Carl Jung Archives - Daniel Davis, LMFT

Dreams

January 17, 2017 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

My dreams never cease to dazzle me with the insight, emotionality, and creativity that are hidden within them. I awake with such gold and jewels. My life is more beautiful, because of the time I take to examine my dream life. Our dreams are trying to convey inner truths to us. There is a reality to our psychic life that can be transformative when we embrace it.

Yet where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Virtual Reality is highly valued. Science is our religion and technology is our god. Sadly, our dreams are forgotten and discarded as useless trash. When we have the courage to explore our dreams with wisdom and respect, then valuable wisdom can be gained.

Carl Jung said at the end of his life, “I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. . . There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole….I have failed in my foremost task: to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.”

Please watch this video by Manuel Costa about dreams:

Blog 61

The Self

January 10, 2017 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

“It is not the end of the world,” my dad would say. Often, the crises we perceive as so ominous are not the end of our life as we know it. Sometimes an event, such as disease, divorce, or death can deliver a blow so severe that our life changes. Life can then seem meaningless.

Yet amidst this devastation, we may find something of value. Carl Jung said, “There is nothing so bad that some good can’t come of it.”

That which breaks our hearts, makes it larger. In this breaking, we may find a mysterious wholeness or – in other words – The Self.

The Self is the whole or total personality. A whole personality embraces the unconscious part of our mind which includes our spiritual center. A connection between our self awareness (also called “ego”) and this spiritual (psychic) center is of vital importance for our health and well-being, asserts John Sanford.

Please watch this video by Manuel Costa about the Self and living with a sense of purpose:

Blog 60

What Kind of Attitude do You Have?

May 10, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

“Sensation tells us something exists; thinking tells you what it is; feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not; and intuition tells you (from where) whence it comes and where it is going,” writes Carl Jung.

Our attitude determines the direction and order of our psychological functions: sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. There are four attitudes: Introverted, Extraverted, Judging, and Perceiving. Each person who prefers introversion is primarily concerned with the inner world. Someone who prefers extraversion is oriented to events primarily in the outer world. Someone who prefers judging is oriented to the outer world in an organized and methodical way. One who prefers the perceiving attitude is open and free flowing with the outer world.

There are eight psychological types:

Extraverting sensation – People who prefer this type are primarily concerned with objective reality, with how things really are. Their constant pursuit is to “have sensations and enjoy them if possible,” says Jung.

Introverting sensation – Emma Jung (who preferred introvert sensation) described herself as being like a highly sensitized photographic plate. Every detail of a situation is observed and these can be recalled at will.

Extraverted thinking – People who prefer Extraverted Thinking are good at “solving problems, reorganizing businesses, clarifying issues, and sorting the grain from the chaff,” writes Anthony Stevens. They are often concerned with outer conditions – not theories or ideas.

Introverted Thinking – People who prefer Introverted Thinking show little interest in events that take place in the outer world but basically are concerned with ideas and theories. They want to understand impersonal and objective truth. They seek justice and value fairness.

Extraverted Feeling – People who prefer Extraverted Feeling value what is culturally acceptable. They are easy to get along with. They are able to read others and then respond by caring for others when possible.

Introverted Feeling – Those who prefer Introverted Feeling have a clear sense of their internal values and generally keep to themselves. They exert influence on others by embodying their internal values.

Extraverted Intuition – People who prefer Extraverted Intuition quickly see the possibilities in a given situation. They identify patterns and connections and seek to reshape their environment.

Introverted Intuition – Individuals who prefer Introverted Intuition focus on unconscious images, like dreams and visions. They have difficulty communicating about these images and may uses abstract symbols to explain their insights.

We all have different gifts that we bring to our families, marriages, workplace, and communities. The better we are able to see each other’s gifts and collaborate together, they more we are able to accomplish together. Understanding psychological types helps us to relate well and be successful. If we observe what we do, say, and think, we will be better students and workers. Who are you?

If you want an assessment to understand your psychological type, please consider contacting me at danieldavislmft@gmail.com. Also, please watch this video by Gretchen Sterenberg on note making:

Blog 55

What Type of Person are You?

May 3, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

“Psychological Type is nothing static – it changes in the course of life,” writes Carl Jung.

“We cannot safely assume that other people’s minds work on the same principles as our own. All too often, others with whom we come in contact do not reason as we reason, or do not value the things we value, or are not interested in what interests us,” writes Isabel Briggs Myers.

All of us humans have the same psychological equipment to perceive what happens inside us as well as outside us. We use four different kinds of building blocks to form ideas about our experiences and decide how to respond to events – sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition. Virtually every one of us is born with a preference for one of these four psychological functions in a descending order. We will use all four of these functions, but our preference will determine how much we will use sensation, thinking, feeling and intuition.

Sensation is simple to explain – how one relates with material things in the world. When a person who prefers sensation type person enters a room, he evaluates the things in it. “There is a solid black table and wooden shelves. The walls are brick, and ceiling has exposed beams.”

The thinking function is rational, cool, and logical. One who prefers thinking will interpret events as they happen, working what it means. This rational psychological function is high valued and almost exclusively taught in North American schools. Our capacity to think is tested and an I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient) labels us. Our place in the modern American world is almost exclusively determined by our ability to think, says Robert Johnson.

The feeling function is a way of judging using values. One who prefers feeling function responds to what happens with value judgment. “Awesome concert, Dude!” “This class bites!”

This name can be confusing, because the term “feeling” function is often confused with emotion or affect. Feeling, in this sense, is the capacity to place value on people, places, things, and events. For many, the feeling function is the orphan of these four and largely misunderstood and haphazardly named.

The person who prefers intuition is able to ‘see’ the whole picture, asserts Anthony Stevens. This is a mysterious process. Intuition is very hard to define. “It is an extraordinary and out of the world capacity of knowing without knowing how one knows,” says Robert Johnson.

These four functions are like radio stations, we can either use our thinking function or our feeling function at one time. Jung assumes that we are born with a preference for one of these. Due to this preference, we will often develop skills related to one of these functions. If we are not supported in our family and schools to develop our preferred functions, then we may have difficulty. For the psychological functions that we naturally prefer may be undeveloped. We are like a fish trying to fly. A fish needs to swim; this is what they are naturally inclined to do.

Balancing our brain helps us to use more of our mind. It is very helpful to learn over time to access all our psychological functions. Please consider watching this video on the importance of balancing your brain:

Blog 54

Anima and Animus

April 12, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

Have you ever been carried away with a mood? We can be swept away with our emotions and thoughts. A mood can come over us, and we may look back and think, “I just wasn’t myself today.”

One way to think about these emotional storms is that there is a psychological benefit to these reactions. Carl Jung identified the animus and anima as parts of ourselves that erupt and interfere with our relationships and work. A woman has an animus, and a man has an anima. June Singer writes that “anima and animus are those unconscious part of ourselves that carry the mystery of sex which is not ours.”

How we identify with our masculine gender role or feminine gender role can vary greatly from one culture to another. It is obvious that there are – in fact – differences between men and woman. Whether these differences are more psychological or physical is debatable as well as complex. Yet it is obvious that men and women are different.

These differences show up in our dreams and fantasies. The anima shows up in a man’s dreams as an image of a woman, whereas the animus shows up in a woman as an image of a man. This is because the anima and animus are related to what is the opposite of our conscious attitude. When we mature, we develop the opposite attitude to what we cling to in our youth. “Men have dared to discover their vulnerability and their feeling side, while women – more confident now of their strengths – are beginning to take risks which would have frightened them before,” writes June Singer.

Animus is defined as a “usually prejudiced and often spiteful or malevolent ill will” or a “strong feeling of dislike or hatred.” Aminus is the masculine form of the word soul in latin. Yet the animus is not as much masculinity repressed as it is the unconscious other that a woman is prevented from being in her daily life. The part of herself that is furthest from her waking life is what makes up a woman’s animus.

Carl Jung describes the animus as a strange passivity. “In the depths of the woman’s being, the animus whispers: ‘You are hopeless. What’s the use of trying? There is no point in doing anything. Life will never change for the better.’”

When a woman is able to separate herself from her animus, she is able to see that part of herself objectively. She is able to be detached and just notice these negative thoughts and feelings. She does not fall into the false belief that these thoughts are her thoughts. When she simply observes these thoughts and realizes that her response to them makes all the difference, she is able to main a healthy detachment.

A woman’s animus assists her in becoming a complete person by shifting repressed energy into active and creative pursuits. The animus does have negative qualities such as “brutality, recklessness, empty talk, and silent, obstinate evil ideas.” Yet the animus also has a positive and valuable side. The animus can “build a bridge to the Self through creative activity.”

For a man, the anima, represents his unconscious feminine other. The anima symbolically represents the eternal feminine. For a woman, the animus represents her unconscious masculine. Conversely, the animus stands for the eternal masculine. Robert Johnson writes that the “anima and the animus function most effectively for us as mediators between the conscious and unconscious parts of personality.”

When one learns to work with the animus or anima, one discovers a certain kind of genius within oneself. Please watch is short video by Judith Peterson on the animus and learn how to work with this energy to improve how you feel, behave, and feel:

Blog 51

Do You have a Faith that Works?

March 28, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.” Quote by Carl Jung

Our lives have different eras. What was true when we are young is a lie at midlife. When we are young our lives are focused on educating ourselves, obtaining work, and finding love. These are the appropriate tasks of our early life. We may get married and have children.

Our initial experience of religion is often about certainty. It creates meaning about being a separate individual. If we practice the correct rituals and believe the correct rules – dogma – then we will be saved. Someone translates other people’s experience of God. Yet this level of religion does not change the consciousness of the person. It is all about me – saving myself. This level of spirituality consoles the self and this is needed. It defends us. The problem is that we can use this type of religion to not become a more loving person. We can justify our self-centeredness.

Spirituality can also be transformative. As a young person we need to develop our ego boundaries by separating from our parents. We need to leave home psychologically and develop an identity of our own. We need to distinguish our values from those of our parents and friends. It is important to have meaningful work to do.

About 35 to 45, we reach midlife. Jung called this the afternoon of life. We have the opportunity to grow into a deeper consciousness not possible in our younger years. Richard Rohr says: “This process of transformation does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it. Not consolation but devastation. Not entrenchment, but emptiness. Not complacency, but explosion. Not comfort, but revolution. In short – not a conventional bolstering of my usual consciousness, but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.” Our transformation comes indirectly, “catching us off guard and out of control. We have to be empty instead of full.”

Richard Rohr goes on to say: “The lust for certitude. The lust for answers the last 500 years of the Western Church has not served us well. Once we lost our spirituality of darkness for light, there just wasn’t as much room for growth any more. Everything was . . . words.”

Our journey of spirituality inevitable leads inward. There are many paths on this inward spiritual journey, but they all lead to an experience of the divine. This conscious knowing leads us outward again toward others. We are willing to risk vulnerability to join with others in intimacy. Our spirituality isn’t about looking good, but simply loving others. Please watch this video by Bob Epperly on centering prayer to discover one of many paths inward toward the center of our being:

Blog 49:

Adult Development

March 22, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT 2 Comments

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.” Thomas Merton

Our world is changing ever faster. Facebook, the iPhone, YouTube, WiFi, the internet, Twitter, and Instagram give us a connected world with lots of instant information available. These and other changes complicate our lives in many ways. We may be busier than ever. Our children often are doing homework later into the night. The family structure is breaking down, and we see changes in marriage and sexuality. The values that we assumed made us unified are changing because of the great diversity we see in not only America, but throughout the world. As we cope with the impact of these changes and many more, we encounter stress in our bodies.

In the middle of all these changes globally, we still face the challenges of adult development. Frederick Hudson writes: “Most grown-ups know very little about the territory of their (later) adult years.”

This becomes more important as our life expectancy grows. The changes in lifestyle and medicine enables us to live much longer. We often waste our most valuable resource – citizens over fifty year of age. Corporations too often want to eliminate older workers. Our cultural assumption – in the United States – is that aging is bad and as we age we lose much more than we gain. Robert Lifton says, “There is a special quality of life-power available only to those seasoned by struggles of four or more decades. . . . The life-power of this stage can be especially profound.”

Carl Jung viewed the second half of life as a time of immense growth and development. It is a time for personal introspection, reevaluation of our lives, and dynamic spiritual discovery. We may assume that we need to decide on our work and marital partner by our late 20’s. Wow, that is a lot of pressure! Most of us are engaged in several different types of jobs in our working lives. Sometimes this happens by our choice. And there are times when someone chooses for us, saying: “You are fired.”

As our income changes, we need to reassess our lifestyle and adjust our spending. Our assumption that we would simply continue to earn more money endlessly may have been false. The larger world economy also affects us all as we learned in 2008 with the financial crash.

“For centuries, it was the understanding that when people became adults, they stopped growing and became fixed as predictable, responsible persons the rest of their lives,” writes Frederick Hudson. “Growing was over. The adult years were shaped by the personality and experiences of the child.”

Our lives are a heroic adventure. Life after fifty can be rich in many ways. Robert Epperly wrote his very personal and open book, “Growing Up After Fifty: From Exxon Executive to Spiritual Seeker,” about his journey after midlife. Please enjoy this video about his book:

Blog 48

Expressive Art Therapy

March 8, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

Creativity can save us. We suffer when we lose our sense of creativity. Our lives are full of opportunities to create. When we cook a meal, we are creating. When we build a fence, we are being creative. If I sing to music on my iPhone in the car, I am being creative. In our creativity, there is great promise. Being aware of the possibility of creativity can dramatically improve the quality of our life.

When we feel angry or afraid or shame, we can be creative. It is also true that I can be destructive. I can drink alcohol to excess. I could punch as wall. I may argue with someone that I love. I can yell at the driver of a passing car.

Another set of possibilities is to be creative. The artist’s work is to awaken all that is and all we perceive. Mathew Fox writes: “The artist first does this by waking up oneself to what is. Then he or she can awaken others. The artist finds himself or herself vulnerable to beings and events and takes the time to experience them in depth. In this way, we wake up to being, we awaken to what is and its great depth and mystery.”

When we are feeling overwhelm emotionally, we have the opportunity to wake up to a new reality. Daniel Siegel writes that “emotion is the process of integration that brings self-organization to the mind.”

When we are experiencing emotions, we can work creatively to integrate a larger reality – a wider view of life and the world. When Carl Jung was going through a difficult time in his life, he discovered something important. He found a way to calm himself by being creative. He built a small dwelling on a lake. Dr. Jung also make drawings and paintings when he was emotional. He also build a miniature village like he used to do as a child.

Carl Jung wrote: “Everything seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down on me…. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength…. To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images– that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions– I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them. There is a chance that I might have succeeded in splitting them off; but in that case I would inexorably have fallen into a neurosis and so been ultimately destroyed by them. As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which lie behind the emotions.”

Please watch this video by Judith Peterson on using art to see reality more clearly and feel better:

Blog 46

What Does HALT Stand For?

February 9, 2016 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

12 step programs offer our modern world an enormous gift. Through-out the world, we can find Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, Al-anon meetings, Over-eaters Anonymous meetings, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meetings, Debtors Anonymous meetings, and many other meetings. For many reasons, when Bill W and Dr. Bob founded Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, something profound began. It was revolutionary in very positive ways. Meetings, books, sponsors, resources, and the 12 steps offer great resources to learn how to consciously live and even thrive with the thought disorder of addiction.

Part of the tradition of 12 step work, includes a great deal of folk wisdom in the form of slogans. This is found in the conference approved literature and can he heard at many meetings.

“One day at a time.”

“Cultivate an attitude of gratitude.”

“Your worth should never depend on another person’s opinion.”

The phrase HALT reminds us to: “Never get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired.”

When we take the time to do the simple things to take care of ourselves, we strengthen our individual will. We are more mindful and careful in our choices. When I get 8-10 hours of sleep, my physical brain is healthier. You can see this on a brain scan. When I eat a healthy diet of natural fresh food – including fruits, vegetables, and proteins – I further strengthen my brain. When I get aerobic exercise, I produce endorphins and eliminate adrenaline. My body is calmer and my brain is healthier with exercise. When I take the time to talk with friends who are accepting and empathic, I feel better. These are the practices that support sobriety as well as general mental health.

Psychotherapy can also be a terrific asset for those dedicated to working a 12 step program. It is very helpful to seek out a professional aware of the differences between general psychotherapy and chemical dependency counseling. A counselor, social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist with training in chemical dependency treatment can help the client hold themselves accountable and navigate the world of recovery. Addressing the problems with emotional self-regulation can greatly help with the recovery process. Alcoholism and drug addiction is an attempt to control one’s thoughts and feelings with chemicals. Learning how to calm oneself down without doing anything self-destructive is critical for all of us, if we haven’t learned already.

People who are physically and/or sexually abused in childhood are more likely to abuse drugs. Those who abuse substances use alcohol, nicotine or other drugs to change their emotions that we began regulating poorly due to trauma or adversity in childhood. First, the drug abuser uses the substance to calm overwhelming emotions. Second, the substance enables the person to vicariously re-experience their unresolved emotions from childhood abuse or adversity. Usually, these emotions are associated with memories of traumatic events that are yet to be resolved.

The abuse of alcohol and other drugs interferes with maturation. When a teen drinks regularly from age fourteen to eighteen, he tends to act as if he is fourteen or fifteen many years later; this is called delayed adolescence. When someone smokes marijuana regularly from sixteen to twenty one, she is likely to act as if she is sixteen or seventeen later in life. Taking care of our basic needs of life for sleep, healthy food, social support, and exercise is part of being a mature adult. We take over care of these basic needs from our parents as we grow up, if we are healthy.

Addiction is also known as the sacred disease. Carl Jung wrote that “perhaps it was no accident that we traditionally referred to alcoholic drinks as spirits, and that alcoholics were people who had a greater thirst for spirit than others, and that perhaps alcoholism was a spiritual disorder, or better yet, a spiritual condition”.

People who become slaves to alcohol and other drugs long to go back to paradise, reach Heaven, reach home – more than most. Addicts desperately yearn to regain that lost warm, fuzzy sense of oneness. There are two ways of looking at this longing to go home. One is yearning to return to infancy, not only to go back to paradise but to crawl back into the womb.

M. Scott Peck writes: “The other way to look at it is as a potentially progressive kind of phenomenon; that in this yearning to go home, addicts are people who have a more powerful calling than most to the spirit, to God, but they simply have the directions of the journey mixed up. Many contemporary men and women are cut off from their own life source. . . (They) are undermined by the loss of connection to their own energy in their own body. . . . In infancy, ‘I desire” is indistinguishable from ‘I need.’ As adults, they look at other people who seem to love life and wonder why they themselves do not. They pretend, even as children, to be reaching out from their own desire. Their place of desire is false; their desiring is not coming from natural instincts; therefore, those instincts cannot be satisfied. Because their bodies are not expressing desires that come from natural desires, they fall into unnatural desires, driven desires that overwhelm them with stupor and manifest as addictions. They crave food that brings them no nurturance, drink that brings them no spirit, sex that brings them no union. Because their culture worships matter and minimizes soul, they concretize metaphor and minimize life. Their hunger is for food – Soul food; they are starving for sweetness – Mother Food that will reconnect them to who whey were born to be. Their thirst is for spirit; their longing is for union. They yearn for connection to their own ‘I desire'”.

We all suffer from addictions, in a sense. It is human to struggle with self-destructive patterns. Ultimately, alcoholism is a blessing because it is a disease that visibly breaks people. Those who are alcoholic are no more broken than normal drinkers. We all experience terror and shame. One may not be aware of their pain, but they certainly experience it. We are all broken people, but because of their struggle with drinking alcoholics cannot hide their brokenness. The rest of us normal drinkers can hide behind our masks of composure. Yet we do not have the gift of talking with each other about the things that are most important to us. The disease of alcoholism put one into an obvious crisis. Out of the crisis of alcoholism, the alcoholic has the unique privilege of experiencing the profoundly healing community of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Please watch this video by Elizabeth Schindler on HALT:

Blog 42:

Is it Possible to Feel Good and Make Good Decisions?

September 22, 2015 By Daniel Davis, LMFT Leave a Comment

Lee Atwater wrote shortly before his death from cancer: “The 1980’s were about acquiring – acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I pay for a little more time with my family! What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends! It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead (in the future), but they must speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

When someone says, “He has a big ego,” they mean he is inflated. Inflation means to fill up like a balloon or tire – to be puffed up! To be inflated is to see yourself as unrealistically large and unrealistically important. One is beyond the limits of one’s proper size, so one is proud, vain, pompous, and presumptuous. Deflation means letting the air out of something. It can be a great blessing to hit bottom which has been called, “the dark night of the soul.”

From 1995 to 2001, I worked for CPP, Inc. as a corporate trainer and consultant. CPP, Inc. is the exclusive publisher of the MBTI(r) which is also known as the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator(r). The MBTI(r) is the largest selling personality test in the world.

I had just graduated with my Master’s Degree from Santa Clara University a few months before arriving for my first day on the job at CPP, Inc. I thought I knew a lot about the MBTI(r). Over the next six years I learned a great deal about the MBTI from psychologists, researchers, and authors who have devoted a great deal of their profession work to study personality type . It was a humbling experience for me in a good way. I had an exaggerated perception myself and life corrected me. It was a painful lesson – but a valuable one.

Emma Jung said to Elizabeth Howes, “There are egos, and egos, and egos, the problem is to find the real one.”

There is a false ego which is not based on the reality of who I am. Yet, there is a real ego. When our real, authentic ego is in its most creative role, it is spiritual in nature. This healthy ego is an accurate view of who I am. I perceive myself and the world in the right size. I can develop a real ego by making healthy choices which are sometimes difficult and painful.

The ego is who I am speaking about when I say “I.” The ego is what I know about myself, including my attitudes as well as my reactions. It is the part of myself that is aware of reality and makes choices. The ego is an extension of my creative center, what Carl Jung called, the Self. This is true for all of us, I believe.

Some egos are like a canoe on a raging sea. When someone has a weak ego, they feel overwhelmed by the challenges of their life: homework, dating, money, family, work, or children.

There are egos like a Cruise ship on a duck pond. Someone with this type of ego says and does things to look powerful or important, often in an aggressive or ruthless way. Like a large ship, they are too big and slow to maneuver efficiently and effectively with other people and situations.

Once in a while, we find an ego like a tugboat. This type of ego is small, yet nimble and very powerful. The tug boat is powerful enough to tow a Cruise ship. Robert Johnson writes that humility is to know yourself as you are – no more, no less.

The modern world has lead us into a state of consciousness that feels hopeless and barren, because we have lost our instinct. We build planes that fly into space, map genes, cure certain types of cancer, design and build amazing super computers, and reduce the spread of disease – like AIDS. Yet our success goes to our heads, and our contempt grows for what is natural and accidental. We consider the irrational to be an inconvenience and the irrelevant to be a mistake. I get frustrated when my iPhone takes too many seconds to respond to my command. We must all cope with the reality of the world which is both logical and emotional as well as rational and irrational.

As human beings, we can be in a state of self-deception where we are cut off from our psychic resources. This alienation of our ego is a state of not being aware of ourselves and others – egocentricity. When we are consciously aware of reality, our decisions reflect the people around us – those whom our choices affect. If we are objective, then we serve the world with our choices and not merely what we perceive as our narrow self-interest. The more egocentric we are, the greater we lie to ourselves. Fritz Kunkel writes: “Egocentricity without self-deception is not possible.”

Gerhard Adler said, “The ego has to be born and the ego has to be reborn.” The real ego is reborn continually when we act with wisdom. Sometimes, we act under very difficult circumstances with people criticizing us, and it can feel painful – sometimes extremely painful. These are the choices that shape who we are. These are the choices that, in time, cultivate joy within us. Please watch this video, where Dr. Tim Locke discusses, “We Psychology” and the reality of inflation and deflation.

Keywords:
Blog 22:
Gerhard Adler
Blogs by Daniel Davis, inflation
Elizabeth Howes
Robert Johnson
Carl Jung
Emma Jung
Timothy Locke
deflation
ego, false
ego, metaphor (canoe, oceanliner, tugboat)
ego, real
egocentricity
inflation
iPhone
Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
Santa Clara University
the Self
“We Psychology”
“Is it Possible to Feel Good and Make Good Decisions?”