Five psychologists and psychotherapists from Malta recently completed their specialised training in Jungian Analysis and were proclaimed analysts at the University of Vienna, Austria, during the 21st congress of the International Association of Analytical Psychology (IAAP). The five Maltese Jungian analysts are Laner Cassar, Anna Maria Mangion, Marcella Muscat, Christiane Sullivan and Rev. John Vella.
This is a first for Malta, with the training having been made possible through the support of the IAAP and the Centre for Analytical Psychology (CIPA, Southern Institute). As a result, the public in Malta now has the opportunity to access a different psychotherapeutic modality that activates a Depth Psychology perspective.
This educational route was started in 2007 when the Malta Depth Psychological Association (MDPA) was founded by Cassar and Sullivan. MDPA began by organising continuing professional development courses in Depth Psychology for other caring professionals. In the same year, the association applied to become a member of the IAAP and was formally approved as a developing group in 2008. The members started to prepare for entry in the formal training by undergoing teaching seminars and personal analysis. The members were accepted as affiliate candidates of IAAP and CIPA in 2013-14.
Jungian analysis is the psychotherapeutic approach of Analytical Psychology in which the analyst and patient work together to bring unconscious elements of the psyche into a more balanced relationship with conscious awareness and experience in an effort to discover meaning, facilitate maturation of the personality, improve mental health or provide relief to psychological suffering.
The father of Analytical Psychology, Carl Gustav Jung, was much more than a psychiatrist and analyst who took Freud’s concepts to another level. Jung was also an expert of various disciplines including, mythology, anthropology, art, religion and dreams. Far from seeing each of these areas in isolation, he applied them to psychology to make them deeper, more unified and more dynamic. As a result he widened the explanation of the unconscious.
In analysis, one becomes aware of what unconscious issues influence one’s behaviour. With greater awareness of these issue comes a greater sense of well-being and an opportunity to make better choices in one’s life.
Work is primarily done through interpreting dreams, complexes and physical symptoms as well as making sense of the symbols created in art and movement. Self-awareness is further expanded by observing the concrete manifestations of the collective unconscious revealed in the archetypal stories, patterns and images found in mythology, fairy tales and the arts that mirror human behaviours and patterns.
At the heart of all IAAP accredited, academic, Jungian training programmes is the required fulfilment of Jung’s ‘Training Analysis’ mandate to ensure that the analyst’s craft is in place, and is separate from other purely academic programmes. Anyone training to become a Jungian analyst must first and foremost wrestle with the material of his or her own life within the context of an extensive, personal training analysis.
The MDPA intends to set up a Centre of Analytic Psychology (CAP, Malta) in the near future so as to start offering the next cohort of formal training in Jungian analysis in 2021.
For further information visit the website below or e-mail lanercassar@gmail.com.