Lecture 1 (07-02-2025)
The dilemma of human suffering; WHY do we suffer?
What are humans? → We are…
- Symbolic
- Compared to non-symbolical animals (rituals,
- Finitary
- In need of frames (delimiting what is relevant)
- Local frames (categories such as emotions that inform us what things are)
- Their motivational relevance; affordance
- We get ‘stuck’ in frames ⇒ maladaptive frames: self as worthless, self as
weak/victim, need to avoid, cannot withstand stress, world as dangerous
→ Adaptive creators of new frames
- Insight problems require breaking maladaptive frames and making a new frame.
- Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resist shocks and
stays the same, the antifragile gets better.
- Metaphor pile of sand (maladaptive frames → give a base for new more
adaptive frames)
- Larger frames (culture) “fundamental purpose is to provide the firm structures for
human life that are lacking biologically… can never have the stability that marks
the structures of the animal world.”
- Separation from culture is the danger if meaninglessness
Loss of larger frames:
→ Intuitive (poetic; imaginative) : most of the rules are intuitive
Differences between how we are in the world and pre-modern people are
in the world:
- Immediacy of sense experiences
- The ‘sacred’ (=the more real) shows itself to us in experience
- Relational and participatory⇒ everything is alive (agency);
powerful forces that interact with human life
- Myth + ritual (isnt bad science) which delimits ‘cosmos’ from
‘chaos’
→ Western disembedding :
● Canopy of participation - Language (? what about this)
● Religious + philosophical turning points
○ Importance of the self (the internal); and as assigning meaning
○ Consequences: an overfocus on one individual's feelings can be
contributing to increased rates of depression, anxiety and so on.
● Enlightenment + scientific revolution
○ Disenchantment of the world
Psychotherapy + inability to recreate smaller frames (stuck in suffering) and loss of larger
frames (alienation)
,→ (stuck in suffering) : neurosis is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting
different results
→ (alienation) modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature (Erich
Fromm)
Consider how the therapies presented in the course address these two issues:
1. Getting unstuck from dyscontrol (increasing flexibility and adaptation)
2. Alienation
a. From oneself
b. From other people
c. From nature
d. From something transcendent
Making sense of Jung: romantic response
→ Romanticism (art is the tree of life, science is the tree of death)
● Reaction to enlightenment of cult of reason
● Reaction to industrialism and capitalism (urbanization)
○ Degrades humans and nature
● Common themes: divine is immanent in nature and in the human psyche (unconscious
irrational forces but with a rational aim of realizing potential)
● Transformation of heroic quest to interior spiritual journey
● Importance of imagination
● Importance of symbol and myth
Adaptation as (dis)equilibrium
- Assimilation: generalization, integration
- Accommodation: particularization, opening up
Complexification
- self-transcendent/qualitatively change
Analytic psychology
- Self-regulating beings/systems, that achieve adaptation through opponent processes,
which can lead to complexification (a more comprehensive way of being in the world)
- The psyche is a self-regulating system, that is aiming for wholeness, through opponent
processes, which can lead to complexification (a more comprehensive way of being in
the world)
→ more forward perspective, where as Freud was more back looking
Theory of psychological suffering
- Symptoms represent blocking of the processes that are aiming at wholeness/
adaptation.
, They have meaning → are indications of the blockage and that something needs
to be addressed to unblock the system
⇒ Aim is not symptom relief, but unblocking growth process
- Consciousness is only part of the psyche and rests on something larger and mysterious
(called the unconscious)
- The unconscious has a different language
Some important concepts
- Complexes: ideas, attitudes, which accumulate around the core of emotion: autonomous
(like a personality)
- Ego (complex): what we think of as ourselves (ideas, attitudes, etc.); primarily in
consciousness
- Can be (but not necessarily) identified in persona
- Personal unconscious: ‘space’ where aversive memories are presented
- Collective unconscious: ‘space’ where archetypes exist
- Archetypes: not inherited ideas/symbols, but ways of framing (evolutionarily adaptive)
⇒ involves framing that has been evolutionarily adaptive, like imprinting, basic
emotions.
→ archetypal image: cultural elements that fill in the archetype (warrior,
mother, father, trickster)
⇒ complex: personal material that interacts with archetypes
- Self: the central archetype: potential for unity: involved in the process of development
(sun+solar system metaphor)
Jungian psychotherapy part 2
- Getting stuck in frames: they become maladaptive
Goals of the person in life have changed, but still stuck in the old frame? → maladaptive
● Normal sort of problems: stuck in frame→ need to break through that, but you still move
in the same frame.
● Other creativity problems: when you need to break through a frame and create a new
larger frame.
As children we create a frame that helps us in the world, but then as we get older, these frames
aren’t needed anymore so they can become maladaptive.
- Child abused by parents → blames itself, since it is completely dependent on their
parents, it is more adaptive to blame themselves and think that the parents are doing
what is best for them. ⇒ so I need to change my behaviour to help them, I am worthless,
I am wrong.
- Needs to break through that frame? A new frame of radically understanding it self,
people, the world and everything around them
⇒ psychotherapy
The dilemma of human suffering; WHY do we suffer?
What are humans? → We are…
- Symbolic
- Compared to non-symbolical animals (rituals,
- Finitary
- In need of frames (delimiting what is relevant)
- Local frames (categories such as emotions that inform us what things are)
- Their motivational relevance; affordance
- We get ‘stuck’ in frames ⇒ maladaptive frames: self as worthless, self as
weak/victim, need to avoid, cannot withstand stress, world as dangerous
→ Adaptive creators of new frames
- Insight problems require breaking maladaptive frames and making a new frame.
- Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resist shocks and
stays the same, the antifragile gets better.
- Metaphor pile of sand (maladaptive frames → give a base for new more
adaptive frames)
- Larger frames (culture) “fundamental purpose is to provide the firm structures for
human life that are lacking biologically… can never have the stability that marks
the structures of the animal world.”
- Separation from culture is the danger if meaninglessness
Loss of larger frames:
→ Intuitive (poetic; imaginative) : most of the rules are intuitive
Differences between how we are in the world and pre-modern people are
in the world:
- Immediacy of sense experiences
- The ‘sacred’ (=the more real) shows itself to us in experience
- Relational and participatory⇒ everything is alive (agency);
powerful forces that interact with human life
- Myth + ritual (isnt bad science) which delimits ‘cosmos’ from
‘chaos’
→ Western disembedding :
● Canopy of participation - Language (? what about this)
● Religious + philosophical turning points
○ Importance of the self (the internal); and as assigning meaning
○ Consequences: an overfocus on one individual's feelings can be
contributing to increased rates of depression, anxiety and so on.
● Enlightenment + scientific revolution
○ Disenchantment of the world
Psychotherapy + inability to recreate smaller frames (stuck in suffering) and loss of larger
frames (alienation)
,→ (stuck in suffering) : neurosis is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting
different results
→ (alienation) modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature (Erich
Fromm)
Consider how the therapies presented in the course address these two issues:
1. Getting unstuck from dyscontrol (increasing flexibility and adaptation)
2. Alienation
a. From oneself
b. From other people
c. From nature
d. From something transcendent
Making sense of Jung: romantic response
→ Romanticism (art is the tree of life, science is the tree of death)
● Reaction to enlightenment of cult of reason
● Reaction to industrialism and capitalism (urbanization)
○ Degrades humans and nature
● Common themes: divine is immanent in nature and in the human psyche (unconscious
irrational forces but with a rational aim of realizing potential)
● Transformation of heroic quest to interior spiritual journey
● Importance of imagination
● Importance of symbol and myth
Adaptation as (dis)equilibrium
- Assimilation: generalization, integration
- Accommodation: particularization, opening up
Complexification
- self-transcendent/qualitatively change
Analytic psychology
- Self-regulating beings/systems, that achieve adaptation through opponent processes,
which can lead to complexification (a more comprehensive way of being in the world)
- The psyche is a self-regulating system, that is aiming for wholeness, through opponent
processes, which can lead to complexification (a more comprehensive way of being in
the world)
→ more forward perspective, where as Freud was more back looking
Theory of psychological suffering
- Symptoms represent blocking of the processes that are aiming at wholeness/
adaptation.
, They have meaning → are indications of the blockage and that something needs
to be addressed to unblock the system
⇒ Aim is not symptom relief, but unblocking growth process
- Consciousness is only part of the psyche and rests on something larger and mysterious
(called the unconscious)
- The unconscious has a different language
Some important concepts
- Complexes: ideas, attitudes, which accumulate around the core of emotion: autonomous
(like a personality)
- Ego (complex): what we think of as ourselves (ideas, attitudes, etc.); primarily in
consciousness
- Can be (but not necessarily) identified in persona
- Personal unconscious: ‘space’ where aversive memories are presented
- Collective unconscious: ‘space’ where archetypes exist
- Archetypes: not inherited ideas/symbols, but ways of framing (evolutionarily adaptive)
⇒ involves framing that has been evolutionarily adaptive, like imprinting, basic
emotions.
→ archetypal image: cultural elements that fill in the archetype (warrior,
mother, father, trickster)
⇒ complex: personal material that interacts with archetypes
- Self: the central archetype: potential for unity: involved in the process of development
(sun+solar system metaphor)
Jungian psychotherapy part 2
- Getting stuck in frames: they become maladaptive
Goals of the person in life have changed, but still stuck in the old frame? → maladaptive
● Normal sort of problems: stuck in frame→ need to break through that, but you still move
in the same frame.
● Other creativity problems: when you need to break through a frame and create a new
larger frame.
As children we create a frame that helps us in the world, but then as we get older, these frames
aren’t needed anymore so they can become maladaptive.
- Child abused by parents → blames itself, since it is completely dependent on their
parents, it is more adaptive to blame themselves and think that the parents are doing
what is best for them. ⇒ so I need to change my behaviour to help them, I am worthless,
I am wrong.
- Needs to break through that frame? A new frame of radically understanding it self,
people, the world and everything around them
⇒ psychotherapy
