Subject: Psychiatry/Psychology/Psychoanalysis
Branch: Analytical Psychology
Purpose: learn to specialise inside the deep mind, the unconscious, inner conflicts that shape your life and drive personal growth, the psyche, the ego, the self, the persona, the archetypes, the shadow, individuation, active imagination, dream analysis, introversion, extraversion, the psychological complex, synchronicity and the collective unconscious.
Why: Cultivate Mastery over The Unconscious Mind [The Life Long Process of Self Discovery Through Individuation]
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was an influential Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. These ideas on the unconscious, personality traits, and lifelong personal growth offer practical tools for deep self-discovery and emotional wholeness. His work explores deep layers of the human mind, and the ability to deconstruct and even bring to surface repressed emotions from inside other people’s minds, focusing on how your unconscious shapes thought patterns, dreams, and behaviours.
Carl Jung studied under psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich. He was also heavily influenced by and collaborated with Sigmund Freud and attended lectures by French psychologist Pierre Janet in Paris. He was educated in medicine, specializing in psychiatry, studying at the University of Basel from 1895 to 1900 and earned his medical degree (M.D.) from the University of Zurich in 1902, completing his dissertation on the psychology and pathology of occult phenomena. He did his most influential and mature theoretical work between 1913 and the late 1930s. During this period, he broke away from Sigmund Freud, navigated his intense self-exploration, formulated analytical psychology, and published his landmark structural frameworks.
In 1923 Carl Jung built The Bollingen Tower, a rustic stone retreat serving as a physical expression of Jung’s inner psyche and a quiet place to disconnect from modern life. He even designed it intentionally without electricity or running water to maintain a primitive, timeless environment. Jung used this space for months each year to write, think and meditate in isolation. Much of Carl Jung’s most profound and visionary work was forged in intense solitude.
This will help you to explore (and access) the depths of other people’s minds, allowing you to make sense of and therefore see through people’s behaviour in the world. Throughout Jung’s psychological framework it explains how jealousy and envy often stems from an inner reflection of unacknowledged parts of that other person’s self.
When someone develops a problem with you for no reason, that problem is generally due to an underlying repression inside that person. And we are going to bring them to terms with what that is. They do their best trying to spend their whole life ignoring it or pretending it doesn’t exist.
But this will force you to see it.
When someone has a secret rage or resentment towards you, and especially when it is someone who embodies deep wisdom, more freedom and has achieved better success in life, you can bet that mirrors their own abandoned path of dreams and potential or hidden insecurities.
So when someone’s got this problem with you, that person is playing out, unconsciously projecting what’s missing from their own life and they resent you for being able to do and have this control over something in your life which is lacking in theirs: a meaning and life purpose.
Seeing someone else doing everything in their power, using all of their potential forces a painful confrontation with our own neglected dreams. This is known as The Shadow Projection. Envy arises out of this condition from a deeper sense of our own personal disconnection from who we actually are, rather than who we thought we were supposed to be some day or by now.
As this tide gets closer to shore, one starts nearing the course of mid-life, and this uncomfortable realization hits you that death is more likely to happen next than your dreams come true, a crisis then of some sort may start to set in as one realises they haven’t done anything they hoped or wished by now. And, they are not going to either. Now chaos in the mind ensues.
This personal lack of meaning and connection to their own life unconsciously exudes its energy outwards, towards you, because it is afraid to turn itself inwards and confront their own reality, which is: frustration of a goal-less self.
Maybe you’re in a loveless marriage and no longer find your partner sexually attractive and maybe that makes you unhappy and therefore depressed, or angry, whenever you see someone who does have those things and you thought you deserved that more. There goes the beginning of how these states manifest inside your mind. Not only has that become your real life but now you’re beginning to enter into the second half of life. No one will find you attractive. So in terms of finding new love or ever feeling desired, your days are numbered. Time to stay depressed.
Maybe you’re stuck. Maybe you stayed in that same dead end job that you probably spent far longer in than you should have. But now it’s too late to move or start over trying anything new or better. Too many commitments now to afford risking a chance at freedom. Or maybe you just have no idea what to do with yourself even when you have all the free time in the world to do it. For this is how one experiences the state of apathy and boredom. So then, you are lost. It’s just you, four walls and taking calls all day. The job has become a part of your identity, one of the biggest mistakes you could ever make, forming itself into who you think you are. Lose the job, however, and the self of you will collapse entirely entering you into an identity crisis, completely lost in your world, making you even question the point of your existence or if you are even alive? No friends but work friends. They say threes a crowd. But a narcissistic extroverts day comes when no one pays any attention to them whatsoever anymore. When you are the boss of a company, employees are not your friends. They please you because it pays them to listen to you. Stop paying them and what you shall find is nobody cares about you anymore.
Without that job then, who exactly even are you?
No other interests outside the office?
More interested in other people lives than your own life?
Well then, that confirms you are no one and don’t even have a life of your own. For how could one when one can only feel his experience is worthy when another is present and not only when another present but only when engaged with this other to talk about others.
This man’s experience of his existence therefore depends heavily on others being around him to alleviate his boredom and suffering. He cannot cope with no one, and never realises that everyone copes finely without him.
People will use you when you’re a boss for your pay check. Stop paying them and you shall find these “friends” of yours never thought of you as a friend of theirs. They pretended, acted finding you funny, simply because they needed money in their bank account once a month. And that’s the only reason why they care about you. It pays them to pretend you’re funny.
How hard it must be to read for the first time and realise that nobody really liked you. We all just pretended to. And now we’ve moved on. While you’re still stuck taking orders and trying to get by on the idea these customers are your friends. Your experience of life is dependent on needing customers to feel alive, or feel as if you exist. And that sure sounds like one shitty ass existence.
It is now high time for you to understand the hidden layers of the human mind. This might make you feel extremely uncomfortable. I will therefore not be offended if you wish to no longer partake. Step off now and leave before this reveals too much of what is an uncomfortable reality. As many are afraid of coming to terms with these deeper aspects of themselves: introspection that unlocks and shines light onto the darker aspects of how and why people’s minds operate the way they do.
Whatever the problem you have with someone, we are going to reveal the real problem masked within you.
To study Carl Jung effectively, a recommendation is to begin the process with Man and His Symbols then move onto his personal autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
Full Book List Update Coming Soon 📚
Check back in a couple of days for further updates as I’ll be spending the following days building his collection of works in order of release and the best way to navigate these subjects.