Carl Jung on Dissociation – Lexicon
Dissociation:
The splitting of a personality into its component parts or complexes, characteristic of neurosis.
A dissociation is not healed by being split off, but by more complete disintegration.
All the powers that strive for unity, all healthy desire for selfhood, will resist the disintegration, and in this way he will become conscious of the possibility of an inner integration, which before he had always sought outside himself. He will then find his reward in an undivided self.[“Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” CW 17, pars. 334f.]
In the analysis of neurotic breakdowns, the aim is to make the conscious ego aware of autonomous complexes.
This can be done both through reductive analysis and by objectifying them in the process of active imagination.
Every form of communication with the split-off part of the psyche is therapeutically effective.
This effect is also brought about by the real or merely supposed discovery of the causes.
Even when the discovery is no more than an assumption or a fantasy, it has a healing effect at least by suggestion if the analyst himself believes in it and makes a serious attempt to understand.[“The Philosophical Tree,” CW 13, par. 465.]
This reconciliation symbolism as a cure for psychic dissociation is found in most religions.
C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 1: 1906-1950
Letters of C. G. Jung: Volume I, 1906-1950 (Vol 1)
To Pastor Ernst Fischer
Dear Pastor Fischer, 21 December 1944
The article you sent me in the Volksblatt may refer to a dreambut the development is literary so that one can never be quite certain how much invention is mixed up with it.
The dream is not uninteresting and was obviously dreamt by a very religious person.
We know, of course, that what happens in the dream is a drama taking place on one’s own interior stage, where the dreamer is the actors, the libretto, the theatre, and the public rolled into one.
Here the dreamer witnesses how his wife and daughter suddenly vanish as though rapt up to heaven.
This is undoubtedly a process of dissociation which the dream by projection extends to any number of other families.
If we take this bit as genuine, we would have to conclude that the dreamer is suffering from a dissociation affecting not only himself but his whole circle.
His dissociation consists in a splitting-off of the feminine element in the unconscious, which in Western languages is designated by anima, psyche, and their cognates, all of the feminine gender.
These dissociations usually occur when consciousness has in one respect or another strayed too far from its natural basis and consequently gets into conflict with its natural preconditions.
This is such a common phenomenon in the history of culture that for the purpose of healing such dissociations reconciliation rites were instituted which frequently took the form of the hierosgamos.
Even in Christianity we have this symbolism in the nuptiae agni and in the union of the sponsus Christ with the sponsa ecclesia.
This reconciliation symbolism as a cure for psychic dissociation is found in most religions.
Even in the strongly masculine Jewish religion we have the love symbolism of the pardes rimmonim and the ultimate union of the Shekhinah with the sponsus Tifereth.
The dissociated state is itself a morbid one and people who run around in such a state are liable to infect others.
The excitement emanating from this article tends to rouse the naive reader to expect some kind of miracle which is not altogether as it should be.
I therefore always advise my patients when they have significant dreams of this nature to regard them as messages directed to their own private address (somnia a Deo missal) and I would have given the same advice to the writer of this article.
On top of that he lays himself bare before the eyes of the knowledgeable.
It would be another matter if together with the dream he had made an insightful confession of his own state.
But from lack of knowledge this was obviously impossible.
Hoping I have given a satisfactory answer to the complicated questions raised by the article I remain,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 355-356.