Explanation of Carl Jung breakthrough treatment

When Jung first interned and practiced medicine people who were “insane” were considered to be just babbling and what they actually said was never attended to. While Freud had already invented psychoanalysis or what’s called “the talking cure,” it was a tool used for people with mild issues or neuroses. No one really dreamed of using a talking cure with a severely mentally disabled and institutionalized patient. One of the most famous and seminal episodes in Jung’s first days as a doctor was when he encountered an institutionalized schizophrenic woman who insisted she was from the moon and had, obviously, been on the moon. To the astonishment of his colleagues Jung engaged her in therapeutic dialogue and accepted “as fact” that she had been on the moon. Jung explains in his writings that the way the conscious and unconscious mind works, this woman was providing valuable and “true” information to be used for her own therapy. A patient who states and lives within such a reality of belief has to be treated within the context of the very real impact that this belief has on their psyche and prognosis.

Here is a modern day example. When a soldier comes back from war, often he or she has post traumatic stress disorder. One symptom of PTSD is frequent flash backs occurring in either dreams while asleep or while awake. Years ago studies were done that demonstrated that each incidence of dreaming one is back in battle is the same physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually as if the service person had actually been transported back to battle in reality. In other words, every dream or flashback is another “dose” of the traumatizing event, just as if the event had in fact happened again. Therapists who are very “venting” oriented may make a serious error by minimizing as “natural” repeats in the imagination of the traumatizing events. This is not “letting it out” but actually reinforcing and repeating the event as if it was actually, physically in reality taking place again. Further, a person who dreams of a traumatizing or violent event over and over will have changes made to them even if they have actually never experienced that event even once in personal reality. Thus a civilian who had never seen war but who dreams of battle over and over can and will be traumatized with PTSD even if they never had been a soldier in fact. The dreams and imaginings will change the brain, spirit and body chemistry in such as way as if the person was actually thrust into battle over and over.

So Jung was the first to recognize that a woman who believed she lived on the moon and had been there several times “really has been there.” Her body and mental reality would be shaped by her “experiences on the moon.” Therefore Jung applied psychoanalytical practices to this patient and others like her, treating their perceived experiences as if they were real because for all intents and purposes of therapy they WERE real experiences to the patient.

Nowadays an idiot New Ager would conclude that the woman was an “alien,” or “was trying to remember past lives,” or “had a strong lunar position afflicted in their astrology chart.” Good grief. Malpractice would be too mild a word for this. That is like treating the soldier by saying that instead of being traumatized in Iraq, he or she had “an afflicted Mars in their chart,” or was a “reincarnated soldier in Napoleon’s army.” Somewhere along the line popular thought has become unhinged and can’t even comprehend that “it is what it is.” As my neighbor would say about such people, “They don’t remember that two plus two equals four.”

When I worked with crazed New Agers who actually are paid lots of money to be “therapists,” they were terrified of actually listening to the dream of a person with a serious mental disorder, such as schizophrenia. They have rejected not only Jung but also Freud, for such people, and have bought into the pill popping culture of the insurance companies and entertainment media. They peed in their pants or skirts at the thought of my listening to and analyzing the dreams of any of my “clients” (we can’t call them patients because that would imply they are sick, duh). Even my personal Jungian analyst dragged out stupid reincarnation books for me (that was one of my first big clues about the New Age and Gnostic stalker cabal), forgetting Jung’s own teaching that reality is reality and nothing more. So I did listen to the dreams of “clients,” even those with schizophrenia. I cannot describe the relief and palliative effects that they experienced when their dreams and experiences were treated with dignity and reality and analyzed and explained accordingly. Whether they thought they saw Jesus or whether they had traumatic or embarrassing dreams, those are their realities and need to be treated as such because their bodies and their minds sure react and conform as if those events were reality. So dreams and hallucinations are important to heed and not to go to either extreme of: discarding/forbidding/shutting them off as “ravings” or elevating them as symbols of some fruity cultic worship that will do even more harm to the patient. The last thing a patient who dreams of war repeatedly needs is to be treated as if he was a reincarnated soldier in Napoleon’s army. The second to the last thing the patient needs is to be encouraged to keep “venting” because it is “healthy” to keep remembering and repeating trauma and then drugging it into submission. One must medicate to remove the pain so that one can treat. I cannot believe what poor, little or no treatments that our Iraq and Afghanistan service people are receiving, for example. Every repeat they have of their trauma is as if the trauma has actually occurred once again. But what do I know, I’m not a licensed social worker or part of the pseudo medical elite.

Anyway, I thought I’d share this famous breakthrough of Jung’s and explain it as it really is, rather than some of the mythology that has grown up around it. Jung has quite incorrectly become the poster child for depraved liberal New Age Gnostic “values” and the baby papa of every moon calf that is running around ruining medicine today. Moderation and reality have been thrown out the window in far too many places in modern society and as a result wounds are not healing… they are becoming infected instead. People with severe illness need to be institutionalized and treated with appropriate REAL remedies and therapies. People have not only removed the safe container of places of healing but they have also mainstreamed snake oil and charms along with pills as “therapy.” It’s unbelievable. The damage is far beyond what anyone can imagine. Ugh. *Sigh.*

I don’t want to leave a blog posting on a negative note, though I must be a straight shooter about what is really going on or the fall for everyone is going to be long, hard and unrecoverable. So the positive that I want to give you to consider, and the reason I told this Jung story, is that the body and the mind want to heal and do give accurate signals on their face value of what is wrong. There is no mystery or double meaning. When a woman feels she has been on the moon, she “has” been on the “moon.” When a person dreams about traumatic events there are “in” those events and need to be treated accordingly. They need to be treated at face value because their minds, bodies and spirit are telling the therapist what they are experiencing in the here and now in truth, and not in some goofy sci-fi fantasy symbolic Gnostic world. A dream grenade is a virtual reality of a physical grenade. It is not an anagram for a “deer nag” and thus the sufferer is found to be a reincarnated pushy antelope. *Rolls eyes.* I wish I were joking or exaggerating but as many of you know first hand I am actually understating the problem, sadly.