Jung held that psychotherapy involves more than just the relief of symptoms and can assist individuals in achieving individuation and making a deeper connection with life-meaning. His reflections on life-meaning were quite varied, and traversed existential, archetypal, and transcendental themes—themes which reflect the range of concerns which informed his psychology throughout his career.
In this seminar we will begin by exploring the existential themes which Jung linked to life-meaning: individuation and the realization of the self, a focus on life in this world, a personal confrontation with death, and an embrace of absurdity, paradox and the shadow elements of the personality. We will then discuss archetypal themes, including Jung’s emphasis on the significance and power of myth, symbols, and religion, and explore transcendental themes, which grew out of Jung’s experiences which led him to speculate that our world is only a small part of a greater, and presumably more meaningful, reality.
Finally, we will contextualize Jung’s thinking within the philosophical and psychological conceptions of “the meaning of life” from the Bible and ancient Greece to the present day and explore the relationship between psyche, values and life-meaning. In sum, this seminar will aim to enhance appreciation of life-meaning, consider the questions of objective and “cosmic” meaning, and advance an understanding of life-meaning’s clinical relevance and its place in our own lives.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
- Describe how the process of psychotherapy can go beyond symptom relief to work on issues related to individuation and life meaning.
- Articulate the classical responses to the question of life’s meaning and relate these to the phenomenology of the human mind and the archetypes of the collective unconscious as they are understood in Jungian psychology.
- Describe and critique the distinction between “personal” and “cosmic” meaning and its relevance to the ethics of psychology and psychotherapy.
- Articulate how a metaphorical understanding of such age-old disciplines as Kabbalah and alchemy provide a guide to our understanding of the meaning of life and the process of individuation/self-actualization.
- Assess the significance of the archetype of “the Shadow” for life-meaning.