Archive for the ‘About Psychology’ Category

“Psychotherapy is a field of the art of healing that developed and reached a certain autonomy in the last fifty years. The opinions in this field have transformed and differentiating in various way, and the amount of experiences that has been accumulated gave place to different interpretations. This because psychotherapy is not that simples and unique method it was first believed, but it slowly revealed itself to be a kind of “dialect procedure”, a dialogue, an evaluation between two people. The dialectic, originally the art of converse of the ancient philosophers, was soon used to designate a creative process of new synthesis.” (“Pratica della Psicoterapia”, C. G. Jung Opere, Torino, Boringhieri, 1981, Vol. XVI, p. 7)

These are the first words that open the book of Jung “Principles of the practical psychotherapy”, whose first edition was published in 1935. Let’s see what they mean. Read the rest of this entry »

There aren’t many, but there are people who lie in therapy.  Lie to whom? To themselves, for sure. But who exactly does the therapist represent that it is “necessary” lying to him?

By the best of the hypothesis, the therapist stands for the patient’s consciousness. By the worst, for a mother (or a father). Because the parental figure has always been a child’s reference for good behavior, revealing the truth to a parent is like admitting something and becoming aware of what one has done. Therefore, the therapist is a mother of father’s vicarious.

There are therapist who in fact set themselves as big moms and dads of their patients giving them directions about what is “right” and “wrong”. Thus, these professionals occupy a place already prepared, only Read the rest of this entry »

The material value of a psychotherapy or a psychoanalysis, that is what one is willing to pay for it, is directly proportional to the values that lead one’s life. The use of money is a powerful symbol of what does have a “value”. Consequently, the list of “needs” is the result of the priorities one has. Values aren’t explicit and clear, do not believe that you are in control of your values. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite its 110 years, there’s much unawareness about psychoanalysis. What is it for? Does the person who look for it do therapy or analysis? And what’s the difference between the two?

As I wrote in a previous article, “Difference Between Psychology and Psychoanalysis”, the term psychoanalysis entered history thanks to Sigmund Freud. To him we owe the “discovery” of the unconscious. If, in a wide sense, both are psychology for they refer to the psyche, without the unconscious there is no psychoanalysis, but psychology in a strict meaning (for what they have an university degree). For having the unconscious as a reference for the psychoanalytical practice, the psychological work turns to be a self discovery and self awareness journey.

This is the reason why who goes to a psychoanalyst does analysis. The person will analysis himself, know himself, look closely at himself, distinguish and reevaluate, name, demythologize, elaborate, digest and overcome whatever he’s going to find out. That’s an analysis: it’s a bet on the process of consciousness as conflict resolution. By its very nature, analysis deals with deep issues bond to the personal identity, but also to the human kind’s, to the individual destiny as well to the collective’s, to the meaning of my, your, our lives, to the mystery of spirituality and religions. Psychoanalysis addresses the abyssal fundaments of human existence and how the magic or terror reflects on our everyday life.

To do psychoanalysis one assumes a baggage of knowledge that goes for beyond the strictly “technical” information. One needs to penetrate the vaster cultural space where the human kind expressed itself: philosophy and theology first of all, but also anthropology and sociology, least but not last mythology, literature and fairy tales. Psychoanalysis is everything but psychological recipes to fix problems, for it invests on the individual awaking as the path for “salvation”.

The term therapy has been used many times to refer indiscriminately for the psychoanalytical practice and not. In fact, the side effect of analysis is the “cure”, that is the therapy, but the focus is different. Many are the therapies: you have physiotherapy, massage therapy, acupuncture and etc. All the treatments addressed to adjust something that doesn’t work well are  therapies. In this sense, analysis is therapy.

However there’s an ambiguity here. By cultural habit, a therapy make you think, for example that the doctor or another health care professional will give you the cure, providing whatever would be needed (medicines, exercises, exams, and etc.) to make it happen. The emphasis is on the person who manages the treatment and the “enchantments” that will solve the problem. This attitude before the psychological problem denies the intrinsic meaning of psychoanalysis, which doesn’t look for and doesn’t give recipes; above all it doesn’t put the person in the passive position of receiving a treatment. Quite otherwise, psychoanalysis inputs autonomy in the subject. That’s why, it’s less “popular” than other forms of therapy, for autonomy goes along responsibility and conscience, which people tend to avoid.

Freud himself alerted against the understanding that tended to pull psychoanalysis into the perspective of the medical-scientific therapies during his first trip to the USA: psychoanalysis, he said, couldn’t be sucked in the medicine field, but it had to maintain its wider scope. That is, psychoanalysis is not a “science” in the traditional sense, its domain is located on the borders between them (including philosophy of science) and the humanistic knowledge. In fact, psychoanalysis doesn’t treat a psychic dysfunction as it were an isolated organ, but the human person, their conflicts and desires, in which are mirrored the eternal questions that we ask ourselves as humans. Doubts and challenges that shape our lives, pain, search, loss, obsessions, fear, and etc., they are all valuable human material for self knowledge and deepening.

We can say that psychoanalysis is a kind of philosophy applied to the actual human life. It‘s “applied” in the sense of the process of inferring and deduction, of synthesis and analysis, that is dialectic, which characterizes philosophy. It’s as if philosophy has come down from the ideal world and has landed on the perturbed human reality, looked at it and placed the immutable questions: what?, why? and what for? Silvia Montefoschi says that it’s not by chance that after philosophy had reached its heyday (with Hegel 1770-1831) psychoanalysis sprouted out (Freud, 1856-1939, published his “Interpretation of Dreams” in 1899, at the same time the revolution in physics was happening with the theory of relativity and the quanta physics). The paradigm shift that can be observed in philosophy, psychoanalysis and physics creates a movement that goes from the big to the small, from stillness to change, from the universal to the particular, from the object meant as static to an object related to the subject observer.

Each of us is a mobile laboratory for energy transformation, a powerful machine to solve problems, transmute matter (old and moldy thoughts taken for granted), reinvent life, open path, discover and create. Psychoanalysis is born with this call: to accompany, translate and know the evolutionary process of the human consciousness.

Psychology and psychoanalysis are not the same thing. There’s an essential distinction between them rooted in their origins, such difference leads to distinct mindsets and methods of research, thus different diagnosis and different results.

The discourse about the soul (in ancient Greek psyche-logos from which the word psychology comes) is an inquiry that was born in Ancient Greek times, among others related to the universe, life and politics. The first psychologist in history was Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) one of the founder of the Western thinking and our great classifier. In a life time of research, Aristotle categorized the entire known world including culture and human behavior.

Psychology entered the modern age through the work of Wilhelm Wundt. In 1879, he founded, in Leipzig, the first laboratory dedicated exclusively to psychological research. Many other scholars followed him and different branches of psychology were born: Behaviorism, Existentialism, Cognitive are all fields of psychology.

Psychology developed as one of the fields of experimental studies, among others in the general science group. Its underlying philosophy is based on Positivism, thus the human being was approached  using the same tools as for the study of a molecule, a plant or a fish. Traditional science studies nature (and humans as part of it) trying to identify its laws, which once are discovered help preview and understand how the whole works and therefore its abnormality.

Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, wasn’t a psychologist. He was a neurologist and the new field of knowledge he discovered assumed an element unknown to psychology and to any other conventional science: the unconsciousness. He called this knowledge psychoanalysis because it is based on the analysis of the psyche. Its approach keeps the traditional distance between the observer (the analyst) and the object of his studies (the patient), therefore the analyst speaks little, writes a lot, and analyzes the patient, as if they were different species. However, on the other hand, this method actually shakes the very foundations of the conventional scientific method.

The psychoanalysis main subject is the unconscious, which, by definition, it’s present in each person, analyst and patient, it influences the conscious activities and perceptions of reality, twists the sight, and manipulates the rational understanding. Freud actually walked on a very unstable soil that would necessarily lead to a shift in the psychoanalysis epistemology. Epistemology is a branch of philosophy concerned about the nature and scope of knowledge, whose questions are: what do we can learn? What are the limits of human understanding? Thus, if psychoanalysis assumes the unconscious as its main object of study and the unconscious is the unknown (all it’s not conscious) that interferes on the way we know the world, we get here to an apparent vicious circle. How can we state anything with objectivity?

Freud relied on his own self analysis to help him understand his patients. This puts him in a completely different position than the one of the psychologist who sees himself as an outsider researcher to whom the study of a shellfish or of a person is ideally based on the same premises. Rather than that, Freud undertook a different path: through his own inner experience and the knowledge he obtained precious the tools to better help others. Although Freud officially remained in the limits of the positivist epistemology, his practice betrays that he actually broke this paradigm, shifting the scientific method.

Who became aware of this revolution and its consequences was Jung (1875-1961), who reached horizons Freud could ever imagine. Jung’s background freed him to inquire the unknown field that the Freudian psychoanalysis had opened. The positivist scientific method was substituted with the dialectic one that better suited the psyche. Jung’s methodology relies more on the dialogue and on the self awareness of the analyst than on the “analysis” of the patient as an external being to be “fixed”.

To Jung, not only dreams are, as Freud said, the main road to reach the mysterious element in us, the unconsciousness, but the entire psychic life, once we have eyes to really see, reveals elements and directions, for the unconscious is more than a twister bothering the conscious activities. Analyst and patient are both engaged in a journey of discovery and growing that affects both of them. Jung’s long years of experimenting and learning from his inner life gave birth to his analytical psychology, which although it’s a step forward Freudian psychoanalysis, belongs to the same road Freud first traced, owing nothing to the contemporary current of the “scientific psychology”.

If psychology studies a human being as it can study any other mammal and psychoanalysis is based on the dialogue between to people in order to together understand the psychic activities, therefore the very first psychoanalyst in Western history was Socrates (469 BC-399 BC), for his methods is the seed from which psychoanalysis is born: dialogue. Socrates believed everybody to have more knowledge than what they could imagine. Through dialogue he was able to make the person think and get to their own conclusions, developing a surprising understanding.

Psychoanalysis is a dialogue with the unconsciousness. The psychoanalyst interacts with his unconscious mind and with the patient’s, helping the latter to do the same. That’s the goal of analysis. In Jung this idea is further developed since the analytical setting graphically includes it: two chairs facing each other. The Freudian couch implies the idea that the analyst inquires the patient’s unconsciousness. In the Jungian setting the dialogue happens at multiple levels: two people talk, two unconscious minds interact (through feelings, dreams and non-verbal language), two persons become aware of the unconscious interaction and its meanings, a person help the other to get familiar and start his or her journey to unfold his or her uniqueness.

Thus, in psychoanalysis normality is a questionable term, for it refers to a medium, an average number no one likes to be. The normality one seeks in psychoanalysis is the incomparable singularity of human individuality. Moreover, psychoanalysis, in its Jungian and post Jungian version, resembles the Quantum Physics and its revolutionary approach to matter. The observer and the observed interfere with each other, no real objectivity is possible. It’s not by chance that psychoanalysis was born in the turning of the twenty century along with the modern physics. Both belong to the new paradigm about human understanding of life and its meaning.

Forget the horrible movies scenes, with drooling, shouts and wide open eyes. Exorcism, which is “removing a devilish spirit from a person”, is one of the possible methods do solve a real problem. However, in order to work traditional exorcism must rely on a truly powerful exorcist, something that we miss nowadays. If there is an actual shortage is of a positive spiritual power. It only remains psychology, it’s not by chance that the Middle Ages are gone.

Psychology borders two distinct worlds: the physical and the spiritual. We have emotions that cure the body and others that harm it. Happiness and serenity bring health, organs that work and delay aging; fear, anxiety and insecurity lead to stuck births, heart strokes, addiction and a series of others unpleasant situations.

On the other hand, what we call spirit can only be perceived by our psyche, on the contrary it would be like purport seeing the physical world without using our eyes (I remind here that I’m not doing theology but psychology). Every human experience is psychological by nature, because we are a psychic system. Thus, the spiritual dimension, whatever it is, manifest itself in that transitional space between two realities, in the blending of two elements, the psyche and the spirit, when one turns into the other.

Jung would call this world “archetypal”. Spirits and archetypes are two words with potentially the same meaning but belonging to two different paradigms. The first one draws immediately attention to itself, the second appeals only to those who know something about Jungian psychology, on the contrary it sounds “weird”. One is emotionally charged, the other seems abstract. However, there are real chances that these two words mean the same thing, even because the concept of “archetype” is not so defined as we would like. Everything that is not consciousness lives on the shadowy banks of the unconscious.

From the psychological point of view, exorcism is meant to be necessary when an external force (to the person’s awareness) penetrates in the person’s inner self (that is, it becomes perceptible by the conscious psyche) and acts over the individual against his or her will (that is, against one’s “normal” way of thinking) twisting one’s thoughts and actions. That shows the action of complexes (ego’s) or of archetypes (collective unconscious/spiritual world’s) over a person in spite of one’s consciousness and intentions. Their actions is always negative because violate human free will. In practice, it means that a person does things that don’t make sense with what this person says, uses to think or would like to happen. It’s like a football player who suddenly starts scoring against his own team and, on top of that, gets infuriated if somebody point that out to him.

Up to hear this is psychology, a tough neurosis… but until when? When is it a case for an exorcist? When the scores against one’s team (personal life hurt, family knockout, work and future in peril, etc.) are too many. It means that the “malignant spirit” is taking more and more space.

Possession is different from madness, in the latter the ego’s control is totally lost and with it the rational logic is gone (although a symbolic logic is present). Continuing the example above, it would be as if the football player would start dancing in the middle of the field instead of playing. In the possession, on the contrary, the traditional logic remains but it’s wildly distorted. The possession is generally momentary, having a person alternating between playing right and playing against. The logic of the negative possession is about destruction (disguised or explicit), there’s a kind of impetus towards razing things (including the dear ones) and limits, mainly the ones imposed by the “light” (order and consciousness) and its representatives. It’s like a powerful rage that wants to end up with everything – intentionally. But this is not what the person wants and besides he doesn’t acknowledge this “rage”, although in that moment he is submitting to its devastating force and actually fully embodying it.

This picture is frequently found among alcoholics and possibly other drug addicts too. Experiences of this kind are always negative because they nullify individual freedom and dumb a person, that is, one doesn’t think right anymore although one thinks he does and defend oneself against the opposite hypothesis until death. We can explain this condition as the possession and enacting of the negative aspect of a determined archetype that is acting beyond awareness, which, in this way, perpetuates its power and reduces considerably the person’s chances to realize what’s going on. To this obstacle, the individual’s pride is added (one of the seven capital sins!), which turns extremely painful to face one’s weakness and one’s domination by shattering forces unfamiliar to one’s will.

It’s here that a nice exorcism would save years of suffering to individuals and families, putting the person in conditions to be ready to start a therapy without all that agitation and yells, without the deranged aggression and the obtuse self destruction. Life is too short.

We know ourselves through people, things, and situation we like and dislike. Projection is the way the psyche interacts with the outside and distinguishes itself from it. It can be positive and negative; above all, it’s a general and perfectly normal psychic mechanism (Jung).

We projects the traits we admire (but believe they don’t belong to us) on heroes and public figures, or simply on the classmate, the neighbor or the friend. We create idols and shining potent people from our own psychological “blood and flesh”. We empower them with our own power, because they are “what we, unfortunately, are not”.

The thing about worshiping idols is that we don’t need to get up and go for it. It takes a lot of effort to make a dream come true, to change a pattern, or be whatever one wants to be. Idols, like stuffed animals, are likable, they can stand on a shelf and remind us that a beautiful life does exist… But let’s now go back to the couch, to relax and munch popcorn!

The same applies to negative projections. We get rid of what is unpleasant to face throwing it onto somebody else. We literally wear the other person with our own fantasies. That’s another way to create a comfortable world: we have the idols on one shelf and the evil on the other. And what about us? We can comfortably stretch our legs out on that same sofa and…!

To turn projections into a resource of self knowledge one must do the sweaty process to look at oneself and enact a psychological work. The less self conscious a person is the more their projections will be like giant balloons, floating far away from reality. However, there’s a hook. The objects of our projection do have something to do with it.

We are not crazy people who see a horse and project on it a monkey. The idols do have some of the qualities we give them. The evil person does have a bad character. The point is that an unconscious projection creates absolute. Thus idols become The Idols, and a bad person turns into The Evil. This is the childish part of this story.

Once you become conscious of your projections idols and evils continue existing, but you are not so much bothered by them. You stop being a pious follower of new idols or a gossiper of the bad guys. Growing out of projections is a form of freedom. Now you understand why those people are what they are while you learn something important about yourself. Then you simply move on.

Underneath our singularity as individuals there’s a common underground from which our human nature sprouts and keeps itself rooted in.

This inner deep foundation (the collective unconscious) has concentration areas developed during the many centuries of human experience. These psychological regions are thematically organized, possess a center circled by suburbs. The more inhabitants these regions have, that is the more traffic they generate, the more powerful they are, which means they draw a lot of energy to themselves.

The technical name for these concentration areas in the psyche is “archetype”. Archetypes were first identified by Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) in his empiric researches about the way the psyche functions. He came to the conclusion that archetypes are images, more precisely they are the imaginal product of the instincts themselves, result of the human experiences over the thousands of years of its history.

Archetypes pass on generation after generation and they exist because human beings since the beginning of times had dealt with some identical issues: birth and death, love, sex, marriage, war, group, survival, and many others. If biology says that the living creatures can develop an ability or an organ and inherit it genetically, why shouldn’t we be able to pass on the basic essential meaning of our human experiences?

A psychology that focuses mainly on archetypes is called “Archetypal Psychology” and it’s first representative was the psychologist James Hillman. He suggests that many of our social disease and neurosis come from having we ignored and repressed some basics archetypes on which our health and balance rely on.

Archetypes are susceptible to be worked in many different ways. As their symbolic nature suggests there represent viewpoints and forms to express a single truth. Being an image, the archetype is easily caught by the consciousness even when the mind can’t translate all its meanings. Its non-rational essence grabs a variety of human aspects.

To see by yourself the archetypes that influence your and others’ psyche, pay attention at the way you feel, at your dreams, behavior, reactions, words, and desires. If you’ll observe closely you’ll notice a pattern. Going deeper and comparing different people’s psychological facts together, you’ll notice models of behaviors, an entire life scene may be represented. If you then work on distinguishing the subjective elements from the common material, you’ll realize that you are dealing with a kind of abstract material, as it were a draft. As any draft, this one too can be used to paint in a variety of styles and colors – as many as there are people on Earth. That’s an archetype.

There’s an old saying I learned in my times of psychoanalysis student, “A man walks down a road and meets two men. The first one asks him where he is coming from, the second, where he is going to. They are Freud and Jung.”

Sigmund Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September, 1939) was founder of the psychoanalysis. He created his theory after and because of his studying of an interesting “disease” much spread in those times: hysteria. Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), who Freud had first proclaimed his “heir”, proceeded from the experience of another field of psychological disease: schizophrenia. Both pioneers worked mainly with women, their chiefly subject of research. They stood amazed before the unconscious mind’s activities, which they realize could so deeply subvert and disturb a person’s life. However, they also came to quite different conclusions.

Their social background was quite unlike. Freud was Jewish and his family life in Vienna (Austria) suffered from racial prejudice. When young, Sigmund witnessed his father weakness when a man passing by in the street threw his hat away in a disdainful gesture to which the Jewish man didn’t reply. Jung, on the other hand, grew up in the peaceful and eternally neutral Switzerland, born to a Christian pastor father who had lost his inner faith. Jung’s mother recalled the great Goethe  among her ancestors. Thus, while Freud experienced insecurity on the social aspect, Jung lived the inner insecurity of a troubled soul aware of the limits of institutions and collective values. While the former dealt with collective issues about power and stability, which will soon bring Europe and the Western World to the catastrophe of the Second World War, the latter was merged into cultural and religious references related the inner battle between evil and good, and the individual journey throughout the opposites, that would define the century and the next one, ours today.

Consequently to their different social and cultural background, Freud and Jung had diverse educational paths. Freud’s positivistic backdrop, in accordance to his times, is mirrored in his academic options. He graduated as a neurologist. As a diligent student, Freud searched the best professors to learn more and thus went to Paris to study with the most renowned neurologist of those times, Jean Martin Charcot. This experience made him turned to psychopathology, for he felt engaged by Charcot’s studies about hysteria and its susceptibility to hypnosis. Back to Vienna, Freud used hypnosis with his own patients, soon dropping it to build up his free association and dream analysis as the method that will give birth to psychoanalysis.

In the new scientific era of the end of the XIX century, Freud was the first one who took dreams seriously and studied them. He discovered that they are the result of disguised psychological matter that has been stored in the dark closet of the unconscious personal mind. What a person understands as forbidden or unpleasant is immediately repressed, buried inside. However, the banned contents pop up whenever life events and the inner struggle meets and turn impossible to the individual to hide from them. Periodically or chronically these contents bother the person’s consciousness and make themselves visible through dreams.

After decades of research Freud believed that two main streams wrestle with each other in the psyche: Thanatos (in ancient Greek, “Death”) and Eros (in ancient Greek “Love”). Human life unfolds between the tendency to destruction and end, and the one towards life and the continuation of it. Although the rebellious Eros gets frequently into trouble, being the biggest of all represented by the Oedipus Complex, Freud finalizes his theory stating that Thanatos is the one who, at the end, wins.

The unconscious sexual drive he initially believed to be concrete, thus the son would be sexually attracted to his mother and the girl to her father (in the Electra Complex), later one he admitted that it was predominantly a symbolic drive, thus getting closer to Jung‘s vision.

The unconscious mind Freud theorized is identified as the result of personal disposal accumulated throughout one’s life and whose contents come mainly from childhood. The matter of this “dark closet” constantly struggles to get to the surface, disturbing the conscious ego. Freud believed that this is the inevitable price human kind pays for civilization (“The Future of an Illusion”, 1927). Although we cannot completely get “cured”, we can surely soothe and alleviate the hardship of this human condition and transform the childhood traumas by facing the past issues and redirecting that drive to other objects and goals, process he calls “sublimation”.

While Freud was publishing his revolutionary “Interpretation of Dreams” in 1900, Jung was starting to work as a young psychiatrist at the Burgholzi, a psychiatric hospital in Zurich. From then on he studied Freud’s works and applied them to the treatment of his patients. However, the results surprised him, for the schizophrenic mind denied some of Freud’s assertions. The main problem was about symptoms and fantasies’ literal and symbolic sense. It soon become clear that the Freudian approach was too concrete and didn’t adapt to some of the psyche‘s aspects Jung was dealing with.

Through the free association method, Jung recognized relationships between ideas that patients could not had previously learned, neither by reading or hearing. Going further in his research, he found parallels among dream’s main plots and symbols of all kind of people: since his patients to American prisoners and natives of middle Africa. Not only that, he realized there were recurrent themes in the history of human culture expressed in mythology as well as in literature. Jung’s conclusion was that the unconscious mind could not be just personal. There‘s a deeper layer that is collective, belonging to each individual on the planet.

Jung’s first main work, “Libido, symbols of transformation” (1913), was a long interpretation of fantasies and dreams of a woman. This material had clear symbolic aspects that Jung showed to be related to the universal human symbolism. After publishing the book, Jung met the harsh Freudian reproach and the inevitable break up of the relationship. Because of the symbolic analysis and vast background knowledge in mythology, culture and literature Jung used throughout the hundreds of pages of his work, Freud felt confronted. Above all, Jung denied that the sexual drive Freud was talking about was concrete. To him, it was about a wider psychic energy that could be manifest as a sexual drive but it was much more than that and had symbolic aspects that related to deeper and important stages of human development.

From then on Jung and Freud’s ways diverged. Jung was dispossessed of his title of heir, also because he was more interested in research than in managing the growing international psychoanalysis association, and Freud became more and more concerned on holding tight his theory, which was dealing with a series of modifications each time a new member joined it.

Jung spent the rest of his almost 50 years of life working, researching and writing. His legacy gather an enormous amount of ideas, material and perspectives. Part of his works are still going to be published. He never considered himself the founder of a theory, neither he liked to have “disciples” following his steps, for the essence of Jung‘s psychological vision is the individual journey towards one’s inner unity. To him, individuals are driven by inner forces to a higher themselves. This is called Individuation Process. The uniqueness of each person is at stake every day’s choices. As it happens to the heroes of dreams, myths, movies and fairy tales, a person has to fight against external as well as internal obstacles that imprison oneself. This struggle, as the butterfly’s one wrestling to get out of her cocoon, makes one’s wings get strong.

The end of the story cannot be told in a few lines, also because there is no end.

I leave you with this image. You enter Freud’s office. He makes you lay down and sits where you can’t see him in order, as he believes, not to interfere with your process of opening up. He mostly listens and let you talk. Then you go to Jung’s office. You’ll find two comfortable armchairs, one facing another. You and he are two people dealing with the unconsciousness mysteries, the first one is experienced and helps the second to find his or her own way. Naturally, the analyst’s personality is involved. Jung doesn’t believe at all the he can hide himself from you. He bet on honesty and humility. To him, both people are in a journey, both learning, both discovering and both are influenced by the same force: the captivating intelligent unconscious mind.

Any psychology is good for something. But not any psychology is a solution. The psyche is made of layers. There’s a famous dream Jung relates in his Memories, Dreams and Reflections). He’s in a house and goes down the floors, finding that each one represents a specific time in history, each has its own kind of furniture. Eventually he gets to archeological fossils in the basement.

Truth springs in layers too. If we use the physics as an example, we can say that the Newtonian physics is correct and the Quanta physics is also correct. Each of them applies to a “layer” of reality, the Newtonian to bigger objects, and the Quanta to infinitesimals (and much more). The same is true for philosophy and other understanding of the world that I won’t develop now not to linger myself.

Back to psychology, I who am not Freudian, when I analyze dreams I realize that some of Freud’s concepts fit perfectly, I see them working under my own eyes! But I don’t turn into a Freudian because of that. Nor do I have Jung, Montefoschi or Hillman invalided. Truth comes in pieces, being the only problem the human thinking’s tendency to smuggle a little bit as a despotic totality.

How to choose the better “piece”? The better psychology is the one that allows a person to go deeper, see farer and understand clearer. It’s the one that provides more mental “clicks”, a larger awakening.

As well as in any field of knowledge, the most remarkable is the one that is able to explain more, whose principles are vaster and honed, that is, more universal. The better psychology has as backdrop a conception of humanity that allows a larger spectrum of actions and possesses a higher level of fertilization.

It’s important to observe what is the understanding of a sane human being the different psychological lines have. It’s known that Freud, for example, is an offspring of the Victorian time, he was Jew and suffered because of that, has a specific family history and much more. Freud is an individual with a story and a context, whose intellectual production is the brilliant outcome of all the elements involved.

When choosing a psychological line, a person, being aware or not, also lines up also with the backcloth that gave birth to that specific psychology. Like stages, each backdrop has its own narrative going on. A person should know it, because many times from it depends the advancing or the stagnation of her own situation.