{"id":26154,"date":"2023-06-16T11:14:16","date_gmt":"2023-06-16T08:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/art-therapy\/depression-extinguished-imagination\/"},"modified":"2023-06-16T11:14:16","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T08:14:16","slug":"depression-extinguished-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/depression-extinguished-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"Depression: extinguished imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"8c2b937e9068<\/a>
Joy: the cure for anxiety
(Chapter 14 of The Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology After the Brain Sciences)
Jeanette Paris<\/p>\n

Published in: G. Paris “Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth psychology after neuroscience”, London: Routledge, 2007
About the Author: Jungian psychologist who teaches archetypal and depth psychology in Santa Barbara, California and is director of the Mythological Research Foundation. Author of the books “Pagan Meditations” and “Pagan Beauty”<\/p>\n

Freud wrote about the “death of desire”, but he could easily see depression as “sleeping desire”, the desire to remain numb, to feel almost nothing, to keep the inner monsters sleepy, calm, inconspicuous, inaudible, just like the desire to be “good girls” to meet generally accepted expectations. The lethargy of the imagination often hides a disturbed need for dependency, envy of the fate of Sleeping Beauty, a yearning for a paradise childhood in which the world cared for me, not I for it. Resisting depression is inappropriate; it should rather be ascertained where the imagination begins to revive. Once awakened, it will shake up all the inner monsters that depression has lulled. Anxiety is transformed into fear, allowing action. With the awakening of the imagination, the salt from the tears enters every wound and signals the return of fear and horror. They enhance the excitement and drama, bring in a whole complex of characters that require an explanation for every game that plays out in the soul.<\/p>\n

It can be assumed that a citizen of Ancient Greece, getting into dramatic events, asked: \u201cWhich deity did I offend? What and in relation to whom can I correct? In psychological terms, this is like asking, \u201cWhich experience am I trapped in? What is the intrigue? What’s the genre? What act? What’s the catch? What series, and in what production am I playing? Am I in the story of a poor little victim, or rather in a heroic save-family-job-people-planet episode? Do I feel like a tortured hero trying to fight one test after another, or like a desiccated old maid who spent her whole life looking for the perfect love and never found it? Am I leaning towards the role of a big child who refuses to grow up, or an eternally generous breadwinner, devoured by too old children who take up all the living space? Or am I the slacker son who comes home and\u2014surprise! – nobody is at home; they all left to play golf and there is no one to take care of me. Perhaps I am in my family – an outstanding person, a winner, I play in a success story, I am a champion, and I am completely tormented by the fact that my entire environment communicates with my mask, and no one, including me, no longer knows who I am.<\/p>\n

The repertoire of stories is endless. Mythology conveys a very long and incredibly varied list of recurring life motifs of human existence. The number of variants of each repeating fragment is as infinite as the variations of a piece of music. Offering all these possibilities, it requires good imagination to work out the best scenario for any given situation. Only imagination can offer a competent compromise between the fantastic world of inner life and external objective reality. This alignment is what Jung called the process of individuation. He envisioned it as a gradual integration of the shadow, an acquaintance with one’s inner demons, constantly matching the demands of the ego with a Self-orientation, establishing friendly relations between consciousness and the unconscious. Individuation is a different understanding of what the ancient Greeks considered the search for harmony, lasting a lifetime, or what others called the achievement of peace with the deities. Jung’s follower, James Hillman, made a distinction between Jung and the ancient Greeks, showing people’s constant desire to “achieve a mental image” of what exists within. <\/p>\n

Most, but not all, psychotherapists agree that a client who lacks a lust for life can find the desired relief in targeted drug treatment. Most clinicians, but not all, can hear the silent moan expressed in the symptom. Thousands of prescriptions are written every day to reduce depression, the effects of stress and anxiety. If medicines can alleviate mental suffering, why not use them? But trying to look into the subconscious is not a pleasant trip to the pharmacy, but a lifelong search for greater awareness, the pursuit of humanity. Many of the symptoms systematized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness (DSM) can be seen as forms of communication, as signs, as the symbolic language of the suffering soul. Refusing food due to the death of someone who cared is a symbolic act. Depth psychology points out that there is a significant risk in treating these kinds of manifestations as symptoms. Imagine someone trying to consider drowsiness, a wonderful feeling of its kind, only as a symptom of fatigue that is cured by a night’s rest. Such a person may subsequently lose the ability to appreciate the eternal poetry of the night, as well as the great importance of sleep. He’s trying to go from being a man to a machine in need of maintenance if he doesn’t plug the hole with eight hours of twenty-four sleep. Night does not care about the clinical condition. The survival of any culture requires artists to do their work, and we, depth psychologists, to master the art of hearing the subtle song of the soul, keeping alive the psychological meaning of such words as rest, night, love, joy, death. <\/p>\n

The symptoms are strikingly similar to those of a theatrical production. Like all art forms, they express their meaning through emotions. One of the indications that a symptom has appeared is the diminution of our usual susceptibility; one could even say that the symptom is lethargy, just as night is a decrease in activity, and winter is a slowdown in all processes. The psyche has a seasonal decline in activity, this is the time of experiencing weakness, when the ego is broken and hands down. This deceleration is necessary in order to collect the bits of knowledge that are scattered along the winding road, at first it seems impossible to make this way. What to explore if there is no sequence of changes, digressions that increase and diversify the experience? What does a lover, a gourmet, an esthete do, if there is no one to have a good time with, who will go inside the soul to experience, slowly advancing, this joy? The art of psychology creates, changes, uses internal images, energy that saturates life and brings peace. At worst, you can go through life like a hurried tourist visiting the Louvre on roller skates to get it over with. As soon as such a person ceases to run faster than anyone else, he will see that stopping for pleasure will make it quite possible to renew his senses. <\/p>\n

Aphrodite – the Greek goddess of beauty and sensuality – had the divine ability to return innocence every spring, performing a ritual of purification in the river. That is why a successful analysis means duration, rituality, slowness, relaxation, a purification of the senses in the deep waters of the subconscious, which has the power of renewal. It cannot happen if mental suffering is considered only as a symptom and not as a symbol. When a cure is needed, it must happen as quickly as possible: here is my broken bone, my broken artery. Please treat the wound immediately, do it quickly. But the unconscious – let’s call it imagination – is interested, it is challenged, problems, riddles, puzzles, painful experiences, ideas and questions are awakened. In this essential understanding, all symptoms are at the same time significant symbolic messages, letters that want to be read. A cure that chemically removes a symptom can also remove a symbol, leaving us with an “adjusted” soul, like the adjusted background music in a coffee shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joy: the cure for anxiety (Chapter 14 of The Wisdom…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1000],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-therapy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26154\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nazarevich-art.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}