Archetypes | Full Circle POV

Archive for the tag “Archetypes”

16 Oct 2014

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

11 Oct 2014

Full Circle POV Lexicon: Polarities

Polarities are interdependent, opposite motivational values that are equally important over time in order for a system to function most effectively. The pair of values in a polarity are inextricably linked; they are archetypal, universal in all people, everywhere.

Breathing is an excellent metaphor. We absolutely need both inhalation and exhalation. Make the decision to only inhale. That works for a bit until our body, life shall we say, overrides our intent and forces us to exhale. Choose to only exhale, wait a bit, and life does it’s thing, forcing us to inhale. Inhalation and exhalation cannot happen at the same time, although the circular breathing of horn players comes close. There is a rhythmic oscillation between the two, too much of one or the other causes a disturbance.

Polarities are not a continuum. How do you adjust the amount of inhalation or exhalation on a continuum? They are opposites that are both required.

The breathing metaphor is simple enough, no argument about which is more preferred or better than the other. But, what about the polarity of stability and change, perhaps two sides of a larger archetype of sustainability? By personality and socialization (persona shaping), we tend to have our individual and organizational/collective center of gravity in one or the other. Think about conflicts you might have had with another person about which of those should prevail. You will both be very good at advocating for the one you prefer and think is essential, and lay out, readily, the logic and benefits of that preference. You will both be equally adept at pointing out all the flaws, the danger even, in the other approach. It seems self-evident to both sides. Least likely is seeing how your preference could actually be the undoing of the endeavor.

Other examples of interdependent motivational values are competition/collaboration, action/reflection, quality/cost, other-focused/self-focused

Consciousness naturally assigns a good/bad value judgment on the polarity and organizes and acts accordingly, more often than not without question. Our actions reinforce our preference and simultaneously repress the other necessary counter value. We see the one as good/desirable/wise, the other as bad/undesirable/foolish or dangerous. The one becomes reinforced as a Persona/Ego guiding value, the other is repressed or forgotten and slips into the Unconscious (Shadow). The natural benefits of the other are lost.

Here’s a grand statement: Life will not allow exclusive preference for one value in a polarity without forcing the other value back in to the mix. System disturbance will always ensue; it’s a given.

Posted in Analytical Psychology, Archetypes, Conscious, Ego, Lexicon, Persona, polarities, Psychology, Unconscious and tagged Archetypes, Conscious, Motivational Values, Opposites, persona, polarities, psychology, Unconscious | Leave a comment

08 Oct 2014

Full Circle POV Lexicon: The Unconscious

A circle is defined as much by what is outside of the line as what’s within. The line and the area within are positive space, outside of that is negative space. With people and organizations that’s our Unconscious. Revisiting R. D. Laing,

The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice
there is little we can do to change
until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.

The Unconscious is both personal (Shadow) and collective (Collective Unconscious). Psychologically, it’s vast, mysterious and often unsettling, even dangerous. At the least, it’s what rests (or is quite active) in the darkness – what we don’t know, haven’t come to know (and would rather not know), and all the archetypal dynamics (much more on that later) that all humans share (Collective Unconscious).

M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, The Village, captures the feel.