We are more than we know. More than we even suspect.
That is the fundamental insight of depth psychology — that who we are extends far beyond who we believe ourselves to be. We are not only what we consciously experience of ourselves, but we are also a great many things of which we remain largely unconscious.
For some theorists, consciousness is primary and the unconscious is secondary. That is to say that, from this perspective, what is unconscious is that which was once conscious — the things that we have forgotten or repressed.
For C.G. Jung, it is the unconscious that is primary:
“Our consciousness does not create itself — it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition.”
The Mystery of Who We Are
As much as we may like to believe that we are the masters of our own destinies, that is not who we are. This giving priority to the unconscious means that we are more the result of a multiplicity of forces and factors than we generally realize. According to Jung:
“Whatever name we may put to the psychic background, the fact remains that our consciousness is influenced by it to the highest degree, and all the more so the less we are conscious of it. The layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations, moods, and decisions are influenced by the dark forces of the psyche, and how dangerous or helpful they may be to shaping his destiny.”
In other words, who we are is not just an ego that asserts his or her will upon life. We are more like a stage on which many different characters act out a play. These various characters interact with each other with different levels of complexity, each asserting their own separate needs and demands and seeking their share of the spotlight.
The human being, says Jung, is ultimately a mystery:
“It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself.”
Illness and the Unconscious
Photo courtesy of Kristin Schmit(CC Attribution)
All of this, of course, has implications for how Jungian Psychology conceives of mental health and therapy. For Jung, healing in therapy is something other than pursuing a cure, as we ordinarily envisage it.
“There is no illness,” wrote Jung, “that is not at the same time an unsuccessful attempt at a cure.”
Practically, this means that the troubling symptoms a person brings to therapy — those things that in Jung’s time were called “neurotic symptoms” — are not to be approached as alien invaders to be eliminated. Rather, they are unfamiliar parts of the self seeking their place on the stage of our consciousness.
They are, teaches Jung, essential aspects of who we are to which we need to learn to relate:
“The patient has not to learn how to get rid of his neurosis, but how to bear it. His illness is not a gratuitous and therefore meaningless burden; it is his own self.”
This is a radical, and potentially liberating, idea. Our “illnesses” are trying to bring us into relationship with our own self. They are not inimical to life, but are in service of a deeper engagement with life:
“Hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation, bitterness, and everything that is hostile to life.”
From this perspective, therapy consists of becoming better acquainted with these many “others within,” the figures of the unconscious who populate our nightly dreams and animate our daytime fantasies. We cannot reject them because to do so is to reject our very being. They are also “who we are.”
This One Walking Beside Me
For Jung, the goal of therapy is to strengthen the relationship between our conscious life and the unconscious forces influencing it. In Jungian language this is known as developing the ego-Self axis.
This idea of the relationship to the other within is beautifully rendered into poetic language by Juan Ramón Jiménez in his poem “I Am Not I,” which paints a lovely portrait of this unknown, unconscious dimension of who we are:
I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.
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