Vibrant Jung Thing: Jungian Images and Reflections

The Symbolic Power of Home, Part 1: Michaelle Jean

I think that many Canadians' imagination and empathy has been caught by news stories of our Governor General, Michaelle Jean, who has been in the news here quite a bit this week.

Her Excellency is herself a native of Haiti who came to Canada at age 11 in 1968.  In the last few days, she has returned to her homeland in the wake of the devastation, as an emissary of hope and solidarity.  

Michaelle Jean has been both very strong, and also very apparently in grief over the loss of human life and destruction in her homeland of Haiti and her home town of Jacmel.  It is very clear how moved she has been, even shaken to the core.  Yet in the midst of that she has delivered a clear and unshaken message of hope for the future.  Clearly she is a very remarkable woman.

Her experiences should cause us to stop and reflect.  It is hard for those of us who have not been through such an experience to imagine what it would be like to see one's home, the place from which one sprang, facing such devastation, to face the death of many whom one has loved, and to see the places of one's youth endure such damage.

Horrific as these experiences are, they teach us an incredible amount about the psychological significance of home... to ourselves -- and to every human.  It is the nature of human beings that we need a place to belong, a place that is fundamentally ours, where there are others to whom we are bound by ties that never break.  The very bond with the land where we come into being is a very powerful one.  The place that brings us to life marks us, shapes us, never truly lets us go.

Modern people tend to downplay the importance of place, and to feel that one country, one city, one house is interchangeable with another.  This is particularly so in suburban places, like Oakville, Burlington or Mississauga.  Here we often tend to think in terms of houses and the land they are located on as badges of particular social status or as arrangements of convenience, rather than as a fundamental reality that touches us in the deepest places in our being, in what we might very well call our soul.  But increasingly, environmental psychology is demonstrating to us the unshakeable importance of place.

This is a matter of particular psychological importance for nations like Canada, the United States and Australia, which are predominantly immigrant cultures, or particularly mobile.  The immigrant retains a psychological bond to the soil that brought him or her to life.  That bond is not easily broken, and may be a matter of great personal significance to the individual.  To come to terms with that bond, and to come to terms with the particular character of the new homeland may be a major piece of psychological work. 

For Jungians, there is another dimension, also, to the symbolism of home, and that is an archetypal dimension.  For the deepest and true home of all of us is the Self, the core of our being.  Ultimately, it is only by connecting with one's true identity and the unique reality that each of us is, that we can really come to feel at home in the world, and in our lives.

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections on the archetype of home.  What does the symbol of "home" mean in your life?  Where is home for you, a place that you associate with your own fundamental identity? 

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

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PHOTO CREDIT: © Konstantin32 |Dreamstime.com

VIDEO CREDIT: © 'A' Morning Video, 2010 | http://www.atc.ca/ottawa

© 2010 Brian Collinson

 

 

 

 

Here in the Middle Years of Life: Is That All There Is?

The great jazz artist Peggy Lee performed the following beautiful, highly disturbing yet haunting song in 1969, at midlife, in her 50th year: 

 

I doubt that questions get much more real than those in this song.  And the question that Peggy Lee sings about here is of the type, that, for many people, can become achingly urgent at the middle of life. 

For many people, especially in our tumultuous times, the middle years of life can come to feel like an endless process of coping with chaos.  It can feel like life has become a time of just responding to one crisis after another: issues with maturing children, issues with the health of parents; job issues; issues of financial security.  At times, life can come to seem endlessly wearying, and very much as if there is nothing to it, but "just going through the motions".  From such a place, for very many people, there can come a deep heartfelt cry: "Is this really all that there is to my life?  Is this all that I get?"

This moment, the moment of this question, is highly important in the life of the individual.  This is true, even especially true, if the time when this question arises is filled with depression, anxiety -- even despair.

From experience with clients, I can almost guarantee that there will be no canned, pre-packaged answer to this question that will slake the desperate thirst of those who ask such a question. Only an answer rooted in the individual's life will bring any peace, any hope, any meaning -- any sense of value.

By an individual answer, I mean one that emerges from the very depths of the individual.  Not something that the individual's intellect or conscious mind has cobbled together, but something that emerges from the very depths of the person, from what they most fundamentally are.  Something to which they can say "Yes!" with their whole being.

It is the task of good therapy (and of Jungian analysis) to assist the individual in finding the symbolic dimension that conveys meaning, to find the deep story or myth of an individual's life.  There are many in suburban places like Oakville, Burlington and Mississauga for whom the question "Is that all there is?" has become urgently real.  I invite you to enter into the therapeutic journey inward, to find your own inner treasure.

I'd gratefully welcome comments and reflections from readers.  Have you had the experience of wondering in this way "is that all there is"?  How has that question affected your life?  If you were willing to share this important and personal part of your life, I'd be deeply interested to dialogue with you.

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson, Psychotherapist & Jungian Analyst

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

Get "Vibrant Jung Thing" posts delivered to your email using the "FeedBurner" box in the left column! 

© 2010 Brian Collinson

 

What is a Real Man? PART ONE

We live in a society and a time when this has become a burning question with which many men are struggling.  The old understandings of maleness and masculine identity don't work any more, but what are we supposed to put in their place?

Recently, I attended a production by Toronto's Soulpepper Theatre of the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross.  Director David Storch and the Soulpepper company have succeeded in giving us a very provocative production of a rather well-known play.  I had read the play, and was familiar with the excellent film version with Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino and Alan Arkin, but I feel that what Soulpepper's version particularly opened up for me was the dilemmas around masculine identity in which the men in the play find themselves.

This is a play in which macho male identity fairly runs wild.  The setting is a suburban Chicago real estate office in the early 1980s -- at the time of the last big economic downturn.   Things are obviously desperately difficult for the salesmen in this office.  Few sales are being made.  To make things that much worse, the management of the office initiates a particularly brutal sales contest: first prize, a new Cadillac; second prize, a set of steak knives; and, the bottom two sellers end up fired.

The atmosphere that is created is a hideous stew of competitiveness, bravado, insecurity and intrigue.  The salesmen are brutally competitive, and obsessed with the question of who is up and who is down.  The salesmen's competitiveness co-exists with their deep yearning for respect from the other men, and with strange, agonizing moments when the men stand revealed in their desperate vulnerability.

If there is a tragic figure in the play, it is Shelley "the Machine" Levine, a salesman in his 50s.  Once celebrated as an unstoppable selling machine, Shelley has now lost the ability to sell.  He oscillates between pathetic begging, verbal abuse of others, obnoxious triumph and utterly craven despair.  He is trapped by the outer situation in which he finds himself, but also by his own relentless drive for success, which in his case can only mean that he is able to demonstrate his power and virility by outstripping and humiliating other men in the office.

These salesmen understand themselves to be "men", i.e., "real men" as opposed to the bureaucrats and paper pushers whom they feel are taking over the world.  The world of cutthroat competitiveness, deceit and inescapable isolation is what they understand to be their masculine birthright.  In watching these men, trapped by their circumstances, certainly, but above all, trapped by their individualism (not to be confused witn individuation!), insecurities, and by the hard but brittle masks they are compelled to present to each other and the world, it is hard to avoid the question, "Is that all there is?"  If so, things must seem to be pretty bleak for males.

Clearly Mamet portrays an extreme situation in excruciating and eloquent detail, but the questions that Glengarry Glen Ross raises are deep indeed.

How can men relate to each other without the demon of competitiveness destroying the possibility of friendship or even respect?

Is male self-esteem only to be achieved by winning competitions with other men?

Can a man show his vulnerability and humanity to another man without being humiliated for doing so?

How can I ever feel secure in my identity as a man?

These are questions I hope to explore in the next part of this series.

If you have any comments on this blog post, as always, I'd welcome them.  Also, if you have any topics or subjects that you'd like to see here, please let me know.  I value greatly the input of those who take the time to read this blog!

My very best wishes to you on your individual journey to wholeness,

Brian Collinson

Website for Brian's Oakville and Mississauga Practice: www.briancollinson.ca 

Email: brian@briancollinson.ca

Get "Vibrant Jung Thing" posts delivered to your email using the "FeedBurner" box in the left column!

PHOTO CREDITS:  © Tjurunga | Dreamstime.com ;  © Hemul | Dreamstime.com

© 2009 Brian Collinson 

Anger: Everybody Has It, So What Do We Do With It?

There is no easy way with anger.  It can be one of the most powerful psychological forces that we experience.  As an old song once said, "anger is an energy" -- and it can be a force for growth in a person's life, or a source of misery and destruction.

At this time, the problem of dealing with anger is more on our minds in this society than it has surely ever been.  As a society, we really don't know what to do with it.  It is simply symptomatic of our confusion and uncertainty that a major fast food chain has created a major campaign centered around a hamburger called the "Angry Whopper"!

For many people, anger is the unacceptable "taboo" emotion, the one that has no real place in our lives, the one that "decent" or "reasonable" people avoid.  This is a lesson that many of us learned deep in the womb of the family.  When I think of my own upbringing, it is absolutely clear to me that most emotion was suspect, but anger in particular was completely anathema. 

There is a trend in modern thinking to isolate anger, to treat it as some intruder in the human psyche or soul.  There is a tendency in much of modern psychology to want to wall anger off and treat it as a specific discreet problem that has only limited connection to the whole of a person's personality.  So we hear a lot about anger management and rage addiction.  This type of term that ignores the fact that a person's anger stems from real issues in the whole of that person's personality.

But those who have to deal with their anger or rage as personal problem know that such emotions are anything but discreet.  When they are in full force, they can often seem to take complete control of the personality, and to be completely in the driver's seat.

PHOTO CREDITS:

© Olivier Lantzendörffer | Dreamstime.com

© Gareth Cosgrove | Dreamstime.com

© Fallsview | Dreamstime.com

Anxiety and the Downturn

The present economic conditions are deeply challenging to the ways that we all think about ourselves and our lives.  It takes a toll on all of us to be constantly bombarded with negative economic news that often seems only to get worse with each passing day.

It's evident to me from my practice how much anxiety is being created in each of us, and what a heavy burden a lot of people are having to carry in the present situation.  At the tail end of last week, there were numerous people who came through my office who were profoundly anxious and deeply scared at the things that they were seeing in their personal and working lives as we undergo the current economic crisis.

© William Attard Mccarthy | Dreamstime.com

How can we avoid being crippled by the anxiety and the fear?  There are a number of things to keep in focus.

First, the economic conditions that we are confronting are governed by the psychology of the crowd.  Modern communication technology only enhances and deepens this effect.  Crowd psychology is prone to irrational excitements and manias when things are good, and is equally prone to mass panics when they are bad.  In the short run, it can likely be expected that panic will actually worsen economic conditions, and we have to be prepared to weather that.

Second, we must fully expect that this mass panic is going to "hook" and activate all of our deepest fears.  Money is a very emotional matter for the vast majority of human beings.  It symbolizes our life-energy, which we have put into our work, through our sweat and sacrifice.  We can expect that, when we receive the kind of ominous news that has been about, we are going to initially respond with fear and anxiety -- maybe even with terror.

Third, it is important to "hang onto ourselves" by not giving way to this fear and panic.  On balance, weighing decisions carefully at this time, and realizing that we are being infected, so to speak, by the panic of the crowd, and taking action in a way that really is in line with our own true feelings and emotions will lead us to courses of action that will serve us better.  Also, we need to hang on to the recognition that this crisis will not last forever.

Fourth, find your basic trust in life again, and act from that.  This is the time to draw on your deepest philosophical and religious convictions.  What do you really believe is important in life?  Do you believe that life is a meaningful journey, which is unfolding in a way that makes your life and the lives of the people close to you valuable?  If so, now is the time to put that belief in front of you, and to remind yourself of it constantly.

It's Been a While Since I've Posted

...because it's been an extremely busy time for me, professionally and personally!

  I haven't given up on this blog, though.  I'm still enjoying it and I still want to keep sending out thoughts and reflections, and welcoming dialogue with all of you.

If I can just paddle my canoe past the end of November, I should be back to my usual blogging frequency.

 

© Jabiru| Dreamstime.com

Looking forward to more Vibrant Jung Thing, and wishing you all every good thing,

Brian

Cochrane, Alberta

Recently I returned home to Oakville after a trip to Calgary, Alberta on a personal matter.  I always find these trips to Southern Alberta interesting, because of the insights they provide into the nature of suburbia and the suburban psyche.

Because of the current oil boom, Calgary is growing at quite a rate, continuously expanding outward.  It's a real case study of the nature of suburbia and exurbia, and its expansion.

The town of Cochrane, Alberta is located about 22 km (approx. 12 miles) to the west of Calgary -- less than 20 minutes drive from the northwest edge of the city.  In my opinion, Cochrane is a place blessed with incredibly beautiful geography.  To stand at the top of Big Hill on the edge of Cochrane, and to look down at the town in the Bow River valley is surely to witness one of the most incredible vistas afforded by any town in Canada.

If you want to encounter the historical Canadian West, Cochrane has impeccable credentials.  The real west of the ranchers and pioneers -- that's what Cochrane is all about.

When I was a kid growing up in Calgary, when families wanted a Sunday drive they drove out to Cochrane.  Maybe you stopped at Eamon's Super Service station on the 1A Highway for coffee.  Or maybe you just kept going right into Cochrane, and you went to MacKay's for some of the very best ice cream cones around.

Well, that was then.  Today, Eamon's is an abandoned building, a victim of the relentlessly expanding subdivisions of Calgary.  And Calgary continues its explosive, inexorable growth to the west, inching ever further out the 1A highway towards the town of Cochrane.

The Unlived Life

We all live our lives, and in the course of just "getting through" our lives, we all have to make decisions.  With each major decision that we make, we open a door and walk through it.  We also close at least one door, perhaps several.  Sometimes that closing of the door is forever.  Sometimes we cannot go back and make the choice again.  The river of our life moves on, and we cannot easily reverse the flow of time, and head back upstream.

Whatever the choices are that we make, we are closing off options that we could have taken.  Sometimes these options call to us, beckon to us, despite our having left them behind.  Sometimes we leave them behind, and don't think of them.

But we can reach a point at which our unlived life comes back to us.  Consciously, or sometimes unconsciously, we can begin to feel the weight of what might have been if only we had made different choices, if our luck had gone slightly differently, if we had seen things just a little bit more clearly.  When I was at the Art Institute of Chicago, I saw a painting, which seemed to me to capture this feeling with a great deal of eloquence,  American artist Ivan Wright's That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do (The Door).  For me it evoked all the "doors" that we do not open, and all the feelings -- hopeful, melancholy, grieving -- that are associated with them.  As clients remind me constantly, there are so many choices that could have been made, each with the seductive aura of possibility surrounding it.

                                                                    © Igor Terekhov | Dreamstime.com

© Vividpixels | Dreamstime.com

In Your Dreams

Looking at dreams is often a part of Jungian analysis.  Jungian analysis, along with other forms of depth psychology, maintains that dreams are meaningful, and that the dreams a person has are directly connected to what is going on in his or her life, both right at the present time, and over much longer periods of time.

Shtirlitz | Dreamstime.com

Sometimes people are afraid of looking at their dreams, or sometimes they feel gullible or silly for looking at them, as if this wasn't "practical", or "down to earth" in some sense.  However, it is interesting to note that this attitude toward dreams in our culture is at odds with the views of most other cultures, and even with our own culture in earlier periods of time. 

The ancient Greeks, Romans and Hebrews certainly believed that their dreams were meaningful, and this attitude prevailed in the West throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and even up to and   including the Enlightenment.  It is only with the rise of "hard core" empiricism and materialism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that our Victorian forebears began to be sceptical about dreams, a trend reversed by that very hard-nosed and commonsensical empiricist and rationalist, Sigmund Freud. 

                                                                                                                                                                            © Dewayne Flowers | Dreamstime.com

Unlike Freud, who saw dreams as a mechanism for preserving sleep by keeping repressed thoughts and impulses from emerging during sleep, Jung believed that dreams represent an on-going commentary by the unconscious on the conscious position and attitudes of the individual.  For Jung, the unconscious is composed of so much more than just repressed contents, and it has its own wisdom, which can sometimes greatly surpass the understanding of the conscious mind.  If that is true, then we can expect to glean many important insights from understanding the contents of our dreams.

© Petar Neychev | Dreamstime.com

Chicago: An Enormous, Diverse, Extroverted, Friendly American City...

© Bonnie Pignatiello Leer | Dreamstime.com

I've just gotten back today from a trip to Chicago, and I apologize to my readers for the lack of posts over the last little while.  I plan to write about my trip, and to reflect on different psychological and soul aspects of my trip to that great city.

It was a wonderful trip!  Chicago is such a vital place! 

I couldn't help drawing a lot of comparisons with Toronto as we explored different dimensions of the city.  There are certain similarities -- large cities each located on the shores of the Great Lakes.  However, beyond these surface characteristics, the two cities are very different in very many ways.

Most fundamentally, I think , there is a difference in what Jung would call weltanschauung, or world view.  Perhaps to, say, Europeans, or Asians, the inhabitants of Chicago and Toronto would seem very similar.  However, I think that there are some fascinating differences in fundamental attitudes.  It's hard to put this into words, except to say that, even in the midst of the current economic uncertainties, there is an extraordinary confidence that Chicago exudes.  Perhaps it's a bit cliche, now, but I could hear the poetry of Carl Sandburg ringing in my ears as we travelled through the city.

It's not a question of one collective outlook being either wrong or right, of course, but I'm intrigued with the differences in what seems to me to be each city's collective perception of the world.  I hope to write more about this in subsequent posts.