Carl Jung's Encounter with Psychosis/Schizophrenia

spiritual_emergency · 03:05 PM

I've long said that the work of the Jungians was enormously insightful for me in terms of understanding and recovering from my own experience of what would be called psychosis and/or schizophrenia in this culture. This is one of the reasons why I recommend the work of the Jungians to others...

Quote:

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

Carl Jung's Encounter with Psychosis/Schizophrenia

And yet between the book's heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure -- taking place entirely in his head -- he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic. ...

Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with Sigmund Freud, wa
is responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration — a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing. ...

A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante, Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious — claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors and empirical scientists. ...

Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich, felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.

What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”

He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate, academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part — the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what analytical psychology would become.

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book — on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”

Source: Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious

spiritual_emergency · Dec 29, 2009, 02:48 PM

More on Jung's personal encounter with the contents of the unconscious...

Quote:

Trust that which gives you meaning
and accept it as your guide.

- Carl Jung

Schizophrenia is commonly viewed as a paradigm of disintegration and breakdown. It may surprise some to discover that schizophrenic experience often includes visions of the center, and that these visions can provide a sense of well-being to the disoriented sufferer of psychic breakdown. Concerning the meaning of the center, Derrida once listed all the names which it has been called in the history of metaphysics; "It could be shown that all the names related to … the center have always designated an invariable presence — eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth".

In the visions of schizophrenics, the center is most often experienced as an ultimate source of supernatural power; the power to heal and the power to protect. The center is thus not associated with a specific religion or even a personal god. C.G. Jung observed that the encounter with the center is often accompanied by the production of a certain kind of visual art by the individual known as a mandala or centralized pattern; as a rule a mandala occurs in conditions of psychic dissociation or disorientation, for instance […] in schizophrenics whose view of the world has become confused, owing to the invasion of incomprehensible contents from the unconscious. In such cases it is easy to see how the severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state — namely, through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse (my emphasis).

He also hinted that a mandala may be "acted out" by movement in a circular pattern around a center, the center being the mandala. His conclusions about schizophrenics were confirmed by J. Weir Perry, who studied schizophrenics for forty years and wrote many books about it, including The Self in Psychotic Process. He observed the symbol of the center as well as many other symbols in the visions and drawings of schizophrenics.

The appearance of the center as a powerful locus of healing, which I call the "mandala experience," can be seen in the life of John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia and has recently become famous for the depiction of his life in the movie entitled A Beautiful Mind. The tendency to experience the center as a constructive force in the midst of psychic distress and disintegration raises questions about whether one can also find such hitherto undetected moments of constructiveness in fictional accounts of disintegration which have been compared to schizophrenic breakdown. One such account is Kafka's Description of a Struggle, a work in which a symbol of the center appears in the midst of such a psychic disintegration. However, first I will give an account of the "mandala experience" as discovered by Jung during what has been called his "schizophrenic" breakdown.

Jung's Mandala Experience
It was through Jung's own difficulties that he discovered the role of the center in psychic disintegration. It began in 1912, when Jung was at midlife, and in his autobiography he calls it his "confrontation with the unconscious". After it was over he had broken with Freud never to look back, and was well on his way to his own unique approach to psychology.

Jung's confrontation with the unconscious was very serious, and is increasingly being seen by modern interpreters as one which bordered on schizophrenia. "Newer interpretations by nearly all investigators have proceeded on the assumption that Jung's very sanity, and not just an interesting experiment in insight and introspection, was at stake". Moreover, as early as the 1960's, D.W. Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, went as far as saying that Jung was already a childhood schizophrenic. "Jung, in describing himself, gives us a picture of child schizophrenia, and at the same time his personality displays a strength of a kind which enabled him to heal himself. At cost he recovered".

Unfortunately Winnicott doesn't cover Jung's "confrontation with the unconscious" which occurred when he was an adult. I will not discuss the confrontation in its entirety, I only wish to point out that it had the features of a schizophrenic breakdown particularly at the beginning, and the beginning was the most troubled. In addition, it was during that time when Jung discovered the effects of the symbol of the center.

The schizophrenic features of his breakdown are threefold; first he had a couple of hallucinations, secondly the content of his hallucinations and subsequent dreams contain the symbols of death and renewal featuring imagery of the center prominently. Finally, at the beginning of the breakdown there were no intervening archetypal figures, Jung was confronted directly with the unconscious. This is typical of schizophrenia according to Couteau.

Concerning the hallucinations, Jung describes himself as being "seized by an overpowering vision" which last about one hour, in other words a psychosis, a feature of schizophrenia. The vision contains the symbols of disintegration in the form of apocalypse and death. In it, the natural order is being disturbed in a kind of reversal of opposites, order becomes disorder, dry land becomes flooded:

I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood.

The same vision recurred two weeks later. At this point even Jung concluded that he was "menaced by a psychosis". He did not realize that he is already having one.

Unlike many schizophrenics, the symbols continue in dreams, not during a psychosis. Soon after the "sea of blood" vision, he has a dream of rebirth and the center:

There stood a leaf bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd.

Throughout mythology tree of life has been an image of the symbol of the center, often imbued with supernatural qualities. For example, Dumuzi, the son-lover of the Inanna was himself called the "Lord of the Tree of Life." In Ancient Egypt, the sun-god was born from the highest branches of the tree of Isis. Again from Egypt, Osiris was reborn from a tree. In the image of a tree, the center takes on the qualities of power, growth and springtime renewal. Here, in Jung's dream, it bears the fruit to feed the crowd. The dream also contains the symbol of apotheosis, as Jung feeds the crowd in a manner which brings Christ to mind when he fed the multitudes.

At this point the similarity between Jung's visions and schizophrenia starts to waver for two reasons. The first one I have already mentioned. It concerns the fact that Jung's subsequent productions of the unconscious are in the form of dreams and fantasies, and have none of the terrifying, involuntary quality of psychosis so common in schizophrenia. Secondly, according to Couteau, the schizophrenic confrontation with the unconscious lacks the mediation of the anima;

I began to comprehend in a new way the notion of severe illness as a magnifying glass of the soul, from which sometimes the only benefit seems to be insights gained about psyche by the analyst observing "from the outside," for many of my patients, estranged from the mediating function of the anima, were instead confronted directly with the chaotic abyss of the collective unconscious. Yet even for these patients, the presence of a therapist, especially one who could serve as a surrogate anima—a therapist routed in soul-making—provided a vital link to their souls.

Every production of the unconscious which Jung experienced after the initial hallucinations would have such a mediating figure in it including the anima herself in the form of Salome. There are also Siegfried, Ka, whom Jung called the "spirit of nature," a "brown-skinned savage," as well as Elija, the "wise old prophet," and Philemon, the "winged sprit," to name a few. Schizophrenic imagery is largely unpopulated by such figures.

Jung also had a dream of the center which he admits, kept him going. In this dream he was in Liverpool, a "dirty, sooty city:"

It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining […] I had the feeling that there we were coming from the harbour, and that the real city was actually up above, on the cliffs. We climbed up there. It reminded me of Basel, where the market is down below and then you go up through the Totengässchen ("Alley of the Dead"), which leads to a plateau above and so the Ptersplatz and the Peterskirche.

When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square. In the center was a round pool, and in the middle of it a small island, while everything round about was obscured by rain, fog, smoke, and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a shower of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the flowering tree and the sunlit island, and thought "I know very well why he has settled here." Then I awoke.

The ascent upwards, the crossing of the threshold to a center which is in the image of a tree is something which will occur again and again in the experience of schizophrenics as I have discussed elsewhere. For now, it suffices to give Jung's own comments on the dream:

This dream represented my situation at the time. I can still see the grayish-yellow raincoats, glistening with the wetness of the rain. Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque—just as I felt then. But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all. Liverpool is the "pool of life." The "liver," according to an old view, is the seat of life — that which "makes to live".

He represented this dream in a mandala. One can see the blackness of the surround, with a flower which looks like a magnolia in the center. The image grows increasingly brighter, with the brightest spot at the center.

Figure 1 - Jung's mandala with a stylized version of magnolia tree in the center
(Jung Archetypes, Fig. 1)

I will call Jung's "vision of unearthly beauty" the mandala experience. This is to be distinguished from an experience of the dark side of the center, for as I will explain below when examining Kafka's work, the center terrifies as well as uplifts. The mandala experience plays a familiar role in the imagery of the center in schizophrenia, to an even greater extent than the dark side of the center.

Jung remarked of the visions he had during his time of disintegration and subsequent reintegration; "Today I can say that I have never lost touch with my initial experiences. All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912, almost fifty years ago. Everything I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images. These dreams included his "vision of unearthly beauty," which sustained him. It was thus a vision of the center, or in Campbell's words, the "universal source".

The point is, that out of Jung's own suffering, which has been argued to be a disintegration of schizophrenic proportions, came the vision of the transcendent, the mandala experience from which he would draw inner strength from for years to come...

Source: The Mandala Experience: Visions of the Center in Schizophrenia and Fictional Accounts of Disintegration

spiritual_emergency · 03:25 PM

The following is from the "story" I wrote in the process of my own experience. It will, at minimum, reveal why it was necessary for me to investigate the work of the Jungians as a means of understanding and integrating my own experience...

Quote:

~ MANDALA ~

A SANSKRIT WORD MEANING MAGIC CIRCLE

A MANDALA IS A SYMBOL OF THE PROCESS OF PRODUCING
A NEW CENTER OF PERSONALITY – THE SELF.

IT CONSISTS OF CONCENTRICALLY ARRANGED GEOMETRIC
FIGURES SUCH AS THE CIRCLE, THE SQUARE, OR THE SYMETRICAL
ARRANGEMENT OF OBJECTS IN MULTIPLES OF FOUR.

MANDALAS ARE USED IN LAMAISM AND TANTRIC YOGA.
WHEN MANDALAS APPEAR IN DREAMS AND VISIONS,
THEY BRING PSYCHIC PEACE.

Chapter Excerpt: Miracles

Tess was sitting on the floor, in front of the new coffee table by the fireplace. Upon its surface she had placed the necklace with the heart of gold. Inside the necklace she was arranging the chess pieces. Gallagher came out from the kitchen with a dishtowel over one shoulder and joined her.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"These people," Tess said, "These people inside the circle are important to me." She pointed and named them each in turn: "Me, the Black ViKing, my Friend, Five-Star Woman, Limh, and Skadi." She then placed an amethyst crystal into the circle. "This is my mother," she said. "She's here with me." Tess added a jeweled autumn leaf to the grouping. "This is my father," she said, "Thanksgiving Man. He's here with me too."

She rearranged the necklace into a rectangular shape. "Some of these people are protectors. The protectors go in the corners." Tess then placed the jewelled autumn leaf, amethyst crystal, Black ViKing, and Skadi into one of each of the four corners. "The people that are left in the middle," she said, "They are the ones who are hurting. They are the ones we have to fix." She pointed and named them each in turn: "Me, my Friend, Five-Star Woman, and Limh." She sat back on her haunches and folded her hands into her lap. "There," she sighed with a pleased expression.

Source: Story as a Vehicle to Healing

Music of the Hour: Our Lady Peace ~ Thief (Gallagher's Song)

See also: Archetype of the Apocalypse

spiritual_emergency · Dec 29, 2009, 03:00 PM

I am considering initiating a discussion related to The Red Book, Jungian psychology and schizophrenia/psychosis if the interest is there -- perhaps in the social groups area or possibly, within this topic.

If you are someone who has experienced psychosis/schizophrenia or a professional who works with the same and would be interested in that conversation, jot me a line and let me know. If there is enough interest (and my own life permits the time) I would very much enjoy exploring the topic through dialogue.

~ Namaste

Joanofarc · Jan 03, 2010, 01:06 PM

V. interesting read spiritual. I haven't read it all yet but will come back to it.

Joanofarc · Jan 03, 2010, 01:29 PM

Do you believe in magic Spiritual?

Joanofarc · Jan 03, 2010, 01:37 PM

Spiritual, what would Jung reckon about this;

Was sitting on the tube one day sitting opposite very smart woman with dark hair, red lipstick, red coat, black patent handbag and matching shoes with modest heel. I kept thinking she looked very 'town', don't know why, being 'town', 'village' or city had been the topic of lots of my thoughts. Not so much as in where someone is from but more the way they live, more the type of person they are. So it is possible to be all 3 depending on the way you go about your life and your mentality.

Anyway, back to the story; As I sat there (had been having the most maddest psychotic experiences during which my voices referred to me as a witch, albeit a baby one apparently) I sensed she was there for a purpose and it transpired that the purpose was to cast a magic black peppery dust in my direction. I saw this dust although it didn't look real I still saw it. The magic dust collected round my nose and I breathed some of it in through my nose. After this experience my nose kept twitching as though beyond my control.

Joanofarc · Jan 03, 2010, 02:27 PM

(I don't want to write too much in one post because I seem to have a clumsy habit of accidentally deleting them

)

During this particular pshycotic phase I became convinced that people around me were witches, wizards, sourcerers, conjurers, demons or strange creatures in another dimension.

It seemed that there was another dimension.

I heard their voices.

Some seemed cruel.

My world seemed cruel but I would make up stories about them telling myself that they were actually trying to help me. I felt I was an apprentice of this strange dimension yet a victim of a cruel sport at the same time. I felt there was a story behind each character, I spenta lot of time trying to suss out their motives for being a part of my world. What did they gain from it? Evil or good, friend or foe.

Joanofarc · Jan 03, 2010, 02:29 PM

(I read it all btw spiritual)

Joanofarc · Jan 03, 2010, 02:30 PM

oops I appear to have highjacked your thread somewhat

spiritual_emergency · 05:38 PM

Hello Joan,
I don't believe in hijacked threads -- I merely believe in conversations that go their own way.

Do you believe in magic Spiritual?

I don't seem to believe in the kind of magic that features in, say, Harry Potter movies but I do seem to believe in connection and energy. Sometimes it seems that the world is connected via energy in ways that might seem magical.

Meantime, I'm certainly no expert on Jung and depth psychology but I'm willing to share my thoughts with you regarding the following.

Quote:

Was sitting on the tube one day sitting opposite very smart woman with dark hair, red lipstick, red coat, black patent handbag and matching shoes with modest heel. I kept thinking she looked very 'town', don't know why, being 'town', 'village' or city had been the topic of lots of my thoughts. Not so much as in where someone is from but more the way they live, more the type of person they are. So it is possible to be all 3 depending on the way you go about your life and your mentality.

Anyway, back to the story; As I sat there (had been having the most maddest psychotic experiences during which my voices referred to me as a witch, albeit a baby one apparently) I sensed she was there for a purpose and it transpired that the purpose was to cast a magic black peppery dust in my direction. I saw this dust although it didn't look real I still saw it. The magic dust collected round my nose and I breathed some of it in through my nose. After this experience my nose kept twitching as though beyond my control.

During this particular pshycotic phase I became convinced that people around me were witches, wizards, sourcerers, conjurers, demons or strange creatures in another dimension.

It seemed that there was another dimension.

I heard their voices.

Some seemed cruel.

My world seemed cruel but I would make up stories about them telling myself that they were actually trying to help me. I felt I was an apprentice of this strange dimension yet a victim of a cruel sport at the same time. I felt there was a story behind each character, I spenta lot of time trying to suss out their motives for being a part of my world. What did they gain from it? Evil or good, friend or foe.

Based on my limited understanding of Jung, I would say that you were engaged in the act of projecting. In other words, you took an inner experience and "projected" it upon the woman -- likely because she fit the projection in some important way.

In the introductory paragraph, the colors black and red feature along with the idea that the woman has three forms of presentation (village, town and city). You also describe her as being very "smart" -- I gather you mean in her presentation (which seems to relate to her persona) as opposed to her intellectual abilities.

In the next paragraph you say your voices tell you you're a witch who is in her infancy. People have different attitudes about witches; according to some, they are the embodiment of evil while others consider them to be very knowledgable. Perhaps this too is connected to your initial impression that the woman made a "smart" presentation.

You determine that the woman has a purpose in your life which is to cast a "magic black peppery dust in my direction". You don't report any fear associated with this act but you say your nose began to twitch. Years ago, there was a show on television about a witch whose nose would twitch whenever she was doing her "magic". The nose is associated with sensing, smelling and is also an entrance/boundary because it's the transition point where the outside world comes into our inner world -- in this case, in the form of air.

In your final statements you note that during that time you felt that the outer world had taken on a "mythological tone". Again, I would suggest that this was an inner process that in some ways, corresponds to Perry's work...

Quote:

The individual finds himself living in a psychic modality quite different from his surroundings. He is immersed in a myth world ... His emotions no longer connect with ordinary things, but drop into concerns and titanic involvements with an entire inner world of myth and image.

Perhaps the critical difference is that your attention was still flowing outwards into the outer world as opposed to being driven inward, to the inner landscape.

The woman in your -- let's call it a "dream-like" state -- seems to correspond with a shadow figure. According to Jung, the shadow is always the same gender as the dreamer. Her manner of dress suggests a certain shadowy aspect as well because of the colors she is wearing. All things considered, I would suggest that the woman represented shadow material that was attemtping to come to consciousness.

Meantime, what I've done above is a process called amplification wherein you pull out the symbolic aspects of a fantasy/dream and attempt to find the meaning within the symbols as a means of further understanding the role of the fantasy/dream. It's not enough just to craft a fascinating collection of tidbits however. Rather, it would be necessary to find the connection between the "fantasy material" and your "waking life" in order to discover the meaning for that particular experience at that particular time in your life.

Quote:

Although the imagery is of a general, archetypal nature (“imagery that pertains to all men and all times”), it also symbolizes the key issues of the individual undergoing the crisis. Therefore, once lived through on this mythic plane, and once the process of withdrawal nears its end, the images must be linked to specific problems of daily life. Thus, the archetypal affect-images await a reconnection to their natural context: to the personal psychological complexes (which tend to be externally projected).

The most striking aspects of your experience include your presence on "the tube" (this runs underground, right?) the archetypal element of a "witch", the colors black and red, those three forms of presentation, the nose, the magic dust, the elements of good and evil/friend or foe (opposites), and of course, anything else that strikes you as particularly meaningful or significant. "Analyzing" psychotic content in this manner is similar to analyzing a dream.

Anyway, that's what I'd say about all that at this time. Perhaps after I've read more on Jung's personal experiences, I'll have more to say but that might take a while.

Source of quotes: The Far Side of Madness: Psychosis as Purposive

See also:
- The Shadow
- The Amplification Method

spiritual_emergency · Jan 03, 2010, 08:38 PM

This is interesting too...

Quote:

Psychosis. An extreme dissociation of the personality. Like neurosis, a psychotic condition is due to the activity of unconscious complexes and the phenomenon of splitting. In neurosis, the complexes are only relatively autonomous. In psychosis, they are completely disconnected from consciousness.

To have complexes is in itself normal; but if the complexes are incompatible, that part of the personality which is too contrary to the conscious part becomes split off. If the split reaches the organic structure, the dissociation is a psychosis, a schizophrenic condition, as the term denotes. Each complex then lives an existence of its own, with no personality left to tie them together. ["The Tavistock Lectures," CW18, par. 382.]

[In schizophrenia] the split-off figures assume banal, grotesque, or highly exaggerated names and characters, and are often objectionable in many other ways. They do not, moreover, co-operate with the patient's consciousness. They are not tactful and they have no respect for sentimental values. On the contrary, they break in and make a disturbance at any time, they torment the ego in a hundred ways; all are objectionable and shocking, either in their noisy and impertinent behaviour or in their grotesque cruelty and obscenity. There is an apparent chaos of incoherent visions, voices, and characters, all of an overwhelmingly strange and incomprehensible nature. [On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia," CW3, par. 508.]

Jung believed that many psychoses, and particularly schizophrenia, were psychogenic, resulting from an abaissement du niveau mental and an ego too weak to resist the onslaught of unconscious contents. He reserved judgment on whether biological factors were a contributing cause.

Source: http://www.jungny.com/lexicon.175/carl.jung.160.html

Music of the Hour:

Medley - Wonderwall of Broken Songs

spiritual_emergency · 11:14 PM

An expansion on the above...

Quote:

Abaissement du niveau mental:A lowering of the level of consciousness, a mental and emotional condition experienced as "loss of soul." (See also depression.)

It is a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might be compared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather. The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listlessness, moroseness, and depression. One no longer has any wish or courage to face the tasks of the day. One feels like lead, because no part of one's body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy. . . . The listlessness and paralysis of will can go so far that the whole personality falls apart, so to speak, and consciousness loses its unity...

Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one's self-assurance. The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one's self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing egocentricity, narrows the mental horizon. ["Concerning Rebirth," CW 9i, pars. 213f.]

Source: http://www.jungny.com/lexicon.175/carl.jung.37.html

spiritual_emergency · Jan 03, 2010, 11:13 PM

A brief spiel on complexes...

Quote:

Complex. An emotionally charged group of ideas or images. (See also Word Association Experiment.)

[A complex] is the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. ["A Review of the Complex Theory," CW8, par. 201.] ...

Complexes interfere with the intentions of the will and disturb the conscious performance; they produce disturbances of memory and blockages in the flow of associations; they appear and disappear according to their own laws; they can temporarily obsess consciousness, or influence speech and action in an unconscious way. In a word, complexes behave like independent beings. [Psychological Factors in Human Behaviour," Ibid, par. 253.]

Complexes are in fact "splinter psyches." The aetiology of their origin is frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional shock or some such thing, that splits off a bit of the psyche. Certainly one of the commonest causes is a moral conflict, which ultimately derives from the apparent impossibility of affirming the whole of one's nature. ["A Review of the Complex Theory," Ibid, par. 204.] ...

The negative effect of a complex is commonly experienced as a distortion in one or other of the psychological functions (feeling, thinking, intuition and sensation). In place of sound judgment and an appropriate feeling response, for instance, one reacts according to what the complex dictates. As long as one is unconscious of the complexes, one is liable to be driven by them. ...

Identification with a complex, particularly the anima/animus and the shadow, is a frequent source of neurosis. The aim of analysis in such cases is not to get rid of the complexes-as if that were possible-but to minimize their negative effects by understanding the part they play in behavior patterns and emotional reactions.

A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. In other words, if we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance. ["Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype,"CW9i, par. 184.]

Source: http://www.jungny.com/lexicon.175/carl.jung.67.html

(Still the) Music of the Hour:

spiritual_emergency · Jan 04, 2010, 10:14 AM

A few more ramblings, Joan...

Quote:

Jung's Experience: Every production of the unconscious which Jung experienced after the initial hallucinations would have such a mediating figure in it including the anima herself in the form of Salome. There are also Siegfried, Ka, whom Jung called the "spirit of nature," a "brown-skinned savage," as well as Elija, the "wise old prophet," and Philemon, the "winged sprit," to name a few. Schizophrenic imagery is largely unpopulated by such figures.

Your experience: During this particular pshycotic phase I became convinced that people around me were witches, wizards, sourcerers, conjurers, demons or strange creatures in another dimension.

I've only encountered one other individual whose experience contained "characters" to the same extent that my own did, nonetheless, some people may find that their "voices" are the equivalent of "characters", with distinct voices having their own characteristics and tone. Your experience also has an aspect of "characters" to it.

Like Jung, I was entirely engaged with an inner landscape during the most intense aspects of that process. (Unlike Jung, I wasn't able to turn it off and on at will -- I had to hang in until the experience had come to its natural conclusion.) But there was also a period of time when like you, I projected those aspects of my self onto the people and environment around me. I was not aware that I was doing so at the time; it took having that experience before I began to understand the role of projection. This is part of the reason I can agree that psychotic states of consciousness can be an attempt at healing and wholeness. (I'm not willing to say this is the case in every instance.)

It would not be enough to say that those "characters" were all me; neither would it be enough to say that they were entirely other. It seems more valid to say that the others serves as a screen that captured and reflected back key aspects of myself to me. This, I think, is an essential point that applies in your own situation as well.

In my own case, I responded to these "others" as if they were completely independant of me and as a result, I engaged in a relationship with them. It was a dialogue -- not as profound as Jung's, but certainly very meaningful to me. Also, like Jung, I had the benefit of a mediating presence -- the male "character" who served as my constant companion through that experience. Other "characters" were also of great significance and all of them were pieces of my puzzle that had to be fit back together once more. It helped me immensely to discover that each element/character had a place on Jung's model of the entire psyche because that provided a structure. Some people may find that their "voices" can also be placed upon the same.

[ Image Source: The Individuation Process]

In the experience you relayed, I would suggest that what may be valuable is to examine your relationship with the woman on the tube because it is the relationship itself that contains the projection. And yes, of course, to also amplify those other symbols that appeared, explore their meanings and attempt to understand what they are trying to "say". Repeat with other experiences/characters/voices as necessary.

All of which is to say that there can be a very great deal going on in fragmented states that we dismiss as meaningless because we fail to see the value or purpose in the experience and have been all too willing to examine it from a purely biochemical orientation.

Joanofarc · Jan 04, 2010, 02:06 PM

Hmmm it is interesting although I must admit to still be trying to get my head round this Jung theory.

Am I infact all of these characters in my head? The witch, the conjurer, the sourceress, the demon and the wise guiding spirit? Was I my own torturer, slayer and destroyer and my own saviour in the end?

I know I made up stories about certain people to myself, I know I hung on in psyche wishing, hoping and praying for kind words, good wishes. I prayed for a guiding light and hoped to find it in the voice of various people. Some I felt tricked by, some I thought were listening to my own inner voice and repeating it back to me.

Strangely enough I found that the voice that seemed to be my wise guide years and years later turned into one of my worse tormentors.

Though cruel most voices were, I got stronger in a way as I questioned myself, my every action, past, present and future. I became stronger in that the most deepest part of me was exposed to torrents of hideous insults and put downs. I hung on, kept hanging on to the fact that I was good, that I wanted to be good, that I wasn't the evil person that I was being told I was. I struggled on almost believing I was, as I was being told, the scum of the earth.

So yes I can see how I may in a way have been sort of talking to myself. I get that I may have been on some spiritual journey into my subconcious and that my mind was fragmenting into pieces ready to be sorted then put back in place. (and like you spiritual, I had no control over this whatsoever)

However what I cannot buy is any theory that says its all me.....well that is......I cannot buy it totally...........but the concept is interesting and I can identify with it in some ways.......but not all.

Just out of interest spiritual what sort of conceptions do you have about things like ESP, the spirit world and telepathy?

Joanofarc · Jan 04, 2010, 02:16 PM

Strangely enough I found that the voice that seemed to be my wise guide years and years later turned into one of my worse tormentors.

The above reads ambiguously. It should read as follows:

The voice that seemed to be my wise guide became one of my worst tormentors years later.

spiritual_emergency · Jan 04, 2010, 07:29 PM

Joan: Am I infact all of these characters in my head? The witch, the conjurer, the sourceress, the demon and the wise guiding spirit? Was I my own torturer, slayer and destroyer and my own saviour in the end?

That's a good question. On the one hand, according to you, there were other real people around you but you were convinced that they were "witches, wizards, sourcerers, conjurers, demons". I think that's where we can reliably claim that the projection of an inner state was occurring. However, can we reliably claim that inner mythological world is not real or even that it doesn't exist alongside this one we claim is reality?

I believe this is what Jung would have referred to as the unconscious, a dimension he seems to have accepted as entirely real and valid. Certainly, when he was engaged in a conversation with Philemon or examining Nietzsche's relationship with Zarathustra, he seems to be approaching Philemon and Zarathustra as separate entities. During my own experience I felt I had entered into an entirely different world and was interacting with some very powerful forces. The term I might use to describe those forces would probably be "energies". Maybe Jung would have called them archetypes. Maybe some people would call them spirits.

At the same time, we have to bear in mind our own approach -- if we are approaching the question from an ego-based stance, it's natural to assume there is an "I" and there is an "Other". But if we are approaching from the position of the "Self" ... where are the boundaries between "I" and "Other"? What happens to "Other" if "I" disappears?

Just out of interest spiritual what sort of conceptions do you have about things like ESP, the spirit world and telepathy?

I'm not sure. Whatever I might have believed at one point in time was seriously challenged as a result of that experience and in many ways, I am still formulating my own answers.

Meantime, I think we know if an explanation fits our experience and how well it does or doesn't. Anything that I share in this regard can really only be considered a starting point. If some parts of it fit well enough for you that you'd like to learn more, I suppose that's where you begin seeking out additional information for yourself. Naturally, some people find it doesn't fit them or their experience well at all.

~ Namaste

spiritual_emergency · Jan 04, 2010, 07:51 PM

As an additional note Joan, you may find something of interest in this thread: Fight Club: An Example of a Schizophrenic Process

In it, I attempted to take one person's "fictionalized" account of fragmentation and demonstrate how Jungian insights could be used to interpret the various "characters" in his experience. Perhaps it will help you to better understand how Jungian applications might apply to the "characters" in your own experience.

As always though, if it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. There's no hard, fast or absolute rules.

~ Namaste

Music of the Hour:

spiritual_emergency · Jan 05, 2010, 04:38 AM

I've been thinking more on some of your questions, Joan. In particular, I've been thinking about the collective unconscious and "other". I'm lacking the words to try and define what it is although I would say it is a kind of living embodiment. The following seems to be getting into the right vicinity...

Quote:

Bonus Topic: Dreamtime:

... It's always helpful to those of us suffering from the "boxed-in Western mind" syndrome, to remember that all of our rational analysis is nothing more than one cultural and linguistic model to represent our experience of reality. Unfortunately for us, such models often define our experience instead of merely reflecting it, and may leave us feeling spiritually impoverished. For instance, the state that Americans label as a form of schizophrenia bears a striking resemblance to what Haitians believe to be possession by a sacred spirit, or lwa, and is viewed as a positive, not a negative experience.

For a non-Western version of reality and interpretation of the significance of dreams, look to the Australian aboriginal viewpoint. Here are a few important terms:

Dreamtime: The "Dreamtime", the mythological past, was the time when spirit ancestors travelled thoughout the land, giving it it's physical form, and setting down the rules to be followed by the Aboriginals. Beings such as the "Fertility Mother," the Great Rainbow Serpent, human and animal totemic spirits, and even sky-heroes, survive in stories and ceremonies that have been passed down from generation to generation in song, dance and art. In age-old ceremonies Aboriginal men enacted the lives and activities of these creators of the physical world, it's human and animal inhabitants, plant life, and tribal customs. For Aborigines, the natural landscape has its own beautiful spirit that will never change, and in Dreamtime, they share this spirit with the land.

Songlines: Songlines, or Yiri in the Walpiri language, are tracks across the landscape created by Mythical Aboriginal ancestors when they rose out of the dark Earth and travelled, creating mountains, valleys, waterholes - all the physical features of the land. They are ceremonial songs which pass on these stories. As the ancestors underwent various adventures, the laws for living, and hunting skills were established. The songs, and the stories which make up the content of the paintings, are intertwined. The land was literally "sung" into existence.

Walkabout: Aborigines wandered for food, hunting and gathering. These wanderings are called "walkabouts." Beyond the need for gathering food, the walkabout has a spiritual meaning. When the Aborigine is on a walkabout, the land reflects a sacred geography, and the trip becomes a Dream Journey, connecting the travelers to the Dreamtime. Because the Dreamtime creatures became features of the landscape themselves, the land is a sacred dimension in Aboriginal life. To get a spiritual message, the people regularly traverse tribal territory on sacred pathways. Because the Aborigines have no written language, these pathways are passed down from one generation to the next in songs, called songlines. While on a walkabout, or Dream Journey, the Aborigine is connected to the eternal moment of creation in the present, which is more a state of mind than any particular place. The Dream Journey is the Aboriginal path to spiritual renewal because the people and the land are inseperable. These are a people in deep harmony with nature.

(definitions from DreamTime, SongLines)

Bonus Topic: Theories of Everything!

Chaos Theory: Formally, chaos theory is defined as the study of complex nonlinear dynamic systems. Complex implies just that, nonlinear implies recursion and higher mathematical algorithms, and dynamic implies nonconstant and nonperiodic. Thus chaos theory is, very generally, the study of forever changing complex systems based on mathematical concepts of recursion, whether in the form of a recursive process or a set of differential equations modeling a physical system. (from Chaos Theory)

Fractal: A fractal is an extremely irregular curve or shape, any part of which is similar in shape to a larger or smaller part when magnified or reduced to the same size. Take a fern. Its forking branches recreate themselves on an ever tinier scale as you look from the entire plant to each leaf blade, and then to its leaflets and their sub leaflets. There are almost limitless examples of fractals in nature. (from Lori Valigra - Special to The Christian Science Monitor)

Game Theory: Game theory is a branch of mathematical analysis developed to study decision making in conflict situations. Such a situation exists when two or more decision makers who have different objectives act on the same system or share the same resources.There are two person and multiperson games. (from Game Theory)

Grand Unified Theory: The theory which will unify the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces is called the "Grand Unified Theory."

The Holographic Nature of Reality: Under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.
Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.

This phenomemon lead to the theory proposed by University of London physicist David Bohm, that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram. The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order. At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from blue whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is." (from Holographic Universe)

String Theory: The Theory of Everything: In this theory, everything in the universe -- all particles and forces and perhaps space-time itself -- consists of fantastically small strings under immense tension, vibrating and spinning in a ten-dimensional superspace. The ten dimensions are mathematically necessary to avoid tachyons (faster-than-light particles) and ghosts (particles produced with negative probability)....Unfortunately, superstrings theory is very difficult to calculate with and has yet to yield testable predictions. (Professor John Lindner, PhD, Professor of Physics at the University Wooster)

Quantum Physics: Quantum physics is a branch of science that deals with discrete, indivisible units of energy called quanta as described by the Quantum Theory. There are five main ideas represented in Quantum Theory:

1.Energy is not continuous, but comes in small but discrete units.
2.The elementary particles behave both like particles and like waves.
3.The movement of these particles is inherently random.
4.It is physically impossible to know both the position and the momentum of a particle at the same time.
The more precisely one is known, the less precise the measurement of the other is.
5.The atomic world is nothing like the world we live in.

While at a glance this may seem like just another strange theory, it contains many clues as to the fundamental nature of the universe and is more important then even relativity in the grand scheme of things (if any one thing at that level could be said to be more important then anything else). Furthermore, it describes the nature of the universe as being much different then the world we see. As Niels Bohr said, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it." (from Quantum Physics)

As we find and create more theoretical resources, we will post them here!

Source: Spelunkers of the Collective Unconscious: Synchronicity

Joanofarc · Jan 08, 2010, 11:15 AM

s.e. I just thought I'd let you know that I haven't forgotten this thread, and its not that I am not interested, because I most definitely am. However I don't seem to 'feel' like reading your last posts right now, I intend to come back to this though.

I see this as having spiritual meaning, my relationship with Jungian literature is one I would like to develop but first I need to explore other branches of psyche. I imagine I shall be back on this thread soonish. xx

spiritual_emergency · Jan 08, 2010, 02:06 PM

Hello Joan,
No need to explain. This thread will be here if you want it. Personally, I like to hang out with some information for a long, long, long time. That way I can slowly take it all in, sift through it, keep some, toss some away, digest what is personally meaningful in that moment. Quite often, I won't have anything to say about it for weeks, months or even years in some cases.

~ Namaste

Wahzammo · Jan 25, 2010, 07:15 AM

Hey Spiritual,

Loving your posts btw..

So in response to your posts eariler talking about the ego and it relation to the unconscious...
quote
"Jung believed that many psychoses, and particularly schizophrenia, were psychogenic, resulting from an abaissement du niveau mental and an ego too weak to resist the onslaught of unconscious contents. He reserved judgment on whether biological factors were a contributing cause."

and

"Abaissement du niveau mental:A lowering of the level of consciousness, a mental and emotional condition experienced as "loss of soul." (See also depression.)

It is a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might be compared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather. The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listlessness, moroseness, and depression. One no longer has any wish or courage to face the tasks of the day. One feels like lead, because no part of one's body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy. . . . The listlessness and paralysis of will can go so far that the whole personality falls apart, so to speak, and consciousness loses its unity...

Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one's self-assurance. The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one's self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing egocentricity, narrows the mental horizon."

end quote

I'm wondering would that mean that a schizophrenic who has a strong ego would be less likely to experience pyschotic symptoms or on a less regular occurance? Is it possible that someone with a strong ego may experience less severe pyschosis?

Also on the Abaissement part, would this mean at times of say illness/fever, high stress/anxiety or drug use or even REM sleep, that your ego is weakened therefore the pyschosis would be able to push thru the conscious barrier then once your feeling better or off the drugs your ego can replace that barrier?

Im am really curious because my pyschosis is really infrequent, (but can be severe) yet seem to have alot of the other residual/negative symptoms constantly...

'The Ego comprises that organised part of the personality structure that includes defensive, perceptual, intellectual-cognitive, and executive functions. Conscious awareness resides in the ego, although not all of the operations of the ego are conscious. The ego separates what is real. It helps us to organise our thoughts and make sense of them and the world around us.' wikipedia

spiritual_emergency · Jan 25, 2010, 10:48 AM

Wahzammo: I'm wondering would that mean that a schizophrenic who has a strong ego would be less likely to experience pyschotic symptoms or on a less regular occurance? Is it possible that someone with a strong ego may experience less severe pyschosis?

I came across a book just last night that suggests that a rigid ego (what some might call "strong") may be more susceptible to fragmentation in certain instances. I'm going to intiate a new thread to post a link to the book (which has certainly found it's way to my wanne-be-reading-list).

Also on the Abaissement part, would this mean at times of say illness/fever, high stress/anxiety or drug use or even REM sleep, that your ego is weakened therefore the pyschosis would be able to push thru the conscious barrier then once your feeling better or off the drugs your ego can replace that barrier?

Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm using the best terms for this experience -- when I talk about ego collapse or ego fragmentation, I'm talking about both the sense of self-identity and the structure that separates the conscious from the unconscious. I've wondered though if it's the entire structure of the psyche that collapses? (I don't have an answer to that one yet).

Nonetheless, when it comes to the ego, or sense of self-identity, I think this can be rebuilt in the aftermath of a fragmentation crisis. Essentially, we have to rebuild it the way it was built the first time around, although perhaps with a little more discrimination in terms of what we'll accept as building materials. I'm sure I've posted this before but, it works...

Quote:

The first thing to be understood is what ego is. A child is born. A child is born without any knowledge, any consciousness of his own self. And when a child is born the first thing he becomes aware of is not himself; the first thing he becomes aware of is the other. It is natural, because the eyes open outwards, the hands touch others, the ears listen to others, the tongue tastes food and the nose smells the outside. All these senses open outwards.

That is what birth means. Birth means coming into this world, the world of the outside. So when a child is born, he is born into this world. He opens his eyes, sees others. 'Other' means the thou. He becomes aware of the mother first. Then, by and by, he becomes aware of his own body. That too is the other, that too belongs to the world. He is hungry and he feels the body; his need is satisfied, he forgets the body.

This is how a child grows. First he becomes aware of you, thou, other, and then by and by, in contrast to you, thou, he becomes aware of himself.

This awareness is a reflected awareness. He is not aware of who he is. He is simply aware of the mother and what she thinks about him. If she smiles, if she appreciates the child, if she says, "You are beautiful," if she hugs and kisses him, the child feels good about himself. Now an ego is born.

Through appreciation, love, care, he feels he is good, he feels he is valuable, he feels he has some significance.

A center is born.

But this center is a reflected center. It is not his real being. He does not know who he is; he simply knows what others think about him. And this is the ego: the reflection, what others think. If nobody thinks that he is of any use, nobody appreciates him, nobody smiles, then too an ego is born: an ill ego; sad, rejected, like a wound; feeling inferior, worthless. This too is the ego. This too is a reflection...

Source: Ego - The False Center

Our sense of ego-identity arises out of our relationship with others, the roles we take on in life and our impressions of how we fit into the big picture. Therefore, in recovery we need to redevelop those relationship ties and ideally, they will mirror back to us that we are worthy human beings. We also need to take on roles and responsibilities in the larger world that contribute to that sense of self-identity: work, school, or volunteer activities. Hopefully, by doing so, we can rebuild the ego and with it, the egoic structure.

Two thoughts in that vein however. The first is that we may never be able to build it to its original strength so maybe content will still be able to leak through or, if we're placed under stress, there might be a tear in the fabric so to speak.

Another thought that has occurred to me is if the original break didn't go as far as it needs to go (I suspect this means going as far as the Self) then the content that still needs to be addressed might continue to force its way upwards. For example, John Weir Perry found that the individuals who were "most florid" were also the ones who were most likely to have a productive outcome -- maybe it's because they got everything out that needed to come out.