Someone at the seminar put two questions to me at once. You said to love the Self. Is recognising the shadow and going through individuation what you mean by self-love, or have you changed your terms on us? And you said that meeting the Self inside me is meeting God. Taking the object relationship I had with my mother as a child and swapping the object over to God — that part confuses me.
Anyone who heard it that way would be right to be confused. Heard that way, it is an instruction to clear the mother out and seat God where the mother had been. That is not what I said. What I said was about the seat itself — what kind of seat it already was before anybody sat down in it.
Individuation is the closest thing to self-love
The first question first. Recognising the shadow, going through individuation — is that self-love? Individuation is the closest thing to it that I know of. The terms did not change. The same road got called by a second name.
Read it as object relations: you follow the relationship you formed with your parents early on all the way down, and at the bottom of it you meet the actual Self.
Once you start looking inside yourself in order to talk about self-love, you keep going inward. Sadness allowed to stay sadness. Joy allowed to stay joy. Depression allowed to stay depression — permitted, received. That process is the process of loving yourself. And when the looking runs out of room, at the terminus where the thing you call I finally stops, there is something divine sitting in that place. That place is the Self.
Which is why we feel our parents as gods
A human being is made in the image of God. Go down inside a person and at the bottom stands a divine object. Object here means whatever your mind is fastened to. The parent-object is one of those. Which is why we feel our parents as gods. The thing at the far end is a divine object; the parent fills that place in practice; and so it is the parent you find sitting there.
Nobody is asking you to remove your mother from your mind and replace her with God. As an infant, your survival depended on the parent who fed, held, and returned to you, so that parent was experienced as absolute. The religious claim here is that this psychological place of ultimacy points beyond the parent to the divine Self. Recognising that does not erase the mother; it changes what you understand the child’s absolute dependence to have been reaching toward.
We did not make ourselves
God turning up in the middle of a psychology seminar unsettles people, so here is the broad shape. We are not self-originating. We were made — creatures. Which means there is something of God in us, the breath of God, an element of him. And that makes loving ourselves and loving God the same in kind. Self-love widens at this point. It runs past the personal and reaches the origin of the human being.
I have come at this from the other direction before. In So I Was That Angry Too: The Rage I Couldn’t Name I wrote about putting down what my hands had been gripping, becoming nothing at all, and finding God standing in that spot. That place you reach by letting go. This one you reach by going all the way in.
Whole rather than perfect
The place where you meet God is the place where you become whole. Whole rather than perfect. Arrive there whole and you are in a state that can hold another person. Loving yourself turns into loving somebody else — you become able to do it.
Can you truly love yourself? That question runs straight into another one: can you meet another person with real love? Can you give your own child real love? And real love is not love for the capable, handsome, impressive version. It is love for what you take to be the inferior part (That isn’t love, that’s liking).
“The world is my representation” — so what is different here?
The second question came from the floor. Buddhism talks about self-love now, and so do other traditions — you train, and you change by it. The world is my representation; how I take it in decides what world I get. The psychology side is a plus and the counselling side is a plus. What I want to know is where God’s part is in all this.
Love itself is God’s part
Christians get confused at this point, and then put all their weight on that question. They look for God’s part on the visible level — something staged where it can be seen. It is not that. Love itself is God’s part. Love itself, plainly. That we love ourselves, forgive ourselves, love another person — take it that the breath of God and his grace are doing that through us.
Forgiveness is the action arm of love
God loving us, and us loving God, is self-love. And that self-love spreads outward into love of the neighbour. Forgiveness is the action arm of love. Where love starts, forgiveness has to start with it.
Love and forgiveness begin at the same address. They begin with me. Not with the other person. I have to forgive myself before I can forgive anyone else; with myself unforgiven, forgiving someone else is work that will not hold. Love runs the same way. I love myself first, respect myself, decline to dismiss myself — and out of that I can keep from dismissing anyone else. What forgiving yourself first looks like in practice, I wrote out in Say It and You Don’t Do It.
Look at how people raise their children and the whole thing is visible. A parent who does not love himself treats his children poorly — dismisses them, handles them roughly. A parent who loves himself holds his children in enormous respect. He listens closely to what the child has to say, takes the child’s feeling into account, and handles the matter with that feeling in view. All of it settles along one line: whether the person can love himself or not.
Use what you need to use, wear what you need to wear, and then
So here is what I tell people. Use what you need to use, wear what you need to wear, and after that, go help somebody. That is the order it runs in. And whoever can do it should start. If you can say that whatever else is going on, there is some peace in you and some happiness — start there.
Nobody asked you to swap the mother’s seat for God. What I said was what kind of seat it was to begin with.
References
- Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. Collected Works, Vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. — the definition of individuation.
Related
- There Is Nobody There to Love Yet
- The Brighter the Light, the Darker the Shadow: Carl Jung on the Part You Won’t Look At
- Why Self-Love Feels Fake: You’ve Been Faking the Other Thing
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