Phil wrote:

Shasha, I'm not quite sure whether you're denying the existence of archetypes or the value of spending much time working with them�You seem to be saying that you've not come upon dream or other inner symbolism that cannot be explained in terms of one's personal experiences. That's certainly not the case for me, nor for many others I've worked with.

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Phil, I�m sure God has equipped you for your calling, and you probably have a discernment and sensitivity that I simply don�t. I cannot argue with your experience of seeing a difference between symbols that are personal and those that are from some universally shared �space.�

However, I have never seen an archetype, and the group of fellow-therapists with whom I�ve worked do not take archetypes seriously. But, I may be just as susceptible to the �confirmation bias� as anybody else since my training is in developmental and psychoanalytic therapy. (BTW, the confirmation bias, as documented by social psychologists, is the idea that people are prone to seek, interpret and act on their beliefs.)

My training in psychology is all about what makes people tick, what makes them hurt, their maladaptive patterns of relating to the world, and what we can do to bring about healing. To this end, I have never found archetypes useful in any regard.

From my perspective, images, dreams, �energies� all seem to come from the personal unconscious, even if they initially seem alien to us, distorted, crazy, or irrelevant. With proper listening and training, one can provide a place where patients usually readily associate to these images and will invariably come up with a personal memory or meaning related to the image.

All the people I know whom I consider the most dedicated and brilliant minds in the field of clinical and developmental psychology (and have spent their lives working with hurting patients) don�t need archetypes to explain unconscious material. While Western psychology is certainly limited, doesn�t it mean something that Jungian psychology is not taken seriously in any of the accredited universities or academia? Yes, I know, they don�t take a lot of other spiritual aspects of reality seriously either.

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The concept is, as you've noted, theoretical, but with strong explanatory power and much evidence in favor of a collective unconscious shared by the race, with energetic tendencies that account for common mythologies worldwide.

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Phil, I find the bio-psycho-social and evolutionary perspective more than enough to account for the commonalities amongst us. From my clinical and developmental perspective, we all have been subject to long, infantile periods of helplessness and dependence on our caretakers. We all have inborn tendencies, drives, and patterns of relating to one another that cut across all cultures. Hence, we all naturally share common experiences that are re-created in art, stories, social structures, etc. For instance, I don�t need a �Hero� archetype to account for the fact that every little boy and girl wishes to be rescued and taken care of by a big, strong, benevolent care-giver. It�s in every myth because it�s an inborn wish and some part of every human experience.

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But it can also be helpful to know and understand how a few basic archetypal energies work. E.g., male and female energies -- what Jung called the animus and anima, repsectively.
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Again, the bio-psycho-social rooted in the evolutionary perspective holds enough explanatory power to account for male and female energies.

The anima does nothing toward helping me understand the highly personal and complex meaning a man makes of his feminine side or feminine qualities, repressed or otherwise. How a particular man has experienced his mother, how his father treated his budding masculinity, what he witnessed between his mother and his father, how he got along with sisters, brothers, if there was favoritism in the family, how envy and competition were handled, whether he was sexually abused�etc�these will tell me much more about a man�s feminine side than positing something about an anima residing in the collective unconscious.

Why do I need to invoke the anima if I have 400 other determinates that can more personally and adequately account for how a man might relate to women on the outside and to his own �feminine� qualities? It just doesn�t make sense to me.

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Check out Arraj's little essay on Priests, Women and the Anima.

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There is a much more straight-forward picture here, and Arraj completely misses the boat, in my view.

We know that, almost without exception, people who sexually abuse others have experienced sexual assaults themselves.

It is remarkable to me that this essay says nothing of the most salient point regarding sexual misconduct of priests.

Arraj writes, � And at the heart of the question of the psycho-sexual maturity, whether of Catholic laymen or priests, lies in what C. G. Jung called the anima.�

Hello?! What! �how can this be?�Arraj is drastically oversimplifying and, I think, misunderstanding the salient issue here. A pedophile�s main problem is not in his being disconnected from his feminine side, in not allowing his feelings to become integrated into consciousness. No. Somebody who is compelled to fondle little boys or rape them is treating others in the same objectified way as he was treated. In fact, some pedophiles have loving, deep feeling relationships with their victims.

There is nothing in his essay which links up one�s *real life encounters* with the development of psycho-sexual maturity�where the �rubber meets the road.� I know Arraj wouldn't *deny* real world experiences, but why completely omit this reality and invoke some transendending construct of anima?

Instead, he suggests the anima is some magical catch-all for understanding psycho-sexual maturity. Arraj does not seem to support this statement other than providing some classic problems that many men have with unconscious, split off, idealized, ambivalent, etc. representations of women or feminine qualities.

But clinical psychology has understood these representations as deriving from our real-life experiences with the real people in our lives. They call these energies �representations� or �objects� or introjects, which are split off, repressed, projected, denied, etc.

Anyway, I do pray for a docile, teachable spirit, and so I�m open to other points of view.

Much peace to you all,
Shasha

One other point.

Of course, we are spiritual beings and rather porous, so things do float around between us.

People's stuff gets in us, and I have encountered other people's energies and have seen and felt other's energies, but this supernatural realm does not require the concept of a collective unconscious.

Shasha, let's go straight to Jung to see what he had to say, here.
- see http://www.timestar.org/collective.htm

You're saying that you don't require this distinction between a personal and collective unconscious to account for what seem to be somewhat innate predispositions and motifs for behavior. Jung acknowledged that they do interact with and express through the personal unconscious and its symbols, and that's usually how psychotherapists encounter them. He also went to great lengths to describe how a man's relationship with his mother and other women affected relationship with the anima (and vice versa, for women and the animus).

I don't view this quite so much as an either/or proposition as you seem to. As you've noted, most psychotherapists don't make practical use of it, if they buy into it at all. I'm sure they're capable of doing good work without having an ear to the ground for how archetypes might be playing out. OTOH, I've found it helpful in my own life, especially for dream interpretation.

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Re. your critique of Arraj's little essay, I don't think he was meaning to suggest that priests' poor relationship with the anima is a sufficient explanation for the pedophilia scandal. His comments were just a "lead-in" to discussing the problems celibate men have in developing relationship with the anima -- due, in no small part, to their more superficial relationships with women (generalization). That makes sense to me, but, again, I can see that some might not need to refer to the anima to acknowledge this.

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This whole discussion started in reference to spirit guides. We've had other discussions were people seemed to inadequately take into account how the unconscious influences human behavior. Arraj addresses this in an open letter to Catholic Charismatics ( http://www.innerexplorations.com/chmystext/cm.htm ) and the same applies for some of the discussions here about how God or the devil might be involved in certain experiences.

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I'm very much OK with you and others not believing in archetypes/collective unconscious. It is hypothetical, but I think there's strong evidence in favor of it. As the old saying goes, however, "whatever works for you . . ."

At turning points in my own life, I�ve repeatedly found myself having powerful dreams that we archetypal in their structure and content -- although I may have become aware of that far later.

I find Carl Gustav Jung�s work on archetypes and the various layers of the unconscious to be spot on, very much in accord with my own experience and observation.

Sure, in one sense "archetypes" and "the collective unconscious" are just models, keys to understanding. But as with all keys, it is a question of what works for you.

The distinction between "inner" and "outer" is not as we think. They are interwoven in complex and powerful ways. And in the final analysis, beyond death, perhaps the distinction is erased altogether.

The distinction between "inner" and "outer" is not as we think. They are interwoven in complex and powerful ways. And in the final analysis, beyond death, perhaps the distinction is erased altogether.

That's a fine thought, HP. Very fine!

I've mentioned this before at s/p but it's something that continues to work out in me. It's a process where subconscious forces surface in the conscious mind before working themselves out in the unconscious mind of dreams, so that, in actual fact, dreams are sensed before sleep. That might sound a bit obscure. Let me try to explain. It seems that real people from my own past (especially school days) have come to represent parts of my subconscious, and, very often, I get a sense of that part rising to the surface with the symbolic name repeated over and over again in my mind. So for example, I will hear in my mind the name of an old acquaintance, and get a sense of something powerful rising from my subconscious, then, that night, I will dream about the person. It's not that my mind is working out something from my past in relation to the individual, more that the person has come to represent some part of me. It's difficult to pin down exactly what's going on in all of this, but there is a strong emotional response to the coming and going of these forces which I can become quite attached to.

It's a pretty personal symbolic language that flows between the "inner" and the "outer" in waves and tends to be more prominent and relevant than archetypal imagery.

Stephen,

On another thread you wrote about experiencing, during a waking but dreamlike state, a "bejewelled female figures" met in your soul with a sexual energy of great purity. When I first read your description I thought of the woman in the first chapter of song of songs. This morning, after meditation, I was relaxing and to my pleasant surprise "she" visited me. Such sheer bliss.

That sounds remarkable, Ryan. It's happened a few times to me and feels like an subconscious expression of sexual energy. I don't think this is the same as "anima". Perhaps. Not too up on Jung.

quote:

Originally posted by Stephen:
[qb]It's a pretty personal symbolic language that flows between the "inner" and the "outer" in waves and tends to be more prominent and relevant than archetypal imagery. [/qb]

That�s fascinating, Stephen!

I have not experienced what you are describing, but do have dream & waking familiarity with others powerfully representing aspects of self, as well as embodying "archetypes in movement".

Perhaps archetypes may well be dressed in personal imagery, making them even more relevant and potent?

In my experience, the two aspects are sometimes not only interwoven, but truly inseparable.

Yes, HP, I've toyed with the notion that we create personal imagery for archetypes. The parts of self which surface have such a deep root and poignancy.

I'm pretty sure too that the people and places we interact with in day to day life are not only representative of parts of self but are energetically connected to our inner world, so that in dreams of our friends and families (or even our enemies for that matter) there is a substantial energetic interaction. I've experienced this too in wakened states, particularly with an activated Kundalini, where the energy rising draws another's (distant)energy into my own consciousness giving me an almost telepathic awareness of that person, or at least a kind of significant insight, which again works its way out in dreams.

It sounds like you�ve developed a very keen sensitivy along those lines. Some of what you�re describing I�ve only experienced intermittently, on rare occasions.

And it�s been a long time since I�ve done any conscious dreamwork. Some years ago I was getting "flying lessons" when I had a series of lucid dreams. There was actually a clear voice instructing me, helping me gain more and more control. A gentle, observant and very helpful voice. Darnedest thing.

Phil,

Here is a quote from that link you provided:

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1. Definition

The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes.

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OK, agreed on definition. Still a big problem to me as I wonder how in the world can one reliably distinguish complexes from archetypes, those repressed personal symbols from ones which are inherited and don't belong to the personal unconscious. Seems an even taller task if Jung accepts that the two merge together and are not even distinct.

As far as their practical usefulness, such as interpreting the meaning of archetypes in dreams, I see a potentially serious problem. In some cases, I've read of Jungian analysts write soemthing like this:

The patient, Mr. Smith, is clearly struggling with allowing his anima to be expressed in their waking life. After two weeks of treatment, Mr. Smith reported the following dream. "I was in a hurry to get to work but couldn't drive my car because it seemed to be weighed down from something heavy in the trunk...when I stopped to open the trunk, a discovered a large inflatable doll jammed in there. I thought, 'I better stuff this thing in deeper into the trunk so it doesn't prevent me from driving.' Clearly, the inflatable doll represents Mr. Smith's anima which he needs to keep repressed and which keeps him from feeling his feelings. These feelings are felt as something heavy and slowing him down.

To me, this is an example of doing dream analysis completely backward. The therapist has already concluded the patient's problem and uses the dream to support his interpretation. In the psychoanalytic approach, the therapist invites the patient to free associate to the dream, allowing him, the author of the dream, to come up with his own associations to different parts. So a psychoanalytic session might go like this:

Doctor: So what thoughts come to mind about this dream?

Mr. Smith: I don't know....

(pause....long silence)...I dont' know, I have no idea.....

Not to change the subject, Doc, but I was thinking about my supervisor this morning and how angry I am that she asked me to do somebody's elses job! Unbelieveable! I was ready to tell her to STUFF IT!! I can't believe she would treat an employee like this!...I want to say to her, 'Listen doll...why don't you take your job and stuff it'...ha ha ...but I didn't even realize I was angry until just now!

(long pause, laughter)....I guess it's like that inflatable doll stuffed in my trunk! She wouldn't last long without much air in there! (laughs and laughs clearly enjoying his release of hostility)

Doctor: Maybe it doesn't feel safe to be angry when you're feeling insulted...
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See in the latter, the patient is associating to the dream. The symbols are his unique creations. Their meaning is more highly personal than we can imagine and their meaning can only be arrived at by the dreamers associations.

The Jungian approach to seeing archtypes in dreams leads people to a different place, I think, than the free association approach. This is why I think having a set of predetermined archetypes ready to use as interpretations can be leading the dreamer down the wrong path.

See what I mean?

Today is the birthday of Carl Jung, born in Kesswil, Switzerland (July 26, 1875).

"His father was a pastor, and as a boy Jung was shocked to find out that his father was losing his faith. He decided to become a scientist instead of a minister so that he could scientifically prove that religion was important. He was the founder of analytic psychology. He noticed that myths and fairytales from all kinds of different cultures have certain similarities. He called these similarities archetypes, and he believed that archetypes come from a collective unconscious that all humans share. He said that if people get in touch with these archetypes in their own lives, they will be happier and healthier.

He became a psychologist at a time when Sigmund Freud was the most important psychologist in the world. When the two men met for the first time, they talked for 13 hours straight. They collaborated for a few years, but finally decided that they disagreed with each other's ideas. Jung thought Freud was too obsessed with sex, and Freud thought Jung was too obsessed with God."

Quote from Writer's Almanac

Happy birthday, CGJ. His autobiography, "Dreams, Memories and Reflections" is a good read, including in it episodes from his interactions with Freud.

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Shasha, I'm starting to think you've just really skimmed the surface of Jung's psychology and his counseling approach, and are reacting more to anectdotal issues. I'm not a Jungian analyst, but I've read enough of them to know that they do spend time letting clients make their own associations with dream symbols. This is especially true of material from the personal unconscious, which is where much of it originates. Their understanding of the collective unconscious and its archetypal predispositions does provide them an interpretive context, but I don't see anything wrong with that. This understanding is not merely hypothetical in a philosophical sense, but comes from much emperical observation.

quote:

Still a big problem to me as I wonder how in the world can one reliably distinguish complexes from archetypes, those repressed personal symbols from ones which are inherited and don't belong to the personal unconscious. Seems an even taller task if Jung accepts that the two merge together and are not even distinct.

The two can intermingle, as can material from the personal and collective unconscious. I would guess that these are the kinds of issues that people trained in analytical psychology learn to work with. The Freudians would have a different approach, I'm sure, as would those using more gestalt methods and other approaches. As you've noted, there are a variety of ways to work with dreams.

Thanks for your patience, Phil.

You are correct. I have not done more than skimming Jung's psychology because I just can't get past the basic premise of his collective unconscious and archetypes. Still, I'm probably not in a position to criticize what I�ve read of a few Jungian�s dream analyses.

Let me make just a few points, then I�ll stop�I think.

1 - I was in psychoanalytic treatment for many years (on the couch, flat on my back, and free associating), and I never saw an archetype. I experienced and shared a lot of dreams and images that all spoke to my personal struggles with rage, hatred, contempt, competitiveness, envy, jealousy, inadequacy, fears, to name a few!--most of this stuff was completely unconscious before my treatment. My personal experiences all seemed more than sufficient to explain these things. As I look back, I don't see a hint of how even the theory of archetypes would have been useful...and it may have interfered with the process, for that matter.

It seems to me that simply attending to the personal unconscious is sufficient to bring about conscious integration and healing.

2 - You've stated a few times now that there is explanatory power in these basics of Jung's and "empirical observation" supporting his psychology.

I've copied one of your paragraphs from a previous post below and my response, to which you have not responded:

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The concept is, as you've noted, theoretical, but with strong explanatory power and much evidence in favor of a collective unconscious shared by the race, with energetic tendencies that account for common mythologies worldwide.

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Phil, I find the bio-psycho-social and evolutionary perspective more than enough to account for the commonalities amongst us. From my clinical and developmental perspective, we all have been subject to long, infantile periods of helplessness and dependence on our caretakers. We all have inborn tendencies, drives, and patterns of relating to one another that cut across all cultures. Hence, we all naturally share common experiences that are re-created in art, stories, social structures, etc. For instance, I don�t need a �Hero� archetype to account for the fact that every little boy and girl wishes to be rescued and taken care of by a big, strong, benevolent care-giver. It�s in every myth because it�s an inborn wish and some part of every human experience.
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Without knowing much of Jung's psychology, doesn't my point above seem at all relevant?

3 � Let�s say the collective unconscious and its archetypes do exert some influence on us, that that influence is mingled with our personal unconscious. Would it be a fair analogy to say that our personality is formed by our personal experiences and inborn tendencies as well as the gravitational pull of the moon? In this analogy , the moon is the collective unconscious and our moods being the personal unconscious.

If so, the moon is a *constant* in the equation, it effects us all equally. The moon, by itself, *does not influence us differentially.* So what do we know about anything which accounts for NO variability in an equation? You can just as well remove that variable and get the same answer. See what I mean? No explanatory power.

Said another way, if the archetypes of the collective unconscious, shared equally by the human race, exert a uniform influence on us, they add no real meaning to our understanding of personality as all the variance is accounted for by individual differences.

Just a thought...

Shasha, you are "hooking me" into a debate, here, with some of your examples. E.g., your point #3 above presumes that the archetypes are something of a "constant" in all people and therefore a negligible source of human differences. Jung's writings on psychological types make it clear that the archetypal tendencies he described as the four functions, and how they unfold through the years was a great contribution to understanding personalities. Additionally, the way some of the functions are more unconscious, and how they intermingle with contrasexual energies (anima, animus) influences typological expression. Relationship with our parents has a very significant role to play in how this all plays out, but that doesn't necessarily help one to understand and claim one's natural psychological endowment. I've found Jung's approach helpful unto that end, and his teaching on individuation as the integration of opposing tendencies in the psyche to be a good way to understand an important aspect of human development. It's hard to say how much these perspectives would have been relevant in the therapy you went through, but it's safe to say that we don't "see" archetypes as something distinct from a bio-psycho-social-evolutionary context. How would that even be possible? One would have to step outside of one's humanity to do so.

I suspect archetypal tendencies and the collective unconscious are part of the infrastructure of our human consciousness, belonging to what Aristotle/Aquinas called the "Animal Soul." Jim Arraj's perceptive essay on kundalini from a Jungian and Thomistic perspective goes into this somewhat. See http://www.innerexplorations.com/ewtext/some.htm if interested. It's pretty meaty, but worth your while.