Jungian Therapy or Jung’s Analysis for emotional balance

Carl G. Jung is known as the father of analytical psychology in the same way that Sigmund Freud is of psychoanalysis. Both shared proposals and theories in their day, but over time they grew apart until they understood the human psyche in totally different ways. We focus on Jungian Therapy or Jung’s Analysis to see how it can help us take care of our mental health.

What is analytical psychology

Analytical psychology is the set of theoretical, analytical and methodological approaches proposed by Carl G. Jung. Although Jung’s Therapy is not one of the most practiced today, it is one of the most interesting since it attends to both the conscious part of the human being and the unconscious. Going beyond the rational without disdaining the scientific method is one of the most outstanding characteristics of this therapy.

One of the aspects that most concerned Jung was the complexity of the human personality and he established two types of psychological attitude:

The introverted attitude, with a natural interest in the inner world.

The extroverted attitude, with an interest in the outside world or social reality.

In addition to these two basic types, Jung classified the 4 basic functions through which people conduct themselves in life:

1. The feeling.
2. The thought.
3. The intuition.
4. The feeling.

These four functions are not used equally, each person usually boosts two of them and leaves the other two in the background.

All this helps us to understand the main aspect of Jungian Therapy, which is none other than emotional regulation. A therapy that goes into the depths to then come to the surface and explore the different fields that can affect our emotional balance.

Fundamental aspects of Jung’s Analysis

• We will not deny that Jung’s Analysis is a compendium of complicated theories and methodologies. So let’s go step by step trying to understand this analytical psychology a little better.
• Always according to Jung, the psyche is a self-regulating system that is permanently in a kind of struggle to maintain the balance between opposing forces.
• It is important to know how the psyche is structured according to Jung’s Theory. It has three parts or layers: consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. In the personal unconscious are the complexes and in the collective would be the archetypes.
• At the limit between consciousness and the personal unconscious is the “I”, which is the one that organizes the four basic functions that we have already mentioned and the one that defines, so to speak, the personality.
• Complexes are fundamental to understanding Jung’s Theory and on this point it clearly distances itself from Freud’s proposals. For Jung, complexes are not necessarily pathological and stand out for having a certain autonomy and acting independently. The complexes are inevitable and affect and modify moods.
• The collective unconscious also plays a main role in this theory, which can explain some psychological processes for which there is no individual explanation. Here we enter the field of symbols and matters such as mythology, the past of peoples, religion or the interpretation of dreams.
• Surely you have ever heard of Jung’s “archetypes”. It can give us an encyclopedia to try to explain this, so we are going to stick with Jung’s own definition of them. The archetypes are images and thematic containers, “they are factors and reasons that order the psychic elements in certain images… but in such a way that they can only be recognized by the effects they produce.” It is the archetypes that predispose each person to approach life from a certain perspective.

How Jung’s Analysis understands the different psychological disorders

• Mental health is still something of a taboo, and that makes it difficult to address different disorders. Jung proposed a more positive vision of the different psychological disorders. He saw them as the body’s reaction to an unsustainable lifestyle. And, of course, we are referring to mental habits, those that we have sometimes normalized to the point of placing our self-esteem and self-perception at very low levels.
• The origin of disorders as common as anxiety and depression is found in an incorrect internal or external adaptation. It is then when conflicts and dissociations appear looking for precisely that regulation. After all, what we cannot lose sight of in this Jungian Therapy is that the objective is to recover the communication between the conscious and the unconscious and thus reach balance.

The stages of Jungian Therapy treatment

In this way we come to understand a little better the assumptions of Jung’s Analysis, but it would also be interesting to know what are the treatment stages of this Jungian Therapy. There are four phases in this analytic therapy:

1. Confession

At this stage, the dialogue between the therapist and the patient aims to recognize everything that is hidden or hidden, sometimes repressed. You become aware of what is happening and at the same time accept it.

2. Explanation

In this type of therapy, what is known as transference or dependence of the patient on the therapist occurs. It is at this stage of explanation where this question is addressed and at the same time an attempt is made to bring to consciousness the explanation of fantasies that are in the unconscious. The interpretation of dreams is one of the techniques used to find these explanations.

3. Education

In the education stage, an attempt is made for the patient to take control of his own therapeutic process without depending so much on the professional. After all, going to the psychologist is necessary to overcome any disorder, but it is not the psychologist who cures us, but ourselves with his indications.

4. Transformation

• At last the moment of transformation arrives, although this stage of the Therapy does not have to be done by everyone. There are people who after the therapeutic process want to go further because they are still a bit on the margins of society or not fully adapted. The transformation comes from the hand of individuation, which is nothing more than reaching maturity and self-regulation of the personality after having confronted the conscious with the unconscious.
• As you can see, Jungian Therapy is a little more complicated to understand than other psychological therapies that we have delved into. And it is true that it is not frequently used due to its lack of empirical support. But in reality what it is about is, as in any other therapy, restoring the emotional balance that has been lost, finding the meaning of one’s life, knowing oneself, changing everything that is harming one and accepting everything that you find it useful.
• Jung’s Analysis is a path of deep self-knowledge that not everyone is willing to do. Because in this discovery of our own personality we are going to find the tools we need to improve our mental health, but we are also going to have to face conflicts with ourselves that are most uncomfortable.