“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
C.G. Jung, Collected Works 11
As a Jungian analyst working with anxiety disorders, it is important to mention that the medical diagnosis of mental disorders is not similar to physiological disorders. In most cases, there are no laboratory tests or scans to verify a mental disorder, but the diagnosis relies on observations, interviews and rating scales. While the diagnosis can be helpful in accessing right kind of treatment and medication for the symptoms, at the same time it ignores the root causes of the symptoms, including various social and cultural factors, let alone the role of the unconscious. In addition, the diagnosis as a label may turn into identity, which can diminish hope for the healing.
Anxiety disorders are intriguing as the most common form of mental disorders, including generalized anxiety, social phobia, agoraphobia, and panic disorder. According to large population-based surveys, up to 33.7% of the population are affected by an anxiety disorder during their lifetime (Bandelow, Micaelis, 2015). Anxiety disorders are so prevalent in the modern world that some suggest we live in an age of perpetual anxiety. If Jung were alive, he may comment that anxiety is the symptom of the spirit of the time and of disregarding the spirit of the depths.
As Machado (2020) writes, cognitive-behavioral therapies have received a lot of attention for the growing evidence base for anxiety disorders. However, their attempts on symptom alleviation on the ego consciousness level misses the symbolic aspects and meaning of the client’s experience of anxiety. Jungian approach focuses on finding the prospective, albeit unconscious at the onset of symptoms, meaning behind the anxiety. Anxiety is a signal that something in the whole life of the client is out of balance. Anxiety symptom is an attempt of the psyche to cure itself. By listening to the unconscious in the dreams, body symptoms and fantasies, the client can gradually accept and integrate the fragmented, wounded, and hidden aspects of the psyche, i.e. the unconscious factors behind the anxiety.
My experience has led me to believe that many anxiety symptoms arise from a blockage in the psychic energy that then appears as “misdirected energy” in the body and mind as anxiety, fears and panic. This blockage seems to prevent the person from taking the next necessary developmental step in their life span. When this block is gradually resolved and the “legitimate suffering” of the developmental passage is experienced, the anxiety symptoms are reduced, and life energy starts to flow again according to its natural gradient.
It also seems that repressed affects are key part of the blockage. Repression is an unconscious means to conform to external expectations at the expense of authentic life and self-acceptance. Diverging from these expectations brings indeed suffering, since a conscious sacrifice needed to be made. A choice between living a life of others and a life of our own is painful but very necessary one, latest at the midlife passage.
List of references:
Bandelow B, Michaelis S. (2015). Epidemiology of anxiety disorders in the 21st century. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2015 Sep;17(3):327-35.
Machado, Silvio. (2020). Integrative Jungian Psychotherapy for Anxiety and OCD. Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
Jung, C. G. (1970). The collected works of C. G. Jung: Vol. 11. Psychology and Religion: West and East.
