Technique of self-knowledge of jung

Jung had two famous notebooks, the first he called the “Black Book” and it was something like the diary of Moleskin, and the second notebook was the “Red Book”. It contains the largest portion of Jung's famous drawings of Mandala.

This "Red Book" here was similar to a real medieval folio - it had a binding from real morocco, and Jung, when he wrote in it, stylized his letters and design under "Gothic". It is clear that he loved his Red Book more than others.

Probably, each person should have such notebooks. Working daily in his diaries - Jung made many discoveries, because The creative atmosphere of a person who writes is generated by his notebook. This is the minimum that a creative person should have, even if there is no office, desk, home, homeland ... It was not for nothing that Tsvetaeva wrote in her diaries: "If they ask me Russia or my notebooks, I know that I will choose. Poet without his notebooks, no. "

What is a mandala?

Daily work in the Red Book prompted Jung to the invention of a wonderful psychotherapeutic technique.

Like all drawing techniques, it is double-edged:

• firstly, serves the purpose of diagnosis (allows himself to understand and see from the side a complete picture of his problem, "plugging"),
• and secondly, it has a therapeutic effect - it treats the state of depression in the course of daily drawing.

Who knows? It is possible that the therapeutic effect comes immediately when you "understand yourself." Well, "understand yourself" helps - mandala.

Here is what Jung writes in his famous book "Memoirs. Dreams. Reflections":

"In general, I realized then that nothing changes our life like a language. A damaged language makes life incomplete and flawed."

This Jung meant that he goes from words - to pictures, to pictograms. And now his favorite pictogram (almost every day) becomes a sketch, a drawing of a mandala. Jung knew how to draw, like all the people of his generation, so we advise you not to hesitate to resort to the technique of collage, if you can't draw something that you like and “says something” every day.

And that's what happened to him: "Every morning I painted in my notebook the small circle is the mandala, which at that moment expressed my inner state. These drawings gave me the opportunity to see what was going on with my psyche from day to day. "

And finally, Jung comes to the next discovery, he realizes that Mandala is the perfect drawing of our inner world."Mandala is an internal wholeness that strives for harmony and does not tolerate self-deception." She really does not tolerate self-deception, so if on some day torn ugly disturbing pictures are drawn with broken symmetry and harmony, then such pictures should be drawn. They not only show in the language of symbols - what is with you, but also have a therapeutic effect.

In the end, Jung realized that his child, his main archetype - the Self can be best expressed through the mandala.

Where are we going? What does mandala mean?

Previously, like all of us, Jung believed that the development of a person, the course of his personality, his biography, etc., can be represented as a graph in the form of an arrow, a vector, a line tending somewhere “there”, beyond the horizon, in a place called "Forward." And here, drawing his mandalas, Jung understood - no! ..

Human development does not go towards the conditional "Forward"!

"When I started drawing mandalas, I noticed that everything, all the ways in which I walked, all the steps I took, did not lead forward, but BACK to some kind of original Center."

Jung could draw mandalas with a golden palace in the center. He had ink, and the skill to make sketches, sketches. You have plenty of options for how to make your mandala "talking".

But here you have another technique of self-analysis from the arsenal of Jung's psychotherapeutic techniques.

While painting the mandalas, Jung went to the sea (his wife died) and wandered along the shore, often deserted, on cloudy, bad days. And it was there that he remembered that as a boy he loved to build entire cities from stones, sand, mud. Moreover, these cities had a medieval - radial form, that is, they represented the same mandala - a circle. Working with stones and dirt, with which instead of cement stones were fastened, Jung built more than one three-dimensional mandala, from those that were not included in his "Red Book". He tells how this practice ended with mandalas-cities of stones. Having placed a temple in the center of his city, Jung searched for a stone for an "altar". When the stone was found, the obedience that Jung placed upon himself was over.

While working, this great psychiatrist would sometimes ask himself the question: “Where does this work lead me?”, But he did not demand an instant, exhaustive answer.

Ask yourself this question and you. Read how to work with mandalas in the article Mandala-therapy for soul healing.

The author: Elena Nazarenko

According to the materials of the site www.live-and-learn.ru