Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

Self-Knowledge and Statistics 91
and by the silence of others who for one reason or another indulge
us. To really get a handle on ourselves we need an honest, objective
mirror, which our intimates rarely are. The unconscious, in its many
manifestations through dreams, visions, fantasies, accidents, active
imagination and synchronicity, is a rather more unsparing mirror,
and analysts are trained to interpret the reflections.
Again and again, patients dream of analytic work as a refreshing
and purifying bath. Symbols of rebirth frequently appear in their
dreams. The knowledge of what is going on in their unconscious
gives them renewed vitality.
There are many methods and techniques espoused by therapists
of different schools, but Jung’s view was that technique is not important.
What matters is rather the analyst’s own self-knowledge
and continuing attention to his or her own unconscious. Analysis is
in fact both a craft and an art. Whatever school an analyst trains in,
he or she is obliged to deal in an individual way with what comes in
the door. Jung said that when a unique, suffering person was in
front of him, he put theory on the shelf and simply listened. Only
after he had heard the conscious facts did he look for compensating
messages from the unconscious.
Self-knowledge can be the antidote to acute depression or a pervasive
malaise of unknown origin, both particularly common in
middle age. And it can be a spur to an adventurous inner life—the
heroic journey, as it may be called. Understanding oneself is a matter
of asking the right questions, again and again, and experimenting
with answers. Do that long enough and the capital-S Self, one’s
regulating center, is activated.
Marie-Louise von Franz says that having a relationship with the
Self is like being in touch with an “instinct of truth”—an immediate
awareness of what is right and true, a truth without reflection:
One reacts rightly without knowing why, it flows through one and
one does the right thing. . . . With the help of the instinct of truth,
life goes on as a meaningful flow, as a manifestation of the Self. 82
82 Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, pp. 172f.