“If Jungian psychology had a daughter, perhaps it would be Processwork…”
Arnold Mindell developed the foundations of process-oriented psychology in the 1970s during his practice as a Jungian Training Analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland.
Processwork is a transpersonal, depth psychology that owes a great debt to Jungian psychology and still deeply reflects Jung’s fundamental insights and techniques.
The developers of Processwork took Jungian ideas further, expanding into into the body, relationships, the world, altered and extreme states of consciousness and other areas that classical analysis rarely enters.
One of Jung’s foundational contribution to psychology was the insistence that the unconscious is not merely a repository of repressed material, but an active, purposeful, creative dimension of the psyche that is continuously working toward the integration and wholeness of the individual. He called this process individuation: the lifelong movement toward becoming more fully oneself, guided by something deeper than the ego’s intentions.
Processwork inherits this conviction entirely. Its central practices of following the process rather than directing it, amplifying secondary signals rather than suppressing them, treating symptoms and disturbances as meaningful rather than pathological, are the direct application of the Jungian attitude to a broader range of human experience.
The Dreambody, Arnold Mindell’s foundational concept, is precisely this: the recognition that the same unconscious process expressing itself in nighttime dreams is also expressing itself in the body. And that working with one is working with the other.
“Processwork embodies Jung’s basic concepts, but carries these into spaces within the psyche and also into the world, beyond what Jung and most Jungians have imagined … more than conceptualizing, more than understanding, more than interpreting phenomenena, the Mindells enter actively into the processes through which phenomena transform themselves.”
June Singer, Jungian Analyst
These concepts comprise just a few of the overlapping paradigmatic worldviews
between Jungian Psychology and Processwork
Where Freud often looked backward, tracing symptoms or complexes to their causal origins in past experience, Jung looked forward. He understood the psyche as reaching toward something not yet realized.
Processwork is thoroughly teleological in this sense. A symptom in this view is not only the residue of old wounds. It is also a signal from the deeper self about what needs to become conscious and what the person is being called to grow into.
When a process-oriented practitioner asks not “what caused this?” but “where is this trying to go?” When a body symptom is followed to discover what it is trying to express, or a conflict is amplified to find the message inside it, this is the teleological attitude in action.
Similar to ‘The Way’ in Taoism, the dreaming process is understood as purposeful: it has a direction, even when that direction is not yet legible to the conscious mind. Disturbance is evidence that something is trying to happen that hasn’t been able to happen yet.
Jung noticed that events in the outer world would sometimes mirror or speak to a patient’s inner psychological situation. These events, he argued, pointed toward a dimension of reality in which inner and outer were not fully separate. That the psyche and the world are, at some level, part of the same fabric.
Processwork lives in this territory. It views the structure between our internal process and what we experience in the external world are synchronistic in nature. Consciousness and energy flow with signals that cross the boundary between the individual and the world, between the subjective and the objective. A person dreams of puppies, they have constant cravings for ice cream, they notice the fluffy clouds. Maybe they identify as a strong and self-reliant person, but something warm and soft is wanted to be integrated into their wholeness.
Following the process means learning to read this language and to engage with reality in a way that can extrapolate meaning and understanding from our experiences.
Jung outlined his interpretation of the collective unconscious. This is the notion that layers of the psyche are not only personal but shared. They carry the accumulated symbolic inheritance of humanity in the form of archetypes, symbols and shared historical memory.
The collective unconscious is not something any one person possesses. It is the ground beneath us all, surfacing in the great recurring images of myth and dream, in the patterns and figures that repeat in individual human experiences.
Processwork takes this seriously and extends it. In its approach to groups, organizations, and what Arnold Mindell called worldwork, the collective unconscious is understood as something palpable and present. The field that surrounds any individual or gathering of people is permeated, embodying and inter-existing with the collective unconscious. Phenomena that Processwork refers to as ghost roles, atmospheres or when transpersonal figures speak through individuals in a large forum are manifestations of the collective unconscious.
Perhaps the deepest resonance between Jungian psychology and Processwork lies in their shared orientation toward what Jung called the unus mundus. That there is one world with an underlying unity from which inner and outer, psyche and matter, individual and cosmos are not separate. This ancient concept, recovered by Jung from the alchemical tradition, points toward a dimension of reality in which the opposites that seem most irreconcilable (mind and body, self and world, dream and waking life) are expressions of a single underlying process.
This is related to the concept of anima mundi, the soul of the world. The idea is that the world itself is ensouled. Nature and matter participate in a living, meaning-making process. This thread runs through Jung’s late work and flows directly into Processwork’s understanding of the dreaming as something that extends beyond the individual psyche. Sometimes referred to as Process Mind, we are being moved, dreamed or organized by this larger dance of the universe.
“From the perspective of the dream-maker, the emphasis is placed not on your gaining intellectual knowledge about dreams, but rather on your gaining a clearer sense of your relationship to infinity.”
Arnold Mindell
"[This] work expands the scope of Jung’s psychology to include not only the psyche but also the body, relationships and the total environment. … In this way they help make manifest Jung’s late, brilliant intuition of the unus mundus, one world in which differing opposites seek reconciliation."
~June Singer
These texts explore the deeper connection between process-oriented and Jungian psycholoogy and well as delving deeper into the concepts both schools of thought share.
On shadow dynamics on individual and global scales
by Paul Levy
Exploring many of the innovative concepts and practical methods of Process-Oriented Psychology
by Amy Mindell
Surviving Encounters with the Spirit of Death is a non-fiction book about the author's experience with a cancer diagnosis
by Conor McKenna
FROM PSYCHOANALYTICS TO PROCESSWORK
Marks a shift from interpreting unconscious pathology to fostering awareness of meaningful, unfolding experiences
by Nader R. Shabahangi
We offer workshops, classes, and longer training programs throughout the year, in person and online. Whether you’re new to this work or looking to deepen your practice, there’s likely something in the upcoming calendar for you.
