Beginning My Red Book

I went to an amazing training by a local therapist named Jed Murphee this week.  It was well structured and put together and utterly modern.  It was deeply steeped in the drive to label personality traits and define them neurologically.  As I listened to this training on diagnosing teens with bipolar and borderline personality disorder, I became mad.  At the end, there were a series of case studies and people in the audience laid out diagnoses for the teens in the case studies.  In the end, the group decided diagnosing to early was bad, but they also kept limiting the teens to other easy labels. The case studies consisted of mostly behavioral descriptions of the teenagers.   Teenager A has attempted suicide, cuts, and has been hospitalized twice.  Teenager B has run away from home and has rapidly cycling moods. What made me mad is the very factor that has lead me to this blog.  These teens were nothing more than symptoms.  These human beings were nothing more than a collection of behaviors. When I see teens with symptoms like these, there is usually a deeper narrative that is beyond neurology and diagnosis.   They were abused, abandoned and lost and are desperately seeking meaning in a world that has offered them none.

I have seen Carl Jung's  Red Book described as The Holy Grail of the Unconscious.  I think this is beautiful, but inaccurate.  I see The Red Book as a road map to healing and self exploration.  Carl Jung was one of the father's of modern psychological practice and psychology.  He worked with Freud.  His work permeates much of modern psychology.  Jung wrote The Red Book at a time when he was going through  some of the worst crisis's of his life.  It was his road map to healing.  It was his exploration of meaning in a world that was on fire.  One of the teens I work with and I went through the red book together last week and discussed it.  It was, for her, a window of hope.  She felt that it was good to know that even wise men suffer and struggle and she loved the process of it.  She loved the idea of exploring the inner workings of her mind and having someone listen and care and believe that her ideas might have some deeper meaning.  Adults had reduced her to a collection of symptoms.  They had diagnosed her with bipolar with psychotic features and treated her as broken.  She felt hopeless and condemned by the labels that weighed her down and the symptoms she saw as inescapable products of who she was as a person.  There was, for her, as with many of my young people, a solace in the belief that in the journey to life even the wise man could periodically be broken and even she could actually have beauty to offer and have something to say that held meaning.  To me, this is the hope held in Jung's Red Book.  It is the hope that we can all be different archetypes during different stages of our lives and that even in the fool, wisdom awaits.

As I began my work on my Red Book, I had to look into my active imagination.  I explored this deeply and found the same images emerging.  I did the following drawings as my first attempts to make my active imagination more tangible.

I had to do some research to explore the archetypes in my art, but both of the images I drew came from the same mythology.   Both contained images of the triple goddess and the Tree of Life.   The Tree of Life is a reoccurring image in my active imagination.  It is the archetype that permeates all religions and cultures and binds heaven, hell and earth together.  The Norse, Celts, and Christians all embraced the symbolism of the tree.  Carl Jung incorporated it into his own Red Book frequently.  It is a symbol of life and death and reaching for something higher.  The triple goddess required more research.  She is taken from Celtic mythology but it could be argued that her archetype is seen in the Fates and the Norn's.  She is one person and three, like the trinity.  She is the maid, the mother, and the crone.  She represents fate and the unknowable and the fact that women are constantly shifting and changing and evolving. Men are typically represented as stable once they enter adulthood.   Women, however, are constantly evolving.  In youth, they are desired, beautiful, and powerfully sexual.  Our society loves the maid and women often long to remain her.  The mother is the nurturing aspect of woman.  She is older and wiser and focused on caring for others.  Her youth is spent. The crone is the postmenopausal woman.  She is wise and in older cultures she is closer to magic, but her sexuality is lost and so is her beauty. 

So why would these images be so present in my active imagination?  I think it is because I am aging and that is weighing down on me.  I am no longer in my twenties and much of the attention that was paid to me when I could wander the beach in a bikini is gone.  I am firmly in the mother role and I miss my youth and fear my evolution into the crone.  I am not sure why since I have always respected wisdom more than beauty.  I will need to explore this in more depth. 

As with many things in life, it is how we interpret the images in our active imagination that really matters.  Have you ever wondered why every Tarot card reading is accurate? It is because each image can always be seen as holding some piece of the truth and it is how we explain the images that make the validity of each image eternally accurate.  I could have described these images in a dozen ways, but my interpretation gives the images meaning and touches on the truth of the issues that are weighing upon me now. 

Further Reading:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html

The Red Book

Carl Jung's Red Book was an attempt to understand himself, the human soul, the human mind, and its connection to life and death via the workings of his own active imagination and writing.   According to Shamadasan, "The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation.  This is ultimately achieved through enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the the form of a psychological and theological cosmos"  It is Jung's attempt at individualization.

I love this idea and this is where I think many modern therapists fail.  We guide patients through mental illness and discrete crises but we fail to help them gain a sense of the themselves in an increasingly complex world. We fail to guide them in the process of individualization that brings meaning to their life and helps them achieve what Maslow called "Self Actualization."  It fails to help people know themselves and their role in the spiritual and physical world.  Jung had a unique understanding that there are images and longings that connect all of us to something universal.  Jung called these images archetypes.  Every culture and people has a story about a hero that is taken from his noble lineage to grow up poor.  What is noble in him remains despite his hardship because his nobility is born to him.  This is a universal theme that speaks to what it means to be human.  We are all drawn to the Supermen and The King Aurthur's.  We all love Cinderella stories.  Every culture has one.  We still retell these stories.  The idea that inner strength can overcome circumstance is Universal.  We are all connected but separate and understanding this is what Jung called individualization.

If Carl Jung's Red Book was an attempt at individualization, this blog, my Red Book, is an attempt at individualization, but also an attempt to narrate the process in the context of what Jung called the collective unconscious.  The collective unconscious is the part of the mind that is derived from ancestral memory and experience and is common to all humankind.   This is the universal in all of us. I will start with art, much like Jung did. as a tool to explore my active imagination.  Active imagination is a process used to bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious mind.  Although I am not a firm believer in an unconscious mind in the same way Jung perceived it, I believe we all struggle with issues we would rather not discuss.  These are issues we suppress and put in "the vault".   It is these issues that are brought to light when you work with the active imagination.

So my next blog post will be my first dive into my own activate imagination in the form of art.  I will attempt to interpret the images in my painting and explain the process.

Carl Jung: A Modern Clinical Perspective

I recently told several of my colleagues that I had almost completed my certification in Jungian Analysis.  They laughed.  Carl Jung has become a bit of a joke to most modern clinicians.  He is like Freud.  We respect him as a historic contributor to our work, but actually using his philosophies in modern practice is a rare event.  

Modern clinicians are overwhelmingly cognitive behavioral in practice.  This is a rational choice as the evidence overwhelmingly supports CBT as the primary treatment modality.  Beck and Ellis's research and the bulk of scientific research show that if you want to help someone face anxiety or depression CBT works.  Other clinicians lean heavily on Brief Solution Focused methods to attack specific problems and get clients in and out of treatment.  I uses both these techniques heavily in my own practice. In graduate school, on of my favorite professors lectured extensively on how utterly ineffective psychoanalytic techniques are and how much research shows them to be no better than placebo in controlled studies.

So why would I turn to a psychoanalyst who practiced a hundred years ago for my inspiration?  I believe that Carl Jung was a man confined by his times and ahead of his times and deeper glimpses into his work show insights that only recently have come to light in the modern practice of mental health.  For example;  Carl Jung specifically discusses meditation and mindfulness in The Red Book and discusses as a path to clarity of the mind.  Kabat-Zinn (2003) is given almost exclusive credit for bringing this practice into modern mental health practice.  Since it has emerged as a common tool in modern mental health the research has exploded showing the meditation and mindfulness can reduce and eliminate numerous mental health issues including anxiety, depression, trauma, and anger.    Meditation practice is associated with lower levels of psychological distress, anxiety, depression, anger and worry (Baer 2003).  One study found that employees in a corporate setting showed changes in front brain electrical activity following 8 weeks of Mindfulness Based treatment (MBSR) that were consistent with the experience of positive emotions like joy and content (2003).  I could spend all day citing research, but it has been shown that  mindfulness and meditation can help most mental health concerns.  Jung said this in his Red Book almost 100 years ago and little is said of it.    Jung was also the first practitioner to use art therapy.  Research has supported the uses of this more modern technique as well (Complimentary Therapies in Medicine, 18, 160-170).  Jung addressed the spiritual when most clinicians wanted to focus on penis envy.  He was revolutionary and often written off in the world of modern mental health.

In the end, it wasn't these factors that brought me to Jung but issues facing my clients.  I see these issues now, but originally it was the voices of those I hope to help that carried me back to the work of Carl Jung.  Most of my clients thrive and move on with CBT, BSFT, or with person centered techniques.  However, a few of my clients seemed to want and need something deeper.  They were facing existential crises that couldn't be addressed by looking at behaviors or faulty cognitions.  They wanted to explore the meaning of their life.  There was nothing in my regular treatment modalities to address these issues.  Jung's perspective did so.

So as I start this blog, it feels like the culmination of a lifetime of work.  It isn't just a lifetime of work as a clinician, but also a lifetime of work as a writer, folklorist, and painter.  If you have read my other blog, www.ghoststoriesandhauntedplaces.blogspot.com or any of my books, which you can find on my website www.jessicapenot.net, you will find that exploring where we fall in mythology, folklore and in the face of life and death have been questions I have been exploring for sometime.  I hope to go deeper into these questions on this blog and explore it from a Jungian perspective.  I also hope to build my own Red Book, filled with art and thoughts tying all of my work together.