It has taken some time to decide on a theme suitable for my next workshop. At last I have come round to the idea of presenting a day which will begin in the morning on the more difficult work of C G Jung, which will perhaps be called 'Archetypes', and will go on after lunch to make links with this work and the current cutting edge therapy which is now called energy psychotherapy in this country.
Archetypal psychology can seem obscure when couched in the language of fifty years ago. But the fact is that archetypes are all around us all the time, and indeed our present culture is saturated with them. If I said, 'superhero,' 'zombie', 'alien abduction', Thor, Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Hercules, and many other popular ideas resounding in the culture, I would really be talking about archetypes. Archetypes are energetically encoded aspects of our culture, which it seems are inherited. They are themes and personalities which recur in generation after generation in new 'uniforms'. A hundred years ago, students would have been quite familiar with entities like 'Ulysses', the heroic journey, the underworld, the fall of the walls of Jericho, Dr Faustus's pact with the Devil, the Ark of the Covenant, the discovery of the sword in the stone - and on and on. Today's archetypes contain the same germs of ideas and characters, only in different dress.
These ideas, in turn, were often rooted in Greek, Roman, Chinese and Hindu literature and religion - depending on which culture influenced you in particular. Now, we unhesitatingly call them mythology - but of course, for the Greeks, or the Chinese, many names/concepts on this list were religion - taken just as seriously as the crucifixion of Christ and the thoughts of Mohammed are now.
The word 'myth' is greatly abused in our time. We think when we use it that we are describing 'fiction' - something unbelievable. Actually, however, a myth is not some kind of incredible tale, but an account of the nature of human experience, as seen in a particular age or culture. Myths contain germs of truth about ourselves, in other words, expressed in story form. We find in our clients expressions just like this of their life difficulties - encoded in modern life as, shall we say, envious stepmothers to be coped with, or difficult labours to be performed, or immensely tough life journeys with perils along the way to be faced. Sometimes, putting your finger on the appropriate myth being enacted, you can help to explain the client's dilemmas in a new way.
Jung took on board much of Freud's idea of libido, which however he called 'energy', since libido tends to imply sexual energy for orthodox Freudians (remember Oedipus?), and Jung thought that energy was a wider field than that - as do I. Oedipus was not the only classical Greek figure of importance! The others have plenty to teach us too about what it means to be human. Human thinking and experiencing is all around us in every field, just encoded differently for a different age, Jung says. And this 'being human' he calls 'archetypal.' It is, like everything else, about energy.
But now, helped by new psychotherapy practice and rapidly developing neurosciences, we are beginning to understand just how far and deep is the reach of human 'energy' in making us who we are. Energy in the sense of 'energy psychotherapy' refers to the 'subtle energy system', which is sufficiently subtle to be less than obvious in everyday life! Some lucky people are born able to see it, but most of us have to rely on trained sensing, imagination, intuition and the often remarkable consequences of working with it, via the meridians, the chakras and other entry approaches, which enable us to manipulate the system to our healthful advantage. We think now, for example, that 'the unconscious' (not a helpful way of describing that phenomenon, with hindsight!) is actually another way of talking about the subtle energy system. It is not 'somewhere in the head' but all around us! But as Einstein asserted, all of it is still energy - including matter itself. There is a continuity, if you like, between the body and its surrounding auric field - they are not somehow separate from each other. If you manipulate the biofield, the result is a 'trickle down' effect on the actual body - which can be a surprisingly influential impact. This can be extremely beneficial in working with psychological, emotional and physical disorders of many kinds.
So I am thinking in terms of trying to link up these two approaches to psychotherapy in a way that may be beneficial for practitioners of counselling, therapy of all kinds, clinical psychology and related fields. I will demonstrate some work with volunteers on the subtle energy system, and I will attempt to do a whole group exercise or two which should be fun as well as illuminating!
Which this space for more information.
Update:
The workshop will now not take place until the spring. I have deferred it for health reasons, but not abandoned it at all!
Update 2:
The workshop is scheduled for June 24th this year. Details from nwcounselling.org.uk
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