Eight Frequently Asked Questions to Slake Your Curiosity

Depth psychotherapy and Jungian psychotherapy can address:

• Anxiety
• Panic disorder
• Depression
• Nightmares and disturbing dreams
• Personality disorders
• Career and vocational issues
• Lack of meaning
• Relationship issues
• Life transitions

 Self-analysis can be useful, but here are some elements it doesn’t address:

Blind spots. Because human egos naturally seek to preserve and expand dominance in the personality, we’re susceptible to blind spots. The ego maneuvers to block the growth of self-awareness when change doesn’t suit its preferences.

This can manifest as projection (where a rejected quality is seen in others rather than yourself); distraction and compulsive entertainment; living in fantasies or being mired in nostalgia; recurring achievement of dissatisfying successes; and self-defeating patterns. There’s a rule-of-thumb in Jungian dreamwork that it’s much harder to understand your own dreams than someone else’s.

Self-critical stuck-ness. While trying to be objective about yourself, you could misinterpret life events and dream symbols in a way that feeds negative patterns. For example, a man who grew up trying hard to be a good child with authoritarian parents could find himself as an adult acting against his own constructive instincts. If he tried hard to “be good” in self-analysis as an adult, he’d likely expand his negative parental complexes. In this type of situation, a knowledgeable outside perspective would help.

Complexity of dream motifs. Dream symbols draw from various systems of meaning and different layers of the psyche. Symbolism rooted in the objective psyche/collective unconscious references the mythologies of cultures since the beginning of humankind. Beyond that, there are subsystems, like that of alchemy, which have their own rules of operation, color symbolism, and transformative motifs.

Also, if a symbol is part of an archetypal folktale motif, then consideration of the folktale and its history will likely inform all of the symbols in the dream. In addition, a symbol could be subjective or universal; for example, a dog has several fairly universal symbolisms, but if you were bitten by a bulldog as a child, then a bulldog could be a different story for you.

Scaffolded learning. The term scaffolded learning means being able to make faster progress by receiving support that lets you step up a level. Then you integrate the learning from that vantage point, develop the strengths to sustain the new competency, and consider taking another step.

By receiving guidance from your own unconscious mind and your therapist, you have the opportunity to experiment with the information, try new things, see for yourself how it works, and integrate the new ability. In this way, you can learn more frequently from successes—by stepping up— than you likely would by pure trial-and-error efforts. The American Psychological Association offers a definition of psychological scaffolded learning at https://dictionary.apa.org/scaffolding. Also, the website sciencedirect.com provides a page describing the related theories of Lev Vygotsky at https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/vygotskys-theory#:~:text=Vygotsky%20believed%20that%2C%20as%20an,help%20them%20learn%20and%20grow.

Sometimes a person who engages in depth psychotherapy or Jungian psychotherapy can see alleviation of a symptom in 4-8 sessions. Yet, in order to have stable, meaningful change, the goal is to change the structure of personality. This takes time, and the duration is dependent on many variables. This is long-term therapy that works best when there is steady involvement and commitment. Research (Roesler, 2013; Shedler, 2010) has shown that, in comparison to other methods, Jungian psychotherapy and depth psychotherapy bring enduring results.

There are various ways to access unconscious material and to dialog with the unconscious mind. In talk therapy, moments of intense affect often reveal unconscious content. This can happen when talking about the events of the day, memories of the past, or reactions to movies, performances, art and music. It’s possible to work with this material through movement, sound, drawing, painting, and writing. Also, some people process strongly through body experiences (somatic and proprioceptive); these experiences can be worked with in a similar manner as dreams.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said dreams come from a core of your personality that knows your potential. He called this guiding inner core, “the Self,” and described it as “the blueprint of our potential unfolding and the path to greater unity of the conscious and unconscious in us” (Bobroff, 2020). For more on this please see Jungian Psychotherapy.

Yes, but working with youth isn’t my gift. I work exclusively with people 18 years old and older.

There are some situations that may not respond well to this type of therapy. I offer a free initial consultation to discuss whether this method is a match and to provide information beyond the FAQs.

My rate for an individual 50-minute session is $85, payable by check or ACH. Group and workshop rates vary depending on content and duration.