Archetypal Themes in Depression

Muriendo porque no muero. (S. Juan de la Cruz.)

Analytical psychologists have worked extensively with the milder depressive reactions occurring in middle life but, following Jung, they have been concerned mainly with the more normal constructive psychological processes in their patients. This preoccupation with general features of normal adult development, valuable as it has been, has resulted in neglect of study of mechanisms in particular psychological disturbances and a lack of interest in the early development of abnormality. The need for more psychopathologically orientated investigation is particularly evident in regard to depressive illness.

One of Jung's principal contributions is his positive attitude towards psychological symptoms. He regards them as expressions of a spontaneous, unconscious, psychic activity which, by a homeostatic mechanism, tends to compensate a defective conscious attitude. In a limited and ill-adapted manner, the symptoms themselves may effect such a compensation but, only when it is possible to achieve a complementary interaction between conscious and unconscious systems does a development occur which makes symptoms unnecessary. This interaction, observed in the dialectical relationship between patient and therapist, is the keystone of Jung's method and theory (Jung, 1935). His conceptual model is of variations in psychic energy, movements of libido in accordance with changing energy potentials in the psyche. Thus, he has described depression in terms of an attraction of libido to the unconscious, by the activity of complexes functioning autonomously in dissociation from consciousness. In contrast to the poverty of conscious mental life there is an “accumulation of value, i.e. libido, in the unconscious”, often revealed in vivid dream and phantasy, and which, if assimilated, can lead to a transformation and widening of consciousness (Jung, 1928). This transformation occurs by the creative organization of psychic “contents” in typical f