Healing Within the Blur

Greetings to all in this very new 2025! I am tracking my need to show up more often in shorter sound bites. Still sorting through what am I doing here with this, my passion project. As usual, it seems I am still working to distill out a ten page, graphic comic like guide/representation to understanding psyche, our universal challenge, and a pathway to healing born out of the mystery, the reality of the numinosum. Note the posts here are inventoried to the right, below the fixed pages. I try to use hyperlinks to provide easy access to other essays and what I call source quotes. Hopefully you can search within an offering and find your way around. Feel encouraged to talk to me if inspired…

Today we begin with my opening assertion about this symbol system:

These practice-informed symbolic representations reflect intuitive connections. With regards to the validity of the system, reflecting my 50 plus years of clinical practice and process observations, I appreciate this observation by Jung cited by Helene Shulman (Living at the Edge of Chaos, 1996, p.18.):

“All knowledge is the result of imposing some kind of order upon the reactions of the psychic system as they flow into our consciousness … it is not a question of … asserting anything, but of constructing a model, which opens up a promising and useful field of inquiry. A model does not assert that something is so; it simply illustrates a particular mode of observation.” (The Structure and Dynamics of Psyche, Volume 8, par. 362, 381)

We will start with an orientation to Jung’s Ego-Self Axis. I believe this plate captures more on a page than any of the others. It introduces the foundational idea the Ego is in reality the center of the conscious personality, but, the Self is the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious). We can see the importance of usual and unusual episodes of unbearable experiences in activating core dissociative defenses, in relationship to how those get buried somewhere in our bodies. These impossible to metabolize at the time episodes, swallowed whole, encapsulated, split off from consciousness, and uninventoried, constitute a special category of sub-symbolic, incomplete initiatory experiences. From this perspective we will then drop into the deep end with imagining together, don’t hold your breath, the nucleus of a complex in contrast to Representations of Interactions Generalized over time (RIGS).

Recall the nucleus of a complex is simply the scene of a wounding, in the act of being wounded… if/when we have the opportunity to explore this together, I will be calling for important memories of emotionally charged experiences. We will practice listening carefully and each try to drop into the scene as presented, have the experience of taking a look around, noticing what we each can about the ancestral, archetypal layer of collective/genetic memory.

With the help of the symbol system, and your stories, we will think together about what it takes to complete the initiations. And how psyche is working 24-7 to support us in our own timing.

Now it’s time to say goodbye…

Explore posts in the same categories: Author, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically

This entry was posted on January 3, 2025 at 8:36 am and is filed under Author, Complexes and More, Connecting the Dots Series, Individuation, Learning to Think and Work Symbolically. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: ego-Self axis, Experiential State, Philip Bromberg, RIGs

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