Carl Jung on the Wounded Healer.
Wounded Healer:
An archetypal dynamic that may be constellated in an analytic relationship.
This term derives from the legend of Asclepius, a Greek doctor who in recognition of his own wounds established a sanctuary at Epidaurus where others could be healed of theirs.
Those seeking to be cured went through a process called incubation. First they had a cleansing bath, thought to have a purifying effect on the soul as well as the body. Uncontaminated by the body, the soul was free to commune with the gods. After preliminary sacrificial offerings, the incubants lay on a couch and went to sleep. If they were lucky, they had a healing dream; if they were luckier, a snake came in the night and bit them.
The wounded healer archetype can be schematized by a variation of the diagram used by Jung to illustrate the lines of communication in a relationship.[See “The Psychology of the Transference,” The Practice of Psychother-apy, CW 16, par. 422.
Wounded Healer:
The drawing shows six double-headed arrows, indicating that communication can move in either direction-twelve ways in which information can pass between analyst and analysand.
According to this paradigm, the analyst’s wounds, although presumed to be relatively conscious after a lengthy personal analysis, live a shadowy existence. They can always be reconstellated in particular situations, and especially when working with someone whose wounds are similar. (They are the basis for countertransference reactions in analysis.)
Meanwhile, the wounded analysand’s inner healer is in the shadow but potentially available. The analysand’s wounds activate those of the analyst. The analyst reacts, identifies what is happening and in one way or another, consciously or unconsciously, passes this awareness back to the analysand.
In this model, the unconscious relationship between analyst and analysand is quite as important, in terms of the healing process, as what is consciously communicated. There are two other significant implications:
1) Healing can take place only if the analyst has an ongoing relationship with the unconscious. Otherwise, he or she may identify with the healer archetype, a common form of inflation.
2) Depth psychology is a dangerous profession, since the analyst is forever prone to being infected by the other’s wounds-or having his or her wounds reopened.
No analysis is capable of banishing all unconsciousness for ever. The analyst must go on learning endlessly, and never forget that each new case brings new problems to light and thus gives rise to unconscious assumptions that have never before been constellated. We could say, without too much exaggeration, that a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient. It is no loss, either, if he feels that the patient is hitting him, or even scoring off him: it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician. [“Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy,” ibid. para. 239.]
Quotations from “Wounded Healer of the Soul” by Claire Dunne
He [Jung] told Laurens van der Post that he worked through 67,000 dreams with patients and helpers before even attempting to theorize about them. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 85.
On May 6, 1961, too frail for his daily walk, Jung was driven around some of his favorite roads, saying goodbye to the countryside. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 214.
I have been alternately accused of agnosticism, atheism, materialism and mysticism. ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 207.
When he [Jung] said, “Pull up your chair, for I am getting deaf and old and stupid,” I could not help smiling as I reminded him that he had made exactly the same remark to me, just eleven years earlier. He replied with a chuckle “Well, it doesn’t seem to get any better.” ~Mary Crile, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Pages 194-195.
His “autobiography” he came to reluctantly; it was “the one thing I am not going to write” he had said in 1948. Strictly speaking, it is not an autobiography. He always spoke and wrote of it as “Aniela Jaffe’s project,” with contributions made by him in the form of childhood, travel, and closing chapters. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 194.
The publication of Jung’s deepest book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, was met with “stony incomprehension. . . at least for the time being.” Although he wrote, “I have resigned myself to being posthumous,” he also confessed, “sometimes I feel like an anachronism even to myself.” ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 182.
When I asked him what he was writing he said, “My biography. . . . It is purgatory. Frau Jaffe is writing it but I must check it all because no one knows someone else’s life. I have done the first twenty years because one can be more objective there.” ~Mary Crile, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Pages 194-195.
He paused and then added thoughtfully, “I don’t know the meaning of life.” As he said this I felt that, even for Jung, who more than anyone else in our day saw life steadily and saw it whole, there still remained an unsolved mystery. ~Mary Crile, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Pages 194-195.
He [Jung] corresponded with international writers Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Erich Neumann, Miguel Serrano, Sir Laurens van der Post, Sir Herbert Read, Upton Sinclair, J. B. Priestley, H. G. Wells, and Count Keyserling. ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 166.
“The Christian symbol is a living being that carries the seeds of further development in itself.” “its foundations remain the same eternally,” “Christianity must be interpreted anew in each aeon,” otherwise “it suffocates in traditionalism.” ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 149.
“God must be born in man forever. . . the creator sees himself through the eyes of man’s consciousness.” ~Carl Jung, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 147.
Carl Jung’s Fireside Chats
C.G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances
Jung in his late seventies no longer taught at the C. G. Jung Institute, though Emma did. But twice yearly he invited diploma candidates, like Peter Lynn, to his Kusnacht house for “fireside chats.” ~Claire Dunne, Wounded Healer of the Soul, Page 167.
He would stand by the fireplace, pipe in mouth, and ask for questions on anything and everything, encouraging us to engage him in dialogue.
My most vivid recollection of these extraordinary evenings is the experience of Jung as a giant whose head touched the clouds and whose feet were rooted in the very center of the earth.
Within the same sentence he would connect an earthy, peasant-type joke (laughing uproariously) with an obscure pre-Christian myth, both directly relevant to the question under discussion.
I used to come away from these gatherings with a great sense of awe, having glimpsed ultimate issues in a thoroughly human context. ~ Peter Lynn, J.E.T., Page 41.
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