The relation of the individual to his fantasy is very largely conditioned by his relation to the unconscious in general, and this in turn is conditioned in particular by the spirit of the age.
American's have a rather large fantasy that they "know" what is going on, that they "understand" how their government works, that it is "of the people" which to them (to us) means that nothing that is beyond my understanding is "of the government."
Our Representatives at the highest levels (ie Presidents, successful Chiefs of Staff, etc) know this. And they seem to capitalize on it. Perhaps that is how politics is supposed to work - Real Polotik has, after all, been around a while.
According to the degree of rationalism that prevails, the individual will be more disposed or less to have dealings with the unconscious and its products. Christianity, like every closed system of religion, has an undoubted tendency to suppress the unconscious in the individual as much as possible, thus paralyzing his fantasy activity. Instead, religion offers stereotyped symbolic concepts that are meant to take the place of his unconscious once and for all. The symbolic concepts of all religions are recreations of unconscious processes in a typical, universally binding form.
To loosely use this as a model, we can substitute Americanism for Christianity. Surely during the last 29 years Americanism has had a tendency to suppress the unconscious of the individual and insert stereotyped symbolic concepts ... much easier to chew than actual facts and one's own need to grow up. Brings to mind TS Eliot "humans cannot bear very much reality."
Religious teaching supplies, as it were, the final information about the "last things" and the world beyond human consciousness.
Again, substitute Americanism for Religious and you have us here now contemplating "what to do about the torture?" Because surely our subscription to Americanism tells us that the final word lies with the individual.
Wherever we can observe a religion being born, we see how the doctrinal figures flow into the founder himself as revelations, in other words as concretizations of his unconscious fantasy. The forms welling up from his unconscious are declared to be universally valid and thus replace the individual fantasies of others.
Well, let's look at Reagan. And Cheney. Reagan certainly recreated his own "Evil Empire" and formulated diplomacy based on how he viewed the world - good vs evil, us vs. them. We still eat this shit up. Cheney, Rove, etc used the laws of the land and the processes of Washington to simply build, brick by brick, a pathway to the place we are now. A yellow brick road, as it were.
The evangelist Matthew has preserved for us a fragment of this process from the life of Christ: in the story of the temptation we see how the idea of kingship rises out of the founder's unconscious in the visionary form of the devil, who offers him power over all the kingdoms of the earth. Had Christ misunderstood the fantasy and taken it concretely, there would have been one madman the more in the world. But he rejected the concretism of his fantasy and entered the world as a king to whom the kingdoms of heaven are subject. He was therefore no paranoiac, as the result also proved.
It can be said that Reagan and certainly George W. Bush did, in fact, "misunderstand" their own fantasies and took them absolutely concretely. Bush particularly saw himself as equivalent with the "King of the World" and that he was actually called by God to be so. Stifling the unconscious and viewing the world as concrete is what has got us here.
Cheney, utilitarian that he is, never succumbed to the broad-based kingship fantasies. Instead he worked tirelessly to pass laws, file briefs, adjust wording and formulate agency rulings that would simply make the actions legal. Before the actions took place. And he legally and publicly did this. Out in the open. In front of the masses and masses of American people.
And now we want to bitch? To jump up and down? To declare foul?
Right.
It's almost like a textbook case of an adolescent who was so busy texting and emailing that they just didn't notice that Dad sold the car, sold the house, got a job in another state and packed the van. It's over. It's done. We're moving on.
I guess what I'm saying is that yes, we have to hold leaders accountable. We certainly do. But at the same time, we must hold ourselves responsible as well. Responsible for paying attention, for knowing how the system works and for understanding how things "go down" long before it is force-fed to us by the media.
The fact that most of what Cheney and Bush did was done in broad daylight, passed through Congress and with the intention of sweeping away protections will more than likely protect them from criminal accountability. What about us?
Did Jung really aver that all of the storybook characters he populated peoples' minds with were more authentic (or significantly less concretized) than religious or patriotic myths? I mean, I'll give him credit for extending the metaphor further and all, and for making it more appealing. I'll even accept (to a degree) that a diverse hodgepodge of learned and observed patterns gradually templates our thinking, but a headful of archetypes sounds like the exact same semimythical drama that patriotic and religious fables represent.
ReplyDeleteI will wholeheartedly agree, however, that the world is at the mercy of people who take that shit (or who cynically use that shit) too seriously.
Oh, I think he used the language of myth and archetype to be able to talk to laymen, and to express something that (at the time) was inexpressible.
ReplyDeleteIts my understanding that he had some very deep and thoughtful exchanges with the pioneers in physics and that language would end up becoming more expressive of what Jung was trying to articulate. It's not my milieu so I feel kind of stupid trying to make the connections -- but he was most concerned with the seemingly invisible jump from thought/image to matter.
Neurotransmitters etc.
I suppose the clarity needed is to understand that one doesn't have "a headful of archetypes" but rather that the archetypes describe universal energies and patterns that humans fit into. We don't "own" them, they "own" us.
That's probably more confusing and less accurate than I mean it to be. But what I'm saying is that my understanding of Jung's psychology is that archetypes - his word - exist regardless of whether we see them, relate to them, etc. There are powerful patterns .... and that just as the physical world can be described in terms of formulas, equations, and principles so can the psyche.
I wouldn't say that the physical world is peopled with principles, but gravity and the laws of thermodynamics do describe physical phenomena. They don't cause it. They don't create it. They describe it....and because it applies over and over and over and over we begin to see it as a 'truth.'
Long term history teaches us that some of these 'truths' can be overturned, or expanded or exploded.
The realms of the psyche can be, according to Jung, described in a similar fashion in that the universal patterns occur over and over and over and over...such that they describe certain behaviors. They do not cause or create them.
And I guess that is the big difference between common use of Religion as answer, and Jung's use of archetype as descriptor.
That people take and use this shit in serious ways is one of those things I hope we don't all suffer from too much in the end... hopefully voices of reason will prevail when we most need them.
Fair point about descriptor vs. predictor. Although I think the set of patterns that Jung chose as representative are as likey to be external as the other ones are (and maybe the fact that so many parents have dabbled in a couple of psychological models like this in their university days, or have been subjected to them by advertisers--Freud is nowhere more present than in a television spot--they're more valid than when Jung and the gang first dreamed them up! these models of thought may be getting effectively templated too.) Or you could say that attraction to Christian, patriotic, or otherwise archetypical explanations of things comes from the same place, whatever that is exactly, probably the same place that makes us look for a validation for the whole human enterprise.
ReplyDeleteAnd for sure, some of those templates (if that is the right word) can map internal and external reality better than others.
Repsonsibly paying attention and trying to figure out with some level of honesty how the world works is like falling down a well, I'll tell you. (It's like Eve with the fruit, or Odin with the noose, or Prometheus with teh fire, or...)
Hahahaha! That is so true!!! "Responsibly paying attention and trying to figure out with some level of honesty how the world works is like falling down a well..." Touche'!!!
ReplyDeleteThank you for making me laugh at myself -- it really is so hard for me to do sometimes!
I've spent many a year slogging it out in "inner work" "self-help" "recovery" blah blah blah and yet I still forget that the first thing to go is my sense of humor.
I need some kind of buzzer to go off that reminds me. Today you were that buzzer - and I'm very grateful!