Practical Application Session 1 – Resilience Through Meaning

By Bob Bongiovanni, MA

 

Why study the works of Carl Jung, especially if you have no desire to become a therapist?  Isn’t he just a quaint vestige of psychology’s early years, an antique approach when compared to the eclectic, behaviorally-oriented modern therapies, backed up by the wonders of pharmacology?  I’ve been asked these questions many times – and I’ve asked them of myself.  But, clearly Jung has an ever-growing modern following – there have never been as many Jungian publications as there are right now, mostly geared toward non-therapists, who must find something of value there.

 

No doubt, everyone who comes to Jung comes with her or his own questions and motives.  In the upcoming lecture series, I will present what I believe to be some very practical applications of Jungian thought which have proven useful in my own life and which Jungian authors cite in their works.  I don’t presume to know all the other reasons people take up Jungian studies, or how his work is applied.

 

I am not, and have never really ever been, a one-on-one therapist.  I have had over six years of analysis under a diplomate Jungian analyst, so I certain know the experience as an analysand, but that is not how I have chosen to apply what I have learned.  Instead, I have found many applications of Jung in my own personal life, and in my 20-year public health career.  In terms of my personal life, my study of Jung has fundamentally shaped my personal philosophy – when anything of note happens in my life, I apply a Jungian frame to better understand it, cope with it, and ultimately integrate it.  In terms of my professional life, Jung illuminates my daily work in so many ways, often without explicit acknowledgement, but powerfully, nonetheless.

 

Perhaps because of my background in public health, I often consider the importance of private and public issues in terms of resilience.  In medical practice, you deal with patients one at a time, considering their unique circumstances and issues.  In public health, you attempt to influence collective life on multiple levels – from the individual to the cultural levels – hoping to build resilience.  What do I mean by resilience?  It basically means the ability to encounter challenges or needs for change and to respond in a healthy manner.  When people lack resilience, they tend to rely on patterns that have long outgrown their usefulness, if they ever were useful, resulting in a worsening mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual health status.  Then a person is resilient, they are constantly growing and innovating, learning from the big and little challenges of daily life, and optimizing their mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual health status.  That is what I hope for myself, and for my community.

 

What, you might wonder, does that have to do with a practical application of Jungian thought?   My basic premise is that Jung’s concept of individuation is a very expansive way to think of resilience, both individually and collectively.  People who are individuating are resilient, by definition, and if more people took up the path of individuation, we would be a far more resilient community and culture.

 

Going back to my definition of resilience, I have said that people who lack resilience tend to rely on patterns that have long outgrown their usefulness, if they ever were useful.  Restated in Jungian terminology, these are people who are dominated, in varying degrees, by complexes.  A complex is a formidable adversary.  Jung referred to them as “cancers of the psyche,” and with good reason.  Like cancers, if they are not brought under control, complexes will take over, smother out normal functioning, consume ever-greater amounts of energy, and ultimately destroy human life.  When a person is deeply possessed by a complex, perceived choices are narrowed down to a very few, leading to many health-damaging behaviors, such as compulsion, addiction, violence, and suicide.

 

For me personally, learning about complexes was one of the first powerful and practical effects of studying Jung.  It gave me a vocabulary and a mental model to understand what was happening to me.  Up until my study of Jung, I always thought of my personal demons as fundamental and unchangeable parts of who I am.  I am a perfectionist, prone to depression, compulsive about my work, and easily wounded by criticism.  That’s who I am, or so I thought.  Jung opened my eyes to see that these are the effects of my complexes, which no doubt have partially shaped who I am, but the real me is not tied to these sources of suffering.  As I grow as a person, I can step outside of these complexes and find a healthier way of being that is not driven by pain and fear.  Before I began my Jungian studies, I can remember having a very dour and dark view of life – life’s meaning is simply to avoid as much pain as possible, for as long as possible.  That view of life leads down a very frightening path, constantly pursued by demons, doomed to failure.  I really do not think I would be alive today if I had not found Jung and stepped off that path.

 

What, ultimately, was so damaging about pain avoidance as the ultimate meaning of life?  Because it is such a profoundly diminished meaning of life, it is actually more akin to meaninglessness, and that leads to an unendurable life that lacks resilience.  Jung wrote extensively about the absolute necessity of finding, or at least earnestly searching for, life’s meaning.  In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he writes:

 

The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the cooperation between conscious and unconscious.  Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness.  Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God. The Word of God, comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God. There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us spontaneously and places obligations upon us. It is not affected by the arbitrary operation of our will. We cannot explain an inspiration.  (page 340)

 

. . .

 

The Word happens to us; we suffer it, for we are victims of a profound uncertainty: with God as a cornplexio opposi­torum, all things are possible, in the fullest meaning of the phrase. Truth and delusion, good and evil, are equally possible. Myth is or can be equivocal, like the oracle of Delphi or like a dream. We cannot and ought not to repudiate reason; but equally we must cling to the hope that instinct will hasten to our aid—in which case God is supporting us against God, as Job long ago understood. Everything through which the "other will" is expressed proceeds from man—his thinking, his words, his images, and even his limitations. Consequently he has the tend­ency to refer everything to himself, when he begins to think in clumsy psychological terms, and decides that everything pro­ceeds out of his intentions and out of himself. With childlike naiveté he assumes that he knows all his own reaches and knows what he is "in himself." Yet all the while he is fatally handi­capped by the weakness of his consciousness and the corre­sponding fear of the unconscious. Therefore he is utterly unable to separate what he has carefully reasoned out from what has spontaneously flowed to him from another source. He has no objectivity toward himself and cannot yet regard himself as a phenomenon which he finds in existence and with which, for better or worse, he is identical. At first everything is thrust upon him, everything happens to him, and it is only by great effort that he finally succeeds in conquering and holding for himself an area of relative freedom.  (page 341)

 

. . .

 

 

The world into which we are born is brutal and cruel, and at the same time of divine beauty. Which element we think out-weighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely pre­ponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is —or seems to me—not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysi­cal questions, both are true: Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle. (page 358)

 

The search for meaning is no trivial experience, at least for those who have the temperament for the search.  A life devoid of meaning is the equivalent of illness, an inhibition of the fullness of life.  Here’s where I think Jung steps well beyond the sterile landscape of clinical psychology, elevating to highest value what has been the domain of philosophers and gurus.  He reaches this conclusion not just because of his own mystical bent – he reaches this conclusion because he has observed clients who sought meaning, and those who gave up on meaning, and he found the former to be healthier and more resilient than the latter.

 

Then, of course, we must consider – what is this “meaning” we are talking about?  Is there some absolute truth that many seek, but only a few find?  And, once this universal truth is discerned, life becomes carefree, a virtual nirvana?  No, that is not the Jungian view, and it certainly is not the message of the mystical schools throughout history and across cultures.  Instead, we’re talking about a process – the gradual opening of the personality to new insights and possibilities, an ever-evolving and deepening state of wholeness that can never be fully completed.

 

As I mentioned earlier, complexes are about limitation, and the ego complex is no exception.  Therein lies a paradox.  Even if we housebreak all of our other complexes, there is still the ego complex to deal with, if we wish to challenge our limitations.  Why bother, you might ask.  There’s infinite possibility in each moment, but the ego complex, even when it’s relatively health and well adjusted, reduces those possibilities down to only a few – the possibilities that are consistent with personal history and expectations.  An individuating person challenges such limitations, allowing more of the possibilities to manifest.  In other words, creativity is the essential quality of individuation.  Each time the ego takes the chance to be creative, it touches a vast reality that was previously hidden to it.  The creative ego takes steps toward the Self, and the Self takes steps toward the creative ego.  How is that actually experienced?  As an awakening, a discovery of new territory, a deepening sense of certainty that life is meaningful, even if the full meaning remains hidden or, at best, dimly intuited.  At least the creative ego knows that life is more than just fighting your way through the daily struggle of unpredictable events, ending in oblivion.  There is a bigger, more expansive life underneath it all.

 

In the same vein, referring back to the quote from Jung, he tells us that we human beings have a basic need for a myth that is “adequate to explain the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the cooperation between conscious and unconscious.”  We don’t actually create this myth – it is revealed to us, and we either ignore it or we respond to it.  This discovery of meaning is not particularly easy – as Jung says, “we suffer it.”  We have a tendency to try to internalize such experiences, to take ownership of them, when these experiences actually flow to us from “another source.”  That just leads to frustration and alienation.  The proper attitude is to recognize the machinations of the individual ego as a phenomenon, a part of a larger existence, but certainly not the totality of existence.  That is the true source of individual and collective resilience.

 

Here is where words begin to fail us.  This really can’t be described in simple words – it must be experienced emotionally, physically, and spiritually.  So long as it remains an intellectual exercise, it does not contribute to resilience.  So, I will end with a quote from the Bhadavad Gita, in which I hear the echoes of the Self, calling us into true meaning:

 

I permeate all the universe

in my unmanifest form.

All beings exist within me.

yet I am so inconceivably

 

vast, so beyond existence.

that though they are brought forth

and sustained by my limitless power,

I am not confined within them.

 

Just as the all-moving wind,

wherever it goes, always

remains in the vastness of space,

all beings remain within me.

 

They are gathered back into my womb

at the end of the cosmic cycle—

a hundred fifty thousand

billion of your earthly years

 

and as a new cycle begins

I send them forth once again,

pouring from my abundance

the myriad forms of life.

 

These actions do not bind me, Arjuna.

I stand apart from them all,

indifferent to their outcome,

unattached, serene.

 

Under my guidance, Nature

brings forth all beings. all things

animate or inanimate,

and sets the whole universe in motion.

 

Foolish people despise me

in the human form that I take,

blind to my true nature

as the Lord of all life and death.

 

Their hopes and actions are vain,

their knowledge is sheer delusion:

turning from the light, they fall

into cruelty, selfishness, greed.

 

But the truly wise, Arjuna,

who dive deep into themselves,

fearless, one-pointed, know me

as the inexhaustible source.