I cut my psychologist’s teeth on the inexhaustible Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung was a disciple of Freud’s. He took the study of consciousness and behavior much deeper into mysticism and spirituality. It has taken the world many years to catch up with him.
Through my studies of Jung and my own personal analysis, I shifted significantly in terms of how I saw reality. A world of archetypes emerged and the meaning of the world awakened for me with great depth and intensity. I found that working with dreams is Jungian analysis at its best.
If you are wondering what an archetype is right now, Jung believed – and why not? – that archetypes represent universal images and patterns that all humans throughout time shared. What that means, for instance, is that in every culture, throughout time, human stories have had the ”Hero” in them. The reason is because there is something about the hero’s struggle with which we all connect. Similarly, each of us has the archetype of the “Persona,” which is our public face, always a bit – or more- different from who we really are. And the ”Shadow” is the aspect of ourselves that remains unconscious because it is outside the “light” of the ego. What that means is that the material in our Shadow is what we’ve been taught to reject. (That of course has no bearing on its innate value and the recovery of shadow material is key to a successful Jungian analysis.)
The Collective Unconscious, according to Jung, is an archetype that is the deepest part of the unconscious. He suggested that there is a Personal Unconscious which contained all the conditioned material, and the Collective Unconscious, which is the same for us all. There is an intuitive sense to this, I think.
Earlier this week, I had a little dream right before waking. I dreamed that I was beginning to go through a terrifying experience. I was of course suitably terrified! In my terror, I told myself I wasn’t going to be able to handle it. Then I saw a hand. It was no one’s hand in particular, just the dream suggesting the presence of a hand. I reached out and grabbed the hand. I then knew I could handle what I was going through.
I have put some thought into that dream and I think it comes from the Collective Unconscious, which some dreams do. Some are quite personal, but some come out of and speak for the entire human community. This dream was reminding me – and us, I believe – that we walk each other home. We take each other’s hand when we need to. We have support waiting in the other all the time. As social and spiritual beings, we are nourished by the hearts of others.
When there’s a need, please take that hand!
