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The Archetypal Versus Emotional Approach to Essence Work
Everything that exists in the material world is simply the manifestation of a certain idea behind it: an archetypal idea. The archetype determines size, form, color and character of everything it creates. In the 1930‘s, it was the Swiss psychoanalyst, C.G. Jung, who took up the concept of archetypes, defining them as blueprints of the human soul.
Jungian psychology claims that each person has not only an individual unconsciousness based on archetypes, but that there is also a collective unconsciousness that contains ideas and images common to every human being on Earth, no matter their age, sex or place of origin. The collective unconscious can be understood as the home of the archetypes in everyone. This home has, for example, original images of women and men that help with the orientation of being part of the human society.
Read more: The Archetypal Versus Emotional Approach to Essence Work
Dreams, Drawings and Essences
When I first learned about flower therapy, I was taught to use lists of questions in order to choose essences. Although the lists were very rational, patients usually felt they needed many of the Bach Flower essences. Choosing from the list left me feeling like I making a Flower Therapy Supermarket shopping list. Sometimes I just talked for along time to the patient, but setting priorities among the possible choices was occasionally difficult.
I do use my intuition, mostly in setting priorities between remedies, but I rely even more extensively now on clients‘ drawings and dreams. In working with patients, I provide color pencils and paper in the waiting room and encourage the patient to feel free to draw whatever he or she wants. We begin the interview as usual, but toward the middle, we discuss the drawings, and I show them Bach flower photos from a deck of cards as a way of choosing an essence.
Flower essences, drawing and dreams
Some years ago, I attended a flower essence workshop by a French practitioner who said: „Good therapists don‘t push a client, and they only give a few essences -- simplify, simplify, simplify.“ I developed my best method of helping clients in flower therapy from that workshop. We were told to draw, and on the basis of the drawings we analyzed what we felt. I was amazed how the drawings described my state at that moment.