Jung and Shamanism — Two Traditions, One Map
Carl Jung never called himself a shaman. But he spent decades descending into his own unconscious, dialoguing with figures he encountered there, mapping a territory that the shamanic traditions had been navigating for thousands of years. The overlap is not coincidental. They were both trying to understand the same thing: what lives beneath the surface of ordinary human consciousness, and how to work with it in the service of healing.
I have been living inside both traditions for over 30 years. What I can tell you is that they are not just compatible. They illuminate each other in ways that neither tradition fully achieves alone.
What Jung Was Actually Doing
Jung broke from Freud in 1913 and spent the years that followed in what he later described as a confrontation with the unconscious. He descended deliberately into his own inner world, engaging with the figures and forces he found there, recording everything in what became his Red Book.
What he was doing looks, from the outside, remarkably like a shamanic journey. The deliberate descent. The encounter with inner figures. The return with material that needed to be integrated into ordinary life. Jung himself was aware of this parallel and wrote about it extensively in his work on mythology, alchemy, and what he called the individuation process.
Individuation, in Jungian terms, is the lifelong process of becoming more fully oneself by integrating the parts of the psyche that have been split off, suppressed, or exiled. The shadow. The anima or animus. The Self, the deeper organising centre of the whole psyche that Jung distinguished from the ego.
The shamanic traditions have their own language for the same territory. Soul loss. Power loss. Intrusion. The shaman journeys to the lower, middle, or upper world to retrieve what has been lost and return it to the person who is suffering. The mechanics are different. The map is the same.
The Language of Symbol
Both traditions understand that the deeper layers of the psyche speak in images, symbols, and felt sense rather than in logic and linear thought. You cannot think your way into the unconscious. You have to go there through a different mode of attention: through trance, through active imagination, through dream, through the body, through the kind of receptive awareness that ordinary waking life keeps firmly at bay.
This is why talking therapy has its limits. It operates primarily in the realm of conscious thought and verbal processing, which is useful and important but does not reach the deeper architecture of how a person was formed. The patterns that drive behaviour, the relational dynamics that keep repeating, the symptoms that persist despite years of excellent therapeutic work: these live in the layers that symbol and image can reach, and that language often cannot.
Jung understood this. The shamanic traditions built entire healing systems around it. And Sacred Alchemy, the methodology I have developed over 30 years, works precisely at that intersection: using hypnosis to open the receptive state, shamanic imagery and journeying to navigate the deeper territory, and Jungian frameworks to make sense of what is found there and integrate it into waking life.
Shadow Work — The Meeting Point
Perhaps nowhere is the convergence more striking than in the work of shadow. Jung's shadow is the repository of everything the ego has rejected: the traits, the feelings, the impulses, the parts of the self that were deemed unacceptable and pushed below the threshold of consciousness. What is in the shadow does not disappear. It goes underground and runs from there, shaping behaviour in ways the person rarely sees and cannot explain.
The shamanic tradition has a different but parallel understanding. Soul loss describes the way fragments of vitality and wholeness leave a person in response to trauma, shock, or prolonged suffering. The shaman journeys to retrieve those fragments and return them. What is being retrieved is not just an abstract piece of psychic energy. It is a living part of the person's experience of themselves that went away when it became too painful or too dangerous to stay.
Shadow work, in a Sacred Alchemy session, holds both of these frameworks simultaneously. We are retrieving what was lost. We are also meeting what was exiled. The two movements are often the same movement, approached from different directions.
Why This Matters for Your Healing
If you have been in therapy and found it useful but incomplete, this might be why. Talking about what happened is valuable. Understanding the pattern is valuable. And sometimes the pattern is rooted so deeply, in the body and the nervous system and the imaginal layers of the psyche, that understanding it is only the beginning.
Real change at that level requires a different kind of work. The kind that meets the psyche in its own language. That goes to where the wound actually is rather than to where it is most easily described. That understands suffering as the psyche's attempt to communicate something important, not as a malfunction to be corrected.
This is what Jung was pointing toward. It is what the shamanic traditions have always known. And it is what Sacred Alchemy attempts to do in every session, with every person who finds their way here.
If something in this has spoken to you, the next step is simple. Come and have a conversation. That is where everything begins.
Alexia Elliott is a hypnotherapist, shamanic practitioner, and psychospiritual therapist based in Leicester, UK. She has been working at the intersection of Jungian depth psychology and shamanic practice for over 30 years. Sessions available in person in Leicestershire and online worldwide.