In one of his 2014 or 2015 lectures, Jordan Peterson asked his classroom where their sense of identity was located. Most described being in their head, meaning that their sense of “me” is located in their head. He responded that he found himself more in his solar plexus and added elsewhere that he spent “as little time as possible in his head”.
One of the great strength (and frustrating part) of Jung’s work is that it offers a great deal of freedom. There is no predefined way or fix-all technique, at the notable exception that one must pay attention to one’s dreams.
As I was reading Marie-Lousie von Franz’s “C. G. Jung, his myth in our time“, I encountered the following idea: The first dream which one can recall from childhood often sets forth in symbolic form, as Jung later remarked, the essence of an entire life, or of the first part of life. It reflects, so to speak, a piece of the “inner fate” into which the individual was born. (ibid.)
The Green Knight is a unique (and somewhat subversive) retelling of the Arthurian story, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The film is a stunning aesthetic and emotionally charged experience with a story that holds profound psychological insights that are worth learning from.
“The first layer of the unconscious, the shadow, is also called by Jung the personal unconscious, as distinguished from the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious or shadow contains personal contents belonging to the individual himself which can and properly should be made conscious and integrated into the conscious personality or ego. The collective unconscious, on the other hand, is composed of transpersonal, universal contents which cannot be assimilated by the ego. Between these two layers of the unconscious, the personal and the collective, is another entity with, so to speak, one foot on each side. This is the anima in a man and the animus in a woman.” (Edinger, An Outline of Analytical Psychology)
