Going Beyond Oneself: Healing in Jungian Therapy

What Heals?

The first task of a therapeutic approach is to clarify its perspective on what constitutes psychological healing. For many people this might seem self-evident. Surely it is obvious that for a person suffering from depression, healing means eliminating the symptoms of depression? Likewise for anxiety and the myriad conditions that people bring to the psychotherapist.

From the perspective of Jungian Psychology, the situation is not so obvious. Depression, for example, may signal that a particular approach to life has been outgrown and a new understanding needs to be developed.  Anxiety may be the result of someone, in Carl Jung’s words, “running away from oneself.”

Jung believed that the symptoms of an individual’s illness were part of the psyche’s attempt at healing — an expression of a deep psychological need, albeit in a distorted form. To eliminate the symptom without understanding it would be to “pluck out” an essential aspect of a person’s psyche.

Healing, says Jung, is not the same as being cured. It is the development of new, more resilient attitude with which to face one’s life:

“There is a widespread prejudice that analysis is something like a ‘cure,’ to which one submits for a time and then is discharged healed…Analytical treatment could be described as a readjustment of psychological attitude achieved with the help of the doctor.”

Going Beyond Oneself

Is this a pessimistic outlook? Is there no chance, then, for true healing?

Jung is quite clear on this point. A “cure” in the traditional sense can only be a temporary solution. Life will never be free of challenges and true healing does not consist in getting rid of problems, but rather in the development of the capacity to confront the problems that do arise:

“There is no change that is unconditionally valid over a long period of time. Life always has to be tackled anew.”

One of the reasons we suffer is because we tend to identify with our symptoms. “I am depressed. I am angry. I am anxious.” In other words, we become our symptoms. We cannot adequately relate to our experience because we are not adequately separate from our experience. 

Today it is commonplace to hear that we must “get out of our own way,” an idea that Jung himself anticipated when he wrote:

“Healing comes only from what leads the patient beyond himself and beyond his entanglements in the ego.”

The philosopher of religion Alan Watts expresses this same idea from a different angle which provides a deeper insight into Jung’s thought:

“We become insane, unsound, and without foundation when we lose consciousness of and faith in the uncontrolled and ungraspable background world which is ultimately what we ourselves are.”

To know who we are, to achieve a state of health and psychological resilience, we must learn to go beyond ourselves.

Healing and the Capacity for Reflection

For Jung, “going beyond ourselves” means developing the capacity for reflection, which he conceives as allowing an individual to “take up a relation” to some experience. Ultimately, this means that we are able to think about our experience and not just be caught by it. Furthermore, it means that we develop a kind of distance from our experience, as separation from something is a precondition for having a relationship to it. 

Ultimately, the capacity for reflection is the foundation for the development of the freedom that is the birthright of our humanity.

“‘Reflection’ should be understood not simply as an act of thought, but rather as an attitude. It is a privilege born of human freedom in contradistinction to the compulsion of natural law… [Reflection] is an act whereby we stop, call something to mind, form a picture, and take up a relation to and come to terms with what we have seen. It should, therefore, be understood as an act of becoming conscious.”

Healing and Dreams

Of course, we cannot talk of healing in Jungian therapy without talking about the role of dreams in the therapeutic process. 

The exploration of dreams is central to Jungian Psychology. Dreams reveal the dimly sensed background of our waking lives. They are a window on the powerful activity of the unconscious.

Here, however, I want to emphasize the role of dreams in the development of the capacity for reflection. For Jung, dreams are central to the strengthening of this capacity:

“To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on our selves — a way of self-reflection.”

It is through our dreams that we can connect to “the uncontrolled and ungraspable background world which is ultimately what we ourselves are” that Alan Watts described. For Jung this background is “the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity” or, more simply, “the self.”

“It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew.”

Ultimately, for Jung, healing does not involve treating one’s symptoms as foreign intruders to be removed at all costs. Difficult though they are, such experiences can serve to deepen one’s experience of life, to open a person to the fullness of their being. 

Henry David Thoreau once declared that it was only when we become lost that we finally can find ourselves, a sentiment with which Carl Jung is in complete agreement:

“People always suppose that they have lost their way when they come up against these depths of experience. But if they do not know how to go on, the only answer, the only advice that makes any sense is ‘Wait for what the unconscious has to say about the situation.’ A way is only the way when one finds it and follows it oneself. There is no general prescription for ‘how to do it.'”

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