Development Of Symbolic Language

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

I often hear similar requests from clients, repeated at different intervals, their essence can be summed up in one message "What should I do?" very rarely does it sound like that. It often manifests itself in complaints that

Increased anxiety

Lack of motivation

General tiredness and apathy

and is rarely expressed as a complaint - such an open aggressive impulse - "Tell me, what should I do?"

Such states indicate a violation of the connection between the I (ego) and the Self (God within us)

Once upon a time, parents, being in close emotional connection with their children, were carriers of this projection of God for children. Then, in the adolescent crisis, for the first time, children seek their own meanings, which are necessary for the development of the self; rebel, trying to REALIZE. And instead of help, they face their parents, desperately anxious with the questions “What to do? How to do?"

This also occurs during periods of therapy, when the client's attempts to REALIZE the hidden, unconscious reasons fail and anxiety grows again, and then the usual mechanism of relieving anxiety by DOING! You need to do something - get medical treatment, get married, get divorced, study, eat and drink, etc. But doing this gives only a temporary release - how to eat a candy and satisfy hunger for a short time, get energy and pleasure. This method only undermines the metabolic system. And such a mechanism plays the pathological model over and over again.

Then associations come to the rescue, figurative, metaphorical language - a harbinger of the symbolic. And as C. G. Jung argued: "Now we do not have a symbolic life, and all of us are not happy from this." And then he writes: “We need a symbolic life. Only a symbolic life can express the need of the soul - I dare say, the daily need of the soul! And, since people do not have it, they will never be able to get out of their "squirrel wheel" - this terrible, banal, exhausting life in which they are "nothing but"."

When, in the course of work, anxious, aggressive and other impulses find their own abstract or real image, it must be exposed in words, since the image essentially contains the experienced experience (this makes it at odds with the mother's body). And conviction in words acts as the paternal Logos. Thus, in the space that has arisen, the I gets the opportunity to develop.

The final stage is the decoding of this image, i.e. SEARCH FOR MEANING. In other words, a symbol is formed and the inner symbolic meaning is enriched. This gives rise to the "Transcendental Function", which, according to Jung, regulates the connection between the conscious and the unconscious - restoring the I-Self axis. After all, it is this connection that underlies a healthy mental state. But it's actually very difficult to go through this path, only a true Hero can do it. It took the well-known Homeric Odyssey 20 years.

And using this metaphor, we can symbolize our search for a universal Monomyth for all mankind and walk our Path of the Hero.