Dissociation as Design: Why the Mind Sometimes Lets Go

There's something about this topic that what it really gets at is the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious, which of course, you know, is is one of the ideas that undergirds all of Jung in essence. And I think as you were saying, Joseph, you know, basically, yeah, we've got ego consciousness, but it is a fragile little thing. You know, Jung at one point had this dream where he was holding a l a little ca a little lit candle in a storm and he had to

protect it. And his interpretation of that was, that's consciousness. And I've got to protect it. Otherwise it's going to get snuffed out by the wind. So We we wake up every day and that that is, you know, the age old symbolism of the sun arising from the the depths in the east, you know, with consciousness renewed. Welcome to this Jungian life. Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee, invite you to join.

I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst on Cape Cod.

There is an experience, a moment that most all of us can identify. You're exhausted, you're overwhelmed, you've gotten a big emotional hit, and suddenly your thinking kind of tilts a bit. Your focus drops, these feelings can surge, memories can jump in, images, worries, strange ideas kind of push their way into your consideration. And over a century ago, a French psychologist Pierre Janet was studying this kind of shift, and he gave it a name, Abissement de Nouveau Mental.

which is a lowering of the mind's organizing level. Now Jung studied with Jennae, and this idea was very helpful for him to explain many of the things that he was observing And became an essential idea in the way that he conceptualized who we are and how our psyche functions. So we thought today is part of examining these core ideas around Jungian thought that will unpack a basement de nouveau mental.

And so Jung studied with Shahnet in nineteen oh two, and this was around the same time that he was working on the associate the word association experiment. And of course w we we've discussed that before. What he would do is he would give subjects o a word and say, just name the first thing that comes into your mind. So if he gave the stimulus word a table, someone might say chair.

And what he noticed is that some words would trip people up. They take a really long time to answer. They might laugh inappropriately. They would have some kind of as he saw it eventually, an intrusion from the unconscious. That would

change the fluidity with which they responded to the stimulus word. And for him, this was an example of this thing that he learned about from Jeannet, that that Ego consciousness seems to be in control most of the time, but throughout the day, any number of given moments, we might have that lowering of the threshold of consciousness. That would allow a kind of incursion to come up from the unconscious? So abaisement is an involuntary experience. We've all had it happen to us.

from something like what the truckers call white line fever. I think most of us have experienced that, that we're driving along and our mind just starts wandering until all of a sudden something yanks us right back to hit the brakes or shift lanes or or whatever it might be. And Jung would eventually come to understand that this is one aspect of the essential dissociability of the psyche, that we have these various Capacities levels

that are not explicitly all one all connected, although we like to think of ourselves as as all one one thing. And he would also come to use it Uh how could we make this a little more intentional?

and came to develop what we call now and he called active imagination. How can we intend, while awake, to dip into the unconscious and dialogue with it. So Jung, as he often did, was interested in the telos of something, that rather than thinking even of symptoms as pathologic, he thought of symptoms as the psyche's best attempt. to move forward with what it had available. So it's an interesting and very reasonable shift from Jeannet trying to diagnose.

severe psychiatric disorders, which by the way, that whole field was in its infancy. This was all kind of wildcat research, so to speak. And Jung adding in an ethos for himself and ethics. that he has, which is central to Jungian work, that everything has a purpose. It might not be the most skillful way that is possible in terms of the w human experience, but within the individual system It's it's what someone can do.

So for Jeanne, you're just starting with this initial idea is that he was interested in what happens as people are shifting states of consciousness and why do they seem to lose information as that happens.

So he came up with what he thought was an observation is that to be conscious requires a certain kind of Muscle tone, it takes energy. To stay conscious of Now, if we just take that idea, that makes sense. If we're exhausted and we're just sitting there watching Netflix and kind of zoning out, maybe we're enjoying it.

Like your spouse could walk into the room and wave at you and maybe you don't even notice them until they finally make a noise and then you're s surprised that'cause you didn't see them walk in. That's a normal process, but what if that happened all the time, on and off all day long? That could really interfere with how you function. So he was interested in these really severe problems. So he noticed and I think we would all agree that

We need a certain amount of energy to stay conscious. And Jeannet said we need that in order to integrate experiences. So that we actually know what's happened, we can take it into ourselves and regard what we've experienced. We also need it in order to sustain goal-directed action. We also need it to maintain a coherent, personal synthesis.

Now, if we put that in context, Genet and m many of the psychiatrists in the institute were very interested in things like hypnosis, multiple personality disorder. They were very influenced by Mesmer and his experiments as well, and they were trying to explain it in what they felt were scientific terms. So while Jung understood that this could be a transient psychological state,

Some people seem to have a very strong vulnerability to this. And then it starts to interfere with somebody's ability to function. And that takes us full circle to what you were saying, Lisa, at the word association test. is that when you would bring up a very conventional word like tree, and if somebody found that they couldn't respond or they suddenly didn't understand or they're saying things that don't have a logical connection to trees.

In a sense, their ability to relate to the tree is being interfered with without their permission. The interference could be very minimal, but sometimes the interference is substantive enough that the individual can't function very well in the outer environment. And Jenet was trying to understand it. Jung was trying to understand it, and they came up with different theories to explain it, but they were all pointing to something that was easily observable. Within people.

You know, I think there's something about this topic that what it really gets at is the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Which of course, you know, is is one of the ideas that undergirds all of Jung in essence. And I think as you were saying, Joseph, you know, basically, yeah, we've got ego consciousness, but

It is a fragile little thing. You know, Jung at one point had this dream where he was holding a a little can a little lit candle in a storm and he had to protect it. And his interpretation of that was That's consciousness and I've got to protect it. Otherwise it's going to get snuffed out by the winds. So we we wake up every day and that that is, you know, the age-old symbolism of the sun arising from the the depths in the east.

You know, with consciousness renewed, but it is an effort to stay consciousness. And we know this from fairy tales because People are always falling asleep or being put under a spell. You know, we can lose consciousness so easily, like our mind drifts. We forget what we were doing.

This just happened to me in an annoying way the other day where I I got in the shower and I was like, I'm I'm not gonna wash my hair today. I don't need to do that. And before I knew it, I was like washing my hair, which of course means I have to dry it, which is a huge pain in the butt.

You know, it's like, well, I didn't mean to do that. How why did I do that? I had entered the shower thinking I'm not gonna do that. And then before I knew it, I was just on kind of automatic pilot because consciousness had relaxed a little bit. I was off my mind was wandering, but I had more access, perhaps, to the unconscious at that moment.

So that can be a good thing. It can also be a bad thing. And Joseph, as you were saying, Shaunae was very interested in this sort of pathological aspects of that. you know, that that we that we wind up doing things we didn't mean to do or we sometimes actually are challenged to be in touch with consensual reality. I mean, it can really run the gamut. But as I think we'll get to in this episode, it can it can also be a positive.

Yeah, I'm just thinking about Jeannet and some of the other early now we call them psychoanalysts. paving the way, and they were working with people that had very severe symptoms. So It's always important to to remember that this is the context in which they were operating, you know, not things that are sort of like, Oh, I'm really troubled by whether I should be in this career or not. That that was not the patient population they were working with primarily.

The other is what you touched on, Lisa, is that really, you know, I've come to think of all of Jungian concepts and work. in the consulting room work with ourselves as all of the different ways in which consciousness and the unconscious can interact. So with a base mall, all of a sudden your mind wanders or some shock occurs and you're bolted out of your usual ego consciousness into some other kind of mindset.

We talk about dreams a lot. So there's another way that consciousness and the unconscious can relate.

in in trauma consciousness can be absolutely disrupted and so it goes and the question as ever is what do we do with the contents of the unconscious If they emerge in an involuntary way as they do every single night with dreams. Mm-hmm. We didn't think it up. It just happens. Or uh something like an abaissement. Can we use it? Can we bring it to consciousness? Can we write it down? Can we reflect on it? Can we make meaning out of it? Can we integrate it? Or does it just take over?

as it can in people that have very severe psychoses, that then you fall into a kind of possession where the unconscious is is ruling things. I'm gonna give an example here from a charming children's story by Maurice Sundak called I think it's Max and the Wild Things, or maybe it's just the Wild Things. No, it's where the Wild Things are. Thank you. Okay. Little boy Max.

five years old or so, is is, you know, storming around the house and stomping around and upsetting the dog and his mother calls him wild thing and sends him to his room. Where he has an abaissement, a lowering of the threshold of consciousness, he's upset, he's being punished. And off he goes to this imaginary realm where all these funny monsters with sharp teeth and weird grins live.

And when he's on the island of the wild things, eventually he takes charge of the wild things. And then from very, very far away he hears his mother's voice. He hears a voice calling him, and he smells something really good to eat. So he comes back to consensual reality. His mom has brought his dinner up to his room and it's still hot. So there's a great example of integrating all those feelings, his wildness, stomping around,

at mom and being able to master the wild things and come back and enjoy his dinner. And that that's a great example of that. But we do that all the time, you know, after you got out of the shower, you were back.

And I I just wanted to say to I'm just thinking about that first of all, when we're kids, it's very easy. That's what I was thinking. Consciousness is an achievement. There's a wonderful book written by the Jungian analyst Eric Neumann, who was contemporary with Jung called the Origin and History of Consciousness.

And it's an incredible book. And he makes it clear that consciousness is born from the unconscious. That's part of why the unconscious is associated with the mother, with the creatrix, because it gives birth to consciousness. So it's it's we we sort of take it for granted, but but we lose it every night when we fall asleep. We probably lose it, you know, multiple times every day. And in some sense we have to struggle to hang on to it.

And it is more tenuous than maybe we like to think. And yes, when we're children, we can easily slip into an abysma. Go ahead, Joseph. And I think that all of the tremendous work that's being done now on trauma and dissociation and recovery, recovering from trauma is also a butting uh against these early discoveries about

What does it do to us when we don't process the trauma? Where where is it stored, even neurologically? What is the ongoing what tends to be a kind of distortive effect on the personality to have such intense emotional images still alive in the psyche, but not tethered to an access to the ego.

So the dissociability of the psyche is natural, as you were saying with children, daydreaming feeling that there really are monsters under the bed and there really are monsters in the closet. that's a natural abasement. They're living between the worlds, which is just part of being a child. And as you said, Lisa, the gentle, natural emergence of of an independent ego from the great imaginal ocean that we swim in as children. And

when that continues into adulthood, it's very hard to to function. I mean, if we were to imagine that, you know, you show up at work one day and you're just convinced that you saw some enormous monster hiding under your friend's desk.

And you rang the alarm and you pulled the fire alarm and you're pulling everybody over to the side of the office and you're pointing and maybe weeping or shouting, that would be a problem. That would be a big problem. It's all a symptom or a a phenomenon that all human beings are subject to, when it gets out of hand, then our ability to navigate the environment becomes really compromised. So Jenet was was concerned about people who are plagued by this.

He took this on board, was thinking about his clients in this fashion, and over time Jung began to think of the abessement as a border or a threshold condition. Which was more interesting to his work of self development and self exploration. So in a sense he was experiencing how consciousness can become influence or even aware of unconscious content that is imminent.

that's that's about to emerge and that dreams could even signal this. And very boldly, because we don't hear about this, let's say, with Freud or Jenet, Jung was interested in learning how to manipulate the hold that his ego had on unconscious content. He was curious of how to suspend the ego's involvement and to sink down or allow content to rise up and to be just an observer, but not an actor in any way.

This kind of opened a floodgate of all kinds of unconscious content which was scary to him. And yet it was also an initiation that he granted himself by a decision to learn how to suspend ego interference. I think that's you know exactly it. of how can we relate to the unconscious? How how can we intentionally suspend ego consciousness? And let some of these images and visions

float up from the unconscious. And other times we're kind of abducted by it. Mhm. As Jung was, this was very difficult and troubling for him. And he writes about it in his memoir Memories, Dreams and Reflections, of having these things, the involuntary the force and power of the unconscious. Involuntary from ego's point of view, it happens whether you will or no. Especially from somebody where the permeability uh was so great be for Jung between consciousness and the unconscious.

And he talks about this, he says, Toward the autumn of nineteen thirteen, which is also the precursor to World War One coming on board, but also his break with Freud. which was incredibly disturbing for him. So he says the pressure which I had felt was in me. seemed to be moving outward as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been.

It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. And the feeling grew more and more intense. And then while he was on a journey, he had an overpowering vision. I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came to Switzerland I saw the mountains grow higher and higher to protect our country. I realized a frightful catastrophe was in progress.

He saw yellow waves, the rubble of civilization drowned bodies of uncounted thousands, the whole sea turned to blood, the Two weeks later the vision returned, and an inner voice spoke, Look at it well, it is wholly real, and it will be so, you cannot doubt it. And then he realized that it was presaging the commencement of of World War One. It's a great example of abeissement of the the involuntary aspect of it and what do we do with things like this?

So if I can kind of noodle on that, and this is partly my imagination, but the first time he had that vision, he was on a train, right? So what do you do when you're sitting on a train if you don't have a smartphone? You you stare out the window and it's somewhat mesmerizing. It's a little hypnotizing. And things just come up. You might have a creative idea. Young, there's this incursion from the unconscious that came up.

But it reminds me of another famous incursion from the unconscious of among famous people, J. K. Rowling. I think she was twenty four or something, she's sitting on a train. All of a sudden, this idea pops up a boy wizard. And she gets home and she starts writing it. But that occurred to her and I think I mispronounced her name. I think her name is Rowling. But it occurred to her when she was sitting on a train. So it's that sense of

I remember as a kid like staring out the car window and just the the thoughts would sort of flow by. But I want to go back and pick up on something both of you said, Deb, you were talking about this this orientation, you know, what is the relationship between the ego and the unconscious and And Joseph, you mentioned Freud, and this is a place where Jung and Freud, this is a key difference between them, because Freud basically said, It is bad and you need ego to conquer it.

And Jung says, well, it's a little more complicated than that. It isn't necessarily about ego gaining dominion over the unconscious, but that they have to have a relationship. It's not that you want to hand the keys to the kingdom over to the unconscious. But that the unconscious can both be a place where things that are repressed live, but it can also be the source of generative new ideas. Like for example

you know, nonfiction books about boy wizards. I mean excuse me, fiction books about boy wizards. Oh no no it's nonfiction. Oh sorry. You're right. That's it. Because there are boy wizards. Yes. And you w you would know because you were one. I thought I was. But

But but that you know, that this just kind of comes up, you know? Or i Jung er experienced this sort of precognitive vision of World War One, which by the way, he didn't know how to make sense of until he heard that war broke out. And then all of a sudden he's like, Oh, that's what that was. And J.K. Rowling experienced this incursion from the unconscious, just kind of arose up, just this incredible story that, you know, and the rest is history and all that.

So being able to have a kind of channel of communication is really important. It's not about making everything that's in the unconscious conscious. It's not about gaining control over that flow of information. It's about having a workable relationship, but that's

Easier said than done because as we've been talking about, it's possible that this can be completely overwhelming. And, you know, how do you control it? How do you make sure that you can unhook? And go back to, I don't know, getting your laundry done or whatever it is you need to do. Oh, the question is how do we go back and forth? instead of being stuck at either one, and there are people that are very stuck often in consciousness, at least during their waking hours.

And then of course there are people that kind of get abducted uh by the unconscious. in situations that are really seriously impairing and serious mental illnesses and are terrifying. to the person who is affected. And here's where I think fairy tales again can be. so, so useful the fairy tale that I I liked so much as a child of the twelve dancing princesses.

where every night something happened, but the next morning someone would discover that their slippers, their shoes had been completely worn out and what on earth could be happening every night that this could possibly occur? And it's a mystery and the king wants to know what's what's going on with his daughters. And finally, after the usual series of failed observers, our our hero comes along and manages to trail after them and remain silent.

that they go into the other realm, where they dance all night with wonderful young men to fantastic music. They wear out their shoes and then they come back in the morning. And that's the connecting, the linking function of the observer who can be part of both realms. And that that's our mission. Isn't it that the girls also can't remember it? Like when they're questioned, they they don't know why.

their shoes are that way. Right. They've dissociated. They go exactly, exactly. Thank you for adding that. So we need the linking function that that is the observer suitor who can go into both realms, who can go back and forth. And and I think that's our essential task. How do we go back and forth? in some way that brings consciousness to these contents, which is why we're always talking about dreams and dream interpretation and dream school. Our special opportunity

You can go to the Shengian Life dot com and click on Dream School and find out about it. So we go back and forth s so that we can make use of the riches of the unconscious. And some of its darker materials as well. They're there anyway, but the key is traversing the realms. So I think that's a beautiful bid for lifting the abessement out of a kind of pathologizing frame and

And really understanding that it's a gift that the human nervous system can do this, can move from the unconscious to the conscious. And if we can maintain a sense of memory between those things, that then we are able to integrate the things that we survey in the mysterious world.

Often in fairy tales, people return from the fairy realms, they don't remember, they don't have a sense of passage of time, or that there's generally some kind of a difficulty with it. And in fairy tales it's often thought of as very dangerous.

What I wanted to swing back to, because we were we were right near it, is Jung's concern about the latent psychosis. Which is a which is a difficult term for us to understand what he might have meant fully, but I think when he was analyzing individuals and he was interested in the relationship between the ego and the unconscious. In general, he thought that the conversation between the two gave rise to all kinds of rich material and particularly the symbolic

content inside of us. But for some people he sent that the line between the conscious and unconscious was kind of fraught. And it was very unclear that if that door was opened, how that was going to get closed again or whether the ego really could regulate a lot of material. So sometimes he would analyze a first dream. And in one of his writings, he says that I just told the guy that everything was going great. He didn't have anything to worry about and he should go on home.

No, that's that's a famous case that he wrote about. Yeah. The man I believe was a well educated, a physician. And had a dream in which some very alarming and and very regress Content came up. And that is when Jung said, Let's not go there. You're fine. Go home. Like he had an adequate adaptation to life? Don't mess around, don't poke around in the unconscious. And Jung got that from from the dream image. So respecting the the reality of the abasement.

in that if if there isn't confidence in regulating it, probably best not not to poke the dragon. A very contemporary example that I I saw when I worked in the psych hospital was that sometimes young men who were doing very well did their first experiment with a psychedelic and they couldn't shut the door and they were they were devastatingly psychotic

most of them could kind of be recontained with medication. I can remember one situation where nothing that they could give to this young man could close the door again. So we don't really have in in our modern work a really clear sense of how to evaluate that vulnerability. But it still exists even though we don't quite know how to predict it. And I think that the individual cannot predict it or we don't know how to advise people to self evaluate.

So for the most part, yes, engaging the unconscious and doing that more skillfully through technique generally produces remarkable results. And there is a little cautionary disclaimer that no one ever reads. At the door to hell, by the way. You know, you just scroll, scroll, scroll, you click the I give consent, and then you open the door, and then we realize, gosh.

That twenty page document that Apple gave me before I opened the door to the infernal regions, I just signed it off and walked right in. Right. So there's a little cautionary and it really is small, but it applies to a certain number of people who who couldn't know that they're more vulnerable than they would have imagined. Yeah. No, I think that's a really great point. And and it is a reason to be careful or cautious or little circumspect when using substances that sort of create that abesmal.

Because I think Many do. Right. Without any of the natural safety factors that our bodies might have provided, including fear. Sometimes brush up against the unconscious and they immediately have a sense of terror. that might be something in place because not such a good idea to jump into the unconscious at this time or in these conditions without containment. So that said,

Jenet helped people find language to describe something that was observable, and he was looking for a kind of functional psychological description of how ego integration fails. or weakens in the individual. That's what his thing was. Now, many years later an anthropologist named Levi Bruhl, who was studying tribes in Africa and trying to understand and write about what he was observing was interested in how reality is experienced when differentiation is not primary. So it wasn't about

Pathologizing anything. He was trying to just understand what he was observing, and he was privileged. to be there when various tribal rituals were being enacted, and he was fascinated by this kind of cohesive experience that happened in these very exalted rituals and trying to understand how Could an entire group of people seem to be sharing an experience, and he called it a kind of mystical participation? Now, Jung's studying with Jenet, he comes across Levi-Brule's descriptions.

which speak more to the personal experience. And he brings those two things together along with his own fund of knowledge. And he begins to understand that the non-pathologic side of this abaissement, how it actually is a natural adaptation and sometimes, as Levi Brule observed, creates a kind of unification of a community, allows them to be cohesive, to experience themselves with a commonality through that kind of shared mystical experience.

So we can think of the abassement du niveau mental as a kind of precursor to a participation mystique because a participation refers to a group experience, right? Whereas an abess mom, one person could just have that, like me in the shower. But if I'm going through that and you're going through that, then we might be in a shared field. And and Jung Jung talks about when somewhere he says he that he imagines we dream all the time, even while awake. But it's it's as if

you know, the sun comes out and eclipses the moon and you can't see the moon during the daytime. So when when consciousness is turned on, as it were, we're not aware of that kind of organic flow of images and impressions. that may be going on all the time in the unconscious, but I wanna speak to the non-pathologic aspect of it. I wanna talk about a kind of clinical use of it. We we as analysts think about our own reverie in session.

As a potential source of information about the case. So there's a very famous paper by Thomas Ogden, psychoanalyst that Jungians love. to quote and in it it's this great case where he's sitting with someone and he's kind of frustrated. It's not a very alive case for him. And he just notices he's kind of staring at this envelope next to his chair. And he's been kind of using the envelope all week to just scratch down phone numbers and other things.

But while his patient is talking to him across the room, he's staring at the envelope and he notices things he hadn't noticed before. And it brings up all these feelings in him, and then he notices something else. And he brings himself back to the case and he's like, What's going on? you know? And then he starts realizing that he has to go pick up his car, but he's afraid the garage is gonna close and and he has a a kind of intense experience around that.

But he gets curious about it. Why now? Why are these thoughts, impressions, feelings coming up now? And he's able to relate them to the case. he has a kind of totally different understanding of what's going on with his patient. And there's the idea that they've both been participating in a shared field. But it didn't get communicated kind of

consciously, it got communicated at the level of the unconscious through this shared experience. And that can only happen if we have a little bit of an abessement. So so I think it's related to this clinical idea of reverie. So we might say that that's connected also to intuition and I'm not sure which which historic analyst said listen with the third ear. Which is like listening with intuition, with the non rational, with these impressions.

And as you said, these subtle enactments that the analyst might find themselves entrained in, which is relevant to what's happening with the individual. So it's a great example of uh kind of a dual awareness of of Ogden goes into this. you know, preoccupation with all the little doodles that he wrote down back of the envelope and comes back and then can be curious about it. Why now you know, why did my eyes fasten on this particular thing and use it

for for a greater awareness. Other ways that the I mean Jung says for his experiences that were so intense, uh that he used his body. He said he would do certain yoga exercises to hold my emotions in check. And he would do them only until he had calmed himself enough to resume work. But there is something here in both cases, they're you know, different in in degree, but not in kind, of can you notice?

Can you notice like, I don't know, what what was I doing? And how can I connect these two inner realms? Whether it's to be able to make meaning as Ogden did or just influence your own state of of awareness. Of I don't want to be here anymore, I need to slow my heart rate, I need to breathe slowly. I need to come back. And Jung also says he used to tell himself sometimes when it was such a struggle, My my name is Carl Jung, I live at one twenty eight C Strasse, I have a wife and children.

So there's a where the consciousness can and our bodies and community participation, as you were alluding to, Joseph, with Levi Brule. of doing something with others, an intentional kind of abasement through through ritual or substances or or all of the above, to make sure that we can open and close that door.

So I think that puts us on a nice organized ground to pick up something that you had said, Deb, earlier, which I I really want to come back to, which is that Jung's experiment with the Abaissement, move into his work with the tension of the opposites. So one of his primary theories, which in some ways was supported by his investigations into Gnosticism, which is that the universe in Gnosticism is organized in pairs of opposites.

Jung came to think, Huh, that may be a metaphor for the way that the human psyche is universally organized in pairs of opposites. Now if we take that seriously, What that suggests is every time you formulate a conscious attitude, for instance, I love ice cream. Ice cream's the best. in order to have that idea At the same moment, somewhere in the unconscious is another anchor of the opposite idea.

So I love ice cream. I'm not sure how it might be in each individual psyche, but let's say the idea that I find ice cream disgusting. I love ice cream. Ice cream's disgusting. So the com compensation kind of moves out of awareness. So I just keep eating ice cream and telling myself it's the best thing I've ever had in my life. But it still has to be anchored over here.

So Jung noticed that when consciousness begins to relax, The fantasy material will often erupt which will reveal the opposite attitude. Now, I can't say I've ever had a a fantasy that ice cream is disgusting, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere, but but you know, but I'm gonna just trust him. But there are many examples and some listeners might relate to this. Let's say you've been raised in a very, very

morally rigid environment that demonizes sexuality. So you hold your sexuality in a very, very specific way. Maybe you only have sex for procreation. There's a conscious attitude about that. It feels like it's aligned. It's egocentonic. But at the end of most days when you're relaxing and just daydreaming, all of a sudden there are all these very intense fantasies around sexuality.

you know, it suddenly looks like a a broigel painting. You know, everything under the sun is dancing around, you know, in the field. Everything's copulating with everything, and then the individual could become very distraught. think that there's some kind of an evil incursion and one has to double down on the the purification of the sexuality. Jung might say ha. So what's happening is that the conscious attitude is so Spectacularly rigid.

that when consciousness is relaxed, its opposite wants to introduce itself. So to the degree that you're sure sexuality should be regulated the Dionysic or pangenic sexuality is very, very active in the unconscious, and that both of them live on a kind of seesaw in a way. So the abaissement, whether it's consciously induced or unconsciously breaks free, is often showing the opposite of the dominant attitude. And if we can see it decipher it in that way, it is spectacularly helpful.

And then it's part of that self regulation of the psyche that Jung talks about, that the psyche is a self regulating system. And if you have a two one sided attitude, it's gonna get corrected. So again, that's part of this. this way that this is not pathologic. And the other way, and and I think we've mentioned this so far, but it I I want to make sure we really lift it up.

that that this abaissement is exactly what Jung encourages us to do with active imagination. So what what you need to do when you do an act of imagination is is let consciousness drift down a little bit. That's why you you close the door, you turn off the phone, you make sure you're not gonna be disturbed. You get comfortable. Maybe you breathe deeply. Maybe you light a candle. There's a c you know, there's a sort of I am entering into A slightly lessened

degree of consciousness. I'm gonna I'm gonna relax my ego hold on things, not let it disappear altogether, but relax it. so that I can see what wants to come up from the unconscious. And, you know, Jung said of active imagination, and we we've done an episode on it previously, you know, that it it's one of the most important techniques.

for psychological growth, that it really speeds up the process of individuation, as it were, because it directly invites this kind of relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Something we might add a little bit. is that while we are aiming to allow unconscious material to appear, there needs to be enough ego participation

to support later reflection and integration. Yeah. And that's the difference between what Jeannet was worried about versus Jung's constructive application through active imagination. Right. Or even what Ogden did, right? He's like, wait, he didn't say, Oh, I've got to I've got to get my tr my thoughts back on track. What am I doing? He said, That's interesting. Why am I so interested in that envelope right now?

You know? So that's that process of engaging consciousness to make meaning out of what's come up. But I wanna add that for Jung with active imagination, it wasn't some kind of decoding process. Of oh you know, now I'm gonna make this up about Ogden that oh, I looked at that phone number on the back of the envelope and I couldn't remember whose phone number I had jotted down. It doesn't have to necessarily go that that far.

that there's a subjectivity uh with these images that are affect images that we can be curious about, we can enter into w without having to sort of get into a you know, what does all this mean? Like, oh, it was this and it was because of that and then it was last week and of tilting way too far into something that wants to nail it all down. as if it was uh some kind of a cipher. But just holding it a little bit lightly, noticing

getting interested, having an observing eye, and also being able to notice and manage the feelings that come up. Because it's like dreams. Dreams are images of affect. So here we have these revelies, these Ape Small. Of Oh yes. I enter it, I feel it. I'm curious about it and let it keep flowing.

and then, you know, come back to your consulting room and your client and go, Ha, that's interesting that it happened right now with this person. And speaking of dreams, I wonder if now might be a good time to turn our our consciousness in a directed way to a dream and see what it might have to say.

So today's dream comes from a woman who's thirty-two years old and is self-employed and training to be an expressive arts therapist. Here's the dream. I dreamed that I was at my grandma's house and I was throwing myself a birthday party for about six of my friends. My aunt was there and really wanted to help and she was preparing this amazing dinner while I was getting ready. I was feeling really underconfident and went to look at myself in the mirror and didn't feel I looked good enough.

I walked out and saw my auntie waiting to get in and she gave me a lovely smile and told me to enjoy myself. I then bumped into my good friend who told me what an amazing dinner my auntie made and how wonderful she is. I sat at the table and started eating. Some of the friends at the table I could not recall, but I remember feeling a bit embarrassed about some of my guests and not about others.

We then walked into an outdoor forest setting and into an old school setting. There were buses waiting to pick us up. They were like yellow American school buses. The bus was jam packed and began traveling at some speed down the road. It sped up towards what looked like the gate to a city, and it suddenly felt very dangerous.

It felt like a war zone in the Middle East or something, and all looked very sandy like the desert. Men in desert clothes were standing with guns and asked us to get out. They seemed aggressive. Out of the bus stepped six Spanish translators who were negotiating with them. I looked out into the gates and I could see a huge city like an inner mechanism and a spiral pyramid moving in circles.

Animals, giant horses, and small humans were walking around in circles like they were hypnotized. I suddenly realized the scope and danger of this blaze. I found myself off the bus and with a guy I knew from Art College. We were copying some papers in a printing shop. He said he had the document to send for help and asked me for my auntie's email. I didn't know I had it. Then I found it. We sent it and we ran back onto the bus.

and it was quickly pulling away. We drove away again at high speed and I woke up around here. I then went back to sleep and dreamt I was wearing a white wedding dress, looking back in the mirror, and thinking I looked really beautiful. So for context, she says, I'm in transition where I'm moving from my current business into my training as an arts therapist.

I have been undergoing a lot of deep psychotherapy work and unearthing a lot of old emotions. A few weeks after this dream I got married. The main feelings in the dream were admiration, insecurity, courage, deep fear, and self love. And she notes, My aunt is a big inspiration in my life and someone who pushes. Not sure what that means. Probably means she's pushy. I would say who strives someone who is proactive and has access to her own direction and wants and dreams, perhaps.

So we can all imagine what what that might mean. So one of the things that I like about this dream is it ends with a kind of participation mystique where there's an entire world around the pyramid that's spiraling in a trance like process. that she's um given a glimpse of Which makes it seem like there's something happening in the descent of the dream where she's finally given an archetypal glimpse into something mysterious around the pyramid.

The question is how to relate to something so mysterious? and so uncanny. I'm starting Some place else. This is one of those dreams where I I imagine it in scenes. That scene one is at the grandmother's house. Showing myself a birthday party with the aunt who does all these good things. And the aunt has made a wonderful dinner and she's wonderful. She felt a little embarrassed. about them and not about others.

So here we are at that turning point in life. Birthdays often mark, you know, sort of a turning point of a transition from one stage to another. image by um turning from age this to age that. And there's some shadow elements at the table, some guests that were sort of like, Oh my God, did I really invite them? And others that are really wonderful, but the art is wonderful, so it's a mix. There's a kind of wholeness to it. And then scene two they get on the buses and go into this weird

mystical city like you were talking about, Joseph, as a war zone, sandied with men with guns, the spiral pyramids, all the horses. We've left the dreamer's known world and have moved into this mysterious world, which I haven't begun to really think about yet because I'm tracking the dramatic trajectory of the dream. And then while she meets the guy in the printing shop, they get back in touch with the aunt.

Drove away high speed, woke up. So there's a way to get back in touch with the positive shadow figure of the aunt, get on the bus and r and get out of the difficult menacing realm. And then she finds out she's wearing a white wedding dress. And weddings again are another thing of what parts of the psyche are getting married. And then it turns out that Our dreamer has in fact.

recently recently married. So it goes from the birthday and the transitional stage to this odd city to a friend from art school and sending a message and getting on the bus and going back to find a new kind of wholeness. symbolized by the wedding dress. and thinking that she looked beautiful, which she did not at the beginning of the dream, which is especially especially touching. She at the beginning she says I didn't feel I looked good enough. At the end she says I felt I looked beautiful.

Anyway, that that is my quick take on on the stream. I find this dream a little difficult to orient to. It's it's a little there's it it reminds me of, you know, what what is sometimes called a chain reaction dream where this is happening and this is happening and this is happening and it's a little bit hard to find a through line. there's you know, first it's a it's a desert and then it's a s no, it's a worrist and then a school and then a desert and

I'm I'm not quite sure what to make of all of that, but I agree, Deb. I think it's important that the the the ant comes back, but there really is no lysis at the point at which she awakens. Because they're speeding away. It's a dangerous situation. And it's like, Ken, are we going to be able to get a message? asking for help and it seems like they do, but then they just speed away.

I mean it really covers a range, even the emotions that she cites, you know, admiration, courage, deep fear and self love. It's It it's it's a it's a huge, vast range of images and feelings as well. I see it as a going out and then a kind of coming back because they do get to send the message to the auntie. Mm-hmm. And then she manages to get away. So she's gone into the weird realm of the city and then back out again.

And then th the dreamer and this happens in dreams, that you're in a dream and you dream you went to sleep and she's wearing the white wedding dress. and feeling beautiful. So I see it as a going forth and a coming back, a kind of descent, as it were. And a lot of the mixture and it's not a you know, totally cohesive dream, but I think the essential structure is very much there. Also, I'm paying attention, however, you know, just purely subjective this is.

and how much it might relate to the dreamer, to my feeling about not feeling at the beginning that she looked good enough. And it's her birthday. And she's throwing herself a birthday party and doesn't feel she looks good enough. And at the end after all these things he had I looked in the mirror again, like she did at the beginning, and thinking I looked really beautiful. So something has happened in in the psyche as told by this dream.

So something that we might consider as I'm pouring through this is the number six happens twice. Six friends and six translators. And there's something very young about the beginning of the dream that that Auntie is is making the meal for the party. She just has to get dressed and wants to look pretty. And I'm wondering if this Ramia Nellessand. What happened when she was six? What was life like at six years old? there really may have been a process where she was pulling together

sense of identity, how should she think about herself? Does she measure up to her friends? All of that really vulnerable experience that all of us have when we're so young. But more importantly if this is speaking to some some business that's wanting to be tended from six years old, she is granted a vision. And in the vision there is a mechanism that spirals into regarding a pyramid that really all of life is moving and compelled in a great spiral of life.

having glimpsed it, there's a sense of danger at the scope of it. And then she finds herself back on really a child school bus, bright yellow school bus. And then she's going to copy some papers and print things to document something. So what I think is that the dream is returning to her a numinous, even overwhelming experience she may have had as a child, but could not metabolize which is recorded somewhere in the psyche, documented, and it's time it's time to read the document.

And to figure out what this extraordinary archetypal encounter could mean to her, what I might imagine is. Some of us have had an experience like that as a child, we might be left feeling rather anxious about the unconscious or what we might encounter, that as we were talking earlier, that the abassement, the dropping down could feel scary because of this early experience and sorting that out might open something up and and make the sojourn back and forth, as you were saying, Deb, safer.

a little bit more comfortable than it might have been as a child to to come across something like that. They run back to the bus, they quickly pull away, they're driving at at top speed to get away from this really beautiful, numinous, but overwhelming experience of of evolution itself. Evolution is sometimes described as a great cosmic wheel that all of life is moving on whether or not it knows that that's what's happening.

So there is a vision of enormous power in this dream that is compelling an entire world to to to work in concert for a mysterious reason that one couldn't understand. I wouldn't understand at six years old. But she has enough of a sense in her to think if she keeps moving into that, that the too muchness of it, this is dangerous. Like shouldn't play with the live wire. I need to step back.

And as you said, Deb, at least in this dream, she comes back into a knowledge of this and rather than feeling uncertain about herself. She comes back now as an adult with a sense of beauty. in herself that she might have at six just felt scared and kind of broken apart a little bit, leaving her not sure

what to do with it. And the first part of the dream there's a lot of not sureness, right? Am I pretty enough? Are uh did I invite the right friends? I'm not really sure how this is all gonna work out. But something is restored to her.

Through the encounter of the archetypal image, which goes to your observation, Deb, that something seems to be sorted one way or another, and that may require some maternal holding, which is Seen in the image of the ant, so that she doesn't fragment as she might have when she was quite younger. Thanks for listening. Topic or join our mailing list, visit our website, thisyungianlife.com. If you enjoyed this episode, give us five stars and a good review on our