Analysis

When people come into analysis, they generally have a long tale to tell about their troubles: their marriage, their profession, and so forth.  Generally they say they have come into analysis for such and such reasons, and typically the reasons are based on the way in which consciousness sees the situation and on the kind of snare in which the patients believe themselves to be caught.  Very few people say that they have an inner problem, and even if it is an inner problem, they describe it more as “the restless dragon.”  When they come to understand that the solution is to be found within their own psyche and not in the analyst or in some outer thing, the worry diminishes, the restless dragon is appeased.   

One first accepts the situation as described above, but then one says, now we have to see what the person’s psyche has to say.  With that the person is forced to stop worrying and to say, “Well, now I am faced with the unknown and just have to wait.”  Then the waters of the unconscious rise.  That would be the flow of the unconscious fantasies in the night in the form of dreams and in the daytime fantasies, and the entire analytic work concentrates on that.  In that way everybody who starts an analysis drowns within his or her own imaginative inner activity.  This way we consciously stop worrying about outer problems and solutions and put everything into a retort, so to speak.  Naturally, after a while, the waters dry up a little, which means that some inner solution has been found.  Afterwards there is a natural tendency to return to outer contacts and outer life.  AAI 53

Analysis is a temporary, artificial state of complete introversion which is not carried on forever.  Also, the waters dry up – for instance, dream material lessens – and then the libido naturally returns to the outer world to a certain extent.  There the great danger is that people may just snap back into their former way of life, forgetting all about the hot bath they had in analysis, and everything becomes as before.  To a certain extent that danger always exists.  But, as Dorn noticed, when analysis proceeds properly, that kind of relapse does not happen: something precious has taken place in an inner conception, which Dorn compares to an inner child.  In dreams, as many of you know, this conception is often represented as a child, the Self being represented as a form of renewal.   AAI 54

Jung often said that when analyzing someone, one of the important things to watch is to see how much of the personality listens.  Some people are very cooperative with their ego in analysis, bringing their material and making a great effort.  But other parts of the personality do not listen and continue completely autonomously, as if they had never heard of psychology.