2001 Year-End Lecture

Bob Bongiovanni, MA

As I reflect on this year, I particularly recall the lesson I have learned from and about human suffering. On September 11, our nation left its adolescence and learned that we cannot escape the collective suffering of the rest of the planet. More recently, my family suffered a loss due to cancer. In both these instances, I saw that suffering can shake us to our very foundations, leaving doubt about our physical and psychic survival. How much suffering can we bear, either personally or as a witness, and survive? And, in both cases, I found our common systems of religion and science very marginally helpful to the masses of suffering people around me. The priestly talk of sin, of God’s wrath, of the rewards of heaven or punishments of hell felt hollow and tragically out of touch. The scientist’s promise to shield us from missiles and cure our mental and physical pain with pharmacology felt similarly hollow.

In these contemplations of suffering, I find myself inspired by the story of the Buddha, who devoted the entirety of his work to understanding and relieving the pain of humanity. Indeed, it is said that when a student asked an obtuse question that was irrelevant to the relief of suffering, Buddha replied with a thunderous silence. It was not that Buddha did not know the answer; he was commenting on the question.

I believe Carl Jung and Buddha shared this sense that abstractions and theories come to nothing if they do not relieve suffering. Or, stated in the positive, the true worth of any technique or insight is its potential to heal.

The desire to heal and be healed brought me to Jung some 20 years ago, and has kept me studying Jung over these decades. It’s why I agreed to accept ordination in Jungian Ministries. It’s why I agreed to help create the Jungian Circle. And it’s why I am here this morning.

At this sliver of time, at the end of one year and beginning of the next, I would like to present the Jungian framework and some topics that excite and interest me. In the months to come, these are the subjects on which I will be speaking, because I feel that the Jungian Circle could play an important role in our lives and the lives of our larger community in the days and weeks ahead.

Volume 16 of Jung’s Collected Works doesn’t have the esoteric appeal of his alchemical essays, or the mystical qualities of his Mysterium, but I have found it very inspiring. It is entitled The Practice of Psychotherapy and, from the title, you can discern that it is pragmatically oriented. In one of the essays, “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” Jung summarizes the entirety of his work with clients into four straightforward phases. Interestingly enough, when I go back and read about these four phases, I find that they also set out the potential work of the Jungian Circle, at least as I see it.

The first phase Jung calls confession, but he goes far beyond the narrow confines of what confession is or has been. Essentially, to Jung, confession means the dispelling of shame, the building up of one’s sense of being a worthy, loveable person. In analysis, by confessing one’s secrets and experiencing positive regard from the analyst, the client reconnects to humanity and emerges partially from the shadow. We forget how many people walk around feeling sinful, unworthy, and resentful of their seemingly more perfect neighbors. For such people, the opportunity to hear that he or she is basically ok, not worthy of God’s wrath or public humiliation, is a healing balm in and of itself. I think the Jungian Circle has done this, by openly challenging core concepts of sinfulness, shame, racism, misogyny, homophobia, consumerism, unconscious patriotism, and other enslaving ideas that surround us and poison us. Moreover, I think we are basically an open, affirming, and accepting community. I have never hidden my homosexuality from all of you, but I know it would be rejected and condemned in many other groups. I have similarly heard some of you disclose parts of yourself that you would probably have kept hidden if you fearing shaming and condemnation. So, we can heal by our non-shaming, accepting, and affirming ways. Also, I hope that anyone who wishes to unburden themselves of a poisonous secret would feel comfortable asking one of us here for one-on-one time, knowing that they will find a compassionate ear and that their secrets will be held in confidence if they wish.

The second phase Jung called elucidation. Through confession, shadowy contents are laid bare and their feeling-tone is lessened. Through elucidation, the powers of analysis are turned on these contents to understand them, to learn the lessons they are trying to teach us, and to begin to assimilate these learnings. Elucidation involves a lot of work with complexes and archetypes. In the vast majority of cases, if you plumb even slightly below the surface of suffering, you will find a complex feasting itself on human vulnerabilities. In other cases, it is the process of individuation itself, and resistance to it, that produce the painful readjustment. In either case, merely describing the experiences over and over will not alleviate the symptoms nor deepen the experience. Only elucidation will suffice. And, to elucidate, one must have an intimate familiarity with the archetypal layer, which reveals itself through dreams, active imagination, and the folk tales of the world, ancient and modern. And, so, I believe part of what we should do here at the Jungian Circle is to elucidate the events of our collective lives, folk tales, myths, and other archetypal materials.

The third phase Jung called education. As Jung put it, “the patient must be drawn out of himself into other paths, which is the true meaning of education, and this can only be achieved by an educative will. . . . in many cases the most thorough elucidation leaves the patient an intelligent but still incapable child . . . no amount of confession and no amount of explaining can make the crooked plant grow straight, but that it must be trained on the trellis of the norm by the gardener’s art.” What is Jung getting at here? He believed that individuation involves a radically different, sometimes strenuous way of life. It’s not for the dabbler or the undisciplined wanderer or those drawn to spirituality as entertainment. There are certain qualities that mark a person who is ready to do this hard work, and they are qualities that must be nurtured and strengthened on a daily basis. Otherwise, when the lessons get difficult, when life presents its inevitable trials, we will be lured by the siren song of familiar dead-end patterns or suffer crushing despair. Based on my reading of Jung, I believe there are five essential qualities which can be nurtured through education and without which individuation stalls. The first is resolve, which means staying on course with one’s larger destiny, rejecting easier side-paths. The second is compassion, being a healing presence, choosing always to minimize the suffering of the world, including one’s own suffering. The third is humility, the opposite of hubris, which comes from knowing the context of history that has brought you to this place, the modern context that imposes both great expectations and great responsibility, and the future context that will finish the story that you began with your life. The fourth is moderation, holding to the center despite the temptation of the extremes, finding creativity in the tension inherent to the middle path. The fifth is awareness, making full use of the gifts that come in the form of dreams and synchronicities.

Almost by definition, education requires constant application of mature judgment. How am I to stay on the way that leads to my destiny? How can I act with compassion, toward myself and others? Am I acting out of an inflated ego, or a sense of context? Am I being drawn into an extreme position, requiring me to seek a more moderate path? Have I paid attention to the clues from my dreams and daily synchronicities? Obviously, sometimes the choices are far from clear. However, indecision is not a virtue. And, these five qualities – resolve, compassion, humility, moderation, and attentiveness – deepen the more we reflect upon them and practice them. And I believe we can explore these qualities as a Jungian Circle and deepen them among ourselves, to the benefit of us all.

It doesn’t end with education. Jung’s fourth phase is transformation. Where the previous three stages have been about coping with life challenges and finding a healthier way of living, the fourth stage is about launching into uncharted territory. The most highly evolved, individuating person is still in this fourth stage, because it involves not only one’s own soul, but also the evolving anima mundi, the soul of the world. All of the tools of psychology and spirituality are brought to bear in this stage, but not focused on one’s own needs. Jung put it this way: “Our civilization is still young, and young civilizations needs all the arts of the animal-tamer to make the defiant barbarian and the savage in us more or less tractable. But at a higher cultural level we must forgo compulsion and turn to self-development. For this we must have a way, a method, which, as I said, has so far been lacking. It seems to me that the findings and experiences of analytical psychology can at least provide a foundation, for as soon as psychotherapy takes the doctor himself for its subject, it transcends its medical origins and ceases to be merely a method for treating the sick. It now treats the healthy or such as have a moral right to psychic health, whose sickness is at most the suffering that torments us all. For this reason analytical psychology can claim to serve the common weal – more so even that the previous stages which are each the bearer of a general truth. But between this claim and present-day reality there lies a gulf, with no bridge leading across. We have yet to build that bridge stone by stone.”

In sum, I intend to spend time in 2002 building my part of that bridge. Through my speaking and writing here in the Circle and in the wider world, I want to explore the themes of confession, elucidation, education, and transformation. In the context of education, I intend to explore how to deepen our personal and collective resolve, compassion, humility, moderation, and attentiveness, which together make individuation possible.