The Psyche is an Ecosystem

we are connected in deep and profound ways

Somewhere Along the way is a weekly blog exploring human experience through spirituality, psychology, and poetry. This week, a reflection on ecopsychology and pathways to healing.

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Photo by Artur Łuczka on Unsplash

In the last year or so, I have become deeply interested in the work of Carl Jung and the ideas he had. At the moment I am reading his brilliant memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which goes through his life, charting the development of the ideas that came to define his work and have had a huge impact on modern culture.

One of the things I like most about Jung’s work is his holistic approach to the psyche. All aspects of the conscious and the unconscious are taken into account and valued equally. The ultimate goal of analysis, in his view, was a union of opposites within the psyche, which gives rise to a unity of self - the self being the ultimate archetype, encompassing all parts of psychic life. 

Through my interest in Jung’s work, and the influence of other writers such as Sophie Strand, I have come to the belief that the psyche is an ecosystem: in the same way the earth is an ecosystem, and in the same way that the body is an ecosystem of many parts which work together (hopefully) in harmony, the psyche is a complex network of thoughts and feelings, an ecosystem which contributes to our general experience of the world.

Photo by Rosie Sun on Unsplash

Something which is crucial to psychoanalysis is the acknowledgement of things in the psyche which are not nice to look at, not comfortable, not easy to deal with. Facing the shadow, as Jung calls it, is crucial in this work and is an important component of healing splits within the psyche. In the same way that the soil needs to be rich with muck and microbial life in order to grow things, and in the same way that our gut microbiome needs a diversity of bacteria for optimal functioning, our psyches need a bit of dirt, a bit of shadow and darkness, to be healthy.

Identifying oneself entirely with a clean and flawless outer persona might be socially advantageous, but it is detrimental to psychic life. When we deny our shadow and disavow our darkness, it has a constricting effect on the psyche, and the shadow only becomes stronger and gains more momentum in the unconscious. This is why someone who is usually perfectly kind can have an unexpected and volcanic outburst of anger or rage, or why repressed sexuality can lead to violence. The shadow energy needs to find an outlet, and if that can’t happen consciously in a controlled manner, it will happen unconsciously, often with disastrous effects.

Taking this idea further, in the same way that trees are connected underground through mycelium, extensive networks of mycorrhizal fungi through which trees communicate and share resources, our psyches are connected through what Jung termed the collective unconscious. We have unexplainable unconscious connections with others, we have intuition, we are able to perceive someone’s experience without them directly showing it to us.

The collective unconscious is the baseline, the oldest part of the psyche, from which we understand human experiences as archetypal and thus understand their effects and how to respond to them. These archetypes show up in myths, in much of the art we produce, and in our daily lives; they are a way of communicating and sharing experience.

Jung recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections an experience early in his career as a therapist where he woke in the middle of the night with a dull pain in his head, to later find out that one of his patients had killed himself that same night by shooting himself in the head, in the exact same spot as where he felt the pain.¹ These kinds of mysterious happenings occur all the time, though not always as disturbing as that. Call it mystical, call it synchronicity, call it mere coincidence; we are psychically connected in deep and profound ways, and when you are open to these connections, they become even stronger.

Image from foodnavigator.com.

The psyche and the body are also deeply connected. The clearest example of this in my mind is the gut-brain axis, which posits that our psychological activity is mirrored in our digestive system. So chronic stress, chronic anxiety, depression - all of these are linked to symptoms of IBS. In other words: what our minds feel, our bodies feel. It might even be argued that there is no separation between psyche and soma; they are one and the same. 

This also rings true when we think of the effect that repression has on our bodies - what gets pushed into the shadow eventually makes itself known through other means - namely, adverse physical sensations. Someone who habitually represses anger, for example, might have a facial twitch or a mysterious pain which worsens when their anger is activated, or, in extreme cases, something as serious as a heart attack can come about through chronically repressing emotions, though it is obviously not the only cause. This is the body’s way of processing psychic energy which is not being consciously addressed. If you try to push something down, it comes out sideways.

The bottom line here is that if we want to take care of our bodily ecosystem, we must also take care of the psychic ecosystem. True healing takes place through work on both of these parts of ourselves.

Drawing by Robert Fludd, 1619. Image from Wikipedia. Title translates from Latin to “The Triple Vision of the Soul in the Body.”

So, the natural next question is, how do we do this? How do we become custodians of our inner ecosystem? How do we tend to the messy, dark parts of ourselves? There is no easy one-size-fits-all answer, but it is something each of us can do, and we must do it alone. 

There are tried and tested methods of going about this important task - meditation, yoga, spending time in nature, making art (an excellent way of engaging with shadow in a contained but cathartic manner) - but ultimately the path to healing a traumatised psyche is up to you to find. And that can be scary, but it is also a liberating invitation: you get to decide what your life will be; you get to decide what path you take.

I want to finish up with one of my favourite quotes from Jung: “The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.”² Ultimately, I don’t think we can ever be entirely whole, and definitely not for very long, but I love this quote because it taps into what life is all about, which is being committed to the journey. We may never be able to be perfectly whole, but why shouldn’t we try anyway to love what is broken, and make our lives as vibrant and joyful as we can? 

Don’t be afraid to take those detours and get lost - you will find your way back with your inner compass, which always points north to the heart, and never fails.

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The Alethiometer, or symbol reader, from Philip Pullman’s series His Dark Materials. Image from His Dark Materials Wiki.

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Until next time.

1. pp. 165-166.

2. from “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” in Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12.