Is individuation a free for all process? Is the unconscious your friend? Are you that great or are you in an inflation? Read on to explore the major pitfalls of misunderstanding Jungian psychology.
Enjoyed your synoptic breakdown of some of Jung’s biggest ideas. I have a BA in Psychology and have to disagree that Psychology and especially Jung or Freud or any of the pioneers hypothesis were ‘empirical’. In the mid 2000s there was a meta study that revealed that most psychology studies cannot be replicated. Humans are complex and so cannot be summed up based on small sample groups of mostly college students. I am much more of a Jungian based n my spiritual beliefs and only a few of Feud’s ideas still hold up - Defense Mechanisms and Early childhood development’s importance, which actually has been proven empirical, thus government sponsored Head Start programs. Yet Jung’s concept of archetypes were inspired by Plato’s Theory of Forms and the idea of ego has also been around for thousands of years and so has the idea of getting a grip on it and the monkey mind in general. This was the central theme among Hindu gurus and ascetics in ancient India which gave birth to the first great psychologist Buddha - who provided great cognitive tools like mindfulness to tame our mysterious ever active and sometimes nonsensical monkey mind. I personally love the concept of Synchronicity - still an another unproven collective psychic aspect of an unseen universal archetype universe. I believe such a psychic field does exist and even have an idea for a technical invention that could prove it, but it would cost millions to make and I do not have those kind of resources. Any serious Jungian needs to read Atom and Archetype, a great book-30 year letter correspondence between Jung and his friend Wolfgang Pauli, one of the brilliant early Quantum physicist pioneers. Jung was picking his brain trying to see if there were any answers in the quantum realm for consciousness and his concept of Synchronicity. Pauli was skeptical early on but based on unexplainable experiences in his own life over time, eventually warmed up to Jung’s collective psychic realm concept. We can’t see gravity or the electromagnetic field or flying neutrinos with the naked eye, but they all exist and are as real as the nose on our face. Later physicist Roger Penrose who was mentor to Steven Hawkings, pursued a similar micro-tubule in neurons idea of consciousness’ origin. Anyhow - Jung or Buddha or Christ or Confucius or whatever prophet/sage folks follow provide mental and spiritual tools and guidance on how to be a healthy and decent human. There is still so much mystery as to who and why we are - works in progress I think most smart folks agree. Evolution toward higher consciousness hopefully. I think Love is the glue that everything together.
Thank you for your comment! Yes, Jung's concepts weren't new, he merely gave a psychological name to things that were part of mystical or philosophical traditions. I think he himself said he's a mystic, not a scientist, but he had to write scientifically to be taken seriously. I reckon some of these ideas will be more widely accepted as quantum physics develops. We need to remember, as Laurence Hillman said in my last interview with him, that science is also a belief system (I recommend listening to that). There's a lot out there that isn't explained by science but can be "explained" experientially through practices like meditation, psychedelics, or even ancient studies into occultism, mysticism, astrology etc. Have you read "Decoding Jung's Metaphysics" by Bernardo Kastrup? There's a lot there on synchronicity.
So I’m working on this whole series about the chakras and I must firmly disagree that early psychologists were not grounded in empirical evidence. So I guess I disagree with your disagreement? ;)
I think psychology studies are difficult to replicate because — as you should know as a psychologist, and as anyone who’s ever looked for a good psychologist understands — there is no one-size-fits-all psychology; no field of psychology applicable to everyone. Which says a lot about the nature of the psyche.
I’m excited to see Jung in the popular discourse. Like, it-feels-too-good-to-be-true excited. But Jung is not for everyone. Jungian psychology is not for everyone. And I don’t say that as a gatekeeper. If you are not a mystic — if that kind of archetypal realm is not built into your psyche — following Jung’s work is going to break your brain in a way that you may not recover from. I think a lot of people forget, ignore, or are simply ignorant of the fact that Jung began his psychological work studying schizophrenia — and, from the Black Books and the Red Book, may have even struggled himself with some form of schizoaffectivity.
So the real question is: why are people trying to make themselves schizophrenic to fit a Jungian mould??? There are so many of his contemporaries that better suit the psychology of today.
Good point. It reminds me of questions Marie-Louise von Franz often asked around individuation and gaining more consciousness of one's inner world. For some it's crucial, life-saving, and creative. For others, at some points in their lives, it generates a level of instability and pain they cannot cope with (and their environment doesn't help with). They're far better served by a psychodynamic or more conventional approach.
I think about this a lot as a transpersonal psychotherapist: I would ideally love if everyone could connect to their soul and work at that level. But so many folks are not ready or even interested in that. It's unethical and a power trip to take them there.
I agree completely. It’s really nice to read this from a psychotherapist. But I had to learn the hard way that depth is not for everyone. I think a lot of people won’t take responsibility for leading others to drown. :(
Part of the confusion here, I think, is equating “empiricism” with “scientific method”…you can be empirical without being scientific…Freud and early theorists certainly went beyond their observations but they were “based” on clinical experiences…
I will chime in on this one, too. I think a lot of people think that the term 'empirical' refers to something that strictly follows the scientific method as we know it today. The broader meaning of it, though, implies a process of knowledge through that which is observable, and of course, this means that you have to ask what you mean by observation.
In this sense, the tradition of phenomenology, which is based on experiential knowledge, is usually seen as an empirical epistemology in contrast to a rationalistic one. However, it is not empirical in precisely the same way that a physicist studies rocks.
Jung himself admits to being a bit of a conflicted character when it comes to his epistemology - there is a side where he was very concerned with being a good and rigorous scientist, and then there was a side where he went along with his mystical inclinations. His body of work reflects both.
So respectfully, Christopher, I would gently and warmly prod you about what you mean when you use the term 'empirical'.
Appreciate you shinning light on these areas of self-work and Jungian psych. It is easy to find ourselves slipping into the pitfalls if we aren't vigilant. This work would be best done through lineage, containment, and at the very least, a secure dyad. Alas, we've become so unrooted from these traditions that we're left wandering through the process without much guidance. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Thanks for the reflections. I agree, I myself felt uprooted and found the containment and lineage very nurturing in my training. I wrote about this because I made those very mistakes myself when there was no one to guide me and I learned the slow and hard way (thankfully no one was hurt, I believe).
This is a wonderful post. Thank you for laying out so clearly some of the risks and difficulties of introspective work. I don't follow Instagram and had no idea shadow work had become a fad. In my experience it's been a wry and humbling experience of having my Jungian-fluent friends shine a light on my failings. There's no kind of banter I love more than psychwork banter with someone who's encountered my shadow in person and I theirs. It's both cutting and healing.
I did find it odd that you pointed to individuation work as coming late in life. I took a different trajectory, where my twenties were full of heavy internal work and I didn't turn to raising a family until my thirties. I don't think I could have approached raising a child in a healthy way until I'd addressed those unconscious needs.
Your comment about society's obsession with doom-scrolling pithy spiritual quotes from a mishmash of religious figures and quantum babble is so painfully accurate.
Thank you for your comment and for seeing what I was trying to get across. You're probably lucky to not be on Instagram, a lot of complex psychological and spiritual ideas are watered down and misused. Sometimes it's funny, other times it's demoralising.
I think you're right, it doesn't have to start late in life. I often think that when there's lots of trauma or maybe even other factors, people start the work much sooner. In his time, Jung mostly worked with people in their second half of life, so that's where the comment comes from. From his perspective, they'd attained worldly status and could now turn inwards. And while it might be different for some of us, I also know from astrology that there are some very important transits beginning around 44 and carrying through the early fifties that are meant to really shake us and put us in contact with who we truly are. But maybe it's better to say that individuation never really ends and we go through many cycles.
And on your last comment–yep. To me it's about that painful reality when narcissism meets spirituality and turns it into one-upmanship and another tool to feed the grandiose self.
I think it's a symptom rather than a cause. Like we could blame obesity on the plentiful availability of sugar and processed foods in the modern diet, but it would be more accurate to look at poverty and the time and energy crunch that results in people grabbing the easiest and cheapest option. A nuanced understanding of spiritual growth requires education and thought.
Primarily I think it's up to the computer scientists devising the social media engagement algorithms, and the C-suite and shareholders who set corporate priorities. They're shaping the landscape in which people fall so easily into quick fix soundbites. It's like planting people in the middle of Times Square and expecting them to respond to the sensation of a butterfly's wings fluttering against their palm. But honestly I think platforms like this one, and the writers here, are taking part in the fix as well. That's one of the reasons I signed up. Long-form blogging, with an engaged community, transparent profit strategies, and no intrusive ads. Doomscrolling follows from psychic exhaustion and addiction. So I think anything that counters those forces will help.
I agree with you, I appreciate Substack because of conversations like these. It's the nature of social media platforms that content is consumed quickly, without the necessary reflection time (and no space for critical thinking and debate). Not that everyone should engage at that level, but I'm noticing a fatigue around scrolling through endless quotes lifted without context or catchy soundbites that are either spiritual bypassing or just psychobabble. It's easy to feel like you're consuming meaningful content (and some of it is) and "doing the work", but at that pace it's simply overwhelming for the brain to process all the information.
And I'm entirely with you on the responsibility of the people "up there" for what they're creating. And perhaps our responsibility as well for what we're actually participating in and whether it's actually serving. It's easy to get tricked into the Instagram model of growth, which is centred around posting tons of very short content and following trends. Thank god therapists have stopped dancing and pointing at words on the screen, that was a bad time for instatherapy!
Oh wow, dancing and pointing at words? Now I'm really glad I'm not on Insta.
I have a friend who has a tiny Etsy store with LGBTQ+ friendly merchandise. Recently they tried advertising on Facebook for the first time, and then watched in amused horror as the algorithm seemed to deliberately show the post to radical conservatives in order to get some hateful comments, and then a couple hours later, started showing it to left wing activists to fight the conservatives. Meanwhile the metrics dashboard was basically saying, "Look at me! I got engagement! Whee, look at all the engagement!"
These things are primed to appeal to the base sides of our nature, all for the sake of some corporation's growth statistics. I hope that the more time passes, the more people learn to recognize how they're being manipulated this way.
Very interesting. For some reason I'm reminded about a Zen monk's comments: "When I first studied Zen, I knew mountains were mountains and trees were trees. Then I studied Zen deeply and I realised that mountains and trees were the same. Then I studied Zen even more and I realised that mountains are mountains and trees are trees"
Thank you, Maria, for this excellent post. It's refreshing in this sea of pop psychology. I am, myself, one of those pop psyc. self-proclaimed teachers/mystic/messiah/whatever the archetype of the day is. I've been feeling lately an unease towards this, and reading your piece amplifies the voice inside that's been telling me it might be time to get more serious about this, and remove the "pop" from the psychology-related content I write (and coach).
On a personal level, your words have put a name on a process I have been through as well. In the woo-woo world we call it being ungrounded, or remaining in the higher chakras. :) A metaphor to illustrate those moments where we lose touch with this 3D reality and use identification with spiritual experiences and archetypes as a band-aid for a fragile ego. Again, without really understanding, my intuition took me out and back to this life — I got back a job in marketing that grounds me immensely, reconnected with my family and country (without losing myself in it) and started to give more credit to my mother's words about our generation being too self-centered and uprooted.
My discourse about these subjects of pop psychology, spiritual bypassing and over-identification isn't articulate yet. I'm still wrapping my head about all this. I do see a shift in the main discourse, a softening in our obsession about "doing the work" and "healing the wounds", and I think it's a good thing. And, voices like yours are needed to bring back substance to these subjects and, hopefully, discourage many Insta coaches who are not really trained nor competent to do the work they're doing.
What a pleasure it has been to read your essay, thank you for posting it!
Beautiful share, thank you! I think it takes a lot of ego strength (amongst wisdom, self-reflectivity, and humility) to experience this kind of unease about oneself without escaping again to the upper chakras, as you say. I reckon some of the best discourse on spiritual bypassing comes from those who have experienced it themselves in the guise of "enlightenment" or some spiritual obsession/possession and have come back from it either through some crisis or through solid guidance. Good luck with your work!
Thank you, Maria. I enjoyed reading your piece a great deal. I'm the author of Chrysalis Tarot. I decided to comment because you alluded to having had some experience with tarot. Chrysalis is a best seller and won "Deck of the Year" honors in 2014. It's quite Jungian, totally different than traditional tarot, and offers a methodology for conversing with archetypes (all positive), rather than the silly notion of "decoding" some random arrangement of cards.
I am enjoying the humbling-down of this lifelong process, perhaps I needed to hear this whilst engaging with my own pursuit of knowledge and being keenly aware of my impatience with the journey. Sometimes I can read and feel that energetic experience which may be an inflation (often when reading Marion Woodman) and it’s good to know that perhaps I need to put a foot on the ground and look to ego strength to be more considered about what’s happening to me. Love that maybe it’s about the balance and not only the deep dive.
As a mental health pro who also writes on the subject (from trauma-informed lens), I'm glad to read your thoughts and cautions about this kind of work. I think so much of what you shared here echoes some of the same warnings I have about shadow work and any deep psychological work. It's very tempting to view this word from a superficial perspective given the ubiquity of it online these days, but as you stated the work can be destabilizing and disorienting. It must always be grounded in the reality of our everyday lives to be worth the risks.
Thank you for sharing the vulnerability in your experiences!
Very interesting. As is the emergent phenomena of it all. Psychology is biology and psyche means soul (the root word, anyway), and what does that mean?
Well, there seems to have been some foolish notion along the way that we could simply curate ourselves into whomever. When that’s not how it actually works and the costs are astronomical especially by accumulation.
Agreed (and thanks for the comment). The tension between having to become "someone", especially as Western society instructs us, vs becoming ourselves–the much harder task of inner work. Although, thinking of Jung's writing, both directions seem to have their place in development.
I really appreciate the imaginary roses and I'm strategically ducking to avoid getting scratched by the thorns. I may later make a rose petal jam from them.
Life is clearly a difficult and delicate balancing act, walking a delicate middle way between personal and transpersonal influences. I am not a therapist and I do not know your day to day reality, though I have gone to therapy myself gratefully, and productively.
Jung is gone, and even with an extensive corpus of work to indicate his thinking, I have hardly heard of a figure who is held up in so many various ways to justify or rationalize a particular angle or bias in the rhetorical battle between advocates of the personal vs. transpersonal.
In Answer to Job I believe Jung adequately illustrates the pitfalls of mindlessly following after transpersonal influences.
I appreciate the work that you obviously to to temper the pathology if transpersonal drift and to help people get their lives back, if I am reading you right.
But I believe it is a mistake to overly demonize (pun intended) transpersonal influences in our lives. This is too long of a topic to be adequately addressed via comment. I appreciated and enjoyed your writing even though I felt concerns along the way.
Thanks for the comment, Jed. You'll see from the rest of my writing in this newsletter that I am in fact an integrative transpersonal psychotherapist working primarily through a Jungian lens–I love this approach! So my intention was not demonise it, but to also look at it critically, especially when it's misused or applied without a grounding in the real world. It's a very potent philosophy (and modality), but it requires discernment and rigorous study. Most of my observations were either from personal experience and a lot of what I see on social media these days.
Thank you for the response, Maria. I accept it, see the wisdom in it, and defer to your depth of experience both academic, personal, and clinical. I appreciate the article and the thoughts it triggered in me. Demon was intended lightheartedly in reference to the Socratic daemon that, to me, has been an influential concept. Best of luck.
Honestly, I would've felt triggered quite similarly if I came across this article online and like I need to defend transpersonal/Jungian psychology. So I totally get it! Like you said, it's difficult to hold the middle ground.
Great article and a necessary counterpoint to a lot of what I see going around online. I always use the analogy of the unconscious being like a live electric cable and if you go prodding it without knowing what you’re about, it’s going to get messy. That said, I feel depth psychology has so much to offer us, as people and therapists. But it isn’t a game.
It's a relief to read this articulation of the 'Instafication' of Jung and etc. I am skittish about social media in general because of the preponderance of selling and superficiality concerning many topics, but the absolute explosion of interest in Jung's (and etc) work, like the Witch craze of the last decade or so often makes me cringe. It's a lot of rubbish, or even sometimes harmful distraction, delusion and mis-information - supposedly in the name of 'depth work'.
But more to some of your points: the unconscious, the shadow, inner work - these are not trends and they are not easy to field. Following the death of my father and the approach of mid-life, I was dragged into a torrential chaos of nightmares, despair and rage that made me question my mental stability and realize that I had been engaged in spiritual by-passing for years.
I have relished James Hillman's sometimes controversial perspective for this reason. As an example, he was dubious about dreamwork, (of the variety attributed to Jung) claiming that most dreamwork is simply the ego-mind trying to tame and package the images of the unconscious - which cannot be translated in the language the 'waking' world.
Thank you for the comment! It's so interesting how captivating the archetypes are. We like to read about them on social media and tag them to our identity (like you say, identifying with the "witch" or the "wise woman" or "healer")–until they drag us into the unconscious for the "immersive experience". I've benefitted so much from studying astrology and reimagining the archetypes as gods that I try to forge a mutual relationship with. I really like Hillman's perspective too. It's a good counter-balance to over-analysing dreams and becoming too literal about their meaning.
Cleaning out my Amazon 'saved for later,' I came across a book on dream 'work' (my term here) that looks a bit down a side path. I haven't read it, but it's going in the shopping cart : Nocturnes (On Listening to Dreams) by Paul Lippmann.
Enjoyed your synoptic breakdown of some of Jung’s biggest ideas. I have a BA in Psychology and have to disagree that Psychology and especially Jung or Freud or any of the pioneers hypothesis were ‘empirical’. In the mid 2000s there was a meta study that revealed that most psychology studies cannot be replicated. Humans are complex and so cannot be summed up based on small sample groups of mostly college students. I am much more of a Jungian based n my spiritual beliefs and only a few of Feud’s ideas still hold up - Defense Mechanisms and Early childhood development’s importance, which actually has been proven empirical, thus government sponsored Head Start programs. Yet Jung’s concept of archetypes were inspired by Plato’s Theory of Forms and the idea of ego has also been around for thousands of years and so has the idea of getting a grip on it and the monkey mind in general. This was the central theme among Hindu gurus and ascetics in ancient India which gave birth to the first great psychologist Buddha - who provided great cognitive tools like mindfulness to tame our mysterious ever active and sometimes nonsensical monkey mind. I personally love the concept of Synchronicity - still an another unproven collective psychic aspect of an unseen universal archetype universe. I believe such a psychic field does exist and even have an idea for a technical invention that could prove it, but it would cost millions to make and I do not have those kind of resources. Any serious Jungian needs to read Atom and Archetype, a great book-30 year letter correspondence between Jung and his friend Wolfgang Pauli, one of the brilliant early Quantum physicist pioneers. Jung was picking his brain trying to see if there were any answers in the quantum realm for consciousness and his concept of Synchronicity. Pauli was skeptical early on but based on unexplainable experiences in his own life over time, eventually warmed up to Jung’s collective psychic realm concept. We can’t see gravity or the electromagnetic field or flying neutrinos with the naked eye, but they all exist and are as real as the nose on our face. Later physicist Roger Penrose who was mentor to Steven Hawkings, pursued a similar micro-tubule in neurons idea of consciousness’ origin. Anyhow - Jung or Buddha or Christ or Confucius or whatever prophet/sage folks follow provide mental and spiritual tools and guidance on how to be a healthy and decent human. There is still so much mystery as to who and why we are - works in progress I think most smart folks agree. Evolution toward higher consciousness hopefully. I think Love is the glue that everything together.
Thank you for your comment! Yes, Jung's concepts weren't new, he merely gave a psychological name to things that were part of mystical or philosophical traditions. I think he himself said he's a mystic, not a scientist, but he had to write scientifically to be taken seriously. I reckon some of these ideas will be more widely accepted as quantum physics develops. We need to remember, as Laurence Hillman said in my last interview with him, that science is also a belief system (I recommend listening to that). There's a lot out there that isn't explained by science but can be "explained" experientially through practices like meditation, psychedelics, or even ancient studies into occultism, mysticism, astrology etc. Have you read "Decoding Jung's Metaphysics" by Bernardo Kastrup? There's a lot there on synchronicity.
Thanks for the read suggestion - I need a new book as just finished a couple!
So I’m working on this whole series about the chakras and I must firmly disagree that early psychologists were not grounded in empirical evidence. So I guess I disagree with your disagreement? ;)
I think psychology studies are difficult to replicate because — as you should know as a psychologist, and as anyone who’s ever looked for a good psychologist understands — there is no one-size-fits-all psychology; no field of psychology applicable to everyone. Which says a lot about the nature of the psyche.
I’m excited to see Jung in the popular discourse. Like, it-feels-too-good-to-be-true excited. But Jung is not for everyone. Jungian psychology is not for everyone. And I don’t say that as a gatekeeper. If you are not a mystic — if that kind of archetypal realm is not built into your psyche — following Jung’s work is going to break your brain in a way that you may not recover from. I think a lot of people forget, ignore, or are simply ignorant of the fact that Jung began his psychological work studying schizophrenia — and, from the Black Books and the Red Book, may have even struggled himself with some form of schizoaffectivity.
So the real question is: why are people trying to make themselves schizophrenic to fit a Jungian mould??? There are so many of his contemporaries that better suit the psychology of today.
Good point. It reminds me of questions Marie-Louise von Franz often asked around individuation and gaining more consciousness of one's inner world. For some it's crucial, life-saving, and creative. For others, at some points in their lives, it generates a level of instability and pain they cannot cope with (and their environment doesn't help with). They're far better served by a psychodynamic or more conventional approach.
I think about this a lot as a transpersonal psychotherapist: I would ideally love if everyone could connect to their soul and work at that level. But so many folks are not ready or even interested in that. It's unethical and a power trip to take them there.
I agree completely. It’s really nice to read this from a psychotherapist. But I had to learn the hard way that depth is not for everyone. I think a lot of people won’t take responsibility for leading others to drown. :(
Part of the confusion here, I think, is equating “empiricism” with “scientific method”…you can be empirical without being scientific…Freud and early theorists certainly went beyond their observations but they were “based” on clinical experiences…
I will chime in on this one, too. I think a lot of people think that the term 'empirical' refers to something that strictly follows the scientific method as we know it today. The broader meaning of it, though, implies a process of knowledge through that which is observable, and of course, this means that you have to ask what you mean by observation.
In this sense, the tradition of phenomenology, which is based on experiential knowledge, is usually seen as an empirical epistemology in contrast to a rationalistic one. However, it is not empirical in precisely the same way that a physicist studies rocks.
Jung himself admits to being a bit of a conflicted character when it comes to his epistemology - there is a side where he was very concerned with being a good and rigorous scientist, and then there was a side where he went along with his mystical inclinations. His body of work reflects both.
So respectfully, Christopher, I would gently and warmly prod you about what you mean when you use the term 'empirical'.
Appreciate you shinning light on these areas of self-work and Jungian psych. It is easy to find ourselves slipping into the pitfalls if we aren't vigilant. This work would be best done through lineage, containment, and at the very least, a secure dyad. Alas, we've become so unrooted from these traditions that we're left wandering through the process without much guidance. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Thanks for the reflections. I agree, I myself felt uprooted and found the containment and lineage very nurturing in my training. I wrote about this because I made those very mistakes myself when there was no one to guide me and I learned the slow and hard way (thankfully no one was hurt, I believe).
This is a wonderful post. Thank you for laying out so clearly some of the risks and difficulties of introspective work. I don't follow Instagram and had no idea shadow work had become a fad. In my experience it's been a wry and humbling experience of having my Jungian-fluent friends shine a light on my failings. There's no kind of banter I love more than psychwork banter with someone who's encountered my shadow in person and I theirs. It's both cutting and healing.
I did find it odd that you pointed to individuation work as coming late in life. I took a different trajectory, where my twenties were full of heavy internal work and I didn't turn to raising a family until my thirties. I don't think I could have approached raising a child in a healthy way until I'd addressed those unconscious needs.
Your comment about society's obsession with doom-scrolling pithy spiritual quotes from a mishmash of religious figures and quantum babble is so painfully accurate.
Thank you for your comment and for seeing what I was trying to get across. You're probably lucky to not be on Instagram, a lot of complex psychological and spiritual ideas are watered down and misused. Sometimes it's funny, other times it's demoralising.
I think you're right, it doesn't have to start late in life. I often think that when there's lots of trauma or maybe even other factors, people start the work much sooner. In his time, Jung mostly worked with people in their second half of life, so that's where the comment comes from. From his perspective, they'd attained worldly status and could now turn inwards. And while it might be different for some of us, I also know from astrology that there are some very important transits beginning around 44 and carrying through the early fifties that are meant to really shake us and put us in contact with who we truly are. But maybe it's better to say that individuation never really ends and we go through many cycles.
And on your last comment–yep. To me it's about that painful reality when narcissism meets spirituality and turns it into one-upmanship and another tool to feed the grandiose self.
What do you imagine is the way forward?
I think it's a symptom rather than a cause. Like we could blame obesity on the plentiful availability of sugar and processed foods in the modern diet, but it would be more accurate to look at poverty and the time and energy crunch that results in people grabbing the easiest and cheapest option. A nuanced understanding of spiritual growth requires education and thought.
Primarily I think it's up to the computer scientists devising the social media engagement algorithms, and the C-suite and shareholders who set corporate priorities. They're shaping the landscape in which people fall so easily into quick fix soundbites. It's like planting people in the middle of Times Square and expecting them to respond to the sensation of a butterfly's wings fluttering against their palm. But honestly I think platforms like this one, and the writers here, are taking part in the fix as well. That's one of the reasons I signed up. Long-form blogging, with an engaged community, transparent profit strategies, and no intrusive ads. Doomscrolling follows from psychic exhaustion and addiction. So I think anything that counters those forces will help.
I agree with you, I appreciate Substack because of conversations like these. It's the nature of social media platforms that content is consumed quickly, without the necessary reflection time (and no space for critical thinking and debate). Not that everyone should engage at that level, but I'm noticing a fatigue around scrolling through endless quotes lifted without context or catchy soundbites that are either spiritual bypassing or just psychobabble. It's easy to feel like you're consuming meaningful content (and some of it is) and "doing the work", but at that pace it's simply overwhelming for the brain to process all the information.
And I'm entirely with you on the responsibility of the people "up there" for what they're creating. And perhaps our responsibility as well for what we're actually participating in and whether it's actually serving. It's easy to get tricked into the Instagram model of growth, which is centred around posting tons of very short content and following trends. Thank god therapists have stopped dancing and pointing at words on the screen, that was a bad time for instatherapy!
Oh wow, dancing and pointing at words? Now I'm really glad I'm not on Insta.
I have a friend who has a tiny Etsy store with LGBTQ+ friendly merchandise. Recently they tried advertising on Facebook for the first time, and then watched in amused horror as the algorithm seemed to deliberately show the post to radical conservatives in order to get some hateful comments, and then a couple hours later, started showing it to left wing activists to fight the conservatives. Meanwhile the metrics dashboard was basically saying, "Look at me! I got engagement! Whee, look at all the engagement!"
These things are primed to appeal to the base sides of our nature, all for the sake of some corporation's growth statistics. I hope that the more time passes, the more people learn to recognize how they're being manipulated this way.
Very interesting. For some reason I'm reminded about a Zen monk's comments: "When I first studied Zen, I knew mountains were mountains and trees were trees. Then I studied Zen deeply and I realised that mountains and trees were the same. Then I studied Zen even more and I realised that mountains are mountains and trees are trees"
That's excellent!
Thank you, Maria, for this excellent post. It's refreshing in this sea of pop psychology. I am, myself, one of those pop psyc. self-proclaimed teachers/mystic/messiah/whatever the archetype of the day is. I've been feeling lately an unease towards this, and reading your piece amplifies the voice inside that's been telling me it might be time to get more serious about this, and remove the "pop" from the psychology-related content I write (and coach).
On a personal level, your words have put a name on a process I have been through as well. In the woo-woo world we call it being ungrounded, or remaining in the higher chakras. :) A metaphor to illustrate those moments where we lose touch with this 3D reality and use identification with spiritual experiences and archetypes as a band-aid for a fragile ego. Again, without really understanding, my intuition took me out and back to this life — I got back a job in marketing that grounds me immensely, reconnected with my family and country (without losing myself in it) and started to give more credit to my mother's words about our generation being too self-centered and uprooted.
My discourse about these subjects of pop psychology, spiritual bypassing and over-identification isn't articulate yet. I'm still wrapping my head about all this. I do see a shift in the main discourse, a softening in our obsession about "doing the work" and "healing the wounds", and I think it's a good thing. And, voices like yours are needed to bring back substance to these subjects and, hopefully, discourage many Insta coaches who are not really trained nor competent to do the work they're doing.
What a pleasure it has been to read your essay, thank you for posting it!
Beautiful share, thank you! I think it takes a lot of ego strength (amongst wisdom, self-reflectivity, and humility) to experience this kind of unease about oneself without escaping again to the upper chakras, as you say. I reckon some of the best discourse on spiritual bypassing comes from those who have experienced it themselves in the guise of "enlightenment" or some spiritual obsession/possession and have come back from it either through some crisis or through solid guidance. Good luck with your work!
Indeed, it takes one to see one as they say.
Thank you 🙏
Thank you, Maria. I enjoyed reading your piece a great deal. I'm the author of Chrysalis Tarot. I decided to comment because you alluded to having had some experience with tarot. Chrysalis is a best seller and won "Deck of the Year" honors in 2014. It's quite Jungian, totally different than traditional tarot, and offers a methodology for conversing with archetypes (all positive), rather than the silly notion of "decoding" some random arrangement of cards.
Great i need a new deck
I am enjoying the humbling-down of this lifelong process, perhaps I needed to hear this whilst engaging with my own pursuit of knowledge and being keenly aware of my impatience with the journey. Sometimes I can read and feel that energetic experience which may be an inflation (often when reading Marion Woodman) and it’s good to know that perhaps I need to put a foot on the ground and look to ego strength to be more considered about what’s happening to me. Love that maybe it’s about the balance and not only the deep dive.
As a mental health pro who also writes on the subject (from trauma-informed lens), I'm glad to read your thoughts and cautions about this kind of work. I think so much of what you shared here echoes some of the same warnings I have about shadow work and any deep psychological work. It's very tempting to view this word from a superficial perspective given the ubiquity of it online these days, but as you stated the work can be destabilizing and disorienting. It must always be grounded in the reality of our everyday lives to be worth the risks.
Thank you for sharing the vulnerability in your experiences!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
Ah yes. Numinous. My other favorite N-word, after Nternet.
Very interesting. As is the emergent phenomena of it all. Psychology is biology and psyche means soul (the root word, anyway), and what does that mean?
Well, there seems to have been some foolish notion along the way that we could simply curate ourselves into whomever. When that’s not how it actually works and the costs are astronomical especially by accumulation.
Agreed (and thanks for the comment). The tension between having to become "someone", especially as Western society instructs us, vs becoming ourselves–the much harder task of inner work. Although, thinking of Jung's writing, both directions seem to have their place in development.
Aye, becoming ourselves means unscrambling from… a lot. And listening to a blueprint we scarcely understand.
If I could throw roses, I would. This is masterful and deeply insightful.
I really appreciate the imaginary roses and I'm strategically ducking to avoid getting scratched by the thorns. I may later make a rose petal jam from them.
"no offence to the raccoon community"
None taken 🦝
Oh thank god, I'd been waiting for this message forever 🦝
The raccoon federation also said "Sorry about your garbage we were in a rush" dunno if that rings a bell 😂
Life is clearly a difficult and delicate balancing act, walking a delicate middle way between personal and transpersonal influences. I am not a therapist and I do not know your day to day reality, though I have gone to therapy myself gratefully, and productively.
Jung is gone, and even with an extensive corpus of work to indicate his thinking, I have hardly heard of a figure who is held up in so many various ways to justify or rationalize a particular angle or bias in the rhetorical battle between advocates of the personal vs. transpersonal.
In Answer to Job I believe Jung adequately illustrates the pitfalls of mindlessly following after transpersonal influences.
I appreciate the work that you obviously to to temper the pathology if transpersonal drift and to help people get their lives back, if I am reading you right.
But I believe it is a mistake to overly demonize (pun intended) transpersonal influences in our lives. This is too long of a topic to be adequately addressed via comment. I appreciated and enjoyed your writing even though I felt concerns along the way.
Thanks for the comment, Jed. You'll see from the rest of my writing in this newsletter that I am in fact an integrative transpersonal psychotherapist working primarily through a Jungian lens–I love this approach! So my intention was not demonise it, but to also look at it critically, especially when it's misused or applied without a grounding in the real world. It's a very potent philosophy (and modality), but it requires discernment and rigorous study. Most of my observations were either from personal experience and a lot of what I see on social media these days.
Thank you for the response, Maria. I accept it, see the wisdom in it, and defer to your depth of experience both academic, personal, and clinical. I appreciate the article and the thoughts it triggered in me. Demon was intended lightheartedly in reference to the Socratic daemon that, to me, has been an influential concept. Best of luck.
Honestly, I would've felt triggered quite similarly if I came across this article online and like I need to defend transpersonal/Jungian psychology. So I totally get it! Like you said, it's difficult to hold the middle ground.
Great article and a necessary counterpoint to a lot of what I see going around online. I always use the analogy of the unconscious being like a live electric cable and if you go prodding it without knowing what you’re about, it’s going to get messy. That said, I feel depth psychology has so much to offer us, as people and therapists. But it isn’t a game.
Great analogy!
So brilliant - only sorry I didn't find it earlier !
Thank you Fiona! We find things at the right time ;)
It's a relief to read this articulation of the 'Instafication' of Jung and etc. I am skittish about social media in general because of the preponderance of selling and superficiality concerning many topics, but the absolute explosion of interest in Jung's (and etc) work, like the Witch craze of the last decade or so often makes me cringe. It's a lot of rubbish, or even sometimes harmful distraction, delusion and mis-information - supposedly in the name of 'depth work'.
But more to some of your points: the unconscious, the shadow, inner work - these are not trends and they are not easy to field. Following the death of my father and the approach of mid-life, I was dragged into a torrential chaos of nightmares, despair and rage that made me question my mental stability and realize that I had been engaged in spiritual by-passing for years.
I have relished James Hillman's sometimes controversial perspective for this reason. As an example, he was dubious about dreamwork, (of the variety attributed to Jung) claiming that most dreamwork is simply the ego-mind trying to tame and package the images of the unconscious - which cannot be translated in the language the 'waking' world.
Thanks again for your writing.
Thank you for the comment! It's so interesting how captivating the archetypes are. We like to read about them on social media and tag them to our identity (like you say, identifying with the "witch" or the "wise woman" or "healer")–until they drag us into the unconscious for the "immersive experience". I've benefitted so much from studying astrology and reimagining the archetypes as gods that I try to forge a mutual relationship with. I really like Hillman's perspective too. It's a good counter-balance to over-analysing dreams and becoming too literal about their meaning.
Cleaning out my Amazon 'saved for later,' I came across a book on dream 'work' (my term here) that looks a bit down a side path. I haven't read it, but it's going in the shopping cart : Nocturnes (On Listening to Dreams) by Paul Lippmann.