Whole-grained raft

“Archetypes are images of the soul that represent the course of ones life.”
Carl Jung

Jung worked at an acclaimed asylum in Zurich when he started his work on the unconscious by trying to understand his patients.  Freud worked with a drastically different population, notably middle-aged and upper class women in Vienna. While a different generation, different populations and experiences, Jung and Freud both believed in the power of the unconscious and got along like gangbusters at the start, but their views kept on diverging.   They had a huge falling out in 1913, when Jung was in his 30’s, about the nature of the unconscious, and they went opposite of each other’s belief system. The two men most famous for discovering and working with the unconscious were still blindsided by their shadow and were unable to reconcile their differences.This just shows how powerful and unavoidable those unconscious blind spots are.

Their shadow side is not what caused them to break apart, it only made it worse as their views would not fit with each other, and they diverged with why they thought people did things.   Freud thought sex causes everything and Jung thought that nothing causes everything. Freud and Jung however both called their idea of power for the whole person –  libido, but Freud meant sexual energy and Jung meant libido is just energy. This libido powers your brain and body, and whether you are engaged in something enthusiastically or you feel like you have no energy, you are still using the same amount of energy – it could just be tied up and unusable.  A lot of therapy is just untangling all that energy and getting it flowing again. Like those poles we’ve talked about earlier, it can be good or bad, positive or negative, but it’s got to be somewhere.

That energy in your head is flowing all around, and whenever you have a strong emotional reaction, either good or bad, you have hit upon a complex. Jung coined the term “complex” and an easy way to imagine them is as a ball of energy, just all tangled up. It can be from trauma or an important event or interaction in one’s life and everyone has a lot of them. So when the energy is flowing from those poles we’ve talked about, and it hits a complex it gets charged with even more energy and gets mostly stuck there. Complexes can be positive or negative, and working through how we respond to the negative ones (and appropriately respond to the positive ones) is the primary goal of most psychotherapy.

Most of the complex, a term coined by Jung, lies in what Jung calls the “personal unconscious” which is where all of our memories are, both the ones that we can and can’t remember. Freud thought this is all that has existed and the only thing that messes us up is our repressions and distortions of those memories, thus the answer is always in the past moment.  Jung felt differently, he felt there were parts of your unconscious that were never conscious. They were inherited, given to us through evolution.

Jung realized that there are abundant similarities in all humans that we are not taught, that are fairly universal throughout time and space. This can be witnessed in the great similarities in different culture’s myths and folklores, even ones on opposite sides of the globe. Not only that, but the symbols and people we see in dreams correspond to these myths, even if we have never heard of them. Why do we have the same figures in our dreams? Why did they have such similar myths? Cultures that were far removed from each other all had similar creation stories and myths, and this was so common they were given a word- monomyth.  So if all cultures have similar myths and folklore, what could that mean? Is it obviously ancient aliens?

No. Just like certain types of insects know where to precisely strike a certain part of the thorax of a specific bug, or how animals know how to do amazing things without being taught, why would that not also be true of us? We’re animals, too.  They “learned” that stuff through eons of repetition that left an imprint on their brain and eventually the ones close to them and so on. So everyone is contributing to humankind, and life as a whole, by just existing. We are adding our own infinitesimal grain of sand on this mountain of life.  Make it like a whole grain, don’t be some processed, bleached, whitebread that tastes like everyone else and doesn’t fortify anybody.

He called the part of our brain that is the container of that unconsciously learned stuff the “collective unconscious”,  that stuff and symbols we all carry, he called the “archetypes”. Archetypes are charged with even more energy than complexes, and at the core of every complex rests an archetype. They are just the preformed parts of us that carry things that people do and are universally. Some archetypes, like the idea of the ego, shadow, anima/us, and more are universal and necessary.  They are always active in your life. Others are not always active but can be triggered by your experiences and events. Think of them as a specific type of person or action that we all recognize (like the Queen, or Hero) and just like those poles, there can be positive and negative versions of them.

Archetypes are never static images that apply to everyone, and someone with different values will have a different symbol represent that archetype.  We might imagine a “wise old man” or a “shadow” figure differently than someone in ancient Greece, or a village in India, and they would all carry the same general meaning but emphasize different values. Some “mystical bro’s” might tell you about the “12 archetypes” and how they are all of them. There’s an almost infinite number of archetypes and being gripped as any one of them is unavoidable at times, but realizing you’re in one, and that it might be guiding you more than you are, is the important part. Not everything is an archetype, and part of analysis is learning when you are stuck in one. We can get into all of that soon.

I enjoy writing about this stuff, and there’s so many different things to talk about concerning Jung (and life) that I often feel paralyzed on what to talk about.  They say write about what you know, and the more I learn the more I realize I don’t know that much. Socratic sayings aside, the more you learn about yourself and the outside world the more you will gain strength and confidence in yourself.  There are so many crazy things about this world, and we all get confused with it. No one has it really figured out. And anyone who acts like they do? You should realize they will be saying something wrong soon. That goes for everyone, Jung included.  While his beliefs were cutting edge then and some are still now, others are caught in science a century old. A lot of his viewpoints Jungians have modified and I am still trying to understand where I fall in all these grey shades of Jung. I am also not trying to forcibly educate you, so will be touching on this only as much as needed – my apologies that you are learning something. This is my only post planned that’s focusing on his conventional stuff, so think of this post as a required prereq before we can get all deep and weird.  The stuff I mentioned here I think everyone who studies Jung solidly believes (or I do and that’s what matters). This post is the solid raft we are launching out into these uncertain waters on.

One last thing, Freud felt that the answers were found in the past.  Jung felt that some answers were in the past, but old answers don’t always equal new revelations.  The answer, the thing that needs to change is not in the past but now. The first place to look for the answer is in front of you.  Do the next right thing. You can change your life.

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