MENTAL
HEALTH
"A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning." - Carl Jung(1)
Mental health is becoming a universal concept, infusing the realms of business, psychology, everyday life and the media. The rise of this ubiquitous concept is in response to global awareness of psychological functioning brought into focus and importance post the Covid-19 Pandemic.
It is also reflective of the increase in emotional, environmental, financial, social, globalisation and political pressures across the world, increasing the psychological demands on each of us. Mental health may be described as the measure of maintaining functionality while dealing with these variables. However, in a world focussed on maintaining functionality at the exclusion of a meaningful experience and psychological growth, the Jungian perspective has much to offer.
For Jung mental health is about the individuation process, the process towards integration and wholeness throughout our life journey. The central idea is that we don’t just focus on relieving symptoms and function better, but that we engage with the meaning of symptoms. Jung stated that symptoms and conditions like depression are meaningful, that symptoms are messages, and the unconscious wants our attention, and the symptoms call us to meaningful relationship to our inner worlds, opening deeper resources and experience from within.
As we grapple with our mental health and the symptoms precipitating from living life tensed by societal, interpersonal and internal fragmentation, we are reminded of Jung’s courage and guidance to travel into our own unconscious, guided by the Self. In this process Jungian analysis provides the container to develop a conscious attitude in working with our archetypal unconscious material (such as dreams ), enlarging our consciousness and mental health as lived experience.
The concept of mental health has become an extremely important nodal point in global awareness that opens the aperture to the human psyche as a dynamic of functionality in negotiating everyday life, as well as creating meaning and wholeness through engagement with the unconscious in the quest to know ourselves as psychological beings.
Post written by Konrad van Staden - Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Analyst.
Reference:
(1) Jung, C.G. (1969), “Psychology and Religion: West and East,” CW 11. Princeton: Princeton University Press.