Depth Psychology
At the beginning of the last century, the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) and the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) laid the foundation for a modern and profound psychological understanding of the existence of the unconscious and its possible content.
Divided consciousness
A known and conscious part
= our cognitive reflective outside world
The “I” here is our self-image (EGO), who we think we are
An unknown and unconscious part
= our subjective inner world that controls us but of which we are often not aware
The “I” here is our true SELF, who we really are in essence
Stored in our unconscious are:
- supressed parts, experiences and pain from the past that were once conscious
- experiences and pain from the past that have never been conscious, because they were
- too strong to be experienced at that moment or
- experienced when our cognition was not yet developed (peri-natal and early life experiences)
The experiences and pain stored in the unconscious act as unconscious drives that lead to feeling, thinking, saying and doing things that one often does not want to feel, think, say and do at all. Moods and reactions arise that one does not understand where they come from. Often it is thought the cause of these lays outside of oneself (situations, others)
In order to discover the unconscious motives and to arrive at understanding oneself better, it is necessary to penetrate into the unconscious layers, to go the roots of the complaints, to gain insight there, to heal the pain and resolve the problem there, in order to finally be able to come back into balance through AWARENESS, ACCEPTANCE and INTEGRATION.
Depth Psychology is thus not so much concerned with behaviour, thoughts, feelings or functioning per se, nor with aspects of the nervous system and the brain, but rather with the essence of the human being and what drives the behaviours, thoughts, feelings and functions.
"No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell"
Carl Jung