HomeDan Keusal, M.S., LMFT
Jungian Psychotherapy for Individuals & Couples
"Find Your Purpose, Heal Your Pain, Live With Passion"
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Autumn 2025:
"Something Unexpected and Irrational"
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Greetings...
Drawing on the classic story of an interaction C.G. Jung had with a struggling patient, this newsletter looks at an often neglected approach to getting unstuck, one that stand in stark contrast to prevailing, linear, one-dimensional methods in modern psychotherapy--and in life!
As we move from a deepening autumn into winter, I hope you will find here some 'falling leaves' that hint at the promise of a nourishing, fallow winter, and, on the other side of that, new life.
Take good care,
~Dan
* * * * *
Reflections: “Something Unexpected and Irrational"
Sometimes when you’re stuck, the way through is not a clear, organized, step-by-step plan to “fix” things. Sometimes, the way through is something that comes (I’m writing these words not long after the World Series) “out of left field.”*
Jung tells the story of a patient with whom he was struggling, a highly educated young woman who, as he put it, “always knew better about everything,” who used her intellect and rationalism as a defense against her emotions. As a result, she was not making much progress in her therapy.
Jung writes: “After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that would burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself.”
One session, the woman was telling Jung about a dream she had where someone gave her an expensive piece of jewelry, a golden scarab. While she was still reporting the dream, Jung heard something gently tapping on the window, and saw that it was a large insect, trying to get into the dark room. He opened the window and caught the insect in his hand as it flew in.
“It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer,” Jung continues, “whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your golden scarab.’ This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance.” Jung adds that after this, the therapy continued “with satisfactory results.”
Contemporary approaches to therapy—spurred on in large part by models designed to increase profits—advocate a precise diagnosis, and a clearly-defined treatment plan and course of action. In other words: nothing unexpected or irrational. But experience tells us: that’s not how life works.
Modern psychology would write off the beetle appearing at the window as the client was relating her dream as “just a coincidence.” But that’s the problem with much of therapy these days: too much focus on rational, “evidence-based” techniques and predictable outcomes, not enough room for the unexpected and irrational. And insurance? Imagine Jung reporting to a modern, profit-driven insurance plan that his “intervention,” his “treatment plan” in a particular session was catching an insect and handing it to his client!
Yet I’ve seen, over and over again, clients whose therapies, whose lives, were finally moved forward by similar things: getting a traffic ticket when their main issue was needing to slow down …or getting unexpectedly laid off from a job, or left in a relationship, around which they had built a one-dimensional identity…or finally buying and reading a much-needed, life-changing book after the author showed up on their favorite podcast, “as if by magic”…
Waiting for the “unexpected and irrational” does not mean being passive. It means cultivating certain ways of paying attention, of learning to notice a different type of experience and then, when it arrives (and they do arrive), to let it in, take it seriously, see the “magic” in it, and respond to it, take action that derives from it.
In these difficult, turbulent times, I find myself wondering, too: what about ways to get unstuck collectively, (politically, socially, economically). What if, instead of business-as-usual, or a reaction to business-as-usual that shows up as repressive and authoritarian, we began to look for and welcome “the unexpected and irrational”? What might that look like?
Let’s hope we are, individually and collectively, paying attention, and that when something “taps at our window,” we seize the moment.
(NOTE: Curious, I did a Google search for the origin of the phrase “out of left” field, and got this: “The idiom ‘out of left field" has two main theories for its origin: one suggests it comes from the unusual and eccentric sounds that could be heard from a psychiatric hospital located beyond the left field wall of the old Chicago Cubs' ballpark. The other theory is that the phrase originated from the deep, distant, and often unexpected nature of plays made from left field in early ballparks, as it was typically a larger and less-frequented area of the field.”
Dan Keusal, M.S., LMFT, Psychotherapist. (206) 523-1340. Email: dankeusal@dankeusal.com
