depth psychology

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....Jung on Active Imagination - Joan Chodorow, editor

All the creative art psychotherapies (art, dance, music, drama, poetry) can trace their roots to C. G. Jung's early work on active imagination.

Jung developed this concept between the years 1913 and 1916, following his break with Freud. During this time, he was disoriented and experienced intense inner turmoil he suffered from lethargy and fears, and his moods threatened to overwhelm him.

Jung searched for a method to heal himself from within, and finally decided to engage with the impulses and images of his unconscious. It was through the rediscovery of the symbolic play of his childhood that Jung was able to reconnect with his creative spirit. ... He termed this therapeutic method "active imagination." [from Publisher summary:]

In making movies, time is so short -- because it is so expensive -- that we tend to neglect the place from which the best ideas come, namely that part of ourselves that dreams.

The unconscious is our best collaborator. I try to let the participants have downtime before shooting and after rehearsal, so our secret collaborator can do its work. I have learned to trust and encourage that more.

Mike Nichols .. [AARP Magazine Jan/Feb 2004]

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The idea that we're all connected in the collective unconscious is an extremely important part of what makes entertainment successful.

You can't translate that literally, but you can be aware of the ideas behind it: that the psyche has a structure, that the unconscious is a very powerful force, that we're all on a journey, striving for individuation and wholeness. If you understand that, you have a better grip on what's relevant, resonant, and rich about human experience.

Chris Albrecht - president of HBO original programming ... [Fast Company, Sept 2002]

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....Myth, Mind and the Screen: Understanding the Heroes of our Time - by John Izod

This systematic attempt to apply Jungian theory to the analysis of films covers 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Silence of the Lambs and The Piano as well as a variety of cultural icons and products such as Madonna, Michael Jackson and televised sport.

Through these and other examples, John Izod demonstrates how Jungian theory can bring new tools to film and media studies and new ways of understanding screen images and narratives.

... [review from C.G. Jung Page]

Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung (1875-1961), one of the pioneers of depth psychology, developed a form of psychotherapy whose guiding goal is to foster individuation.

Individuation means becoming who you uniquely are. Jungian psychotherapy aims at relating our conscious selves with our unconscious selves so that we can live a more complete life as the individuals that we are truly meant to be.

Jungian psychology sees our symptoms --the painful and disturbing issues in our lives-- as gateways to this process of individuation. Jungian psychology - also known as analytical psychology - welcomes images, dreams and fantasies as harbingers of growth, and honors the sacred in all its forms.

.....statement and image from site of The C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco

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As Jung says, "The shadow is the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious....[The shadow] also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc."

**David Richo. Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side

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There was a daimon in me, and in the end its presence proved decisive. It overpowered me, and if I was at times ruthless it was because I was in the grip of the daimon... A creative person has little power over their own life. They are not free, but captive and driven by their daimon. ....Carl Gustav Jung [paraphrased]

**Memories, Dreams, Reflections

In her book Writing in Flow : Keys to Enhanced Creativity, Susan K. Perry points out an intriguing quality of consciousness associated with flow: "Looseness and the ability to cross mental boundaries are aspects of both schizophrenic thinking and creative thinking," she writes.

Perry also notes that Jung, "contrasting James Joyce [right] to his schizophrenic daughter Lucia, said that they 'were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and the other diving.' Lucia made random uncontrolled and uncontrollable associations, while Joyce, though he pushed language to its limits, knew on some level exactly what he was doing." - from article: Creativity and Flow Psychology - by Douglas Eby

I think people no longer are satisfied by the idea of early history as causality, mothers as the fundamental childhood developmental psychology. It doesn't help you find yourself or why you are here or what the meaning of your personal destiny is... that whole model which we've been living for most of this century.. hasn't solved or helped really.

This [other] myth.. that the child enters the world with some kind of prenatal calling, a destiny, could possibly simply be a new way of thinking about our lives that replaces the former paradigm. ... it instantaneously satisfies something that genetic understanding and environmental understanding, you know, nature/nature, don't fulfill.

We hunger for that. .. it's only American psychology that hasn't got that myth, the myth of calling, destiny. As I say, Mormons, West Africans, Buddhists, Hindus, Kabbalists all have that.

The shamanistic cultures, the American Indian cultures all had this idea that you have a reason to be here. You are a unique creature and this is not just genetic, or where you are in your family, first son or third daughter, or something, all that kind of causal thinking drops away. I think it's something people can feel as -- I hate the word -- empowering, but at least affirming.

James Hillman- from Worldguide Interview, December 13, 1996 - about his book The Soul's Code

What is Psychoanalysis?

When people ask what psychoanalysis is, they usually want to know about treatment. We already have an idea of the analytic situation from a thousand cartoon images; patient lying on the couch with the analyst sitting, pen and notebook poised, behind him.

Even jokes may familiarise us with some of the essentials of analytic technique - "How many psychoanalysts does it take to change a lightbulb?.. Just the one - but it takes a very long time, and the lightbulb has got to want to change."

As a therapy, psychoanalysis is based on the observation that individuals are often unaware of many of the factors that determine their emotions and behaviour. These unconscious factors may create unhappiness, sometimes in the form of recognizable symptoms and at other times as troubling personality traits, difficulties in work or in love relationships, or disturbances in mood and self-esteem.

from Freud Museum London article: What is Psychoanalysis? -
related American Psychoanalytic Association article

The Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts is founded upon the basic premise that psychoanalysis is other than "health care".

In fundamental disagreement with traditional science and its pathology driven approach to human problems in living, the project of rethinking psychoanalysis as being outside the metaphor of medicine involves searching for alternative metaphors - ways of thinking and envisioning - that more aptly speak to ways in which individuals construct, author(ize), and narrate their own life stories, experiences and meanings.

The Academy celebrates and redefines psychoanalysis as an art which explores and articulates the private, subjective, and necessarily idiosyncratic truths of the individual - - truths which, according to Nietzsche, relate to our being "human, all too human", and which exist beyond "the good, the normal, the natural, and the healthy".

.....text & graphic from program page of the Academy site

I've never cared at all whether Psychoanalysis was or was not a science. To me, it has seemed more like the collaborative creation of a piece of art, the outcome being an unexpected, often unimaginable form of the self. ...

There are many ways to come to know the self. For some people, Psychoanalysis is an outstanding method. Who cares then how it describes itself or is described? It also has it limitations, but these have little to do with its absence of scientific rigor.

It seems to me that the exploration, growth and cultivation of one's spirituality are essential to any process of self-discovery and healing. In my own work as a psychoanalytic patient, I hoped to find a significant understanding of spiritual yearning and development.******from essay: Psychoanalysis by Kim Chernin [on her site]

...A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow by Kim Chernin
".. I am writing a story of all the other books I've written. The understanding of them and the need to write them was awakened by psychoanalysis in every case. My intention is to go deeper, to tell the story behind the stories, as if to reach the core story of the self.."

Lucy Daniels turned to psychoanalysis. She credits her more than 20 years in treatment both with saving her life and ultimately dissolving her writer's block.

"My writer's block was caused by unconscious conflict very similar to the conflict that caused my anorexia... When I was in analysis I didn't have any money, and as I began to feel better and as I was able to write again, I thought, If I ever get any money I am going to pay for other people to get into treatment." She eventually did and created the Lucy Daniels Foundation

from article: A Couch for Authors in Need of One by Phoebe Hoban [NY Times]

...With a Woman's Voice: A Writer's Struggle for Emotional Freedom by Lucy Daniels //
Lucy Daniels Foundation

...Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature - by Valeria Finucci, Regina Schwartz

Drawing on a variety of psychoanalytic approaches, ten critics engage in exciting discussions of the ways the "inner life" is depicted in the Renaissance and the ways it is shown to interact with the "external" social and economic spheres.

Spurred by the rise of capitalism and the nuclear family, Renaissance anxieties over changes in identity emerged in the period's unconscious--or, as Freud would have it, in its literature. Hence, much of Renaissance literature represents themes that have been prominent in the discourse of psychoanalysis: mistaken identity, incest, voyeurism, mourning, and the uncanny.

Essays in this volume range from Spenser and Milton to Machiavelli and Ariosto, and focus on the fluidity of gender, the economics of sexual and sibling rivalry, the power of the visual, and the cultural echoes of the uncanny. [Amazon.com]