Jungian | Full Circle POV

Archive for the category “Jungian”

08 Nov 2014

The Art of Making a Living

So much rides on our ability to create and maintain our personal and professional Persona. To swim with the big fish, in whatever pond we’re in, we have to jump in and start swimming, like the others, like right now. Unfortunately, that focus on swimming can become the end in itself; we can’t stop swimming, too much to lose. Polarities are manifested, sides are picked.

In the process, we lose track of the gold we let fall into the shadows, that we can reclaim, rather than defend against. There are life-enriching, life-expanding potentials, in our individual and organizational Shadows, that become adversarial because of inattention, neglect or abuse. They turn on us. The things that go bump in the night, and day, that, actually, can be helpful. And, are meant to be helpful.

I like the way Laurence G. Boldt, in Zen and the Art of Making a Living, captures how parts of us, sometimes the best of our potentials, become split off and lost, and are seen as contrary or other as we shape and maintain our individual and collective Personas. [My interjections in red].

It’s time to get a job. Time to forget all that stuff about choices. Don’t think about visions or values. Don’t concern yourself with whys. Just be responsible [sic] and concentrate on how you can get the “best” job. Suppress your awareness of yourself as an observer and creator of social reality and plunge into playing the game as it is already defined, with your eyes closed. We have seen other ways. We are aware of choice, and yet if we are to be “responsible” citizens, we must try to forget. Be a good kid, now, and get yourself heavily involved in the game of winning social approval [power, network, income, job]–anything else and you risk ostracism [loss of same]. That’s enough to keep most of us in line for a long time. We still think about these things–now and then. We may talk about it some weekend, late at night, over a few beers or glasses of wine. As we grow older, we may bore our children with repeated tellings of stories about the good old days of our freedom (of choice). What was questing, searching, evaluating now gets stuffed, shelved, and compartmentalized. But make no mistake; it is not dead. It is only sleeping. (2009, p. 87)

[For full citation go to Bookshelf]

Posted in Jungian, Organization Development, Persona, Personal Development, polarities, Professional Development, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow and tagged Jungian, organizational development, persona, personal development, professional development, psychology, Shadow | Leave a comment

16 Oct 2014

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Full Circle POV Lexicon: The Collective Unconscious

The Unconscious is all that which is not conscious. The fullness of the psyche is quite simply unfathomable. It is symbolically thought of as the depths, the sea, the darkness, dark forest, the Great Mother, God itself. Unconsciousness is the ground from which consciousness rises and to which it returns. We develop greater consciousness out of an unconscious state. We incarnate into consciousness, as it were, potentialities that lie within the Unconscious. The emergence of consciousness is easy to witness in the development of children.

Jung described two layers of the unconscious, the Personal and the Collective. The Personal Unconscious is the accumulated memories, experiences, thoughts, perceptions, and feelings that have fallen out of conscious awareness through forgetting, repression, or because they lack the energy necessary to be perceived. This is the vast accumulated stuff of a lifetime that is subjective in nature. Clients in therapy, often come to see me to work through this material. There is always a deeper, not personal, level operating for all of us, the ground of being.

The Collective Unconscious is the great depth or vastness of the psyche. It is the nonpersonal, objective psyche common to all human beings. It is here the universals of mankind exist that manifest subjectively in different particular, idiosyncratic ways. The Collective Unconscious is the ultimate source from which consciousness emerges; it is not a by-product of individual consciousness or experience. To Jung, the entire structure of the human psyche and dynamic patterns for psychological development and growth have their origins in this deep primordial level. From the universal objective psyche, the individual subjective psyche emerges.

The Collective Unconscious is the supra-personal foundation, the ground, of both the personal unconscious and consciousness, and is complete in its nature, containing both the negative and positive, thesis and antithesis, what have you, and is unaffected by the directions or judgments of the conscious psyche. The conflicted polarities of human Ego consciousness exist as wholes at this level. The filtering of Unconscious polarities through the conscious Ego determines the positive or negative value of any given polarity (see A Principle of Opposites).

These roots or dominants within the Collective Unconscious are what Jung referred to as archetypes and are, in effect, the universal operating programs, the human software shared by every human being. While archetypes generate psychological images and patterns of behavior, they are not experienced directly, as such, but in the manifestations of their effects.

Because of the bottomless depth of the Unconscious, all human possibility is potentially experienced given the right conditions of biology, personality, gender, or other triggering condition or event, and, by far, mostly never can or ever will be experienced directly. Those possibilities will be given different expression varying from individual to individual, group to group, culture to culture, circumstance to circumstance, but will at root have the same source in the Collective Unconscious. Although individuals, groups, and cultures may look different in their specifics, look beyond and through the particulars and you will see the common archetypal patterns in action.

(Jung, 1973, 1977; Stevens, 2003).

See Bookshelf for complete citations.

Posted in Analytical Psychology, Archetypes, C. G. Jung, Collective Unconscious, Jungian, Lexicon, Psyche, Psychology, Unconscious and tagged Analytical Psychology, Archetypes, C. G. Jung, Collective Unconscious, Conscious, lexicon, Psyche, psychology, Unconscious

13 Oct 2014

Jung’s Map of the Psyche

Posted in Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Jungian, Persona, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow, Unconscious and tagged Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Ego, persona, Psyche, psychology, Shadow | Leave a comment

13 Oct 2014

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Full Circle POV Lexicon: Shadow

Daily, we see figures moving at the edge of consciousness that are a bit disconcerting. They are the thoughts, feelings, behaviors, potentialities, desires, and dreams that are unacceptable or that we might characterize as not me: aspects of the personality that have been pushed down for years. This is the Shadow, a term that most people have probably heard more and more in daily conversation.

Shadow, initially, is the entire unconscious psyche. Like looking out from the close proximity of the campfire into the inky darkness, we know the dangers that exist out there, or in there, that will potentially, or likely, do us harm. We remain close to the light or we take a bit of light with us, a flashlight.

The Shadow is mostly unconscious and is both personal and collective. Psychologically, we avoid the shadow side of our personality as threatening and distasteful. These elements threaten the sense of identity held onto tightly by the Ego/Persona. Rather than interact readily with these elements, we ignore them or erect defenses against them. Robert Bly, the poet, describes the Shadow as the bag that we drag behind us, into which we throw all difficult truths or possibilities that we cannot face about ourselves. We naturally ignore/repress the shadow aspects of our personality with the mistaken belief that we have them under control. They will have their say however, forcing themselves into our conscious awareness, if not now, then at some point in the future.

We receive loud hints of the Shadow’s presence daily, most frequently through the phenomenon of projection whereby we experience the repressed material as if it were exclusively true of an object in the environment. A sure indicator that our Shadow is involved in our reaction toward someone else, known or unknown, is the level of intensity of affect, of emotion. The more intense our emotional reaction or mental energy, the more we are experiencing our own Shadow, even when we have a legitimate complaint about that person or situation. After all, a projection cannot occur unless there is something on which it can hang.

Others see our Shadow much more readily than we ever will. That’s because we are oblivious to our unconsciousness and see the cause for our emotions and behaviors as externally caused.

Molly Tuby, a British psychoanalyst, suggested some typical ways all of us receive hints of our own shadow side:

In the content of our humor
In our exaggerated feelings about others (positive and negative)
In negative feedback from others who serve as our mirrors
In those interactions in which we continually have the same troubling effect on several different people
In our impulsive and inadvertent acts
In situations in which we are humiliated
In our exaggerated anger about other people’s faults

I would add: “In those things that we have done and that we have left undone” that leave us or others around us perplexed.

Jung again:

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.

Here is the split within the personality: the Ego/Persona instinctively seeks to defend its dominant position often feeling the struggle with the Shadow to be one of survival itself. The Ego/Persona will perceive the Shadow as inferior and contaminating, the enemy threatening to bring down everything that the Ego/Persona has striven to develop. The Shadow compensates keeping pace with the Ego/Persona in its continuing attempts to reach conscious integration. The struggle escalates proportionate to the level of repression or suppression by the Ego/Persona, as described in A Principle of Opposites.

The Self, the fuller personality, seeking the integration of the whole person, will speak through the Shadow and will be heard even if the consciousness of the individual needs to be thrown into chaos or possessed outright by the shadow quality.