In psychotherapy, symptoms are not just something to suppress as quickly as possible.

Working together with your therapist to discern the significance of symptoms can lead to them dissipating.

Even when symptoms persist, their suffering can be tolerated by better understanding them.

This is Part 5 in a series of articles describing several different methods of listening and speaking to our psychiatric symptoms in an effort to discover the crucial messages they may be trying to communicate to us.

One of the central tasks in Jungian analysis or therapy is acknowledging, confronting, and coming to terms with what Jung famously named the "shadow." According to Jung (1961), "The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself [sic] . . . " (p. 387), and, therefore, represses and defensively projects onto others and the world. The shadow is, by definition, unconscious, some part of ourselves of which we are unaware and do not want to know about.

From a Jungian perspective, this so-called shadow is the source of many if not most of our psychological signs, symptoms and suffering owing to its dissociation from consciousness, i.e., its unconsciousness, which makes it even more powerful and dangerous.

One of the main things that need to happen in Jungian therapy is to become more conscious or aware of our own personal shadow, the disowned or rejected part of our personality, accept responsibility for it, and integrate or incorporate it into the conscious personality as constructively as possible rather than constantly defending against it by denying or projecting these "negative" qualities, tendencies, or traits

What Is Active Imagination in Jungian Therapy?

Jung's primary method for accomplishing this daunting feat is what........

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