/tag/archetypes

18 quotes tagged 'archetypes'

The Social Virus of Political Correctness

Publisher: psychedelicsalon.com (2017)

https://psychedelicsalon.com/podcast-533-the-social-virus-of-political-correctness/

It looks to me like ideology is one of these neonatal behaviors that culture downloads on us. In other words, belief is for kids. It’s a fairy tale. Marxism is no different than belief in the Easter Bunny. Probability theory is no different than a belief in the Easter Bunny. Everybody needs to get a grip on the uncertainty of the intellectual enterprise.\n\nIf modernism is worth anything, it should carry us to a sense of the fragileness of knowing. There are no platonic archetypes. Gödel showed that simple arithmetic is fraught with uncertainty. Things that we thought were so writ in adamantine that they could never be questioned like the second law of thermodynamics turns out to be written in sand - it's just somebody's opinion. It applies locally in some cases, some times. \n\nSo the way to live with a human mind in the world is not to believe things, that's childish, it's undignified. The thing to do is to build models and to call them that. Call it model building, and why? Because the implication is if you exceed your model or if the thing you're studying has dimensions your model can't encompass, throw the model out! You don't round up everybody who's against the model and send them to the wall because God revealed the model - this would be the usual method of acting. No. You have provisional ever-changing relationships to the world. \n\nAnother way of thinking about this is that what ideology tries to do is create closure. There's something in the human mind - we want to finish the crossword puzzle, we want the good guys to win, we want the equinox to happen agasint the same pattern of fixed stars. In other words, we want order - worse than that we want narrative! But this again is childish. The world is not a bedtime story, it is not a narrative, it does not have white hats and black hats. Part of this growing up thing or growing beyond culture or de-neotonizing one's psyche is to accept a lack of closure. \nIt doesn't come to an end. \nIt never makes sense. \nThere is never the moment of resolution.\nWe want it. We want it. We deserve it, but it ain't in the cards. Everything always transmutes itself and opens up new avenues of possibility.

The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 10: Civilization in Transition

Author: Carl Gustav Jung, R.F.C. Hull (Translator)

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1970)

Beginner's Guide to Revelation: A Jungian Interpretation

Author: Robin Robertson

Publisher: Nicholas-Hays Inc (1994)

137

Once upon a time, there was nothing but spirit, one with itself and unchanging. Then somehow (for this is perhaps the greatest mystery), it became aware of itself. It examined itself and noticed facets of itself. These facets thus attained a separate existence as well as remaining part of the whole. This is the stage where Ra created the other Gods. This is where the archetypes come into existence. They are fluid and amorphous - at their edges, one archetype flows into one another. Trying to pin any archetype down in definition ineluctably leads one to still other archetypes in an endless procession. \r\n\r\nWhen the spirit accepts more limitation, more definition, it forms matter. This is interesting to spirit because it is different than spirit, yet is part of spirit since it was created from spirit. But it is still unchanging. The world is static. Once spirit has examined all of itself, identified each of its attributes, once it has created something separate from itself, but unchanging also, there is no further place for development. \r\n\r\nOnly when spirit limits itself further, allows itself to be held within the confines of form, in an uneasy tension between the two, can continuous, evolutionary change take place. That is why mankind was created.

55-56

Our brains are continuously projecting the future from the past, and feeding that information to our sensors. We proceed on the basis of that extrapolated future unless the sensors note some discrepancy which has to be dealt with. This seems to correspond exactly to what we know of the operation of the collective unconscious. It is continually drawing on pas experience in order to feed forward its best estimate of the future. At any given moment in time, the collective unconscious is composed of all the experiences of the past, all that is going on presently anywhere among humans, and organic projections into the future based on the first two components. \r\n\r\nHowever, we find ourselves at a unique point in history. Very soon, we will reach the point where there are more people alive in the world than have lived and died in all previous ages put together; as one radio sage put it: 'the dead will become a minority.' I believe this shift is the same as the shift which we have been discussing throughout this book. As long as past experience vastly exceeded current experience, the collective unconscious was inherently conservative: ritual and structure outweighed novelty. Archetypes changed so slowly as to seem eternal. When current experience exceeds past experience, the situation reverses: novelty and change reign supreme. Archetypes should come into existence in dizzying numbers, many staying around too shortly to register. But some stable new archetype, some 'living symbol,' should emerge in an astonishingly quick fashion (by comparison with the glacial scale on which archetypes normally emerge), an archetype powerful enough to overwhelm the archetypes created by the entire past experience of mankind.

On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art

Author: Carl Gustav Jung

Publisher: British Journal of Medical Psychology (1923)

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Author: Erich Neumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

400

Development in the first half of life is marked by two decisive crises, each of which corresponds to a fight with the dragon. The first crisis is characterized by the encounter with the problem of the First Parents and by the formation of the ego. It is enacted between the ages of three and five, and psychoanalysis has made us familiar with certain aspects and forms of this parental encounter, under the guise of the Oedipus complex. The second crisis is puberty, when the dragon fight has to be fought out again on a new level. Here the form of the ego is finally fixed with the support of what we have called 'heaven.' That is to say, new archetypal constellations emerge, and with them a new relation of the ego to the self.

391

When the individual falls away from the cultural fabric like this, he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically infalted private world. The restlessness, the discontents, the excesses, the formlessness and meaninglessness of a purely egocentric life - as compared with the symbolic life - are the unhappy results of this psychological apostasy.\n\n 'Following the collapse of the archeytpal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malenolent demons. Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, through the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere. Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name. The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindelers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized - and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray achetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human. Worship of the 'beast' is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails whereever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are appluaded, i.e., whereever the aggravating complexities of civilized behaior are swept away in favor of bestial rapactiy. One has only to look at the educative ideals now current in the West.\n\n 'The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates, for instance, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor - 'work,' 'power,' 'money,' or whatever they like to call it - which, in the telling phrase, 'consumes' them and leaves them little or no room as private persons. Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the egosphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence, where personal power, money, and 'experiences' - unbelievably trivial, but plentiful - occupy every hour of the day.\n\n '...Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics are exclusive determinants in the form of parties, nations, sects, movements, and 'isms' of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual. Far be it from us to compare the predatory industrial man and power politician with the man who is dedicated to an idea; for the latter is possessed by the archetypes that shape the future of mankind, and to this driving daemon he sacrifices his life. Nevertheless, it is the task of a cultural psychology based on depth psychology to set forth a new ethos which shall take the collective effect of these daemonic possessions into account, and this means also accepting responsibility for them.

389

The line runs, as we saw, from the archetype as an effective transpersonal figure to the idea, and then to the 'concept' which one 'forms.' A good example of this is the concept of God, which now derives wholly from the sphere of consciousness - or purports to derive from it, as the ego is deluded enough to pretend. There is no longer anything transpersonal, but only personal; there are no more archetypes, but only concepts; no more symbols, only signs.\n\n 'This splitting off of the unconscious leads on the one hand to an ego life emptied of meaning, and on the other hand to an activation of the deeper-lying layers which, now grown destructive, devastate the autocratic world of the ego with transpersonal invasions, collective epidemics, and mass psychoses. For an upsetting of the compensatory relationship between conscious and unconscious is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly. Even when it is not so acute as to bring on a psychic sickness, the loss of instinct and the overaccentuation of the ego have consequences which, multiplied a millionfold, constellate the crisis of civilization.

400

Characteristic of the process of differentiation in childhood is the loss and renunciation of all the elements of perfection and wholeness, which are inherent in the psychology of the child so far as this is determined by the pleroma, the uroboros. The very things which the child has in common with the man of genius, the creative artist, and the primitive, and which constitute the magic and charm of his existence, must be sacrificed. The aim of all education, and not in our culture alone, is the expel the child from the paradise of his native genius and, through differentiation and the renunciation of wholeness, to constrain the Old Adam in the paths of collective usefulness.\n\n '...The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails. A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of 'sensibleness' and 'good behavior' is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective. Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this process.\n\n 'On to the ontogenetic plane there now ensue all the developments which we have described as indispensable for ego formation and the separation of the conscious and unconscious systems. The child's primarily transpersonal and mythological apperception of the world becomes limited owing to secondary personalization, and is finally abolished altogether. This personalization is necessary for the growth of personality now beginning and is effected with the help of ties to the personal environment upon which the archetypes are at first projected. As the personal ties grow stronger, the archetype is gradually replaced by the imago, in which personal and transpersonal characteristics are visibly blended and active.

382

Despite the tendency to conservatism innate in every canon, the Western canon also has in it a revolutionary ingredient deriving from its acceptance of the hero archetype. It goes without saying that this hero figure is not the central point of the canon, nor is its revolutionary influence very easy to recognize; but when one sees in how short a space of time the most revolutionary figures of ecclesiastical history became assimilated and produced a new variation of the canon, one realizes the full significance of the acceptance into it of the hero archetype.

377

The hero is not creative in the sense that he decorates embellishes the existing canon, although his creativeness may also manifest itself in shaping and transforming the archetypal contents of his age. The true hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition and the power of the collective, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.

371

All symbols and archetypes are projections of the formative side of human nature that creates order and assigns meaning. Hence, symbols and symbolic figures are the dominants of every civilization, early or late. They are the cocoon of meaning which humanity spins round itself, and all studies and interpretations of culture are the study and interpretation of archetypes and their symbols.

329

Pure existence in the unconscious, which primitive man shares with the animal, is indeed nonhuman and prehuman. The fact that the dawn of consciousness and the creation of the world are parallel processes which throw up the same symbolism indicates that the world actually 'exists' only to the degree that it is cognized by an ego. A differentiated world is the reflection of a self-differentiating consciousness. The multiple archetypes and symbol groups split off from a primordial archetype are identical with the ego's greater range of experience, knowledge, and insight. Under the total impact of experience in the dawn period no particularized forms could be recognized, for the tremendous force of it extinguished the ego in a sort of numinous convulsion. But a more informed human consciousness can experience, in the multiplicity of religions and philosophies, theologies and psychologies, the innumerable facets and meanings of the numinous, now anatomized into image and symbol, attribute and revelation. That is to say, although the primal unity can only be experienced fragmentarily, it has at least come within range of conscious experience, whereas for the undeveloped ego it was utterly overwhelming.

219

The development of personality proceeds in three different dimensions. The first is outward adaptation, to the world and things, otherwise known as extraversion; the second is inward adaptation, to the objective psyche and archetypes, otherwise known as introversion. The third is centroversion, the self-formative or individuating tendency which proceeds within the psyche itself, independent of the other two attitudes and their development.

111

The activity of instinct lies behind actions which the ego coordinates with its sphere of decision and volition, and to an even higher degree instincts and archetypes are at the back of our conscious attitudes and orientations. But, whereas in modern man there is at any rate the possibility of decision and conscious orientation, the psychology of archaic man and of the child is marked by a mingling of these spheres. Volitions, moods, emotions, instincts, and somatic reactions are still for all practical purposes fused together. The same applies to the original ambivalence of affects, which are later resoved into antithetical positions. Love and hate, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, yes and no, are at first juxtaposed and interfused, and do not possess the antithetical character they subsequently appear to have.\n\n Depth psychology has made the discovery that even today the opposites lie closer together and are more intimately connected than their actual degree of separation would lead one to suppose. Not only in the neurotic, but in the normal person too, the poles are hard side by side; pleasure turns to pain, hate to love, sorrow to joy, far more readily than we would expect. This can be seen most clearly in children. Laughing and crying, starting a thing and then stopping it, liking and disliking follow fast on one another's heels. No position is fixed, and none is a flat contradiction of its opposite, but both exist peaceably side by side and are realized in closest succession. Influences stream in and out from all sides; environment, ego, and interior world, objective tendencies, consciousness, and bodily tendencies operate simultaneously, and all the while no ego worth mentioning, or only a very diminutive ego, arranges, centers, accepts and rejects.

The individual's view of the world changes with every stage of his development, and the variation of archetypes and symbols, gods and myths, is the expression, but also the instrument, of this change.

Jung therefore defines the transpersonal - or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious - as 'the deposit of ancestral experience.

An investigation of the archetypal stages also affords a better psychological orientation in a number of ancillary subjects, e.g., the history of religion, anthropology, folk psychology, and the like. All these can then be brought together on a psycho-evolutionary basis which would promote a deeper understanding.