Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

58 Personal Analysis
avoided thinking about. It is very exciting, all this new information
about yourself. It’s inevitably inflating, and for a while you think
you have all the answers—but it can also be quite painful, since
things generally get worse before they get better.
It has been said that analysis is only for an elite because it’s expensive
and time-consuming. It is true that analysis involves a good
deal of time and energy and it’s not cheap. But I have worked with
teachers and taxi-drivers, doctors, actors, politicians, artists—men
and women in just about every walk of life—of whom not one was
independently wealthy. The fee they paid was no small matter, affordable
only by making sacrifices in other areas of their life. It is a
matter of priorities—you put your money, your energy, into what
you value, and if you hurt enough you find a way.
Jungian analysis is not about improving yourself or making you
a better person. It is about becoming conscious of who you are, including
your strengths and weaknesses. Analysis is not something
that’s done to you. It is a joint effort by two people focused on trying
to understand what makes you tick.
In the process of working on yourself you will change, and that
can create new problems. Others may not like who you become, or
you may no longer like them. Indeed, it may be that as many relationships
break up through analysis as are cemented. When you
become aware of your complexes, and take back what you have
projected onto, say, a partner, you may discover there is not much
left to hold you together. A difficult experience, but the sooner you
realize you aren’t in the right place, the better. Analysis makes it
possible to live one’s experiential truth and accept the consequences.
The particular circumstances that take a person into analysis are
as multitudinous as grains of sand on a beach. They are both as
unique and as similar as one grain of sand is to another. True, the
reasons are always related to one’s personal psychology and life
situation. But behind such individual details there are general patterns
of thought and behavior that have been experienced and ex-