Hello and thanks for joining us today. Today I have a kind of a special episode I brought together
two people that I've interviewed in the past. One is Dr. Kenneth James. He is a Jungian psychoanalyst
out of Chicago and the other is Dr. Eric Monsager. He is a certified Adlerian outside of Switzerland.
So we're all in different time zones. We're all coming together and we're going to try to
present to you guys some of the similarities and differences between Adler and Jung, the way that
they conceptualize cases. We're going to discuss some trainings and all kinds of good stuff. So
we're going to jump in. Well first, thank both of you for joining me here today and taking time out
to do this. Thank you. So we're going to jump in with, I'm going to read kind of a mock case
example and then Dr. James, I would like to hear your thoughts, what stands out to you,
where do you think you might see yourself going with this client in therapy? Okay.
Okay, so John is a 35 year old married white male who is asking for your help. For the last
few years he has been feeling down and depressed. He is not feeling suicidal, although he says he
wouldn't mind if he were to get in an accident or get sick and die. He says he was raised as a
Catholic but as of four years ago no longer practices religion and no longer knows whether
or not he believes in God. John mentions he has vivid dreams including a recurring dream of being
buried alive. He is currently out of work after being laid off six months ago from a job he
didn't really enjoy anyways. His goals are to understand his depression, to get a place in his
life where he feels some enjoyment again and to find a job. Okay, so here's a young man who is
suffering on all fronts except perhaps his marriage. He has lost his faith. He is generally feeling
depressed although he has dreams, the recurring dream is of being buried alive. Not sure if he
believes in God and he got laid off from work. So if we look at love and work we will hope perhaps
and I would certainly explore the quality of his relationship to his wife. But beyond that there
doesn't seem to be much for this young man to be holding on to. The relieving of depression is a
place where I think we would look at this from a Jungian perspective in a slightly different way
perhaps than a medical model. Because when I see depression first of all that seems like a realistic
response to what life has brought him up to this point. And we look at depression as a sinking or
a falling away of psychic energy into the deep parts of the unconscious and that usually presages
a reformation at a very deep level of the personhood eventually to reemerge. That's really
interesting in theory it's not going to help this man in the present moment. So I would want to
begin with a dream and I also would want to ask more and more about spirituality. Does he feel
the loss of connection to his religion or a sense that he doesn't know if he believes in God? Does
he feel that is a loss? Because if we could begin to unpack what that recurrent dream is suggesting
and if we can begin to find where the spiritual is still alive for him I think that there may be a
way out of this very deep, depressive place. I would with the dream I would move very very slowly
to get as many details as possible about what does he notice about being buried alive? Is his dream
consciousness in some sort of container like a coffin? Is he observing this from outside of it
but also knowing that he's in there? And I would really push for details. How did he get there? Is
he comfortable? Can he breathe? I would amplify as much as possible all of the details that he could
bring up from the manifest content of the dream. And in the back of my mind I would be wondering
what has been buried and the hopeful part of that really horrid image is buried alive. So if we can
find a way to get under the earth, under the humus, the humiliation perhaps, same root, of having lost
his job, perhaps we can open that container where he's buried and at least allow for some inspiration,
for some air to come in to help him out. I definitely would also want to know why did he
stop practicing his religion and what were the factors that led to that including how is this
religion related to your family of origin? How is this religion related to the religion your wife
practices? We don't know anything about children. I probably asked about that. And there's a very
passive death wish. If I can get into an accident or get sick and die. So the ego isn't actively
seeking to end his life, but neither is the ego connecting to any kind of core of energy that would
move him out. So that part is definitely a concern. I would also want to know what he's doing in terms
of looking for employment. Is he not doing anything? Is he trying and not being successful? So I'd want
many more details about that. Don't think there's anything else that I have down here. I also want
to know why since it was the last few years, why he's seeking help right now. Was it the loss of
the job six months ago? Is it something in the marriage? So that would be where I would go.
Okay.
Initial.
Thank you. So you'd start with the dream.
I would.
And really try to unpack and uncover that. And you conceptualize this very much as
a spiritual problem. Or maybe if you can get some type of a spiritual sense back,
whatever that might look like, that might help him catch a breath of air or not feel buried alive
anymore.
Well, and we're not supposed to have any memory or desire. But my desire would be open up wherever
he's buried.
And allow for inspiration again. It wouldn't matter at this point if it has a religious label.
But he is that buried alive. I'm not inspiring anymore. I'm very limited in terms of the air.
If we just look at it in terms of physics. So he's suffering from a lack of soon and asphyxiation,
which is truly a lack of inspiration. The dream seems to be telling us where to go in that regard.
All right. Thank you. Dr. Montagor.
All righty. Thanks, Kent. I appreciate that. You'll see a few parallels in that,
which we can maybe talk about later. But let me go through this. I pretty much broke it down by the
seven statements we were provided. And then I want to share with you somewhat of a Socratic
questioning process of what might be going on here. Some might be questions to him. All of it is
kind of a pondering. What can I find here? Because I'm going to be looking for his movement,
his psychic movement, from a minus place, a feeling of inferiority, into one of mastering that
problem. Now, the inferiority feeling might be obvious or might not be because of these terrible
circumstances he's going through right now. And this will give us, Adler would say exogenously,
from the outside, it gives us a look at what's happening here. But the pattern will be consistent,
whether it's this issue or other issues he's faced in his life. So in that regard, my intake
would include learning a bit about his family of origin, his sibling order, his parental alliances,
his school involvement in the past, and his early recollections. Generally speaking,
family of origin will give me a hint about his own gender guide and family values. The sibling
order, what his expectations are in the world, is he the oldest or the youngest or a middle child
or an only? Parental alliances will give him what he saw in his mom and dad, is what I'm saying,
or the parents that he had. What does he expect from adult responsibilities? The school is
the school involvement, even in a minor way, gives us what he expects to happen in unexpected
situations, especially first days of school and the like. And what are the ongoing challenges
that he faces to meeting things that he doesn't understand? And he has what the school process
would be. And early recollections are Adlerian's golden moment to reveal the psychological
movement and his sources of discouragement, which I guess are many at this point.
So the first point, John is 35, married, white, seeking my help. Now, I just want to say to you,
because I know Ken addresses this in a slightly different way, which we might get to,
the difference between psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counseling, things like that.
But if he came to us via our site, we emphasize in our website a depth approach. Adlerians tend
to be cognitive, the depth Adlerians go into the psychoanalytic mode. And so he, it would bode well
that he wants to go a little deeper, maybe he's ready to go more than just give me a job or
something like that. For the last few years, he's been feeling down and depressed. So I'm going to
be looking what he means by down and depressed. Very often, those can be differentiated by clients.
For us, the down talks about an action orientation or not. So is he down and out? Can he not get
himself moving? Does he feel like he's pinned down? I'm going to watch for these kind of metaphors
that he speaks from to see if the depression is holding him still in his initiatives and inspiration.
It might not be the same, but this idea of him getting himself going there. But then the depressed
down and depressed goes to me to the feeling level of confusion, chaos, maybe lack of orientation
in the world. Does his once oriented sense of life seem disrupted now? Or is he telling us that he
never did feel oriented and he's back and confused? And so I want to see, especially in regard to this
life task, the one of the big three, my love life can kind of refer to these, my friendships
with my others in life, and my work area. I want to see how this down and depressed feeling is
impacting him in that regard. What might be the purpose of such moods? And I think that's typical
of Adlerian. Intentionality is not the same as deliberation, although it's used that way today.
He did it intentionally, like he thought it through. That's not at all what we would mean,
but he has an intentionality that his whole psyche is oriented toward a movement, aiming
towards something. And this is what we're going to be seeking out. And we can look at that, at
least get a first beat on that by asking, who is most affected? Here comes the life task. Is it his
friends? Is it his workplace? Now, and is that why he got laid off, would be a question. Or is it his
wife and children? Who's being impacted by this? Okay, third, he is not feeling suicidal, although
he says he wouldn't mind if he were to get in an accident. I agree with Ken, it seems like a
passive death wish of some sort. Does that mean he's endorsing his possible demise to others?
That is, I won't be responsible for it. It'll happen accidentally. Now, that would bring forward
an existential thing. And it might still say something already about his belief in God or
the hereafter or something broader. He doesn't want to do it himself. Most Christian denominations,
I don't know of all religions, but the prophetic ones, Abraham and his pardon me, the Muslim,
Islamic, Judaism and Christianity would say, no, no, no, you don't take care of life.
So he might be hedging a bet on such a thing, but this, you know, it might be a valid expression
of this depression. Does John have early any memories in this regard? Might they be related
to loss or danger of loss or privilege and status? As he doesn't know what to do when he gets booted
and his recollections can show that, booted from a job, in this case. What does he remember about
being sick as a youngster and the care that was forthcoming? That's curious to me, because he
might, I don't know, he's been unemployed for six months. Is he looking or not? Is he expecting
someone to reach out to him to just friends at work? Is his wife doing it for him? Those kind
of things. So I'm looking, looking, looking for his activity level here, because that we're going
to have to hook onto to get him moving and inspired again. I like that word. Excuse me, can I? I'm
using it improperly. You can tell. Number four, he says he was raised Catholic, but as of four
years ago, no longer practice religion and no longer knows whether or not he believes in God.
Now, I took this from a literal sense. It counted four years ago, we were at the beginning of the
pandemic. So I use that as kind of a framing my mind here. What does John mean by no longer
practices? Have he and his partner stopped attending mass when COVID struck? We were all
sequestered. This was a big issue with many of the congregational churches and like. Was he involved
in other practices at the time? Was he teaching catechism to the kids or marriage enrichment?
They have those kinds of things available if it's an involved religious stance. Or was his
involvement pre-fungatory, a connection that suffered when the attendance, which is all he did,
was taken away from him? That's my question. Because that would tell me how involved he was
and what a resource his God might be to him. What was the place of God in his life before the doubts
arose? And what does his not believing in God change in his life? I imagine it does, or it
wouldn't have come up in the first statement, you know, that this is an issue for him. So maybe
something has changed. I don't know if there's been an affair because the wife doesn't see him
as masculine enough. Who knows? If it was a wife, we don't know that for sure. Five, John mentions
he has vivid dreams, including a recurring dream of being buried alive. Okay. I hope you can see
the approach that Adler would take in this period. Does John dream frequently? What are the intervals?
Do his dreams puzzle him? Or are they clear to him? Is he aware of his awakening emotional state?
That's the main thing that Adler pointed at us to. And the idea of not remembering dreams
isn't a problem. It's because there, Adler suggested that the dreams are mainly to gather the energy
needed to attack what problems you see in the waking dawn. Our early recollections give us kind
of a shot over the bow of how life looks to us. Dreams we tend to see as more anchored in the
here and now. So what does he wake up to? Is it horror? Is it panic? Is it calm and peaceful?
We don't know yet. We need to look in that. How might John see a solution to his difficulties
by burying himself on such a regular basis? Now, this is a little punch with Adler and it
wouldn't be asked in any way to make him feel uncomfortable. But we would eventually ask,
it's his dream, we would say. And where it comes from, we would say the lifestyle generally.
It's his patterned way of looking and he doesn't know what else to do besides bury himself.
And what? I don't know what he's doing in there, you know. But he does it quite regularly. And see
that periodicity of the dreaming, I would ask, did it come after fights with his wife? Did it come
after fights with his colleagues at work? He didn't like the job anyway, you know. So I want to see if
there was a connection there. What associations does he make with his own burial? What purpose
might be served by being buried before he dies at his own hands or by accident? This issue of
accidental death might come up again. Was he part of the burial service or not? Does he feel buried
by work, by expectations, by obligations in something? I was just trying to find the metaphor
there. What emotions does he awaken to? I mentioned this, okay. Now, the vividness
is an interesting catch-all for me because more like the neuro-linguistics programming people,
we would see not exactly personality types, but the one who is more visual or more oral or
things like that. I'm wondering what John is in such a regard. What do we mean by vivid? Is it
visual? Is it auditory? He hears the noises. He knows who's performing like olfactory, etc.
Did John favor one or more of these in his childhood? That's what I'm going to be interested in.
Just a couple more here. Thanks for your patience. He is currently out of work after being laid off
six months ago from a job he didn't really enjoy anyways. Was this his first layoff? I don't know.
How does this fit in the pattern of his life? What is his record of layoffs and returns? Is
there such that we could look at over the last several years? What is his awareness of his level
of responsibility for these layoffs? Is it the dirty administration or these creepy people he
works with? Or does he flagellate himself and say, it's me, I just can't hold a job? Or he's just
generally puzzled. I don't know why they laid me off. To which I would ask, how might you find out?
If he hadn't in six months figured it out. What initiative has he engaged in concerning the lack
of employment? Or was he unengaged and permissive of the management in the decision-making process?
Did he fight for his job or did he just roll over or something in between? What impact has the layoff
had on his general Lee feeling down and depressed? We don't know if these are directly connected,
but certainly one is not helping the other. I'd like to understand that better. Finally,
his goals are to understand his depression, get to a place in life where he has some enjoyment again,
and find a job. There's an action orientation. He says anyway he wants to get a job. All the more
important to find out if he's actually been looking or not. There could be, and we'll talk
about that, his shadow or other things that Adler and I talked about. What is going on here?
Okay, my question is, what is the level of what is John's self-awareness level, his introspection,
and his responsibility taking? How does he define enjoyment? He wants to enjoy life. I'm touched by
that because enjoyment isn't used so often. Maybe I want to be happy again is, and I think there's a
qualitative difference between the two, and I'd be interested if he sees it that way. He wants to enjoy
life again. Does it include engaging in his family? And could he be enjoying himself now because he's
got more time with the family? Or is there something there that he isn't taking advantage of? Might
it hearken back to a time when he had fewer obligations, enjoyment, you know? Although right
now he doesn't seem to be enjoying his time off. So with this information, an assumption of John's
discouragement is what we'd be looking for because that reveals inferiority feeling.
And then the counter-fiction we look for is with his minus feeling, he's going to be charging
mightily for a fictional goal, which will take away his feeling of inferiority. And that indeed
can be so aggressive that he's got to hide it, you know, in some way from himself. Not totally. We
don't think this is wholly subconscious, but he might not pay attention to it. And it could come
across as braggadocia or pity me or something like that. So that's what we're looking for,
is this movement that he and I could begin talking about. These constructs would be worked out in
close collaboration, co-thinking we call it, or co-narrating the lifestyle. These will both be
recognized in the style of life and be supported in the patterns of interactions with others.
Okay, I was trying to say here they're co-created in this way. Including another thing I'd watch
was this obsessive compulsions, which we borrow from Freud, I imagine. The idea is what is the
pattern that I do so regularly that allows me to feel the way I need to feel in order to employ
my lifestyle to feel better or about myself? Because those can be did-as-nowhere, they just
keep me fighting in the mechanism. Or with a little adjustment, sometimes a lot of adjustment,
is still the energy and the benefit that he might be able to employ to re-inspire himself.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you. With all of that, where would you, so you're keeping all of that in mind, you have all
these questions in mind, where would you see yourself going in the first two or three sessions?
Yeah, he would be watching for his early recollections and he and I would engage in
probably, I would, now this isn't all depth-deadly-reason, I would be curious about
the feeling he had in his recollections, which we garnish, and ask him is anything like that parallel
right now? That's one technique to see, it could reveal something there. The other would be in his
dream work, which I think is very helpful in this regard, be to say, you know, I'm going to be
to say to find out where the patterns are existing right now. Daniel, I would be very curious,
you know, did a dream inspire him to come to depth therapy? And where does it impact his life right
now? So I'd like to start getting an understanding of what holds him back and what allows him to go
forward? Does he allow himself to go forward? And if I may, we would talk about the encouragement
needed in a discouraged state to step forward when he feels ready and if he feels capable of doing
so. That's what I'd have to assess in the first three or four sessions. Okay, thank you.
Encouragement, I like that. Dr. James, what do you, when you hear all of that, what do you find,
yeah, what are your thoughts, what sticks out to you? Well, quite a lot. First, how organized it is.
We tend not to operate in quite that organized manner. And I'm particularly sensitive to that
because before I did this work, I was a mathematician. So parts of me are shocked at how I live now.
But I am both so much crafted to the organization, but also I would be wary of, and it's not that you
would do this, Eric, I would be wary of using a paradigm to understand him rather than allowing
the configuration of this suffering to emerge in, I think, probably a much slower manner than that.
The early recollections, I was hoping that we'd talk about that because that's an aspect of
Adler's practice that I find particularly exciting and useful. Probably I don't understand,
I don't understand it the way you would, Eric, but the idea for me of bringing the imagination
to early, early history. And when I did take courses at our Adler Institute here in the city
years ago, actually, shortly before I started my analyst training, and I was intrigued by the fact
that you could ask for early recollections, and then maybe six months into the work, you could ask
again and get different, different set of recollections, which I found very exciting,
because for me, that moves it into the realm of active imagination, what's being imagined.
I was also struck by how adaptive the model is. In other words, we want to help this man adapt to
his life. And it's not that Jungians don't think about that, but that wouldn't be what we would
lead with. In fact, if that were the issue, you know, how do we get this person to adapt?
I wouldn't use Jungian approaches. I would probably use more cognitive behavioral approaches myself.
But because he came with a dream, you know, the dream for me, in addition to what I said,
looking at the literalness of the dream, I would also want to look at what are the mythic
expressions of this particular dream theme. And as I looked at the case, too, occurred to me,
I certainly wouldn't lead with this, but they would be in the back of my mind. One is the Osiris myth.
He wasn't really buried alive. He was dismembered by his brother and his body parts scattered.
But he was awakened by the feminine. Isis, his sister wife, went down the Nile collecting all
of his body parts. She put them all together. She couldn't find one part, his phallus, which she
constructed. Some versions say of gold, other versions say of wood, and with which she impregnated
herself to give birth to their son Horus. So we have a redemption by the feminine. The other myth
that occurred to me, again, not strictly a burial myth, but it is a myth of going into the underworld
alive. And that's the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone is taken by the
hermits, and he is taken by Hades down into the underworld and asked to be his bride.
She consents and she becomes the queen of the underworld, which, of course, infuriates her
mother, who makes the world barren. And everyone is starving. And finally, a plea is made to,
I believe, by Hermes to the gods on Mount Olympus to do something. And so they broker
sort of a truce that for six months of the year, Persephone can remain in the underworld
with her husband. And those are the months of the year that we would call fall and winter.
And then Persephone is permitted to return to her mother for six months of the year
and Demeter, who's the goddess of vegetation, allows for food to grow in spring and summer.
So again, we have the feminine. And I did, it's interesting, Eric, you pointed this out,
I did presume that his marital partner is a woman and that probably wouldn't do that in my office,
but it's the result of 72 years of socialization. Yes, that's an assumption,
regardless of how the world is shifting. But either way, I'm looking at, and of course,
in analytical psychology, the idea that someone who is gendered and identified as male
has to get in touch with the feminine. That's a life task. Similarly, a person who is gendered
and identifies as a woman has to get in touch with the masculine. So I also see here that
the two myths that suggest themselves to me are both myths involving the feminine.
So I would want to know definitely what his relationship is like with his wife,
but what is his relationship like to his feeling function, to his sensate function?
You approached this, Eric, when you talked about the modalities of vividness and preferences.
But where's sensation and where is feeling, both of which are considered feminine attributes
alchemically. One is an element of earth for sensation. The other is element of water for feeling.
And see if there's anything else that I have. I don't think so. Being raised as Catholic,
it's interesting because there's all, I was also raised Catholic, all kinds of brands, right?
Catholicism has, again, a very strange relationship to the feminine. I believe Jung
tended to see this more positively than someone who was raised in the Catholic Church,
because Jung felt that the elevation of the Blessed Mother to the queenship of heaven
show that the Catholic Church was bringing the feminine element in. I'm not so sanguine about
that, but that's more my personal history. However, it is true that Catholicism is one
brand of Christianity that does at least acknowledge the presence of the feminine
in both Mary's, well, in many different figures, but certainly Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary
Magdalene, who may in fact have been a spouse, but certainly was a very close confidante.
A spouse, but certainly was a very close confidante of Jesus. So I would want to know
more about his relationship to the feminine and how that might lead to his resurrection,
not quite, but return from the alive burial. May I ask? Yeah. Thank you, Jane, very, very much.
Fascinating. Can you say a little bit about how you would do that with them? Would you be having
discussions about the dreams? Would you lead them in any way? Would he know about those myths?
He may not, but here I would use the fact that if people come to see me, they know I'm a Jungian,
and I do emphasize dreams. In my intake interviews, I asked about obviously family.
I asked about religious upbringing and current religious status. I asked about whether or not
they dream, whether or not they practice a religion in any particular formal way.
I would, after looking at all of the imagery around being buried alive and the feelings around
being buried alive, I would ask, are you aware of any... So I get his personal associations. That
would be what that is. But then I would say, are you aware of any mythic themes that deal with
being buried alive? And this is the aspect of dream analysis in Jungian psychology that we call
amplification. And I might talk about some myths that occur to me. I certainly wouldn't do this the
first time through, but we tend to continue to return to dreams. But buried alive is a big deal.
I mean, there's works of fiction about being buried alive. There are mythic themes about
being buried alive. The central mystery of Christianity is the return to life of the buried
Jesus. So I mean, that is the beginning of Christianity, not Christmas, but the Easter
experience, which was spoken of in resurrection terminology. So I certainly would look at
that as well. Is this being buried alive? It goes along with the idea of depression from a Jungian
perspective. Something is being held in suspension for ultimate return. I mean, if you're buried
alive, I suppose you could die, but you're alive. So if we can figure out how to bring you back,
that would be important. If, just like in depression, you're not always going to remain
with the psychic energy being drained, eventually reform and come back. There was one other. Oh,
you were talking about intentionality. The way we would look at intentionality is through what the
term that Jung used is telos. So what is the telos of this suffering? This man is obviously
going through a great deal of suffering. We don't know about the quality of his marriage,
but at least his emotional state, his loss of a job, don't know about his friends. He's suffering.
And when this much suffering is experienced, we always ask what is the self doing here?
And the self is a particularly enigmatic concept in Jungian psychology. It's very controversial.
I believe one of the reasons why Jungian psychology tends to be rejected in academic circles.
But the self is not myself or yourself. It's that place where we're connected
to all beings across all space and throughout all time. And the self, there's a certain aspect of
fate to it. The suffering that we're in, we look at as the self pulling the person toward
future wholeness. The term that is individuation or being undivided.
So I would want to look at that. Why is he going? And I wouldn't necessarily say that to him because
that could be cruel to say, well, why do you think this is happening to you? I wouldn't be coming here
if I knew. But that would be in the back of my mind. What is he being called to?
So in addition to the causal factors, I would want to know what is the teleologic, the
initial cause, the efficient cause, the causes in the past. I would also want to know what
teleological cause is, what final cause exactly is he being drawn to? And of course, the final
causes wholeness, but along the way, what is this suffering attempting to draw him toward?
This is lovely. May I respond? Howard, would you like to share a bit? Is that all right, Daniel?
So you just mentioned here at the end, teleothe, holism, which goes to the undivided piece,
which I think is what we share in common, although we have slightly different outlooks on it. But
this is very satisfying to me to hear. Adler pointed out early on and got booted for it.
That rather than look backwards at causes, we have to look forward to where we're going, the teleoph.
This is where the fictional final goal comes in mind, comes into the discussion. And what
creates the issue of holism, and I'd like to address a little bit that how holism
goes to integration and there might be individuation, but you'll have to correct you on that.
I guess they're not the same term, but they're related, integrating oneself and individuating
oneself. A little child, we, all of us, our brains come online memory wise, somewhere between our
second and third year. Prior to that, it's implicit memories we have, because we don't have our
hippocampus coding and figuring things out and date stamping, I guess, things like that. I love
the brain neurology, I'm certainly not an expert at it. So a lot can happen in the first two or
three years of life that we don't record, but we don't record cognitively, but we have it available
to us. And Adler pointed to that time as a different interpretation between himself and Jung.
As perhaps Jung saw this, or we say, was more generous with the idea of what happened in the
implicit period of time, up to and including the collective unconscious that Adler said for him and
his understanding of the individual, the implicit two or three years was enough, in essence.
But during that time, when I can now remember what's going on, I can also think about how
yesterday compared to today, and I start puzzling through what am I doing here,
or how does it work around me? Of course, it's not just this well developed, that a little child
in the implicit range was already identifying with mom or the caregiver and learning to walk
and conquer and develop the skill base. But when the memory comes online, they can start thinking
about what I'm doing and where I'm going. While I simultaneously feel that I'm doing
something, I simultaneously feel inferior to what's around him. This is not a complex. It's just
one of the originating feelings of what gets me up and going. And I think if it's a healthy
raising pattern, development pattern, with the help of the community, I don't have to develop
to toward my inferior feeling. But if I am traumatized in my childhood by any number of
things that can go on, I probably will look to conquer that because I've got to get in there
and fight. This is one of the okay. Now what I'm trying to point to is how do I develop that notion
of how I get through this unscathed and feeling as little inferiority as I can? I think this is what
always pushes the individual or pulls the individual more properly. How can I reach that little goal of
mine? And that becomes the unifying factor that brings the individual together in an integrated
fashion. That's why Adler spent a lot of time saying we are undividable, individual psychology,
individual. Can't pull us apart. And this is a major distinction between the two theories, of course,
that where Jung sees our challenge in midlife to individuate and perhaps all our life long,
Adler says the problem is we're already integrated, but we act as if we aren't.
And we creatively make our way through so that we can stay connected when we need to,
but assert ourselves when we can. So our therapeutic move is to remind people that they're united,
and that the seemingly disparate activities that are going on are serving a purpose indeed.
And now the challenge for us both in a gentle way is to explore what purposes might be going on here.
Yeah, okay. Thank you for that. That's that one piece. It kind of brings up those
areas of commonality. I really appreciate hearing that. And if you have a comment on that, Ken?
Well, I don't think Jung did very well with pre, the years prior to age three. The classical Jungian
theory, from my perspective, has no developmental component at all. And that was actually developed
a bit later by a British Jungian called Michael Fordham. So if you read what Jung has written about
childhood, it's really, I come from a developmental background. So I'm very confident in naming
that part of Jung's theory as weak. What Fordham talked about was, and here's where the concept of
the self comes in. When the infant is born, what we are looking at is pure self. It is an embodiment
of an aspect of the self. And then the ordinary exigencies of extra uterine life place stressors
on the newborn. And they cause, these are called by Fordham, deintegrative experiences. So if you
imagine life in the womb, all of your needs are met. You don't experience hunger in a normal
pregnancy. Then you're born and it's like light and temperature and I have to eat and I have to poop
and I have to do all these things. And these experiences are deintegrated. And so that,
metaphorically speaking, bits break off from the self. And these deintegrates of the self are what
form the archetypes from Fordham's point of view. And then the reason that's important is the
complexes which you alluded to form around these archetypes. So a complex is comprised of the
unprocessed material from interactions with the outer world that organize around the archetypes
around the archetypes and they give rise to the complexes. And it is, I'll use the word
identification, but actually it's more being overcome by the complexes. When the ego is itself
a complex, it's not structural. So, and the ego's archetypal core is the self. So these complexes
come along and they push the ego off its throne and they speak with our mouth and think with our
mind and move with our muscles. And so there is an identification with the complex. And so part of
the work is becoming aware of complexes and how they are activated and what feelings and behaviors
an activated complex condemns me to perform. And so that we work to get the ego to develop a
relationship with the complexes. So what Jung would say is that we are not individuals, we're
divigiles. We are divided. And that the individuation process, which is very relational,
is about getting all of these, it's kind of like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I have to identify
what they are and then I have to work with them. We don't get rid of complexes, but we bring them
together and the ego develops an early warning system. And yeah, go ahead. Well, this is nice
about the ego. I agree. Did I understand you say the ego is non-structural? It is not a structural
part of psyche. That's one difference. I'm very aware that Jung's on this side, Adler's on that
side, and you have a picture of Freud behind you, Daniel. So we're sort of, yes, the ego is a complex.
But in this, Adler may be closer than you think or we think because he also said it's non-structural.
And he struggled in his career to come up with this term, style of living, which he borrowed from
Max Weber in the end, which was who was applying it to more communities. But Adler said each
individual also has a style of living. And he interchanged the idea of ego and style of living,
but he considered them both malleable and non-structural. Yeah, absolutely. And that
the rigidity of the style of life is the repetition with which we do the habits we have formed.
And those are structured around moving us toward our fictional goal, which is not remembered as an
actual memory. It's not. It's a projection of how I think the world is supposed to work for us.
And in doing that, in moving toward my goal, I can keep people out or I can let people in.
And the society around us, the Gemeinschaft, if you will, I know you shared a little bit of
the impression about, is the second component that plays into Adler's movement style says we move
from minus to plus generally. Now, that's not a directional thing. It's from a feeling point of
view. And the movement is an impulse and the energy and the aggression that Adler used to talk about.
It gets us direction from the sense of feeling in community with other people,
mas o menos. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And the more we feel connected, the more we go toward the community
and feel safe within the community and cooperate with it and contribute to it and receive from it.
This is and that is, you use the term for that, that's adaptation of a sense, you know? Yeah.
But Adler would never say, just in case it comes up, would never say you adapt to any given society.
In fact, we have to have rebels so that we don't settle for a given form of our human life, but
that we're always advancing toward including more and more of our fellows in that. Yeah.
Yeah, the role of the other for Jung, you know, clearly relationships are valued. But
the cohort that we are living with, experiencing together also form an opportunity for us to learn
more about the unconscious through projection so that connections and well, connections of all
connections of all sorts, either connections of love or friendship or connections of enmity are
actually functions of projection. And it's moving, you know, falling in love is mutual projection.
But it's also necessary. If that hadn't happened, none of us probably would be here. Right. So the
key is to recognize I have to work to pull the projection back to see who is there. And that is
what allows for real relationship. So working on oneself is actually working toward and for the other.
Is that you wanted to comment on community feeling in relation to the shadow and the anima or animus?
Is that what we're seeing now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if we look at shadow and anima,
animus, which are undergoing a lot of change in this era of a kind of a deeper understanding
of what we mean by gender and sexuality, Jung died in 61. So, you know, we have to cut him
some slack when he wrote about anima and animus. And when he wrote about shadow, they were very
gendered. And we don't think that way anymore. And I prefer to look at them as two forces.
The shadow is that which repels me. And the anima or animus is that which attracts me.
And so the ego is sort of suspended between attraction and repulsion. We seek to reduce
that tension through projection. And other things to displacement and blah, blah, blah, but we didn't
need to go through that. But then gradually, as I withdraw the projections, and this is the hard
part, because it means I have to admit, this isn't the person I married. Of course, they never were.
We were each carrying one another's projections. And I need to think twice about the ones that I
label my enemy. Because I'm having them carry parts of myself that I do not admit in, right,
because the shadow exists in polarity with another sort of category that Jung calls the persona.
So as I develop a particular persona, certain qualities that don't fit are thrown into shadow.
But psyche is always wanting us to come to consciousness. So we project that. And that's
how we get enemies. And navigating shadow and anima, animus through our projection of those
things in the world actually can bring more of what I understand Gimai Shafka Fu to mean,
which is a kind of a being in community or being in society in a way that enriches both
myself and the collective of which I am a part. Yeah, well said. I appreciate that clarification
because it sounded initially and I'll go back to try to straighten this out that
the first movement for the other is my projection of myself on them. And therefore, when I clarify
that, I know more about myself and my unconscious, which sounds a little solipsistic. But I also
know more about them. Yes, yes, that's what I heard in that. Right. I'd like to share a little bit
about anima animus from an adler perspective. And I think it fits in with the dichotomizing or the
conjoining with the shadow. OK, we'll see. First, Adler got booted because he was getting crosswired
with Freud. And what he got crosswise with was the idea of the masculine protest.
Freud insisted that the neurosis was sexually bound and influenced and the like. And he said,
that's altogether possible, but only in a secondary fashion. Even Adler's early writings talked about
psychic hermaphroditism. OK, like transgender was kind of the idea. And they were struggling with
the actual physiological facts of that and also the psychological facts of that. And I believe
it would have to have been early on, but you may have been involved in those in distant writing
and stuff like that. But Adler's point was, it's not the penis that the woman envies of man,
it's the position the penis might represent. And you mentioned this earlier in the golden phallus
that brought forth another god, you know, sister of the light. He said it was the status
been given here that has always and forever pushed women down and said, you are a second class
citizen, just do the things that we insist on. Now, I've described myself, it wasn't always and
forever. Adler understood from Bacon and some others that had been writing that there may
have been a primordial female hierarchy. But the Vertings, who were a German couple who were related
to Adler, they said it probably went back and forth. If you look back at the structures of
history and the writings and like that, sometimes women dominated, sometimes men. But eventually,
men got in charge. At any rate, what Adler was trying to structure is saying, if we continue to
denigrate women, we can't come to a full equal community that welcomes everyone everywhere at
all times. That's the mindset. It knows no limits. And it's the one thing that Adler said,
we're very careful about over pronouncing things. The only thing you can't have too much of is the
mindset. Which is a sense in me that I belong here. These problems are my problem, are our problem.
And I need you to help me solve these problems. And in that way, it seems to me,
Adler's joining of man and woman is not so much psychically. He would say something like this,
I know it's not directly from Adler, but the role of a man is to develop himself to his utmost in
such a way that he senses that he can contribute to the community according to his talent. And the
role of the woman? Identical. Identical. But she will do it in different ways. Some of those may
be temperamental. Some of them might be structured, perhaps. But we mustn't look to any structures to
limit the person. But to allow them to contribute as fully as they can because we need people.
And when was it ever more evident we need more people collaborating on things today?
Not taking their own assignments or being certainly not hyper masculine or hyper feminine,
but also saying those terms are a little superfluous. And this is quite controversial.
I hope I don't turn anyone off by it. But in today's movement of gender,
inquisitiveness and trying to figure out what is gender, Adler always said it's a community
construct. It's a social construct. Our sex is something else because they typically can be
identified. But now we have an increasing number of ambiguous genitalia and the like. And that
gives rise to what might be, which could be unnecessary confusions if we were respecting
everyone for their contribution and what they wanted to do rather than what they ought to be
doing and what God intended for them. And this and that. So I hope that. No, that fits when you
talked about, I did not know this aspect of Adler's work at all. And when you use the term
psychic hermaphroditism, I was immediately thrown to, you know, Jung relied on alchemy,
especially in the latter part of his life. He worked on it throughout his life. But
interestingly enough, he didn't publish his work on alchemy until after Freud's death,
which always intrigued me. But in his essay, Psychology of the Transference, Jung likens the
analytic relationship and the process of analysis to a series of medieval alchemical woodcuts called
the Rosarium Philosophorum. And they are a series of 20. Jung only used the first 10.
But they he demonstrates how each of the images shows different stages in the analytic process.
And the final woodcut used shows a picture of a hermaphrodite
as the completion of the work. So the images begin very polarized in a gender manner. And then
there's a lot of mingling and the emergence eventually is of this synthesized figure.
And like you, I wish that these these theoretical motifs could be brought forth. But
I feel that field of psychology is not interested. The field is, you know, Western psychology.
But I knew Jung and now what you're telling me about Adler, we need
psychologies that deal head on with the notion of androgyny, hermaphroditism, the
co-mingling of the masculine and the feminine, whatever that means. As far as I know, Jung did
not though write about gender as a social construct. I'm kind of going out on a limb because I
don't know. I haven't done my own research in that area. But that's particularly exciting to know.
In my young studies, I was trained as a Drikursion, which was Adler's major
disciple, at least in the Americas and the like.
Challenge.
Exactly right. I am tickled by this factoid that you are sitting in Chicago, the seat of Adler in America and I'm over in Switzerland.
I know. I thought you're in the Holy Land. What in the world?
Same thing. But this androgynous, in my early studies, we use that as a term of balance and good strength.
It was a description of a man or a woman who had found a way to appreciate the other sex.
Adler never used the opposite sex. He said the other sex, not the movement in the direction of saying there's variety here.
That is not the most important part. It's just incidental.
But it's far less important than how we present to work out the challenges that face us daily in life.
They don't go away. We need each other to scope these out and to understand them and to have different perspectives like you're sharing today.
So we can rethink, re-approach and reapply.
Adler was always in kind of a practical way, I would say. Because it's the practical, not that it's any faster or whatever, but the suffering individual is what we wanted to help people overcome.
We are the authors of ourselves and our personalities and our lifestyles. Both the author and the artist, he said, the artist and the artwork.
And if we can learn that, all of us, we can help one another undo our suffering.
Yeah. Just need to tear.
So we have about 25, 30 minutes left. Dr. Montserrat, I know you mentioned you wanted to talk on the collective unconscious from an Adlerian point of view.
I don't know that I've heard that product distinctly yet. And then I know that we wanted to talk about Adlerian training as well.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I did make a passing reference to it and that was that Adler felt that this implicit period when kids are taking in so much information, which now Adler made a nod to, but we now know that the bonding and attachment experience takes place also within that time period.
Probably the first 10 or 12 months is going on. And so there's a lot of psychic energy going into there, you know, and the neurology being formed and the like.
And we felt that, I just said it already, that Jung elaborated more than he had to. Adler was all for parsimony, you know. Let's get down to what we know we can deal with and change.
It doesn't mean it's right, it just means it works, you know. We don't need to elaborate too much. It takes us a field of the singular focus of caring for one another and caring for the world we're in, you know.
That was that.
Yeah, Jung was not parsimonious.
I ran across a comment by Adler in one of his case studies back in 1916.
I'll just share it very briefly because he brought in maybe a provocative point.
He was dealing with a man who came to him because he couldn't seem to sustain a intimate relationship.
He had been engaged to a very competent woman, a very beautiful woman, he reported to Adler, but her education wasn't quite what it probably could be, so he really encouraged her to get a good education and evidently kind of badgered her into this
at a time when education for women wasn't all that popular.
She was going for it, but she became totally overwhelmed, had a breakdown, and we don't know much about her, but he broke it off. That was it. He couldn't handle this woman who could not handle this kind of pressure.
Now,
he
had a mother who was very dominant in his life, and Adler, this is shortening it quite a bit, Adler said, this man showed attitude and evidence toward wanting to defeat many women in his environment.
What he feared most was possibly being wed to a woman that he could not escape and her dominating him like his mother did.
And so he arranged, that is intentionally but not deliberately, his intention was to sack this woman so that he could say, I was engaged one time, she broke my heart because she couldn't meet my expectations, and don't ask me again about marrying.
That was his resolution of the life task.
Now in Adler says, Ward would have looked at this not only as a love relationship between, a strange love relationship between mother and son, in some kind of Oedipal manner or the like,
but this was also a narcissistic construct. In the early mention of narcissism, not when it has become so well defined today, but it was all about me, had nothing to do with her.
And Young would have called him an introvert. That's what he said. Young would have seen typologically an introvert because he didn't go out toward people. He kept it to himself and kind of managed it in a passive way behind the scenes.
Not adequate. I mean, there has been a whole lot said there. It would have been lovely to, you know, pick Adler's thoughts about that but it brings in typology also which is something that Dan had said we might talk about.
Well yeah, that's interesting because that man you described may well have been an introvert but that would have been relevant to how he was talking his life task.
But it is interesting that Young's book on typology was spurred by his puzzlement about the differences that had arisen between him and Freud and Adler.
And so the first several chapters of volume six of The Collected Works takes a look at Freud and Adler from a typological perspective.
And because Young, I think Young was puzzled that here were these people, these three people, all of whom are very dedicated apparently to the same goal.
But they fell afoul of one another.
Certainly fell afoul of Freud.
Yes, well said. More accurate. And I think Young tried to understand all of that from a typological perspective, including introversion and extroversion but sensation thinking, feeling, and intuition.
So it is interesting that to hear Adler making that reference because it just strikes me that they both knew they were trying to describe the same territory.
But their personal psychologies were very different and their personal psychologies would have an impact on that.
No, the, I don't remember the author now unfortunately but we have a very interesting journal article on the early recollections of Freud, Adler, and Young.
And to see how their personalities come forward in those. I'll be sure to send that and maybe Daniel can post it.
Yeah, yeah, that would be great.
I've got the collected works of all the triumvirate here and I'll go to chapter, or volume six, excuse.
Very interesting to see how he portrays Adler.
Yes.
Because he believed in the individual.
I'll just say very briefly, Adler saw the main components being the movement, the striving, and then the level of social interest. And so his typology would be, if you put it, movement from lower to higher would be this way, what is the striving capacity,
the social activity level, probably better understood. And what is the high and low of social interest. So you have a low low, a low social interest high activity criminality, possibly a high social interest high activity which would be the socially interested type.
And then the level of high social interest and low activity, which would be similar to the, this ideal type, with one who teaches or quietly philosophizes.
And he was probably in that with afraid of his shadow in many ways but what a great contribution he made to the world without, you know, making a splash. So that's what generally, and he also coordinated them with the humors, like Maddie can, and like, you know, very interesting sanguine was a socially interested one.
He didn't mean to do that. Seriously as much as he was saying, ancient humanity was after the same thing we are trying to understand ourselves, trying to see how we vary and differ from one another.
Although he says that the point of view see what are similarities, you know, and to the degree to remiss thing the sense of social contact with one another and the importance of that.
And energetically said, that's really what we have to be paying attention to. And what got him so, I think upset with Freud in the early days as as I was seeing the importance of the time, the social state and the like that
I can catch Freud's support for that, you know, yeah, and started to weigh on their relationship until finally broke. So, yeah, there's seems to be a trail.
Yeah, left in for this week. Yeah, you don't have a paternity as well. But it would in typology.
The horizontal would be data gathering, and that would be sensation or intuition. And they exist on a continuum, and the vertical would be data evaluating. So thinking and feeling.
So those are the four functions, the introversion and extroversion are considered attitudes.
And they had more to do for you with how psychic energy gets replenished. So if we're a finite open system, we have to find a way to replenish the introvert replenishes by going within.
So not with large groups. The extrovert needs a larger community to regenerate to reenergize. But those are more attitudes toward how to sustain the psychic system.
And then data gathering and data evaluation are the best wonderful functions.
Yeah, in teaching, it becomes typology seems to be eclipsing what I believe are much more.
I'm going to draw a lot of flack for this much more dynamic aspects of the theory, not because Jung's writings on typology were problematic. They weren't they were a dynamism like how can I understand you?
And, you know, how are you experiencing the world? How are you constructing the world? That's really what he wanted to know.
How did Adler and Freud construct the world in a way that was so different than mine that we couldn't. We're living in different worlds. But now it's become like a shorthand.
Oh, you're an introverted sensei or you're an extroverted thinker that, you know, that's like saying you're a Libra.
Yeah, it doesn't tell me anything. It might give me a global picture, but.
We've had the same thing how the Adlerians on birth order.
You know, you're a first born, you're the baby of the family, you're an only child, which became unfortunately caricaturistic in its application, which goes to the training issues, actually.
Yes, but Adler never intended that to be a typology, you know, interest.
Culturally, the general impact on people. And he says, as always, the only point of a typology is to get me in the right ball field.
Am I playing football? Am I playing rugby? Am I playing baseball? What am I playing here? Thank you.
Now I can start to use those tools to understand my team members and the like.
But I mean, birth order is very helpful as a first guess. Adler is all about guessing.
The stochastic method was let me think, what would it be like if I were in their position?
What would I be going after? Because this result, intention always brings a quasi result that is most wanted, but not a perfect end point.
So I can guess these things, the couple interaction, the family dynamics with individual.
I mean, there wouldn't be an individual with themselves so much as it would be fighting the task and not being able to accomplish a contribution or a love life or a friendship dynamic.
I never thought about it as stochastic, but I think Jung's methodology is similar.
Yeah?
Yeah. I mean, you don't come in going, well, I'm dealing with Aphrodite.
You kind of wonder about what's the archetypal ground and suffering?
And am I aware of any myths that could amplify that archetypal ground? And does it get me anywhere?
It's not a matter of characters. It's a matter of the mythos itself.
You know, if someone, let's say, is stuck in a Sisyphus, kind of, you know, I keep doing the same thing and have to do it again and I never get the result I want.
Compulsion, that's, yeah.
Okay, who condemned you? So what character can we look at in your life that, figuratively speaking, condemned you to this?
Because Sisyphus was being punished. And so looking at it mythically expands the ability to speculate on what are the forces this person has to contend with.
That's fascinating.
Yeah. How can we overcome them or how can we make peace with them?
I imagine that would be an excellent approach that an Adlerian could use, you know, when they see the person always creating the same fight with the boss or the wife or the partner or the child, you know, and dominating them.
Right.
Who condemned you to this? It would be an interesting question.
Right. What myths are you caught in?
Yeah.
Jung used to say we want to look toward, you know, the underlying mythos because what we're not conscious of, we meet as fate.
And, you know, how can we break out of that?
What I would add, if I may, in using such a technique, would be our attention to how this condemnation, in this sense, is serving the person striving for the high goal, you know.
That's that. So we'd be using it in a whatever that is, utilitarian kind of manner, you know, how can we help see what's going on here?
Yeah. Yeah. And we wouldn't see it just in that. I'm sorry. I don't mean to minimize it at all.
I mean, there's a rich way of trying to start the talk because I wanted to refer to this. I don't feel organized all the time, Ken, but when you identified what I did as sort of appreciative, but then I want to say the organization of itself.
I mean, we often do the analysis. We can do it in conjunction with our colleagues. And when we share the recollections or this information I mentioned at the front end, their schooling and stuff like that, we all pitch in as guessing, guessing, guessing, guessing, guessing.
And if these ones contradict one another and don't get an answer, that's okay. We let them go to Cassius. And now we guess, guess, guess, guess, guess.
It's a very dynamic understanding of what's going on and a really fun, you know, and stimulating interaction when we do team supervisions and stuff like that.
Well, you had me at seven, Eric, when you said, you know, here are the seven areas we look at. I thought, he's kind of lit. I loved it. All right.
Oh my gosh. I know that in practice a little bit.
I did. I knew when I was in Chicago myself, David Dalrymple, blessed member, and because he was one of the organizers of the accreditation process.
Yeah, we're both young in Freud, and he was doing his level best to get the Adler School involved at that time. It was always a battle because there were some that were very keen to it and others that wouldn't touch it because it smelled of Freud or something like that.
I don't know. Or something.
The Adler School or university now is a degree granting Institute, like any other, and they have relatively limited amount of Adler himself, but they do have a certificate in that area and advanced certificate.
The group I'm associated with call ourselves Adler in depth psychotherapy. And, and the training is called classical Adlerian so he went. Henry Stein was a is, I beg your pardon, he's still alive and well, or well enough, you know, he's one of our ancients, I can say that.
And his mentor was Sophia DeVries and she was a student of Adler's, much like Dreykers was a student of Adler's so there's different schools. Dreykers, as I mentioned before, developed a very cognitive approach, very effective one with families and school rooms, classrooms.
DeVries is more concerned with the larger family and the individual and how deep we could go.
So our, anyway, that's where our roots lie. But we have a program that covers roughly four years of about nine months a year if you were to count how many courses you can take during the years.
There's about 30 courses, and you can get, you know, several of those done a year. And it's a distance training, so the tape material 30 hours per course is sent and one hour a week is spent in conjunction with your, your mentor.
And, and so in that sense, we don't have any value to process right now, although we here in, in Europe, are going for accreditation by the International Counseling Psychotherapy Group.
We will have probably a paper to complete. And as, as with me, when I was doing my doctoral studies, we had to get published, that was a threat, we had to get published with our dissertation, and we'll probably do something like that because there's a lot to be contributed
in the Adlerian realm.
But it covers theory, it covers the modalities, these 30 courses.
It covers the use and how you do psychoanalytic training.
And so, as a person or you start with your mentors cases, and you analyze them and the mentor can be there to guide, not in a corrective way as much as it is in a fuller way, you know, you move into then the, the group, we have a small community, and we look at their
analysis and their work with their clients, and eventually the individual Adlerian depth, psychotherapy student has there, because they have to be masters or doctorate level when they come into the special life training, or just an adjunct, and that's it.
But what we're, what we hold most to is this mentorship, you know,
each of us who have been around a long time, then take students, either one on one for a year or two, or perhaps the whole training.
It's either way through and then they have to do training analysis, which would be with another one of our training, training analysts, you know, one of our teachers.
So, so that you have to have at least one of your four years and fully engaged with training analysis, we recommend to, and our practice is it goes on, even beyond. Yeah, your certification, you know, it's becomes a, even your lifestyle diminished or flexible we would say
lifestyle and stealth is a pattern.
engagement with the world that you've got great, so to speak, but the engagement with the world needs to be fluid and active and ready.
And so we're going to diminish this hold on the fictional goal and and contextualize our inferiority feelings again, and say, we can interact and be helpful by not thinking so much of our own self, finding a piece of our world and our activity.
I mean, I'm not asking direct questions about training but that kind of know it, I was thinking about ways in which the training mirrored ours, we have people have to finish.
Well, used to be finishing analysis before you begin and then start a new analysis, when you enter training.
Now they've changed it to a certain number of hours.
We were encouraged to have to personal analyses one with a man and one with a woman.
And then control analysis, which is part of training, it would be what you would call the training analysis.
And then you go simultaneous with the personal analysis but that would deal with sort of the complexes that get stirred up in your work with analysis, and focus on transference and counter transference type issues and issues of frame.
So it's evaluative, it seems like all the time but to get in. And then there's a big sort of midway evaluation that we call the propaganda coming.
Which verifies that the person is grounded in your theory.
So that under close scrutiny and supervision that can practice, and then the remainder of the training is called the control training period. And that's where they're in control and they're in supervision the whole time.
Yeah, but the control analysis is a little bit different. It focuses particularly on what is coming up in the individual around the cases that have come to them.
And then at the end, there is people formally present two cases, and they're evaluated on those, and a thesis, and they're evaluated on that.
So, excellent. And we coordinate that with
one, we have to have at least one examiner per exam that comes from outside of the individual society. So in my case it would be the Chicago Society so we would draw people from
Zurich or different places in the United States or Europe.
It's fascinating our ICPC accreditation is going to shoulder some of that stuff to evaluate the process.
Do you publish or are the theses available somehow?
Theses are available, right?
Depending on, most of the theses eventually get published in one form or another.
But some of the theses are more personal in nature or deal so closely with case material that had relevance for a particular theoretical development that our candidate wanted to make that those are usually kept a little bit more tightly secured.
But they can be translated, modified, so one can get across without too much divulging of personal material.
I have a final question for me, Ken, is about the modalities themselves.
Adler and his colleagues, Dreykers, among them,
have created a field where we do parenting education and we do family therapy different than the parenting education.
We do school consultation and teach school interactions.
There are schools, you call it individual education, now pretty much Montessori. Montessori and Adler are very close together theoretically.
And so those are available and we do marathon groups as well as this individual and couple therapy.
So all of that, and that is part of our training, we get a course in each of those.
But if I understand right, Jungian is pretty much individual, is that right?
Some of us came, like I came with a lot of child experience as well as family.
But I just came with that and that made me a good referral source of people needed somebody who know how to deal with kids.
There are some initiatives, we're trying to start one in Chicago.
There's a big one in London to train people to do child analysis.
I am not aware of any initiatives for family or marriage.
I do see couples occasionally.
But that, again, is based on my past training and then I move it through a young woman lens.
For me, I mean, working with couples for me becomes more of an issue of communication and facilitating that.
I certainly don't go in what myth is your wife and what myth is your husband.
I don't do that. Some people may.
And there are some things written on couples, but it's not a big, it certainly is not a constitutive part of our training.
The aim for couples therapy generally is to loosen the lifestyle, make it more flexible, which allows the person to pursue becoming a better version of themselves, to use the common parlance,
and to allow each of them to appreciate that in the other and to encourage the other to be who they want to be, not become who I want you to be.
The real game is changing, for sure.
And once we get the lifestyles understood and see how they interact and get this obsessive compulsion stuff out of the way, they find themselves generally with a lot of energy to pour in a different direction.
Roughly, that's a very optimistic outlook. It's a tough thing, but I think we have something specific to share with couples and the betterment and virtuous cycle rather than the vicious one that they come with.
Dr. James, do you guys do much group supervision kind of help Dr. Manzager was talking about getting together?
You mean like among the trainees or among?
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, yeah, there is. Right. We have two group supervision options. Our population of people who are in our program are divided into pre-propidotocum and post-propidotocum.
And there are two groups, two groups of supervision and well, there are two groups of supervision groups and two group processes.
So they process together because we're very concerned, might be too strong, but we know the importance of having a community of people who have this training.
Because it's specialized and it doesn't easily integrate. You know, most people think we're very odd.
And, you know, because I suppose we are, but it's very important because I think that also is a way to grow the field.
And the thing that I like to tell people in our program is Jungian psychology doesn't exist anywhere but in all of us.
And if there's any hope for its perpetuation, it's not in books. Books are telling us what has happened.
But unless this is a living thing, it's just the end of that.
We have to be sorry. We're kind of running over, but thank you both very much for joining us. I'm glad that you guys came together.
Thank you, Daniel. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You're a gift giver.
Absolutely.