Meet my first mentor

I grew up in a small town in East Germany with about 20,000 people at its peak and more like 10,000 now as most people ran away to seek greener pastures after the Berlin Wall came down 30 years ago. People called the 1990's in East Germany the "Wild East" - there was a newly-found sense of freedom that we've never had, being able to travel, being able to take up any profession, go to university or buy what you wanted, which wasn't possible before the fall of the Berlin Wall because we lived in a planned economy. For example getting a car could easily take 10-15 years and most people ordered one for their children when they were born. Crazy times!

Two years after German reunification and the fall of the Berlin Wall, industrial production in the East plummeted by 70% from 1989/ pre-unification levels. In 1990 only 5.5% of people in the lowest income bracket in East Germany were affected by unemployment, while in 1991 44.1% were affected and in 1992 it was 57.9% (link).

This was the time when my dad and so many other people lost their jobs as my dad's company was asset-stripped and sold-off. Some parts were privatised most were closed down and sold off. The mental engineering department he was working in was meant to be closed down and machines and materials sold for scrap. Finding himself without a job wasn't a prospect my dad (picture below) enjoyed so he took the brave step, like a few of his friends did too and he started his own business buying up land, machinery and raw materials for the symbolic price of 1 Deutsch Mark.

I was about 12 or 13 and my first job was cleaning machines and the factory floor on a Saturday for what would now be considered pay below minimum wage (￡5/h or so). However, doing my 4h of work every Saturday I could see the impact my dad was having on our family. His decision to start a small business would provide our family and the families of 5 other early staff members with an income in an area of Germany where there were no jobs as there were no more businesses. I continued going to school, doing my A-levels but at some point during my 9th grade my parents thought it would be better if I was to become a metal engineer, with the view of taking over my dad's business at some point.

I wasn't very pleased with that decision at the time but went ahead with it. I left some of my school friends who all went to continue their A-levels and started a metal engineering apprenticeship that would take 3 1/2 years to complete. I would do so in an even more remote place than my home town, in a part of East Germany that seemed just as alien to me now as it was back then. Whilst my home town was considered a small town, I now moved to a village of around 1,000 people. There I had my own little studio flat (1 room + bathroom) and would spend the week there, from Sunday to Friday. Work started at 6am and finished around 4pm. I would consume a huge number of books on a monthly basis as village life wasn't very exciting.

At the time, one of my friends gave me a small book with quotes from Carl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychologist who lived from 1875 to 1961. I had missed him by about 35 years when I started reading his works but that did not matter to me. I would not just read his books, I consumed them! Staying in my little secluded place, his teachings felt like they came alive and sometimes I had the feeling like he was with me, in the silence of my little room when I consumed his theories about The Self, The Personal and Collective Subconscious, about the dark side that is in all of us that he called The Shadow. Lacking a lot of external stimuli, I began to read about his work to understand dreams better. Jung, by his own account, must have analysed some 10,000 dreams over his lifetime as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He disagreed strongly with Freud that dreams would generally point to repressed sexuality but can reveal to us things we are usually unaware of. This fascinated me. Unlike my dad, who I see as a role model, especially when it comes to him starting a business from scratch and building it into one of the best small businesses in our region, I considered Jung to be my first mentor.

Unlike a role model, who you can look up to and model your behaviour against, I wanted instruction and guidance. I found them in Jung's many books and drawings. To me, he took a scientific approach to understanding the psyche better and in turn, helping me look inwards to try and understand what motivates me, drives me, scares or annoys me.

I am currently reengaging with Jung's work again. Many of the theories he developed and popularised, revolutionary at the time, are now 50 - 100 years old, some seem outdated or need questioning. One of the big concepts I'd be keen to understand better is what Jung would describe as 'the self'; a social construct and yet a psychic reality important enough to warrant a deeper look at in mentoring relationships. How important is self-awareness in mentor/mentee relationships? Do mentors/ mentees from wildly different backgrounds or with different value systems find value in an advice/ guidance situation? What makes a productive advice setting for both mentors and mentees?

If you've got advice or insights on this topic, do let me know in the comments. Thank you for reading!!!