Dreams & The Unconscious by Carl Jung || Psychology Series

i'm going to be looking at one of my favorite areas of young's work and that is the dreams and the unconscious every day is a struggle every day is a trial so what's on the agenda today well we're going to be looking at who was young historical context young's training the psyche the conscious and unconscious mind jungian techniques to explore in the therapy room to clients of young and will do a little critique of young to round off the session jung was a swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology he was born in kesseville switzerland in 1875 and he died in 1961. as a student young attended the university of basel where he studied psychiatry and medicine young became an incredible scholar fascinated with a range of topics such as astrology gnosticism psychology alchemy and world religions for young a person's spiritual life was incredibly important to the healing process therefore in later life he became dedicated to exploring his own inner world through dreams and the unconscious what was happening during jung's life towards the end of the 19th century charles darwin's theory of evolution challenged all religious thinking science was beginning to prove that we'd evolved from an ape-like species which unsettled the traditional views of the time and caused people to question the bible sigmund freud an austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis was also making waves freud wrote theories about the unconscious and human psychology with the aim to expand people's minds overall there was a newfound hunger for exploring the psyche and self-knowledge what about young's training now this is really interesting because he was such a radical for his time most psychiatrists of the time were not totally interested in what patients had to say they were more interested in statistics and making a diagnosis you could say that they were sacrificing the journey that was supposed to be embarked upon between therapist and client they were sacrificing that for the end goal this displeased young and this is when he began to get interested in freud's work freud was interested in hysteria dreams and looking at each patient as an individual with a unique personality and problems he also stressed that a patient's problem was never the symptom alone it was a whole person therefore we must ask questions to challenge the whole personality young believe that every patient came to therapy with an untold story and it's the secret story that is the key to knowing the remedy for the treatment however the remedy can't be accessed purely through the conscious mind we must delve into the patient's unconscious this life doesn't go well with me i'm not a member of the band this brings us to the psyche so the psyche means breath or life or soul it's a greek word you know the whole of the mind the spirit the conscious and the unconscious young describes the psyche as a process rather than an object he also notes that it's constantly changing seeking growth and wholeness and ultimately the psyches main goal is to move towards our most authentic self young saw our minds as divided into separate parts the conscious mind the unconscious mind and then the collective unconscious now the conscious mind is unique to the individual it organizes perception thoughts and feelings our conscious mind controls what we're doing in the present moment you know it's central to consciousness is our ego which gives us a strong sense of identity and purpose then we have our unconscious now this is a vessel for repressed traumas forgot memories and experiences of anything that could be perceived as threatening or destabilizing to the ego and you may have experienced this but our unconscious expresses itself through dreams through slips of the tongue and fantasies what's most interesting here is that young felt if the unconscious wasn't acknowledged or if it was ignored the consequences could be detrimental it could manifest in a physical illness or madness then we have the collective unconscious now this is the most interesting part of the human mind for me the collective unconscious is symbols archetypes innate knowledge that is known to the whole of the human race archetypes are psychic patterns repeated throughout history and myth and some common versions of archetypes are things like the father archetype the mother archetype the divine child archetype and we see these archetypes play out in the tarot in major arcana as well and jung was particularly interested in tarot he could see the benefit of exploring the tarot and using the tarot potentially with patients to reflect or find something within themselves and unpack it so what's the point of all this well as with any therapy it's about integration it's about acknowledging the trauma so you can move through the trauma young thought that if we encouraged the patient's more negative complex to surface that they could be examined and changed and therefore the patient would be able to release themselves or free themselves from these negative patterns of behavior and stop acting from such a negatively charged place what is generally considered psychology 101 now the fact that you have to acknowledge the repressed traumas to move through them this was some of young's earliest thinking let's look at some jungian techniques to use in the therapy room all these techniques that i'm about to list are supposed to help the client bridge the conscious and unconscious mind and integrate them these activities require the client to surrender to fantasy while also maintaining an active imagination and a conscious point of view first off we have the famous association test and you probably know what this is so jung would usually say a word and then he'd ask the patient to make an association with that word pretty much immediately and they'd examine kind of the links and the associations why these associations were made and see if it revealed anything about the unconscious so for example let's try it right now what word comes to mind when i say fire note down that word what about joy again what's the first word that comes to mind really feel it what about death what words are evoked with death and then lastly to end on a good note rebirth what words do you associate with rebirth leave the comments below i'd love to know what came up for you then we have a dream interpretation so young would ask his clients to relate a dream to him and they'd kind of co-interpret them together some questions he might ask would be what does this symbol mean to you in this moment is this a reoccurring image how does it make you feel is this a reoccurring dream and what's particularly important is context you know what was happening in the patient's life at the time they had the dream i'd encourage you to think about your own dreams maybe even create a dream journal i know from my personal experience that a dream journal has been incredibly enlightening for me the most bizarre dreams have revealed the most truthful profound things about my unconscious and really help me navigate my own life path another jungian technique is active imagination and when i say jungian technique okay he kind of gave it a name but actually there are so many cultures ancient cultures that were practicing these sorts of things way before young started using them in therapy room so active imagination is achieved by getting your client into a hypnagogic state so hypnagogia is the state between wakefulness and sleep and when you're in a hypnagogic state you might be aware of you might be aware that you're dreaming um and you might be aware of like sensations in the body maybe like a tingling in your palm maybe tingling in your third eye you know things come up in the body when you're in this sort of hypnagogic state similar concepts to active imagination are things like um shamanic journeying or yoga nedra and you know different types of meditation that really encourage you to kind of let the unconscious mind surface but while in the synagogue state young said it simply wasn't enough to just kind of like watch these images play out but you actually must interact with them now that might seem bizarre to some of you and that's totally okay but yes i've had i can say from personal experience i've done shamanic journey in workshops and there have been these moments where i've interacted with certain symbols or beings in the dream and yeah answers are revealed or you're shown more if you ask or if you know how to ask the right question and it's really quite amazing what i found most fascinating about these jungian techniques is he was really aware that whatever his patient was experiencing he needed to be almost like doubly aware of of his own unconscious at the time you know how am i experiencing this patient's dream what is coming up for me how am i feeling this in my own body and he thought that if the if the therapist failed to kind of keep tabs on both the unconscious of his patient and the unconscious of himself this could be again detrimental a little bit of information as well which i would like to just elevate jung said that every therapist should have somebody to confess to and he said that women were particularly good listeners and had excellent intuition so there you go young he knew what he was talking about no one knows i'm wondering whether it would be useful to look at some of young's cases so there was one in particular that struck me and this was a woman who came to young she was just a one-off client she was up class and she claimed she used to be a doctor she admitted that she had actually murdered her best friend to be with her best friend's husband yes she'd committed the murder out of jealousy and she felt that for some reason if nobody discovered the murder then that she wouldn't be affected not so so when she married the best friend's husband he died relatively soon after um she was also a keen horse rider but after she murdered her best friend um the horses actually were afraid of her and and threw her off so she had to give that up also her daughter from that marriage as soon as she was old enough left and estranged herself from a mother and then last but not least um one of her dogs got or her only dog got paralysis um so yeah she she felt as though she had been punished um by god knows what but she felt so she was being punished and that she needed to confess to someone who would not judge her and that's what brought her to young so there could be one or two things going on here or maybe it's both um so were all these events actually related to the fact that she murdered her best friend is young by including this story in one of his case histories is he you know implying that our unconscious is sending out a signal to like animals and our family that we've kind of done something bad does this kind of like send out a bad energy was this murderess is unconscious stricken with guilt and and did her mind somehow create a narrative wherein she was being punished i don't know what do you think but i absolutely adore this quote you know one who commits a crime destroys his own soul patient 2 was a long client of young's and he suffered from depression now this relates to the phenomenon of synchronicity the story i'm about to unfold is related to this phenomenon synchronicity refers to something that is kind of a simultaneous occurrence of events which appear significantly related but i have no seemingly causal connection a small example would be like when you're thinking of a friend you've not spoken to them in a while and then the next minute they're calling you on the phone that is a synchronicity so the story goes young managed to pull this patient out of depression but after a year or so he plunged right back into it one night young was giving um a talk away from home and he returned to the hotel went to sleep and then around about 2 a.m he suddenly woke up and he felt as though someone burst through the doors and entered his hotel room and he felt this horrible pain in the back of his head and he thought that's weird went back to sleep then the next morning he received a telegram that his patient had actually the depressive patient had committed suicide and he'd shot himself and the bullet had come out of the back of his brain um so yeah this was something that astonished young so young had this aim that you know we're supposed to balance the conscious and unconscious mind and i love this quote here you know there's some people whether we care to admit it or not can tolerate the loss of myth they cannot find fulfillment in a purely exterior world as it's portrayed by science and rational materialism they're also not satisfied with intellectual juggling of words which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom i am one of those people i am not satisfied with scientific rational materialism like science to an extent but please can we please merge science and spirituality like that would be that would just be amazing please young felt that if our conscious and unconscious mind were out of balance and we could develop a neuroses for example if we're too consciously invested in seeking status reputation outward success or money while lacking any sort of spiritual sustenance you know which could be developed by integrating the unconscious mind well if we don't do that then we'll feel confined no matter how much money we make will feel confined remain unfulfilled and neurotic you know even when we've attained those materialistic things however if we are imaginative enough to develop a rich inner life filled with spiritual and symbolic meaning we have the power to heal ourselves he said neuroses forms when we divide against ourselves so when we're not being true to ourselves and if we still lived in a time where humans respected myth um and the world of our ancestors then we wouldn't separate from ourselves and the world would be spared this sort of split or this division some final critiques of young so um yeah young was racist he said that black people got under the skin of white person that black people wanted to become white people which is obviously not true um there's a racial complex going on here and that's so much bigger than this oversimplified statement however saying that you know part of our collective shadow as a society is that racism is systemic and it would be beneficial for us to look at this collective shadow using young's theories anti-semitism is something that also comes up in young's stories um some have accused him of anti-semitism but i encourage you to go and look up that story yourself and decide too often young is dismissed as unscientific um mystic obsessed um and placing too much importance on dreams and symbols young was for women's rights however he did that thing where therapists say if you've got a female patient they would schedule the appointment with the husband rather than the female patient themselves that was quite common for the time however he acknowledges in his autobiography that women often entered into his work with extraordinary conscientiousness understanding and intelligence and it was essentially because of these women that he was able to strike out new paths in therapy which i think is bloody cool so finally i just wanted to leave you with this thought there is no coming to consciousness without pain people will do anything no matter how absurd in order to avoid facing their own soul one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious that is everything well it's not everything because young's work is just like ridiculous there's so much of it but this was kind of the bit that fascinated me most so i hope you enjoyed it if you want to get your hands on this deck head to my patreon drop a like on the video drop a comment below and again just thank you for watching i appreciate all your support so amazing i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Gabriella Tavini

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Keywords: carl jung, carl jung best ideas, who was carl jung, the shadow, psychotherapy, psychology, psychologist, the psyche, jungian techniques, dream interpretation, active imagination, the unconscious mind, dream symbolism, jungian psychology, jungian therapy, carl jung lecture, carl jung lesson, carl jung theories, carl jung techniques, dreams and the unconscious, the conscious mind, jungs red book, jungs best books, mans search for a soul, carl jung key ideas

Id: FJ5_RhTpRPA

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021