Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

15
The Analytic Process
As long as an analysis moves on the mental plane nothing happens,
you can discuss whatever you please, it makes no difference,
but when you strike against something below the surface, then a
thought comes up in the form of an experience,
and stands before you like an object . . . . Whenever you
experience a thing that way, you know instantly that it is a fact. 45
True healing does not happen in the head. It occurs through feelingtoned
realizations in response to lived experience. That is why the
analytic process, when pursued on an intellectual level—and that
includes most self-analysis—is sterile.
Thoughts “in the form of an experience” have a transforming effect
because they are numinous, overwhelming. They lead to a
more balanced perspective: one is merely human—not entirely
good (positive inflation), not entirely bad (negative inflation), but a
homogenous amalgam of good and evil. The realization and acceptance
of this is a mark of the integrated personality.
The process of assimilating unconscious contents does not happen
without work. It requires discipline and concentrated application,
and a mind receptive to the numinous.
Jung purposely did not develop a systematic therapeutic method
or technique, because he valued what happened in the individual
encounter with patients above any theories on how things “should”
proceed. He writes:
No programme can be formulated for the technical application of
psychoanalysis. . . . My only working rule is to conduct the analysis
as a perfectly ordinary, sensible conversation, and to avoid all appearance
of medical magic.
45 The Visions Seminars, pp. 337f.
60