One of the most complete and vivid description of the self by Jung is the following:
Behind a man’s actions there stands neither public opinion nor the moral code, but the personality of which he is still unconscious.
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.
