Teaching in Poland: Emergence from Repression

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

—Henry David Thoreau

This article reflects my psychological and philosophical orientation as a Jungian Analyst. Through my affiliation with the international Jungian organization, I have traveled to Poland for the past four summers to teach Jungian analytical psychology. Poland is a country, like many around the world, where only a short time ago this form of education was disallowed by the government. The reality of this fact made me conscious, more than usual, that culture affects our personal lives and how individuals are restricted in their development by forces beyond themselves.

In Poland the spectrum between the basic instincts and the complexities of cultural advancement are evident in a history of repression. The grain is harvested with scythes, and the village milk is collected in cans that we in America buy as antiques. The simple beauty of village life contrasts with the bustle of Warsaw, where people scurry around with cell phones. However, now West and East, old and new meet and through education and learning a process of emergence is occurring. For me, this validates what a Jungian Analyst said, "The real legacy of C.G. Jung does not so much consist of certain ideas about the psyche, but of an attitude. We have to try to explore the life of the psyche, to search for our soul, everybody in her or his own way" (Guggenbuhl-Craig 1).

For the people in this analytical program, the suppression of ideas, especially since World War II, has been a primary force in their lives and in those of their parents. Poland and its people sustain many projections from others due to the pain of the events that took place there—the repression from the Nazi invasion, the huge loss of life in the concentration camps mostly located in Poland, and the Communist takeover. Projections that are unacknowledged represent the contents that we disown and then easily put onto others. In order to remain conscious of projections and how they distort our view of self and other, each of us must work to own what belongs to us in social, cultural, and personal situations.

Teaching makes apparent these projections and the ways culture shapes how we define ourselves as well as how we work analytically. While culture affects learning, it also reveals our distinctive personal and collective shadows. The shadow is a term used in Jungian psychology to denote the repressed qualities for good or ill that the ego cannot admit into consciousness. "It is the very stuff of the soul, the interior darkness that pulls downward out of life and keeps one in relentless connection with the underworld" (Hillman 56). In essence, recognizing the shadow as our own rather than projecting it onto others promotes the analytic journey linking us with the unconscious, both personally and collectively.

Analysis itself is a way of thinking and a philosophy that inherently penetrates the formerly forbidden. The students in this program are professionals in the fields of psychology and psychiatry yet are used to being told what to do and how to think, a passive attitude that does not promote exploration of the analytic depths or reflect the questioning or assertion typical of America.

While teaching I am translated one paragraph at a time, English to Polish and Polish to English. Nothing can be taken for granted, and the nuances of language and ways of phrasing must be explained to encourage the broadening of consciousness that can occur in us all. Like the language of the psyche, the translations make us conscious of what could become unconscious and demonstrate our mutual projections to find out what is true and what is not in a process that parallels the analytic one.

At the seminar lunch breaks we...