C. G. Jung | Full Circle POV

Archive for the tag “C. G. Jung”

28 Oct 2014

The Suit: Persona Embodied

In checking out Andrew Sullivan’s blog this morning, my attention was drawn to a great article by A.A. Gill about the venerable and enduring Suit. Gill captures the story of the suit:

There is not a corner of the world where the suit is not the default clobber of power, authority, knowledge, judgement, trust and, most importantly, continuity….

No one knows or can say what the spell of the suit is, or how it works, but still it exudes its inoffensive writ.

It is the naivety of young men to believe that it’s what they think that is important; that surface and show and fashion are what the established order uses to maintain itself. But just look at those group photographs of powerful men, of left and right, outside conferences and meetings, and see the power of the suit. It’s not in the singular but the collective. If there were only one in the world, it would be a mad thing, but its strength comes from the massed ranks, the united power, the union of flannel.

Remember the flap when President Obama wore a tan suit to a briefing on the terrorist group ISIS?

Shutters and Blinds

Posted in Analytical Psychology, Ego, Persona, Psychology and tagged C. G. Jung, Conscious, Ego, persona, Persona/Ego, professional image, Public Face | 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.

Posted in Analytical Psychology, C. G. Jung, Ego, Jungian, Lexicon, Persona, Psyche, Psychology, Shadow, Unconscious and tagged C. G. Jung, Ego, persona, Persona/Ego, projection, psychology, repression, Shadow, Unconscious

08 Oct 2014

The Unconscious: Two quotes from Jung

The unconscious is always the fly in the ointment, the skeleton in the cupboard of perfection, the painful lie given to all idealistic pronouncements, the earthliness that clings to our human nature and sadly clouds the crystal clarity we long for. (Para. 207)

There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the “thorn in the flesh” is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent. (Para. 208)

C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Zen Steps

Posted in C. G. Jung, Psychology, Unconscious and tagged C. G. Jung, 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.

Posted in Analytical Psychology, Archetypes, C. G. Jung, Collective Unconscious, Lexicon, organizations, Psyche, Psychology, R. D. Laing, Shadow, Unconscious and tagged Archetypes, C. G. Jung, Collective Unconscious, lexicon, Psyche, psychology, Shadow, Unconscious | Leave a comment

07 Oct 2014

Full Circle POV Lexicon: Conscious and Ego

The Conscious is that part of the psyche that is potentially under the control of the Ego, which, as the center of the conscious, we typically relate to as I. The Conscious is a very small part of the total, or whole, psyche and is a fairly recent development in the evolution of humans.

My Ego, as the center of my consciousness, exists between the environment in which I move and the unconscious psyche and has the function of perceiving, interpreting, integrating, and adapting to the demands, often conflicting, of both. The ability of the Ego to fulfill its function varies in development from person to person, and, for the individual, development continues over the life span. The Ego can be ineffectual or excessively rigid.

To come: Persona and Shadow.