you: the breath in you, not the clay.

    Somebody hits you once

    So what does small wisdom actually look like, close up? It is a calculation of profit and loss.

    I often say that the Bible is paradoxical. What it runs against is human thinking, exactly this kind of calculation. People work out that doing it this way will pay off, that this way will be good for them, and the Bible mostly says the reverse: no, do it the other way, and that is where the benefit is. Sacrifice, give, forgive: that is the kind of thing it tells you.

    In human terms, forgiving is a loss. Somebody hits you once, across the face. You are told to forgive. Forgive and you do not get to hit back, so this is a loss, and you are being told to take it anyway. And then you are told that forgiving is good for you. By human arithmetic, that is very hard to accept.

    The road that helps you gets counted as a loss

    Because small wisdom calculates like this, nearly every time, the methods we think will benefit us are the ones that bring us harm.

    The same thing happens in counselling. People are shown a way that would do them good and make them happier, and they do not take it. There is one reason: they think they will lose by it. It is not that they cannot see the benefit, and it is not that their faith is different. It is that the loss calculation answers first: before anything else gets a say, it has already said no.

    In fact, most people struggle through their whole lives the ego’s way and die like that. They never taste real freedom or real truth; they try hard in their own way, and then it is over. And then there are people who became addicted, or who carry a wound, and who went looking for a way to fix it and met the truth on the way. It hurt too much to leave alone, so they searched for wisdom, searched for the truth, deeper and deeper. For them, the pain can turn out to be a blessing.

    But to meet the truth and find real freedom, there is one point you have to pass through. It is the point where you look at the way the ego has been running your life and admit it plainly to yourself: this was crap; the very way I have been living was completely wrong. Only when you can admit that do you finally take in the big wisdom, God’s wisdom. That admission is the clay climbing down from the place that belongs to the breath and settling back where clay belongs.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • You Were Not Asked to Swap Your Mother for God

    At a seminar on self-love, I had been talking about ideas from Carl Jung’s psychology, among them the Self: the real you, further inside than the you other people see. In the discussion afterwards, someone put two questions to me at once. You said to love the Self. Do you mean that acknowledging the shadow and going through individuation is self-love? Or have you changed the subject? And you said that meeting the Self inside me is meeting God. So am I meant to take the relationship I had with my mother as a child and put God in her place? That part confuses me.

    Anyone who understood me that way would be right to be confused, because it would sound as if I were telling you to push your mother out of your mind and put God where she used to be. That is not what I said. I was talking about the place itself — the place your mother held in your mind when you were small — and what kind of place it was to begin with.

    Individuation is the closest thing to self-love

    The first question first: is acknowledging the shadow and going through individuation the same as self-love? In Jung’s psychology, the shadow is made up of the parts of yourself you think of as inferior and would rather not look at, and individuation is the long process of becoming a whole person by accepting those parts as your own. Individuation is the closest thing to self-love that I know of. So I have not changed the subject: self-love and individuation are two names for much the same path.

    Object relations is the branch of psychology that looks at how the relationships we formed with our parents early in life stay inside us and shape us. In those terms, individuation means following that early relationship with your parents as far into yourself as it goes, until at the bottom you meet the Self.

    In practice, loving yourself starts with looking inside yourself, and once you start looking, you keep going further in. You let sadness be sadness, joy be joy, depression be depression — you allow each one and accept it as it is. That process is what loving yourself is. Keep going inward like that and you eventually reach the deepest point of the thing you call I. That deepest point is what I mean by the Self. And in that place there is something divine.

    Why our parents feel like gods to us

    The Bible says that human beings are made in the image of God. If that is so, then deep inside each person there is something of God. In object relations, an object is someone or something your mind is attached to. A parent is an object in this sense. The deepest object of all, at the very bottom of a person, is divine. But in a small child’s real life, the one who actually fills that deepest place is the parent, so the child finds the parent in the place of the divine. That is why our parents feel like gods to us.

    So I am not asking you to remove your mother from your mind and put God in her place. As a baby, your life depended on the parent who fed you, held you and came back to you, so that parent felt absolute to you. Seen through faith, there is a deeper reason why that dependence went so deep: the place the parent filled was a divine place to begin with. Because we are made in the image of God, that place is part of us from the very start, and the parent is the one who came to fill it. Nothing is being swapped, so there is nothing you have to throw away. Seeing this does not erase your mother. It changes how you understand what you were reaching for, as a small child, when you depended on her so completely.

    We did not make ourselves

    When God suddenly turns up in the middle of a talk about psychology, people can get confused, so here is the broad picture. We did not bring ourselves into being. We were made — we are creatures, beings that were created. And because God made us, there is something of God in us: the breath of God, a part of him. (The Bible tells how God shaped the first human and breathed the breath of life into him; that breath is what I mean here.) That is why loving yourself and loving God are the same in kind: when you love what is deepest in you, you are loving something of God. Seen this way, self-love is more than a personal matter. It goes all the way to meeting God, the one human beings come from.

    There is also another road to the place where you meet God. In So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name I wrote about opening my hands and letting go of everything I had been gripping so tightly. When I had become nobody at all, I found God standing right there. In that piece, the place is reached by emptying your hands. In this one, it is reached by going all the way into yourself.

    Whole rather than perfect

    The place where you meet God is the place where you become whole. Whole rather than perfect. Perfect would mean nothing in you is flawed; whole means nothing in you is shut out, including the sadness and the parts you think of as inferior. Once you are whole, you have room to care about other people. That is how loving yourself turns into being able to love someone else.

    Can you truly love yourself? That question leads straight to another: can you treat another person with real love? Can you give your own child real love? And real love is not love for the capable, good-looking, impressive side of someone. It is love for the side we look down on as inferior, whether in ourselves or in someone else. Loving your child only when they do well at school and do as they are told, or loving someone only because they are good to you, is liking, not love (That isn’t love, that’s liking). Liking says, “I like you because you are good to me.” Love means you can still be good to someone who is not being good to you.

    “The world is as I see it” — so where does God come in?

    Later, someone in the audience asked another question. These days Buddhism talks about self-love too, and so do other religions. People change themselves through spiritual training. They say the world is as I see it: how I take things in decides what kind of world I live in. What you teach from psychology and counselling is a help, of course, but what I want to know is what part God plays in all this.

    Love itself is the part God plays

    This question, what part God plays, is exactly where many Christians get confused, and then they put too much weight on it. They look for God’s part in something they can see, something happening before their eyes. That is not the way to look at it. Love itself is the part God plays. Simply love itself. Think of it this way: whenever we love ourselves, forgive ourselves or love another person, we are doing it by the breath of God and by his grace.

    Forgiveness is love put into action

    Because there is something of God in us, God’s love for us and our love for God are self-love too. And that self-love spreads outward into love for our neighbours, the people around us. Forgiveness is love put into action. As soon as love begins, forgiveness has to begin too.

    Love and forgiveness begin in the same place. They begin with me. Not with the other person. I have to forgive myself before I can forgive anyone else; as long as I have not forgiven myself, forgiving someone else is hard. Love works the same way. When I love myself first, respect myself and do not belittle myself, I am able to keep from belittling other people too.

    You can see all of this in the way people raise their children. Parents who do not love themselves treat their children badly — they belittle them and handle them roughly. Parents who love themselves treat their children with great respect. They listen closely to what the child has to say, and they take the child’s feelings into account when they decide how to handle things. It all comes down to one thing: whether the parent can love themselves or not.

    Take care of yourself first, then go and help someone

    So this is what I tell people: spend what you need to spend on yourself, buy the clothes you need — look after yourself — and after that, go and help someone. That is the order. And the people who should start are the ones who already can: anyone who can say, “Whatever else is going on, I have some peace and some happiness inside.” If that is you, you can begin helping others now.

    So, to come back to the question about the mother and God: I was not telling you to take your mother out of that place in your mind and put God there instead. I was telling you what kind of place it was to begin with — a place that already had something of God in it.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. Collected Works, Vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. — the definition of individuation.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Chiron’s Wound: When the Lid Stops Holding

    If you spent years pushing an old hurt out of your mind so you could keep going, that was never a character flaw. I want that settled before anything else, because many people hurry past this point and then stay quietly ashamed of themselves for having looked away all those years.

    For a long stretch you had a method, and it worked. Something hurt, so you didn’t look at it. You pushed it to the back of your mind and got on with your day.

    Then, at some point, the method starts to fail. Memories come back without warning. Small things set off reactions that feel far too big. Feelings you once put off start breaking into ordinary days.

    Back then, pushing the hurt down was how you got by

    You buried it because burying it was how you kept going. You had to get through the day. Somebody was waiting on you — a shift that started early, a kid who needed picking up, a parent who expected the Sunday call, a bill with a date printed on it. You couldn’t stop and sit with an old injury and still be out the door on time.

    Look honestly at what a week contained back then. There was no afternoon in it for this. There was no one in it who could have covered for you while you sat down with the worst thing that ever happened to you. So the wound got a lid, and the lid held, and the week got done.

    You covered the sore place and looked away from it. That wasn’t weakness. That was an adaptation — the right move for the conditions you were living in. It kept you upright. It deserves some credit, not an apology.

    Somewhere around forty, the method quits

    Then it stops working. In my experience that’s usually somewhere around forty, give or take a few years.

    Something begins in people around then. Slowly, without ever deciding to, you start to live as yourself — rather than as the person you put together just to get through those years. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung had a word for that: individuation. Heavy word, plain meaning. You become the particular person you are, instead of the useful version of you that the years required.

    Here’s the catch. You cannot become more fully yourself while continuing to organize your life around never feeling what happened.

    So now, even though it hurts, what you pushed down has to be looked at again. You have to see it for what it is: a wound, not proof that you were weak. Once you see it that way, you can start to tell which old hurt your reactions today are coming from, and the wound can begin to heal. Without that, you may still get everything done, but you go on avoiding the people, situations, and feelings that remind you of the wound.

    At that stage of life, the things you pushed to the back of your mind start coming back. They won’t stay where you put them anymore. You cry at something small and feel ridiculous about it. A certain tone of voice from a coworker takes you straight back to a moment you haven’t thought about in years. It can look like falling apart. But it is also a signal: the old hurt can’t be put off any longer, because you can’t become more fully yourself without looking at it.

    Growing as a person costs something, just as building muscle does

    Think about what it takes to build muscle. You pay for it with your body: the strain, the shaking on the last lift, the ache the next morning that tells you exactly which muscle you used.

    Psychological growth also requires strain. When you begin facing what you avoided, you may cry more easily, feel tired, remember forgotten details, or become angry about things you once minimized. That is the price of letting back into your mind what you kept out of it for so long.

    The centaur who couldn’t die

    There’s an old Greek myth I keep returning to here. It’s about Chiron.

    He was one of the centaurs — part man, part horse. His father was a god, and that was why his body couldn’t die. Then, during a fight between the hero Heracles and other centaurs, Chiron was struck by a poisoned arrow.

    Anybody else would have died from that poison. That’s what such a poison is for. Chiron couldn’t. And in his case, being unable to die was not a gift. It meant feeling what the poison did to him forever. The pain would never end.

    Most people know this from their own lives without needing the myth explained. Something hurt you a long time ago. It didn’t kill you. But it never healed, either.

    He faced the pain instead of going around it

    The pain grew so great that Chiron would rather have died. But dying was the one thing he could not do.

    At the time, another figure from the Greek myths, Prometheus, was chained to a rock, serving a punishment that would never end. Chiron gave up his immortality and went down to Hades, the world of the dead, in Prometheus’s place. That set Prometheus free.

    Long before any of this, Chiron had been a famous physician and a teacher of medicine. The wound made him a more patient, more merciful, more mature physician.

    Notice what the story says about pain. Chiron did not try to get away from it by distracting himself or by waiting for it to pass. He felt it in full, and he accepted that the life he had been living could not go on. In our own lives, change begins the same way: you stop looking away from the wound, and you accept that the old way of living — pushing the hurt down and carrying on — cannot go on either.

    He could have chosen to stop feeling the pain

    This is the part I find most useful, and it’s the easiest one to miss.

    Chiron had another option. He could have dulled the pain with a drug so that he no longer felt it, and he would have gone on living. People take that option too. There are ways to arrange a life so that pain stops reaching you. Keep the calendar full. Never be alone in a quiet house. Stay busy enough that nothing ever catches up with you. People live that way for a long time.

    But that has a cost. For Chiron, a drug would not have taken the poison out of him; it would only have kept him from feeling it. His body would have gone on living, still poisoned, while his spirit died. In everyday life, it looks like this: you keep answering messages and showing up where you are expected, while you slowly lose interest in things, feel less and less, and drift away from the people closest to you. Your life keeps working, but less and less of you is actually in it.

    He didn’t take that road. He faced the pain straight on, with all of himself, body and spirit, right to the end — and that is the only reason the wound could make him a better physician.

    Watch a child after a hard stretch

    Anyone who has raised a child knows this. A child goes through something genuinely difficult, and afterward the child is bigger. Not taller. Steadier. They can suddenly handle things nobody taught them. You catch yourself thinking, when did that happen?

    None of it is pleasant while it’s happening. The child doesn’t enjoy it, and neither does anybody standing nearby, watching and unable to fix it. The growth shows up later, and only to people who kept looking.

    Pain does the same thing to grown people. It takes longer, and it’s uglier while it’s happening. When you’re hurting, you look at everything again. You start to see what you had always taken for granted and what you had never once noticed: who actually calls, what you keep apologizing for, which rooms you go quiet in.

    It’s an awful way to learn anything, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But people who go through it without running from it usually end up building a steadier, safer life than the one they had before.

    For now, just give one buried thing a name

    I’m not going to ask you to lift the lid and look at the old hurt today. That takes preparation, and preparation isn’t something a page can hand you.

    There’s a smaller thing, though. One memory has probably been coming back to you lately — most likely the one that came to mind while you were reading this. Don’t write it down. Name it silently, in your head, in just a few words. “That thing she said.” “The one nobody ever asked about.” That short.

    You don’t have to explain it or work out what it means. Naming it is simply a way of admitting that there is something under the lid. That admission is the first step.

    Chiron carried the poison with him to the very end. What the wound changed was not whether he was a physician, but what kind of physician he was.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1928). The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 7. — individuation.
    • Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Aldus Books.

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow: Carl Jung on the Part You Won’t Look At

    You know someone who has never once been wrong — not in their own account of it, anyway. The argument was the other person’s fault, the job went bad because the manager had it in for them, and the friendship ended because the friend was the one who changed.

    You nod along, mostly, because arguing with a story like that costs more than it’s worth. Then one evening you catch yourself telling a story of your own the same way — every piece accounted for, every motive explained, except your own part in the thing.

    That blank spot, where your own part should be, is what this article is about.

    Why does insisting you are right leave you in the dark about yourself?

    We prefer to remember the moments when we were capable, generous, and reasonable. But refusing to recognize anything else in ourselves does not make our envy, selfishness, and cruelty disappear. We simply stop seeing them in ourselves and start noticing them mainly in other people. When we see them in someone else, they can make us far angrier than the situation calls for. Over time, the story becomes simple: I am the reasonable one, and everyone else is the problem.

    Jung called the rejected side of the personality the shadow. It contains whatever does not fit the good image you want to maintain: envy when a friend succeeds, the wish to humiliate someone who embarrassed you, or pleasure at the failure of a rival. The more firmly you insist that you are only kind and fair, the less able you become to recognize these reactions as your own.

    This leads somewhere uncomfortable. When sunlight falls on something, the stronger the light, the darker the shadow behind it. It works the same way in us: the harder you insist on seeing only your good side, the darker your shadow grows. So the people most certain of their own decency often have the darkest shadow of all, and they are the ones who do not see it.

    Does having a shadow make you ill?

    Here’s where people get it backwards. Having a dark side is not what makes a person ill — Jung was plain about that. What makes a person ill is refusing to look at it.

    A feeling you keep denying does not go away. It starts steering what you do without your noticing. Envy may show up as relentless criticism of a successful colleague. Anger may come out as sarcasm toward a family member who did nothing to cause it. Jung’s point was that once you name the feeling and admit it is yours, it can no longer steer you from behind — and you get to choose whether to act on it.

    That sounds easy written down. It isn’t. Something in us resists looking, and not out of laziness. Seeing our own envy or cruelty would break the good picture we hold of ourselves, so part of us would rather not look at all.

    Where do you look for the part you can’t see?

    If you are hiding this part from yourself, and the people around you can see it plainly, where do you even begin to look?

    Jung’s first answer was dreams.

    Jung’s school of psychology is called analytical psychology, and it puts so much weight on dreams that it could fairly be called a psychology of dreams. Many popular books about dreams have been shaped by it. For Jung, dreams were a way to find the part of yourself you have not been looking at.

    There’s a reason he started there: you do not get to choose what you dream. A dream takes no interest in which picture of yourself you would rather keep, so it can show you what you have pushed out of your waking mind, in the form of people and scenes. Unlike the stories you tell about yourself when you are awake, it doesn’t take your side.

    Do all dreams come from the same depth?

    No. Some float near the surface — you ate too late or had a difficult meeting, and your brain shuffles the day’s events and plays them back to you. Underneath those are dreams that come from your own unconscious, the part of your mind that holds what you are not aware of. These dreams draw on your own life: your history, the people in it, the business you never got to finish.

    And beneath that personal layer there is a deeper one. Jung called it the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that does not come from your own experience. In his view we are born with it, it is older than any single life, and we share it with people we will never meet.

    Dreams from this layer carry what Jung called archetypes: images that turn up again and again across many different lives and cultures. In a dream like this, a flood, a threatening animal, a ruler, or a figure waiting at a gate can feel larger than anything that has happened to you lately. You may wake with intense fear or awe and keep thinking about the image all day. For Jung, that emotional force is the sign that the dream comes from somewhere deeper than your memories of yesterday.

    Why can images from this deep layer be frightening?

    Because they carry real force. “Frightening” here doesn’t mean spooky, or even unpleasant. It means they are strong enough to swallow up the waking mind.

    The ego is the part of your mind that holds on to who you are, keeps track of what is real, and keeps what is happening inside you separate from what is happening in the world. If images and feelings from the unconscious grow stronger than the ego can handle, a person can lose their footing. At worst, they lose touch with reality and can no longer tell a dream image from what is actually happening in their life.

    The unconscious is also much larger than we usually picture. Waking awareness has limits: it can take in only what your own senses bring to it. In Jung’s view, the unconscious is not bound by that limit.

    People sometimes say they knew someone far away had died before anybody called to tell them. In his memoir, Jung wrote that before the First World War broke out, he had visions of terrible destruction. Stories like these, Jung’s included, are personal reports. They are not scientific proof that anyone can see the future, and reading them that way misses the point. The point is simpler: what lies in the unconscious is not small, and it is not tame.

    What did Jung do with these experiences, and what did he refuse to do?

    Jung never went around announcing what he saw, the way a fortune-teller might. No stage, no readings, no room full of paying strangers waiting to hear what was coming. Instead he turned inward, into what he called his confrontation with the unconscious: he watched what rose up in him and wrote it down in his own hand.

    Jung did not simply receive this way of working with the unconscious. He built it himself, slowly, and kept at it. But this kind of work has a condition: if the ego is not healthy, what rises up from the unconscious can swallow the ego whole.

    Is your ego healthy enough to hold what comes up from the unconscious?

    If you forget everything else here, keep this part.

    Here is one way to tell. If a single difficult conversation leaves you unable to work, sleep, or feel like yourself again for several days, your ego may not yet be steady enough for dream work. An ego that one hard conversation can knock over is in no shape to meet images far stronger than that. At that point, diving into your dreams is more likely to leave you confused and shaken than to help you understand yourself.

    This matters when the dream belongs to someone else, too. Dreams are fun, and that is exactly the trouble with them. A friend tells you her dream over coffee, and you have an interpretation ready before the cup goes back down. Usually it’s harmless. But if she is already close to falling apart, one confident sentence from somebody she trusts can push her over the edge. So when you hear yourself begin, “Your father in that dream stands for…”, stop there. Not at a café table, not as a remark tossed off in passing, and not from you. You are her friend, not her therapist.

    So there’s an order to this, and the order is not a formality. Steady the ego first: keep up your sleep, meals, work and relationships, and stay grounded in everyday reality. Go deep afterward. Skipping that order is how people get hurt, and the person who pushed too fast, into their own dreams or into a friend’s, almost always meant well.

    If your life is steady right now, here’s the smallest possible way into your dreams, and it’s small on purpose. Tomorrow morning, before your feet hit the floor, write down a single image from the night. Two or three lines, no more than that. Not what it meant. Only what you saw: the corridor, the water, the person who had no business standing in that room.

    No interpreting. That sounds easy and it isn’t, because your mind will hand you a meaning before the pen is back down. Let the meaning come if it wants to, but write down only the image.

    Give it a week and something odd starts happening. The same door keeps showing up. The same stranger, the same weather, the same locked car you can never get into. You’ll begin to notice the repeats — and the repeats are already saying something, long before anyone tries to interpret them.

    One more thing before you go and try it. Sometimes a week of two-line entries turns up an image that is too much for a notebook to handle: one of those archetypal images I described earlier, the kind you wake from in fear or awe and then keep thinking about all day. If a morning comes when what you have written frightens you, that is the morning to stop writing and call a therapist. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong. A therapist can answer you back. A notebook can’t, and neither can I — I’m on the other side of this page, with no idea what you are facing. The order I described, steady the ego first and go deep afterward, isn’t me being careful with you. It’s the order the work runs in.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books. — the premonition of the First World War is Jung’s own account in this autobiography.
    • Jung, C. G. (1959). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 1.
    • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part 2.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

  • Why Do We Dream? A Jungian Reading of the Night

    Some mornings a dream follows you through the entire day: a hallway that should not be there, someone you have not thought about in years, or a feeling you cannot name. The story makes little sense, yet one image returns in the shower, on the train, and during a meeting. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist whose way of reading dreams this article follows, would say it matters that the image keeps coming back. Often the dream is carrying something you have not fully felt or thought about while awake: the hurt of an insult you brushed off as nothing, say, or the sadness of a breakup you told yourself you were over.

    Why don’t the feelings you already know about show up in dreams?

    In the psychoanalytic tradition, a feeling or a memory rarely comes up in a dream unless it was first pushed out of your awareness or kept apart from the rest of what you feel. Repression is the pushing out: a feeling or a memory becomes uncomfortable enough that your attention stops going near it. Splitting is the keeping apart. The feeling stays in you, but because it clashes with another feeling you hold, it gets filed under not mine, as though it belonged to someone else. If you cannot bear the thought that you might also hate someone you love, you may admit only the love during the day, and at night dream that you are attacking that person.

    So a dream, simply by arriving, is already telling you something. It suggests there is a piece of your life you’ve pushed out of view, or quietly disowned. What you already know about yourself and accept has no need to come to you in a dream. You can just think about it. What appears at night is more often the part you don’t know — or the part you know and are pretending not to.

    That is why waking with the thought I have no idea what that was about does not make the dream useless. It may feel foreign precisely because it comes from the part of you that you do not know. Instead of forcing an immediate interpretation, you can ask which feeling or image seems least like the person you believe yourself to be.

    What is a dream trying to do when it comes?

    Jung saw a dream as a message. It comes from the unconscious, the part of your mind you are not aware of, and it is addressed to your waking self. Not an instruction. Not a prophecy. Closer to a report that says: this is how you are actually living, and this is what that way of living is leaving out.

    And the message pushes toward balance. Spend a whole day being patient — swallowing what you wanted to say, keeping your voice level, being the reasonable one — and that night you may dream that you are shouting in a supermarket and cannot stop. Jung called this the compensatory function of dreams. To compensate is to make up for something, and here the dream makes up for the side of you that you have been leaving out during the day. This idea of compensation is central to how he read dreams. The picture you have of yourself while awake is always partial. It has to be. You can only pay attention to so much, and each of us builds a workable story about who we are, a story that is bound to leave things out. At night, dreams bring back some of what that story left out.

    Seen this way, an unsettling dream reads differently. The one where you behave badly. The one where you feel something you would rather not feel, or find yourself somewhere you’d never choose to be. It may not be a verdict on your character at all. It may be showing you what your daytime picture of yourself leaves out: a feeling that is really there, but that you have not been able to accept while awake.

    What changes if you treat a dream as a signpost?

    It helps to treat a dream as a signpost rather than as an order. A signpost does not make you do anything. It gives you information, and it can show you that you have drifted off the road you thought you were on. A dream in which you shout does not instruct you to shout at anyone. It may show that behind the patience you keep up during the day there is anger you have not yet admitted to yourself.

    When people approach dreams the way they’d approach a fortune-teller, they get stuck on a single question: so what am I supposed to do? Dreams don’t answer that question, so the whole exercise starts to feel useless, or people are tempted to make up an answer. Read the dream as a signpost instead, and you ask a different question, one you can actually work with: Where’s the gap between the road I believe I’m on and the direction the dream seems to be pointing? In the shouting dream, it is the gap between the patient person you believe you are and the anger the dream shows you. That gap is what you work with. You don’t have to close it tonight. You only have to notice that it’s there.

    Dream dictionaries tend to disappoint because they give each symbol one fixed meaning, and a dream is about your own particular life. A snake, a house, a dog — none of these means the same thing to everyone. A dog may bring to mind a protector for one person and, for another, the fear left over from being bitten as a child. What matters far more is what the image is connected to in your own life right now, and how it felt while you were inside the dream.

    Have you been dreaming much more than usual lately?

    The more you are keeping out of your awareness, the more frequent or vivid your dreams may become. You may be functioning normally during the day while repeatedly avoiding grief, anger, or a decision that feels too costly. At night, when you are no longer steering your own attention, what you have been avoiding comes back as images.

    It’s worth being precise about what this avoiding looks like, because repression, the pushing out described earlier, gets imagined as something far more dramatic than it is. It isn’t a decision. Nobody sits down and resolves to bury a feeling. Something simply needed to be felt and lived through, and it hurt, and your attention turned away. That’s the whole mechanism: a turning away, repeated so often that you no longer notice it happening.

    But what you turned away from doesn’t disappear. It waits. And at night, when the daytime habit of turning away loosens its grip, it comes up.

    If your dreams have become more frequent or more vivid lately, that may deserve a gentle question rather than alarm: What have I been busy not looking at?

    Why does living against your own nature bring suffering?

    Jung held a plain view: when we live at odds with our own nature, we run into suffering.

    Don’t hear this as moral advice. He isn’t describing a code of conduct, and none of it is about being good. Living by your own nature means something far more ordinary: feeling what you actually feel and going through it, instead of looking away because it hurts. Being sad when you are sad. Recognizing anger as anger instead of relabeling it as tiredness, or maturity, or being reasonable. Admitting that fear is fear.

    A good deal of psychological pain has this shape: the original feeling is avoided, but the effort of avoiding it creates another layer of suffering. Anger relabeled as tiredness may come out as irritation with people who did not cause it. Grief that is never acknowledged may show up as sleeplessness or emotional flatness. The dream is one more place where the avoided feeling can return.

    What about the dreams that feel ancient and strange?

    Sometimes a dream doesn’t feel personal at all. Something in it seems older than your own life: a ritual, ancient symbols, a gloomy, primitive scene unlike anything you have lived through. People often hesitate to mention dreams like this, because they seem to reveal something disturbing about the dreamer.

    Jung believed that if you go on not looking at what is inside you, it gains more and more influence over you, until your dreams are no longer limited to your own life. Besides the people you know and the rooms you have stood in, they start showing you scenes you have never been anywhere near. These scenes come from what Jung called the collective unconscious: a layer of the mind that belongs to human beings as a whole rather than to your own life. It holds images that seem to come with being human: a flood, a chase, a giant, a figure waiting at a gate. Nobody taught them to you, and someone born on the other side of the world dreams them too. Not all of this shared layer is gentle. Cruelty and a raw, primitive side are part of that human inheritance too, which is one reason such dreams can feel both foreign and dark.

    When an image like that comes up, it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It does not tell you what kind of person you are. The same flood, the same figure at the gate, turn up in the sleep of people who have nothing in common with you, or with each other. It may mean that something you have not been looking at has been building up for a while, and that what is rising now reaches past your own history into that layer shared by all human beings.

    What could you try tonight?

    Put a sheet of paper and a pen where you can reach them from bed. Not your phone: the screen pulls you fully awake, and the dream stays within reach only while you are still half asleep.

    When you wake, don’t try to interpret anything yet, or to piece the whole story together. That can come later. Write down one image you remember, in a single line. Then one word beside it for how it felt. Hallway. Ashamed. That’s enough. It should take under a minute.

    Do this for a week or so, then read the page back. Don’t try to squeeze a meaning out of it. Look for repetition instead: the image that keeps returning, the feeling word you’ve now written four times. What keeps coming back often points to what you have been turning away from during the day. Then ask where in your waking life the same feeling comes up: around a decision at work you keep putting off, say, or something you wanted to say to someone in your family and swallowed. You don’t have to do anything about it yet. Noticing where the dream keeps pointing is already a start.

    This article is educational and reflective in nature. It isn’t a substitute for individual assessment or treatment. If your dreams come with persistent distress, disrupted sleep, or intrusive memories that are hard to manage, it is safer to look at them with a qualified mental health professional in your area than on your own.

    References

    • Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. New York: Aldus Books.
    • Jung, C. G. (1934). The Practical Use of Dream-Analysis. Collected Works, Vol. 16.

    Related

    Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board