Category: Mind

ANALYSED FEELING

In bio-analysis we use the concept of analysed feeling to communicate with and understand the comprehensive organisation that happens all the time inside our biological system.

 

In any discussion about bio-analysis, the reader will always come across the concept of analysed feeling. As a clinician treating mainly patients with vague, confusing, and chronic diseases such as metabolic syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, auto-immune diseases and allergies, I was forced to search for an underlying pattern in those cases where treatments were reasonably successful. What really happened during the few weeks or sometimes months that we worked together to understand the illness, to coordinate the medication and lifestyle changes, and eventually to create an independent model for the patient to manage his/her symptoms in the future? After many years of observing and adapting therapy methods based upon models as diverse as bio-feedback, psycho-analysis, medical hypnotherapy, and guided daydreaming, I noticed that it boils down to one fundamental concept. It does not matter what technique or process we use to support the medical treatment, as long as it includes authentic analysis of the feelings that accompany the disease process.

To analyse, from the bio-analytic point of view, is to consider relationships between different parts of our system in order to discover their all-inclusive nature, rather than merely examine the distinct elements which make up the whole.

Feeling in bio-analytic language means to evaluate, integrate and become conscious of all the bodily, emotional and mental impressions which confirm or disrupt our inherent identity.

An analysed feeling binds this comprehensive awareness into a network of self-experience, biologically, psychologically and spiritually.

 

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Analysed feeling.

ARCHETYPES AS BIODYNAMIC SYMBOLS

“It is as if something somewhere were ‘known’ in the form of images – but not by us.” (Marie-Louise von Franz)

 

The first night after I started to write this essay, I dreamed that I was walking with a child – someone like a grandchild – through an art gallery or museum. As we walked through the rooms, the images in the paintings we were looking at became less and less complex. The child tried to find single words that were as short as possible such as cat or tree to name the artworks. At first there were the intricate landscapes and domestic gatherings of the early Renaissance painters, for which she easily managed to find a word – dog, man, sun, star -, but as we moved along, the paintings became more abstract and simplistic, until we stood in front of a beautiful line drawing with just a few dark lines curling out from an invisible point in the left lower quadrant; delicate black threads against a background of transparent watercolours in the rich tones of a South African desert at sunset. The dream ended with me waiting in enthusiastic anticipation for the young child to name this artwork. I woke up with a distinct feeling that it will be difficult to name the intuitive knowledge about archetypes in a modern world where the explanations for our mind and its images are based on the straight lines of neuro-science. However, I still hope that intuitive knowing and neuro-scientific certainty can draw a fascinating reality against the transparent background of the natural world.

 

To name and describe something that we only intuitively know but that is part of everyday life was much easier a few centuries ago, when scientific reasoning was already an enlightening opposite to religion and mysticism, but when myth was still accepted as a necessary part of human understanding. Today it is extremely difficult where, in a world of materialistic and empirical approach, science ironically takes on many of the qualities of a religion and develops the intolerance and rigidity typical of any established religion. One therefore has to be very careful in naming reality, and although our knowledge about the micro and macro world has increased dramatically, there is a real danger of missing the essence of our understanding of the natural world. 

I am convinced that I will not succeed in naming this most sensitive aspect of our mind’s capacity for interpreting reality with symbolic images in a way that is clear enough to withstand the scrutiny of many in the priesthood of modern science. However, I hope that most readers will find their own ‘short words’ to affirm this fundamental aspect of self-exploration. 

 

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Archetypes and symbols.