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I SELF-ORGANIZING NATURE First Principle of the Jungian Paradigm The psyche, through the process of psychic compensation, is self-regulating. In contrast to the conflict model of the Freudian Paradigm in which the struggle between the conscious and unconscious is ongoing and as such experiences no respite but that which comes through the intervention of the ego, within the Jungian Paradigm, the psyche as a total system is regarded as being self-regulating. The psyche, according to the assumptions of the Jungian Paradigm, is held to be, in this manner, not only capable of maintaining its own equilibrium, but also of bringing about its own selfrealization . Such self-regulation is more typically referred to by Jungians as psychic compensation. The paradigmatic progression from the Freudian notion of a psyche in conflict with itself to the Jungian understanding of a self-regulating psyche constitutes, as already noted, a noncumulative break. Jung, we should, therefore, not be surprised to know, even prior to his association with Freud, was already in possession of what would prove to be some of the key pieces of the answer to his yet unformulated question—the question of the self-regulatory psyche. “As far back as 1907,” Jung writes in “General Aspects of Dream Psychology” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche , “I pointed out the compensatory relation between consciousness and the split-off complexes and also emphasized their purposive character.”1 Going back further still, we see that Jung’s 1902 dissertation delivered before the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zurich touches no less on this question. Jung’s medical dissertation, which in its English translation is titled “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena ,” asserts that certain psychological phenomena associated with what at that time was termed somnambulism—trance states—far from being random manifestations, constitute actual “attempts of the future personality 23 to break through.”2 The self-regulatory psyche, Jung is saying in other words, utilizes trance states as a means of bringing to consciousness those hidden, still unconscious aspects of personality of the greatest developmental importance. Now of course a more common, yet no less intricate manifestation of the psyche’s self-regulatory activity is the dream symbol. Within the Jungian Paradigm, the dream symbol, as has already been noted, is understood to consist of, among other things, both personal and transpersonal elements. The former being derived from what Jung terms the personal unconscious ; the latter being derived from what Jung terms the collective unconscious . The personal unconscious is understood to have arisen out of those experiences which were once conscious and then either forgotten or repressed , or which, on the other hand, were never conscious but rather entered through subliminal channels.3 Concerning the latter, as hard as it may be at a glance to understand what is meant by such influences, we should understand that subliminal influences are everyday occurrences. Such phenomena will often present, for example, in the behavior of children where an unacknowledged tension is present in a child’s environment . Because children are generally more susceptible to the presence of such tensions than adults, as that tension passes into a child as it will invariably do with all present by way of a type of psychic osmosis, the direct and overt consequence to the child of the subliminal transmission will typically be problematic behavioral manifestations, such as out-of-control behavior. Problematic behavior thus erupts; disciplinary responses on the part of the adults thus follow, while the real significance of what is truly unfolding is lost on all present, children and adults alike. Now if, in continuing with this example, we were to think about such influences as being ongoing, everyday experiences for children, especially in their family environments, and if we were then to envision the cumulative effects, both positive and negative, of these types of psychic, environmental in- fluences over the course of many years, we would approach what Jung has in mind in speaking of the presence of subliminal influences in the personal unconscious. To summarize, we should emphasize that the personal unconscious is, as its name suggests, unique to each individual and consists of all that has been acquired, consciously and/or unconsciously, in the course of a particular individual’s lifetime. This, as we will see in our examination of the second principle of the Jungian Paradigm, is very much in contrast to what Jung described as the...

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