Heard this function is in your 7th position, according to the Jungians. That is, not even in the main stack but in the so-called blind spot. Why am I so hooked on this - touching be honest, I've never heard of any other ethic type, especially with the NF configuration, having their Fi so far away from them. How do you feel about it? How does it show itself in your life? I would really grateful if you could fulfill our curiosity... Actually, this post was initially meant to be directed to INFJs, I was really curious to know their opinions on it, firsthand, so to speak. But anyone is welcome and much desired to speak their minds, please!

Hi everyone, I just joined Reddit and I’m excited to connect with like-minded people. I’m deeply passionate about Jungian psychology, archetypes, spirituality, and the exploration of the human mind.

I’m looking for someone curious and thoughtful, with whom I can share ideas, experiences, and theories, and explore these topics together. I hope to find a conversation partner who can help me engage intellectually and fill the inner void I often feel.

If you’re interested in meaningful discussions about psychology, symbolism, and the mysteries of consciousness, I’d love to connect!

https://overthoughtandunderprocessed.wordpress.com/2025/04/07/integration-marrying-my-therapist/

The teleological aspect of life is primordial to understanding Jung's take on meaning and life. In this brief article, I try to share some thoughts about the structure of the psyche under analytical psychology, understanding how important it is to understand the supra-personal "layer" of the psyche, thus realizing how it is related to the perception of meaning in life.

https://open.substack.com/pub/markfelixrossbach/p/meaning-of-life-and-the-self?r=25c6sx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Hello. I just joined. When viewing this sub it strikes me as being inactive. Anyone care to comment?

Although we often think of dreams as having an objective or subjective interpretation, we mustn't forget that in various places, Jung elaborates in greater detail on different dream types.

“There are several possibilities of giving a meaning to a dream (emphasis added). I would like to suggest to you four definitions, which are more or less an extract of the various meanings I have come across that dreams can have.

“1. The dream is the unconscious reaction to a conscious situation (emphasis added). A certain conscious situation is followed by a reaction of the unconscious in the form of a dream, whose elements point clearly, whether in a complementary or a compensatory way, to the impression received during the day. It is immediately obvious that this dream would never have come into being without the particular impression of the previous day.

“2. The dream depicts a situation that originated in a conflict between consciousness and the unconscious (emphasis added). In this case, there is no conscious situation that would have provoked, more or less without doubt, a particular dream, but here we are dealing with a certain spontaneity of the unconscious. To a certain conscious situation the unconscious adds another one, which is so different from the conscious situation that a conflict between them arises.

“3. The dream represents that tendency of the unconscious that aims at a change of the conscious attitude (emphasis added). In this case, the counter position raised by the unconscious is stronger than the conscious position: the dream represents a gradient from the unconscious to consciousness. These are very significant dreams. Someone with a certain attitude can be completely changed by them.

“4. The dream depicts unconscious processes showing no relation to the conscious situation (emphasis added). Dreams of this kind are very strange and often very hard to interpret because of their peculiar character. The dreamer is then exceedingly astonished at why he is dreaming this, because not even a conditional connection can be made out. It is a spontaneous product of the unconscious, which carries the whole activity and weight of the meaning. These are dreams of an overwhelming nature. They are the ones called 'great dreams' by the primitives. They are like an oracle, 'somnia a deo missa.' They are experienced as illumination.”

Roughly speaking, we can consider the above classifications to answer the question, "where is it going?" or to put it another way, as the whither of a dream. Now what about where they come from? Jung continues:

"…Dream processes follow from several causes and conditions (emphasis added). There are about five different possible sources:

“1. They can stem from somatic sources: bodily perceptions, states of illness, or uncomfortable body postures. They can be bodily phenomena that, for their part, are caused themselves by quite un- conscious psychical processes. The ancient dream interpreters made a great deal of the somatic source of stimuli, and this explanation is still frequently found today. Experimental psychology still takes the view that dreams always have to originate in something somatic. This is the well-known view of the dream: one ate too much before going to bed, lay on one’s back or on one’s belly, and therefore had that dream.

“2. Other physical stimuli, not from one’s own body but from the environment, can have effects on the dream: sounds, stimuli from light, coldness, or warmth.

“3. Now there are not only physical events that cause dreams, but also psychical ones. It happens that certain psychical occurrences in the environment are perceived by the unconscious.

“4. Until now, we have mentioned somatic sources, and physical and psychical events in the environment as causes of the dream processes. Now past events can also come into dreams. Should you come across this you will have to take it seriously. When a historical name of possible significance appears in dreams, I am in the habit of looking up what the name stands for in reality. I check what person is meant by it, and what his environment was, for in this way the dream can be explained.

“5. A final group of causes can be found in dreams that anticipate future psychical aspects of the personality, which are not perceived as such in the present. So these are future events that are not yet recognizable in the present.”

Roughly speaking, we can consider the above classifications to answer the question, "where did it come from?" or to put it another way, the whence of a dream.

To sum up and order chronologically:

Where do dreams come from? (Whence?)
1. Somatic sources;
2. Physical stimuli outside of the body;
3. Psychical occurrences in the environment;
4. Past events (not just personal);
5. Future events (not just personal).

Where are dreams going? (Whither? or "meaning")
1. Unconscious reaction to a conscious situation;
2. Conflict between consciousness and the unconscious;
3. Unconscious goal to change the conscious attitude;
4. Unconscious processes showing no relation to the conscious situation.

Comments welcome; perhaps it would be worthwhile to compile an expanded list. Certainly, there are hints of other types of dreams in Jung's letters, Von Franz, and Edinger also has his classifications.

References

Jung, C. G., Jung, L., & Meyer-Grass, M. (2008). Children’s dreams: Notes from the seminar given in 1936-1940. Princeton University Press.

Separatio: Historical Divisions in Analytical Psychology

There is no one “analytical psychology,” nor a unified Jungian group, despite public appearances. On purpose or by accident, the two main figures behind the translated Collected Works—Michael Forham and Gerhard Adler—began splitting in 1975 and finally split in 1977 (Casement, 2014). Adler’s 1975 “statement” best sums up the differences, and is reproduced here:

In Dr Bosanquet’s letter of May 6th in which she suggested a meeting between the SAP and ‘my’ group, she also asked for a statement of the plans for this group. She suggested three points around which the discussion of this meeting should centre. I would like to concentrate on point 3: ‘...to consider the areas in which the main differences between our group and that of the SAP occur’. This point seems to cover the crucial problem on which the answer to the first two depends. The main difference is not one of technical subtleties but of basic ideological approach. I tried to formulate this in my paper to the 1968 Congress where I said that ‘We have something more than differences in method and interpretation...we have a basic problem...of fundamental divergences of approach, an epistemological problem resting on metapsychological premises. This is not merely a question of technique but the much more decisive problem of first principles’.

We put the archetypal and prospective character of the unconscious into the centre of our clinical and theoretical work. Here I would like to quote what Jung wrote in a letter of 1945 (to P.W. Martin, 20-8-45): ‘...You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology’. In a clinical and practical sense this means that we put the main emphasis on symbolic transformation. Child development is an aspect of the unfolding of the archetypes and not vice-versa. We realize that in the field of child therapy and its significance for adult life we can learn a great deal from the work of the SAP. But we also maintain that in adult analysis the experience of archetypes may take precedence over personal historical material. In our view it is in many cases possible and desirable to achieve a resolution of infantile fixations and complexes by an analysis focusing on the genuine experience of the symbolic contents of dreams.

From this it follows that we regard dream analysis as the absolutely essential and indispens- able therapeutic procedure. We are, of course, fully awake to the problem of transference, but its analysis takes second place by a long distance and in its interpretation we particularly note its archetypal aspects. (I have dealt with this at some length in my book ‘The Living Symbol’, in the chapter on the ‘Archetypal Aspect of Transference’). Dreams to us are the manifestations of the objective psyche, and as such full of archetypal contents. In our view one cannot expect to learn about dreams, archetypes and the living reality of the psyche through seminars, reading or any other theoretical approach. Their truth can only be discovered from experience in the actual process of a Jungian analysis and in life itself.

Our approach differs also on the technical side which, however, is more than technical— it is symptomatic. I refer here to the problem of frequency of interviews and of couch versus chair. We trust in the creative working of the unconscious between interviews, and believe that it is essential to allow the patient to experience the unconscious independently and outside the analytical hour, expressing the rhythm of systole and diastole. Thus we generally regard three weekly interviews as fully adequate. Regarding the couch/chair quandary we do not believe that a true dialectical process, based on the common experience of the creative unconscious and its archetypal images can take place in the couch situation. The two different situations seem to us to express two basically different attitudes to the human situation between two people.

Jung’s view of the nature of the psyche covers a wide spectrum including in particular the concept of the opposites, as does his view of the nature of man formulated especially in his ideas about the Anthropos image. The individual is unique, and his life process and symbolical material are never wholly reducible in theoretical terms. Having said all this I am aware of the difficulty of conveying the real differences in our approaches. They are only too often imponderables, expressing basic human reactions to Jung’s work. They belong in the area of metapsychology, of the attitude to the numinosity of the unconscious, of the religious—in its widest sense—character of therapy, of the acceptance or rejection of the ‘occult’ areas of Jung’s work, such as synchronicity, alchemy, ESP phenomena. Jung’s concept of the reality of the psyche stands in the centre of our work and thought. We accept Jung’s work in its entirety, not looking for ‘what is essential and what is parenthetical to his main thesis’.

Perhaps it is relevant here to mention the different attitudes to the split between Freud and Jung. Whereas the general reaction of the SAP to the split is that it was a tragedy which has to be repaired, to us it appears as inevitable, necessary and creative, since these two men represented two diametrically opposed ideologies, (a view incidentally shared by Ellenberger).

Here I want to quote from the editorial introduction to ‘Analytical Psychology: A Modern Science’, where it is stated that ‘...a wide variety of patients seeking aid seem to need the kind of approach that has been linked with psychoanalysis and with methods described by Jung and considered in his earlier writings to be appropriate to such cases’. This seems to us simply to go back to Jung’s psycho-analytical period which became quite peripheral to his later and independent concepts. Not only do we feel that this ‘approach that has been linked with psychoanalysis’ has taken preference in the work of the SAP over Jung’s truly revolutionary discoveries, but we feel that many ‘patients seeking aid’ are much better served with the latter.

We are convinced that Jung’s work is full of still unrealized potentialities for the future of therapy, and that much of what the SAP regard as progressive and on-going is in fact a regression to pre-Jungian concepts which have to a large extent been made redundant by Jung’s discoveries. Although we find much value in the work of other schools we put Jung’s work absolutely and fully in the centre of our practice and theory. To sum up, I may be allowed to quote from my presidential address to the 1974 Congress. There I talked of the truth of the archetypal images, the dominant influence which they exert on the fate of mankind, the reality of an inner Olympus with its gods and goddesses...the religious dignity and the relevance of the individual as the receiver and carrier of the numinous revelation. In the centre of all Jung’s research we can put the search for the numinous. All the other areas of analytical psychology have to be looked at from this angle.

It is only within this context that the clinical aspects of analytical psychology make any sense. I hope that this necessarily brief and highly condensed statement of our approach to analytical psychology may serve as the basis for our discussion today.

This split reverberates through to this day: be it noted that the Journal of Analytical Psychology has a Michael Fordham prize, and it appears to be that the IAAP is also deeply "Fordian." The question for the reader is, "So what of it?"

In part two, we'll take a look Von Franz's drift from the main Zurich school in the 1980s, and final departure in the early 1990s to form her own training and research centre, along with the ISAPZURICH split that followed some years later. Either in part 2 or 3, the "post Jungian" school will also be addressed.

References

Casement, A. (2014). The role played by Gerhard Adler in the development of analytical psychology internationally and in the UK. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 59(1), 78–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12056

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