What do you like about Psychology?

Psychology is one of the "soft" sciences. Evidence is elusive, ambiguous and usually anecdotal. Controlled experiments are difficult to conduct, not to mention often immoral or illegal.

That said, I appreciate Jung's work, which straightens out some of the problems with Freud's models, digs a little deeper and casts a much wider net. (Freud gathered most of his data by studying middle-class Europeans.) He has many popularizers such as Joseph Campbell, who render his work and his models accessible to any educated layman. Campbell produced a fabulous PBS series about twenty years ago that's easy to find.

Jung coined the term "collective unconscious," which is the set of beliefs, images, dreams and other motifs that are common to the members of a society or culture. Some of these are gathered by the common experience of cognizantly living among the culture's artifacts and attitudes, others are handed down, consciously or not, by the elders teaching the young, yet others are what Jung calls "archetypes."

An archetype is bigger than that: an instinctive belief or other motif that is pre-programmed into our synapses by the vagaries of evolution, and the same archetypes are found in all cultures in all eras. They may be the vestiges of survival behaviors that have outlived their usefulness and can no longer be fathomed, or they may be the random bequests of a genetic bottleneck like Mitochondrial Eve. For example, the gods in every ancient pantheon from Egypt to Mesoamerica manifest the same set of personalities, which are also echoed in the dramatis personae of Shakespeare's plays and the stock characters in today's soap operas.

Archetypes also show up as behavior, such as the commonalities among "rites of passage" into adulthood and fraternity lodge initiations. They also manifest in legends and art works.

Some of these preprogrammed instincts are still understandable and therefore not remarkable. Every human (indeed virtually every animal with rudimentary cognitive skills) has the instinct to flee from a large animal with both eyes in the front of its face, because that one is the predator, while accepting the company of herbivores, whose eyes are on the sides of their head. This is obviously a survival behavior.

But will our descendants in the distant future wonder about this instinct? Even today, how many people in the Western countries will ever encounter a wild predator and need that instinct? These days the instinct serves more as a thrill in the zoo, circus or action/adventure movies than as a survival trait. We've already domesticated the wolf and trust him to guard us while we sleep.

I wonder how many babies have woken up to find the beloved family dog or cat staring into their eyes and had a little attack of instinctive fright?

Dogs and humans have lived in harmony for fifteen thousand years and the dog has clearly been selectively bred for the instinct to regard us as pack-mates. I wonder if along the way we too have slowly adapted to that? Did humans who were not comfortable with wolves in their camp leave the tribe and strike out for a more primitive existence, letting the gene pool lose their DNA by attrition?

The cat is a much more recent domesticate, going back less than half of that temporal distance. It's interesting that in some cultures there are urban legends about housecats "sucking the life out of babies" and whatnot. I wonder if this is because the cat has not yet made it into our collective unconscious and become an archetype, whereas "man's best friend" has? The Romans have an ancient myth about a human orphan being raised by wolves. I have never heard of such a legend about Felis sylvestris.

 

That's a common misconception, although to be fair every profession has its incompetents. The whole point of psychotherapy--at least the normal modern Jungian approach--is to dig down for things that are not so easily revealed and understood and hardly qualify as "common sense." Humans are complicated creatures and when a human is depressed or in some other way deeply troubled it's often because something has gone wrong that doesn't yield to introspection and the questions of well-meaning friends and family. Much less the ones we all unfortunately have who are not so well meaning.

Obviously there are other paths to the same goal, each with its own success rate. Meditation works for a lot of people. I'm a big advocate of the Emotional Freedom Technique because it's fast, cheap and after a couple of sessions with an expert (which many of them are happy to conduct by phone) you can usually carry on by yourself. If you go to their website please forgive the trappings of New-Age woo-woo. They have to market themselves like everybody else, but there's no trace of that stuff in the straightforward EFT methodology.

But psychotherapy has done a lot of good for a lot of people. The mistake many people make is to not take charge. If you don't like your therapist, or simply don't see a connection being made, then find another one. That's what you'd do with a veterinarian or an auto mechanic or a French teacher, why should this be any different? If you don't like the way the sessions are going, speak up: Since you're paying, by definition the therapist is working for you.

Finally, it isn't something that's just going to happen to you passively. Solving an emotional problem invariably requires facing up to something you have strenuously avoided facing for so long that you probably don't even consciously realize it's there. You have to do your own work and it can be painful.

"Like any birthing, there is no birth of consciousness without pain."

Usually because their friends and family have been unable to help and often, sadly, because some of those people are part of the problem. Spouses and parents can be domineering and not all of us are strong enough to find our way out of a bad relationship. The Stockholm Syndrome is real. Childrearing can destroy the weak, especially if their own parents were horrible role models. The jobs we take because we have to pay the rent and we don't have the talent or the luck or the education to do what we really love can make us feel like slaves. Even if it's not that bad, humans are not dogs who always think and express themselves at one level. We prefer not to put a lot of energy into contemplating things that bother us and which we feel, rightly or wrongly, we can't control. So they sink deeper and deeper into our unconscious until they become part of us and define who we are. Surely you've met people like that and wondered how they got that way; well not all of them are nearly so obviously in their hurting.

Because he or she is a specialist. Your spirit is a lot more complicated than your car, its problems are a lot more subtle and difficult to diagnose, unlike your car you may take great pains to not show any outward symptoms, and the consequences of something going wrong with it can go a lot more deeply than a busted car. Most people don't rely on their friends and family to fix their cars because those people don't have the aptitude and training to do it right.