Jung famously said that a person should not try to haul in a fish that’s larger than his boat.
Exactly how do we strengthen and enlarge the capacity of our ego-consciousness (our “boat”) to deal with powerful negative emotions such as discouragement and anxiety, and powerful positive emotions such as inspiration and love?
In this course we will discuss how Jung’s discoveries about the human psyche can help us in our experience of our inner world, and also how a strengthened consciousness helps us to relate to others at work, in the family, and in close relationships. We will also explore Jung’s ideas about how we deal with changes in the outer environment.
While Jung is most often identified with concepts such as the archetypes of the collective unconscious, he said his focus with his patients was on helping to them to relate to the realities of their daily living—through the individual process of augmenting conscious awareness. We will focus both on how strengthening and enlarging consciousness involves differentiating and separating from factors that interfere with living creatively, and how integrating and assimilating new ideas and attitudes builds up the lived experience of “what it means to be me.”
