JUNGIAN ANALYSIS
Jungian analysis is a practical application of C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology. As such, it is a tool for depth psychotherapy understood as a healing method, and in a wider sense, as means for individual development and an integration of personality, which Jung described in his notion of „individuation”.
The basic principle of Jungian psychoanalytic process is to recognize the primacy and the creative potential of the unconscious. Psyche in its manifestations is directed towards a certain goal, which is the maintenance of psychic equilibrium. This includes also phenomena that psychopathology describes as „symptoms”. In a wider sense, psyche is directed towards the widening of consciousness and the fullest possible realization of the potential embedded in an individual. And this is what is meant by the process of individuation. Hence, with full recognition of the symptoms that are a source of suffering, the process of analysis simultaneously seeks for their larger meaning in the context of the totality of the patient’s personal life.
Analytical psychology maintains a certain point of view. But it is not as much a school of psychology as a kind of perspective. Therefore it is capable of encompassing ambiguities and different points of view. It can integrate discoveries of many different schools of psychology. Various threads in modern Jungian psychoanalysis are therefore united in an attitude of openness towards general modern psychoanalysis in its complexity and diversity of many schools of thought. It is a practical ramification of Jung’s idea that the individual life cannot be exhausted by framing within one psychological theory, no matter how complex and sophisticated it is. Any theory is but a generic map that at its best can serve just as an aid in the process of the emergence of meaning of individual life, which is a goal of analysis.
In my practice I am integrating the principles of so-called developmental school of analytical psychology (which makes extensive reference to ideas of the psychology of childhood and psychoanalytic object-relation theories) with the classical school (Zurich school). As a consequence, I do work with some of my analysands once a week, even though most of the times the process is set upon a higher frequency of the sessions.