Article 4: Another Alice, Another Wonderland
The power of the unconcious revealed. How Jung may be right after all regarding the Collective Unconscious.
"In a fascinating and too little known article published in the January 1940 issue of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, republished in C. Scott Moss's The Hypnotic Investigation of Dreams (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1967), psychiatrist/hypnotist Milton Erickson, and Lawrence S. Kubie, state that
During the training of a subject for a particular experiment in hypnosis, a unique observation was made upon the ability of one person in a spontaneous trance accurately to decipher and to translate the mysterious and cryptic automatic writing of another. In their conscious states neither individual could understand the script. In trance-like states each one quite independently reached identical interpretations of it. Cryptic automatic writing is found to suffer from processes of distortion identical with those seen in dreams; and the translation of such writing, to involve the same principles as those involved in dream analysis. (p. 101)
After describing the protocol by which the subject was given the suggestion to "forget all the vowels" and replace certain letters with numerals, resulting in an entirely cryptic and consciously unintelligible message ...
... a second subject, Alice, entered the laboratory and showed an immediate interest in the problem. This subject has the rare capacity to develop spontaneous hypnotic trances during which she functions adequately in whatever situation she finds herself. Upon awakening from them she has no awareness of her trance activities. Because of her interest in the problem [of interpreting the cryptic writing of the prior subject], she was given an outline of the essential facts and the writing was shown to her by the assistant who then departed leaving this second subject, Alice, to puzzle over the writing with the investigator. Thereupon Alice developed a series of spontaneous trance states interspersed with ordinary waking states. In the trance states she interpreted the writing item by item and explained it step by step to the investigator who maintained essentially a passive, receptive role." (p. 102)
In 1966, for Moss's compilation, Erickson contributed a discussion of this paper. Erickson states:
The main event of this unplanned and unexpected experience is in itself worthy of record for it is an arresting fact that one human being while in a dissociated trance-like condition can accurately decipher the automatic writing of another -- writing which neither of the two subjects was able to decipher while in states of normal consciousness. The observation stresses from a new angle a fact that has often been emphasized by those who have studied unconscious processes but which remains none the less mysterious -- namely, that underneath the diversified nature of the consciously organized aspects of the personality, the unconscious talks in a language which has a remarkable uniformity; furthermore, that that language has laws so constant that the unconscious of one individual is better equipped to understand the unconscious of another than the conscious aspect of the personality of either.
If this is true, and it seems to be a fact attested from many sources, it must give the psychoanalyst reason to wonder as to the wisdom of confining himself exclusively to the technique of free association in his efforts consciously to penetrate into the unconscious of his patient. (p. 111, Emphasis supplied.) "
The above experiment demonstrates with some clarity the point that Jung was making in stating that as humans we all have a collective unconscious. There is a place that we can go to access deep knowledge and symbols that is common to all humanity and which explains why legends and stories around the world all have common themes and ideas running through them.
This explains also the shamanic technique of soul retrieval. The shaman enters trance to discover the missing parts of the clients soul, the source of the emotional damage they have received in trauma. In this way they enter the collective unconscious and make sense of what they see there, which is then understood by the client when the story is told to them. It is the unconscious mind of the shaman reaching out and talking to the mind of the client.
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