Jung and Trauma

You have to dare it to come out, and then allow it to emerge.

Not tell it what it is.

Well i do see your point about the difference between the Freudian and Jung’s approach.
Its there. Undoubtfully the difference is there, though i’d argue that what Jung said is not wrong either, it just takes a trashload more nuance and introspection.

That being said, even the Freudian approach starts off with blindly poking around, trying to find a trail to the landmine that is buried.

Tho if i had to respond directly, i think i’d say that Jung wanted to understand how the mind functions and thats what he ended up describing. Freud was… a lot more about fixing it and addressing why the gears end up losing teeth.
So yeah. I guess i see your point.

If Freud is a mechanic then Jung is a cartographer.

But is he really? Because, if it can hide a traumatic structure, how accurate is it really?

Sometimes it feels to me like Jung was just one long avoidance mechanism.

This of course is the whole point. Trauma is not only hidden, but actively covered. Poking around is the entire craft. Once you find the thing, everything else is pretty common sensical. Give space to the emotion, incorporate into coherent image and narrative, etc.

It’s extracting the motherfucker that is a pickle.

I would even argue that Jungian analysis doesn’t poke around at all. I just intakes information and processes it.

Where as Freudian analysis takes as a given that you are hiding something. The whole reason you are there is that there is something that neither you nor the analyst is consciously aware of. That is the Freudian perspective. Whatever that hidden thing is, through uncomfortable silences and just talking about whatever, we will find it. By probing the egoic thread. Now here, now there. Wop, incoherence. What’s here then?

There is this cognitive therapy technique where you use a pen and paper, and ask yourself why you do X weird behaviour, and write down the answer. Then repeat, you ask why that’s the answer, and you answer that too. And repeat.

Very soon we can dig down more layers this way, than we ever do using our normal thinking. Can dig up stuff from the subconscious within minutes, not just traumas but anything.

I don’t think this is the correct approach to trauma.

You already know the trauma. You don’t actually need to “find” it. A direct approach will not work, because you are hiding it from yourself on purpose.

Ah i see the core of the issue.
Holy shit how do i articulate the difference… ah f…
You recognize that dust piling up in your home is a perfectly natural process. Yes?
Jung would be the dude who knows it happens. Why it happens. How it happens.

Dust piling up in your home being a normal part of life does not mean that you do not need to vacuum regularly.

So technically you can use Jung’s view of explaining how its a natural process that dust piles up as an excuse to not vacuum but… yeah thats not exactly what its for, and you will be sitting in a very dusty and dirty house if you do that.

Yeah, but meanwhile, I was calling an exterminator.

Or I should have been calling an exterminator, but I didn’t know it.

Or I knew it, but I didn’t want to know it.

Can you use this to find out why you’re hiding it? (Just wondering, I can’t hide stuff from myself so don’t have experience with this.)

You do hide stuff from yourself. Conscious experience if far too data rich to all keep in the egoic narrative, which is why the subconscious is most of the psyche.

Sometimes, that stuff is hiden on purpose because it is trauma.

Why you are hiding it is an intrinsic part of finding it, absolutely. You have to listen to emotions.

That’s more like filtering imo, but if we call it hiding then yes everyone is hiding stuff. Btw I think the unconscious is much bigger than the subconscious.

See this is the problem with Jung.

Socrate, are you by any chance in analysis?
I read this thread as pretty ironic.
What Ive seen from analysis is that it offers the idea of integration and self-knowledge.
But, where bringing egoic relief, removes a person all the farther from it.

The general premise you give in the OP is of course correct, or rather well established Freud 101. And the interpretation of Jung holds true for a good part, except that, in my opinion, he is right that not all contents of the subconscious that have no place in the egoic narrative have once been egoic - I agree with Jung that there is much that is dormant at birth, certainly genetic content, maybe spiritual content (who can tell), which can be brought out into the light of the ego. The subconscious is of course much larger than the ego - even that would make it unlikely for it to consist strictly of stuff repressed by the ego. But it is obvious that our DNA carries much more than we can ever become conscious of in a lifetime. Jungs methods are attempts, often pretty naive but we can take the general idea and apply it less naively, to bring out such information.

“You need to feel the incoherence. In your bones. It has to have no shape, no category, no structure, and just feel incoherent. Then its own shape can emerge, by finding the frayed edges and where exactly along the egoic thread the crater is.”

Im afraid this is idealism. You may in part feel relatively surface incoherence, but whats more important, you cannot feel the ugly coherence, which is what will always, to the bitter end resist being brought to light.

The only therapy that I have found to not enforce narcissism is where you are forced to sit through it with the person you have hurt, where both tell their stories in the presence of each other, to the psycho-the-rapist. This is actual mediation, actual confrontation, it makes use of the leverage of the dual witness - the one who has suffered the ugly, and the therapist who secures the objectivity of the situation, so that neither person can be functionally blinded in that moment. Individual therapy is by sheer necessity mostly a means to repress the ugly even deeper.

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Yes, that is the endgame. To find it though, to tease it it the surface, you have to find the the crater of incoherence its repression left. Oh, it’s always there.

To be fair, I am talking about strictly theoretical psychoanalysis. I’m not sure there even are orthodox Freudian analysts working now.

Well, I mean, here I am believeing in God, who am I to judge?

My freind, you are, like my other interlocutors, massively missing the point.

Once the trauma is known, the rest is almost easy. The whole fucking problem is finding it. Not even. The whole fucking problem is figuring out there is something to find, then finding it.

Of course, a real Freudian assumes there is something to find. Incoherence is a rule, not an exception.

But to bring a subject to a real Freudian, to get the person that needs it found to want it found, etc.

Jung is not fucking helping.

What does it mean to integrate into the ego?

Does it mean reliving the event?

No.

It means egoically, narratively, incorporating the fact of the event into the egoic thread. Into the narrative. That in itself will bring all the emotions along with it. Slowly, etc, with care, but that’s frankly the easy part.

It means recognizing what you already know happened. So that you can make of it what you would if you were in your sane judgement.

Sometimes you may think you already did this. But, if there remains incoherence, there remains repressed trauma. Sometimes, it’s not easy to see that yourself, and it’s good to have an analyst. Fc.

I think most people don’t have traumas so hidden they don’t even know they should be looking for something.