THE JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY

I had the chance and the energy to catch up on some reading, and a section in Dr. Murray Stein’s book, where he is surveying Jungian Psychology, caught my attention. One of the earlier chapters about energy, and how the mind uses it to adapt to its environment, gave me an idea for an experiment to boost one’s control over themselves and be influenced less by their mental constraints by feeding their inner world less energy.

The book talks about how when a person is in the process of adapting to his or her environment, they use their mental energy (or as the book calls it, ‘psychic energy’ but that can be confused with less scientific terms)  from a pool of energy, and while generally that energy is used to adapt to one’s environment when that adaptation is complete, the energy does not just go away but begins to sip into their inner world.  This is described as a form of introspection etc., but one thing that we also observe is that after the recovery from the last challenge, a person goes into a stagnant state and begins to regress. This makes perfect sense if you consider that now this person is adapting to their new environment of less challenge. Hence the Roman saying, “comfort breeds complacency and weakness.”

I also have a hypothesis, in addition to this adage in the light, that when you are not expending energy to push yourself that energy that goes inwards will feed a person’s complexes, make new ones, and will feed mental problems. The way I like to imagine it is, that if the mind is a factory,  sending too much energy or resources that are not designed to receive so much will lead to leakage or breakage which will cause it to drain even more resources until it is fixed.

 Now that the holiday season is over, it is the best time to remind ourselves — that if we are not moving forward, we are moving backward. Not pushing ourselves to achieve our goals, no matter how trivial, will keep us healthy, and should, hopefully, prevent the problems inside ourselves.  During this time, we need to pick our battles and priorities, but just keeping ourselves fighting, can be a victory in/itself.