Jung Part 3

[GOD]

The development of an attitude, either extraverted or introverted, and a function, is part of the process of living, of adapting ourselves to our world and making our mark in it. Unless there is some strong interference, we develop along the lines that are easiest to us, but we also like to 'put our best foot foremost'. This means that we usually develop our best function, be it thinking or intuition, feeling or sensation, and at the same time have a strong tendency to conform to what is expected of us, to respond to education and social pressure, to behave in an accepted way.

In the majority of cases with “most” people this may be correct. However, there are people that consistently observe others and the world around them to grow into what they deem the best fit to achieve their innate desire(s). An outcome of this is to always challenge their own weaknesses and even compete on them to become the commensurate competitor.

In this process much that rightly belongs to the personality is lost; or rather it is not lost but has simply been pushed away into unconsciousness; in psychological terms it has been repressed.

That is only correct when it diverges from what is accepted as societal norms. Most societal norms revolve around the majority and as such would likely be reflected of the norm. Hence most people would be in harmony to a reasonable degree. Quite possibly in a restrictive (rather than permissive) society there would be more divergence and therefore more repression.

Small children left to behave naturally are often lustful, acquisitive, and aggressive, and show all the tendencies that the adult is supposed to have grown or been educated out of.

Small children can be more trusting, unselfish and kind which they must suppress in order that the inferiors do not take advantage of them as they go through life.

But the mistake of most educators, parents, teachers, and others, is to believe that they have really changed the nature of the children in their care, while all that has happened is that the disagreeable or inferior tendencies have been pushed into the background and forgotten, yet live on in the adult. This forgetting is often so successful that we come to believe that we are exactly as we appear to be, sometimes with disastrous results. These repressed tendencies belong to what Jung calls the personal unconscious, and far from withering away, as one might hope, they seem to be like neglected weeds that flourish in any forgotten corner of the garden.

What we are really talking about is “outliers” that must be attenuated to conform to societal expectations and demands, both good and bad traits.

The process of civilizing the human being leads to a compromise between himself and society as to what he should appear to be, and to the formation of the mask behind which most people live. Jung calls this mask the persona, the name given to the masks once worn by the actors of antiquity to signify the role they played. But it is not only actors who fill a role; a man who takes up a business or a profession, a woman who marries or chooses a career, all adopt to some extent the characteristics expected of them in their chosen position; it is necessary to do so in order to succeed. A business man will try to appear (and even to be) forceful and energetic, a professional man intelligent, a civil servant correct; a professional woman nowadays needs not only to appear intelligent but also well dressed, and a wife is required to be a hostess, a mother, a partner, or whatever her husband's position demands.

Society expects, and indeed must expect every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as possible, so that a man who is a parson ... must at all times ... play the role of parson in a flawless manner. Society demands this as a kind of surety: each must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man is expected to be both ... that would be 'odd'. Such a man would be 'different' from other people, not quite reliable. In the academic world he would be a dilettante, in politics an 'unpredictable' quantity, in religion a free-thinker -- in short, he would always be suspected of unreliability and incompetence, because society is persuaded that only the cobbler who is not a poet can supply workmanlike shoes.1

This all sounds very reminiscent of a restrictive society. I would guess the pre 1970s this would be more prevalent.

[GOD]

The persona is a collective phenomenon, a facet of the personality that might equally well belong to somebody else, but it is often mistaken for individuality. The actor or artist with long hair and casual clothes is looked on as someone unique -- a personality -- while often in fact he has simply adopted the dress and habits of all the other artists of his group. The friendliness and hospitality of Mrs. So-and-So the vicar's wife, seem to spring from her boundless good nature, but in reality she adopted these ways when she married her husband believing that 'a vicar's wife should be the friend of all who need her'. To some extent, it is true, people choose the roles for which they feel best fitted, and to this degree the persona is individual, but it is never the whole man or woman. Human nature is not consistent, yet in filling a role it must appear so, and is therefore inevitably falsified.

Why? To reduce the variability in ones behaviour is not a falsification, it is just maintaining a more sociable and acceptable consistency.

The persona, however, is a necessity; through it we relate to our world. It simplifies our contacts by indicating what we may expect from other people, and on the whole makes them pleasanter, as good clothes improve ugly bodies.

That assumes a high level of superficiality, and besides all things being equal, if everyone wears good clothes then ugly bodies are still detectable.

People who neglect the development of a persona tend to be gauche, to offend others, and to have difficulty in establishing themselves in the world. There is always the danger, however, of identifying oneself with the role one fills, a danger that is not obvious when the role is a good one and fits the person well. Yet we often say with some concern 'he plays a part' or 'she is not really like that at all', for we are at least partly aware of the danger of living in a way that is not true to our real natures.
This is what I say about introverts. Some are socially excluded and others decide to exclude themselves. There is a massive difference.

Perhaps some crisis will occur which calls for flexibility or a completely new way of reacting, or a human situation may be reached where the lack of a genuinely individual emotional response spells tragedy. Elizabeth Bowen describes such a situation in The Death of the Heart, where the adults in the story are so locked in their conventional roles that they fail completely to understand the needs of a sensitive adolescent girl. Another danger is that too rigid a persona means too complete a denial of the rest of the personality, and all those aspects which have been relegated to the personal or belong to the collective unconscious.

Jung calls that other side of ourselves, which is to be found in the personal unconscious, the shadow. The shadow is the inferior being in ourselves, the one who wants to do all the things that we do not allow ourselves to do, who is everything that we are not, the Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll. We have an inkling of this foreign personality when, after being possessed by an emotion or overcome with rage, we excuse ourselves by saying, 'I was not myself', or 'I really don't know what came over me'. What 'came over' was in fact the shadow, the primitive, uncontrolled, and animal part of ourselves. The shadow also personifies itself: when we particularly dislike someone, especially if it is an unreasonable dislike, we should suspect that we are actually disliking a quality of our own which we find in the other person.

Isn’t the shadow more about the potential range of actions rather than the propensity to do them? All people are capable of having murderous thoughts, but few act on them. And those that do are very likely not the same as the rational types who had those thoughts anyway. In order to be successful usually conformity to the group is required to an extent, hence it would be fair to say that a more “average” range of responses is required but it may be a bit far stretched to say that a mask over the outliers in human behaviour is the standard collection conscious.

The shadow is the personal unconscious; it is all those uncivilized desires and emotions that are incompatible with social standards and our ideal personality, all that we are ashamed of, all that we do not want to know about ourselves. It follows that the narrower and more restrictive the society in which we live the larger will be our shadow.

The shadow, since it is unconscious, cannot be touched by ordinary methods of education; it has remained much the same since infancy, when our actions were purely impulsive. It has probably remained much the same since man first walked the earth, for the shadow is the natural, i.e. the instinctive man.

It is the animal mind that we have evolved from; it is what has driven our primitive ancestors. Our developed consciousness now over rides it (generally).

The shadow is also something more than the personal unconscious -- it is personal in so far as our own weaknesses and failings are concerned, but since it is common to humanity it can also be said to be a collective phenomenon. The collective aspect of the shadow is expressed as a devil, a witch, or something similar.

Our animal mind is that herding instinct. The tribal collective mind. Given that it is likely that humanity has evolved from a common root it is not that unreasonable to expect that we have a common degree of congruence in thought patterns… Individual thoughts but a collective similarity.

In choosing the word shadow to describe these aspects of the unconscious, Jung has more in mind than merely to suggest something dark and vague in outline. There is, as he points out, no shadow without the sun, and no shadow (in the sense of the personal unconscious) without the light of consciousness. It is in fact in the nature of things that there should be light and dark, sun and shade. The shadow is unavoidable and man is incomplete without it. Superstition holds that the man without a shadow (using the word in its ordinary sense) is the devil himself, while we ourselves are cautious with someone who seems 'too good to be true', as if we recognized instinctively that human nature needs the leaven of a little wickedness.

People need variety. Quite possibly this is similar to the oscillations that occur in the natural world, the rhythms in people and the autonomic systems that control us. Hence, the desire and acceptance of variation.

Jung, as a physician to whom people come in distress, has found it as useless to deny the shadow as to try to repress it completely. Man has, in his view, to find some way of living with his dark side; in fact his mental and physical health often depend on this. To accept the shadow involves considerable moral effort and often the giving up of cherished ideals, but only because the ideals were raised too high or based upon an illusion. Trying to live as better and nobler people than we are involves us in endless hypocrisy and deceit, and imposes such a strain on us that we often collapse and become worse than we need have been. The irritability and lack of tolerance of the over-virtuous are well known; the sexual life of the very respectable citizen is sometimes startling, as the daily papers show, and crime appears in most unexpected quarters; these are all manifestations of the shadow. It certainly takes moral courage to realize that these aspects of human nature may be, and probably are, lurking within ourselves, but there is comfort in the fact that once a thing is faced and known, there is at least some possibility of changing it, whereas in the unconscious nothing changes. A man who is unconsciously hating his wife so much that he wants to kill her, may actually do so in a fit of rage --such situations are not unknown; but if he had previously recognized his violent feelings he would have had the opportunity either to wrestle with them or to try to change the situation which provoked them.

These are all outlier cases.

[GOD]

While some repression is a necessity of social life, the danger of repressing the shadow is that in the unconscious it seems to acquire strength and grow in vigour, so that when the moment comes (as usually happens) when it must appear, it is more dangerous and more likely to overwhelm the rest of' the personality, which otherwise could have acted as a wholesome check. This is particularly true of those collective aspects of the shadow which are displayed when a mob riots and apparently harmless people behave in the most appallingly savage and destructive manner.
The animal herding instinct again.

'The shadow', says Jung, 'is a moral problem which challenges the whole ego personality'; it is moreover a social problem of immense importance which should not be underestimated… No one is able to realize the shadow without considerable moral resolution, and some reorientation of his standards and ideas. Jung hints that no redemption is possible without tolerance and love -- attitudes that have proved fruitful in dealing with the social renegade, but that we do not usually think of applying in any constructive way to ourselves.

Having to some extent described the realm of the shadow we can now pass deeper into the unconscious -- in fact into the collective unconscious -- but before going farther it is necessary to make a distinction between men on the one hand and women on the other. So far the term 'man' has been used for convenience in describing both man and woman, for each *** has equally a persona and a shadow, the only difference being that a man's shadow is personified by another man, a woman's shadow by another woman. It has already been said that the unconscious complements the conscious standpoint; to carry this farther, the unconscious of a man contains a complementary feminine element, that of a woman a male element. These Jung calls respectively the anima and the animus. It may seem paradoxical to suggest man is not wholly man nor woman wholly woman, yet it is a fairly common experience to find feminine and masculine traits in one person. The most masculine of men will often show surprising gentleness with children, or with anyone weak or ill; strong men give way to uncontrolled emotion in private, and can be both sentimental and irrational; brave men are sometimes terrified by quite harmless situations, and some men have surprising intuition or a gift for sensing other people's feelings. All these are supposedly feminine traits, as well as more obvious 'effeminacy' in a man. This latent femininity in a man is, however, only one aspect of his feminine soul, his anima. 'An inherited collective image of woman exists in a man's unconscious,' says Jung, 'with the help of which he apprehends the nature of woman.' 2

This was more prevalent in the restrictive society because men and women played specific roles and did specific duties; in effect they deviated from their natural tendencies more. Effectively, various situations would allow the person to conform more to his/her natural state; men playing with their children is a good example.

But it is only woman as a general phenomenon that man apprehends in this way, for the image is an archetype, a representation of the age-old experience of man with woman, and though many women will conform, at least outwardly, to this image, it in no way represents the real character of an individual woman.

The image only becomes conscious and tangible through the actual contacts with woman that a man makes during the course of his life. The first and most important experience of a woman comes to him through his mother, and is most powerful in shaping and influencing him: there are men who never succeed in freeing themselves from her fascinating power.

There are quite a number of paragraphs that Jung talks about on this topic of women. But it all seems very Freud influenced. Quite often I wonder is whether all these men were repressed themselves or a result of their times. I think the later. But they seem to have followed the ideals and consensus of the time, almost like the 1960s music scene which appears full of drugs and psychedelic imagery.

The masculine principle -- that is, the masculine element in women -- found very positive expression in women's activities during the war years, when it was made clear that they could fill adequately most positions previously reserved for men. But only an abnormal situation brings out such manifestations; there is a contemporary movement towards a wider range of activity for women, but generally this activity is better expressed in a domestic milieu, or in one that bears some relationship to it, e.g. teaching, nursing, social work, &c. 'Personal relations are as a rule more important and interesting to her than objective facts and their interconnections. The wide fields of commerce, politics, technology and science, the whole realm of the applied masculine mind she relegates to the penumbra of consciousness; while on the other hand, she develops a minute consciousness of personal relationships, the infinite nuances of which usually escape the man entirely.' 9

Women since the dawn of time have participated in the hunts for animals. Many of these issues seem more related to repression via religion and simple social conditions/expectations of the pre 1950s.

The influence of the anima and animus is far more difficult to grasp than that of the persona or the shadow. Most people know someone who is so completely 'persona' that they cannot fail to see its effects, and the shadow is sufficiently obtrusive to be recognized when pointed out. The anima and animus are, however, elusive, and only a certain number of people can understand what is meant by them. Neither can they be completely integrated into consciousness; something of them remains always shrouded in mystery in the dark realm of the collective unconscious. A man, for instance, by accepting and learning to know his anima, may become more receptive, or he may develop his intuition or his feeling, but he cannot possess himself of those qualities which are projected on to goddesses or on to the Virgin. They may be present in him as mercy, benevolence, healing, creativeness, and so on; but they are not really subject to his will -- they work sometimes even in spite of it -- and they cannot be called up just when he desires. The same is true of women who can acquire the enterprise or develop the thinking which belongs to them in a personal sense, but can never possess as their own that aspect of the masculine spirit which belongs to the collective unconscious and manifests itself as something beyond the purely personal.

So men are men, and women are women. Men can gain by allowing themselves to be themselves and vice versa for women.

[GOD]

Anyone, however, who has learnt to know something of the anima or animus will have gained both knowledge of him or herself, and of the forces which activate other human beings; he or she will have plumbed something of the depths of the collective unconscious, but will be far from having exhausted this great ocean, which is, so far as we know, limitless. There is no question of draining the unconscious, or of clearing out its contents. The archetypes which may emerge from it are innumerable, and all one can do is to delineate and become familiar as far as is possible with those which seem to have the greatest significance and most powerful influence on us.

It does seem quite obvious that conscious thoughts and events do peculate down into the subconscious and that by examining your subconscious response to events you can consciously rectify them (As an analogy “to effectively dig them up, and plant needs seeds”).

The archetype of the great mother acts in a parallel way on a woman. Anyone possessed by this figure comes to believe herself endowed with an infinite capacity for loving and understanding, helping and protecting, and will wear herself out in the service of others. She can, however, also be most destructive, insisting (though not necessarily openly) that all who come within her circle of influence are 'her children', and therefore helpless or dependent on her in some degree. This subtle tyranny, if carried to extremes, can demoralize and destroy the personality of others.

I get a strange feeling that Jung’s mother was more predominant in his life than his father, as he has not mentioned any counterbalance to the “mothers” influence.

A more abstract vision is that of the world clock, which was recorded by a young intellectual, who had come to Jung with a severe neurosis. An interesting point is that this young man was only seen by Jung for a short interview, after which he recorded his dreams and visual experiences for five months with a pupil -- a woman doctor who was then a beginner -- and then continued his observations alone for another three months. The possibility of Jung's influence on the material he produced was thus reduced to a minimum.

Sorry, don’t believe dreams have any relevance. Possibly some relevance to subconscious issues, but if one cannot assess the persons life at a conscious level (through dialogue) then the interpretation of dreams via the subconscious seems even more fraught with ambiguity.

Personally, I see that the influence of Freud, Eastern theories and the restrictive nature of pre 1950s society coupled with the intellectual fashion of the day, has produced quite a lot of fiction (more or less).