Category: buch.

• practice of psychotherapy

  Essays on the psychology of the transference and other subjects

  C. G. Jung

  Second Edition

  PRINCIPLES OF PRACTICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY’

  Psychotherapy is a domain of the healing art which has developed and acquired a certain independence only within the last fifty years.

  Views in this field have changed and become differentiated in a great variety of ways, and the mass of experience accumulated has given rise to all sorts of different interpretations. The reason for this lies in the fact that psychotherapy is not the simple, straightforward method people at first believed it to be, but, as has gradually become clear, a kind of dialectical process, a dialogue or discussion between two persons. Dialectic was originally the art of conversation among the ancient philosophers, but very early became the term for the process of creating new syntheses.

  A person is a psychic system which, when it affects another person, enters into reciprocal reaction with another psychic system. This, perhaps the most modern, formulation of the psychotherapeutic relation between physician and patient is clearly very far removed from the original view that psychotherapy was a method which anybody could apply in stereotyped fashion in order to reach the desired result. It was not the needs of speculation which prompted this unsuspected and, I might well say, unwelcome widening of the horizon, but the hard facts of reality.

  In the first place, it was probably the fact that one had to admit the possibility of different interpretations of the observed material. Hence there grew up various schools with diametrically opposed views. I would remind you of the Liébeault-Bernheim French method of suggestion therapy, rééducation de la volonté; Babinski’s “persuasion”; Dubois’ “rational psychic orthopedics”; Freud’s psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on sexuality and the unconscious; Adler’s educational method, with its emphasis on power-drives and conscious fictions; Schultz’s autogenic training—to name only the better known methods.

  Each of them rests on special psychological assumptions and produces special psychological results; comparison between them is difficult and often wellnigh impossible. Consequently it was quite natural that the champions of any one point of view should, in order to simplify matters, treat the opinions of the others as erroneous.

  Objective appraisal of the facts shows, however, that each of these methods and theories is justified up to a point, since each can boast not only of certain successes but of psychological data that largely prove its particular assumption. Thus we are faced in psychotherapy with a situation

  December 26, 2025

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• mysteries and secrets of time – 1

  John William Dunne was born in 1875 and worked as an aeronautical engineer, dying in 1949.

  Although he was practical and pragmatic, Dunne had an inexplicable precognitive dream in which he saw the eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique in 1902 – or else he read an account of it in a newspaper that had not yet been printed!

  This was the beginning of his investigations into the nature of time, and led to his theory that during dreams our human experience of time can be non-linear.

  His book An Experiment with Time was first published in 1927. In it he argues that the philosophical problem of infinite regress confronts any thinker who is trying to solve the mysteries associated with our concepts of self-consciousness, volition, and time.

  Dunne expands these basic concepts by saying that a self-conscious entity is a being that knows that it knows; an organism that wills is one that can examine alternatives and make choices based on its motives; and time is a series insofar as it is necessary to be in another time in order to observe the first one, and yet a third time to observe the second.

  This, according to Dunne, leads to an infinite regression, or infinite recession – a series of times that go on forever.

  But such concepts as infinite regression are unpopular with serious thinkers and philosophers who aim to find effective solutions to problems, not merely play with erudite words. At the start of his work, Dunne set out to eradicate the apparent infinite regress of time, which had puzzled him since childhood. He even had vivid memories of asking his nurse about it the type of question that intelligent children can ask and that few, if any, of the most sympathetic and helpful adults can ever answer.

  As Dunne himself says in his books (he also wrote The Serial Universe and several others) he did everything he could think of to dispose of the ideas of the infinite regression of time, of self-consciousness, and of the will.

  Infinite regression withstood all the attacks he could launch against it. He came to the conclusion that far from dismissing the concept of infinite regression, he should regard it as logical and valid – the true foundation of all epistemology (the theory of knowledge).

  The practical side of Dunne’s work on time theory was the careful recording of dreams to see if they were accurately precognitive, and he used both his own experiences and those of others who reported their apparently precognitive dreams to him.

  A major complication in all of Dunne’s work in this field was that “future” events in his serial universe theory were not finite and unavoidable, but could be altered.

  A significant suggestion from Dunne’s work is that we do make use of fragments of possible futures when we “construct” our dreams, as well as when we express current anxieties and emotions and past memories in them. If these glimpses of possible futures — probability tracks that may or may not become actual future experiences — are real, then it looks as if the dreaming self is not restricted to the present moment.

  Based on all Dunne’s research, there is nothing anomalous, paranormal, or supernatural about the time-free activity of this dreaming self: all of us do it continually to a greater or lesser extent.

  Dunne’s arguments can be summed up by his statement to the effect that if time is a serial phenomenon, then the universe itself has to be serial.

  He has never gone unchallenged, but he was a worthwhile, pioneering thinker whose contributions to the ongoing debate about the real nature of time deserve to be treated with respect.

  How many precognitive dream experiences do we need to support Dunne’s intriguing theory? As well as his dream forecast of the Mount Pelée volcanic eruption, Dunne had a vivid precognitive dream of a railway crash involving an embankment before the Flying Scotsman crashed near the Forth Bridge.

  The biblical Joseph not only experienced dreams of his own future greatness, he also interpreted the dreams of others: but there are curious little inaccuracies and anomalies in his dreams. In his dream that the sun and moon would bow down to him, the two celestial bodies represented his parents — yet Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel (Joseph’s mother, the moon symbol) was already dead.

  Joseph did correctly interpret the dreams of Pharaoh’s butler and baker — the former was restored to royal favour, the latter was executed. Pharaoh’s own dreams about the ears of corn and the cattle were also interpreted accurately as years of plenty followed by years of famine.

  December 26, 2025

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