Ways to access your unconscious

While there are many ways to intentionally bring into conscious awareness what is unconscious in us -- free association and meditation are two obvious ones you may already be aware of  – Carl Jung developed something unique called active imagination.  Active imagination involves an activity in which you concentrate on a dream or an image that might arise through expressive arts or dreams, for example, and then focus on, without judgment, whatever image pops in your mind. Jung called this the beginning of a dialogue between your ego and your unconscious.

What usually happens next is that the image in your mind shifts spontaneously in response to your focused attention. “In this way conscious and unconscious are united,” Jung described, and he  called this the transcendent function. He observed that when we can hold in awareness both our conscious attitude and this unconscious content, which might be just the opposite of what our conscious mind is thinking or how we are behaving, our psyche will respond to the tension between the two with the spontaneous creation of a third new state. This third unifies or transcends the polarity between the ego and unconscious. The transcendent function, according to author and depth psychotherapist Thomas Moore, sparks the coming together of both “mysterious depths of the soul as well as conscious understanding and intention.”

 When you allow images to pop in your mind from fantasies or dreams or art or music or a walk in nature, powerful symbols and mythological motifs, called archetypes, can sometimes emerge. I’ll cover archetypes and other mysterious depths in my upcoming blog posts.