by Ruth Snowden
THINGS TO REMEMBER
Jung emphasized that it was important to study both the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious if we are to understand the human psyche.
Archetypes are helpful because they give form to ideas from the collective unconscious.
Jung did not find it helpful to identify separate driving instincts within the psyche, preferring instead to use the term libido to describe a general psychic energy.
The ego (who we think we are) and the shadow (negative aspects of ourselves that we deny) work together in the psyche as a balancing pair.
The persona is the mask that we wear in order to relate to other people.
The male psyche has a balancing female aspect – the anima, and the female psyche has a corresponding male aspect – the animus.
Projection occurs when we see an unconscious characteristic of our own in another person or object.
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5
The journey of the psyche
In this chapter you will learn:
the nature of the psyche’s journey through life
in more depth about individuation and the Self
key features of the stages of development through which the psyche passes.
The journey of the psyche
In the previous chapter, we looked at the way the psyche is constructed. This chapter will explore the ways in which it develops and operates. Jung suggested several basic principles at work, all of which he based on scientific principles:
The principle of opposites. Everything in the psyche naturally has an opposite aspect, and in fact this principle is basic to all of nature. Think of up/down, light/dark and so on. Following this principle, every ‘good’ content in the psyche tends to be balanced by an equivalent ‘bad’ content. The flow of libido (psychic energy) between opposites is greater when there is a greater contrast between the opposites. This flow of libido drives our behaviour.
The principle of equivalence. Equal amounts of energy are given to each of the opposites. If we deny the energy that is trying to flow towards negative aspects of the psyche, then we will tend to develop negative complexes as the energy is blocked up. These will emerge from the unconscious in dreams and fantasies, slips of tongue and so on.
The principle of entropy. This is borrowed from physics and describes the tendency for all systems to ‘run down’ as energy is evenly distributed. In the psyche, this means that opposites tend eventually to blend together – we can see this, for example, in the way people tend often to ‘mellow’ as they get older, losing the extreme energies of youth.
Jung sees the psyche not as a fixed, static entity, but as constantly changing and developing throughout life. A great deal of the work of personality development goes on at an unconscious level: on the whole we do not consciously choose to grow into a particular type of person. Throughout life, we are influenced by our environment and the people we encounter on our journey. The behaviourist theory that was popular in Jung’s time said that this was really all there was to it: the psyche was a blank slate at birth and developed gradually as a result of responses to external stimuli. Jung disagreed with this, saying that we are also born with a built-in human developmental programme, which is buried deep in the collective unconscious. Our journey of psychic development therefore follows a basic archetypal pattern, in much the same way as the physical body grows and develops in accordance with its genetic blueprint. This means that the conscious mind is only part of the picture and it is contained, like a smaller circle, within the larger circle of the unconscious.
Jung sees the individuation process as a basic biological process, present in all living organisms, not just in humans. In fact he saw it occurring even in inorganic systems, such as when a crystal forms a definite shape as it grows, suspended in a liquid solution. The goal of individuation is wholeness – a process of each individual organism becoming fully what it was intended to be from the beginning. In other words, for human beings it is a long process of becoming as complete and balanced a human being as we can.
Jung applied another basic biological principle to the psychology of the psyche: the principal of homeostasis. This refers to the way living organisms always strive to keep themselves in a state of balance, no matter what goes on in the environment. So, for example, when we are hungry we eat food, when we are too hot we take off clothes or seek a patch of shade. Again, this principle applies throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, and even within non-living systems. Jung always stressed that the psyche has evolved as a part of the world in which we live. Therefore he saw it as logical that the psyche too would seek balance at all times, just as the body does. Whenever a psychic process takes us too far in one direction, the psyche seeks to regulate the balance. Even the relation between conscious and unconscious has to operate on this same principle. This important theory of homeostasis within the psyche is what Jung refers to as the ‘theory of compensation’. Once again, Jung is describing dynamic opposites coming into action. Sometimes we seem to progress, and at other times, like Jung did during his midlife crisis, we seem to regress. All these stages are part of the growth of the psyche.
When we begin to pay more attention to our own psychic processes – perhaps by looking at our dreams, or starting psychoanalysis – the development of the personality becomes more conscious and deliberate. But Jung warns that the way is never straightforward and easy. At first, in fact, it may seem chaotic and endless and we feel that we are not getting anywhere. Only gradually do signs begin to appear that show us that we are getting somewhere on our quest. Interestingly, the path leads us in what seem like endless circles, and indeed Jung says that they are spirals – although we seem to keep coming back to the same place, we are actually further along the spiral. If we examine dream images over a period of time, we will find that the same kind of imagery comes up at repeated intervals. The dreams rotate around a central key theme, drawing closer to the centre as we progress. Jung draws a parallel in nature with the growth of plants, which frequently show spiral patterns in their flowers and other growth areas. In fact, the plant motif often occurs in dreams and is frequently drawn or painted spontaneously when people are undergoing analysis. Jung also found the tree symbol in alchemy, where it appears as the symbol of Hermetic philosophy, a system of thought originating in ancient Egypt, which had great influence on the Bible, the Quabalah, and Greek and Roman philosophy.
The individuation process is never complete: the spiral path takes us on a lifelong journey. As we travel, we gradually unravel the conditioning imposed by our parents and society and peel away what Jung calls the ‘false wrappings’ of our persona. This frees us to meet our own shadow and acknowledge its power within us, so that we can try to stop projecting it onto others. Gradually, our psyche becomes more balanced and we are able to become much more whole and effective humans.
Archetypal stages of development
The archetypes are the structural elements or basic patterns of the collective unconscious, and the psychic health of the individual depends upon their proper functioning. As it develops, the individual ego-consciousness has to go through the same basic stages that occurred in the evolution of consciousness throughout the history of mankind. Jung found all these stages reflected in the imagery of myths. In the developing psyche this process normally goes ahead quite naturally, just as the physical body matures and grows naturally. During the course of this development, the different archetypes interact with one another in a similar way to that in which the physical organs of the body interact. The archetypes in charge of the stages of psychic development are only part of the whole archetypal reality.
Jung is frustratingly vague in describing an actual sequence of archetypal stages of development. He admitted that his ideas are bewildering and that he was constantly being sidetracked by new ideas. The task of making all his ideas into a coherent whole was later attempted by a student of Jung’s, Erich Neumann, in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness (
see Further reading). There is a foreword in this book by Jung, congratulating Neumann on his achievement and offering Neumann his ‘heartfelt thanks’ for his contribution to analytical psychology. Jung likens himself to a pioneer, exploring unknown territory and getting lost among endless new impressions and possibilities. Neumann, tracing Jung’s footsteps, was able to follow the landmarks he had previously laid down. Jung saw Neumann’s contribution as offering an evolutionary basis for his theories about the development of the human psyche, which would give a firm basis for future scientific research.
Neumann describes a sequence of archetypal events that occur on the hero’s journey. It is useful to have a brief look at these, because similar ideas appear in various places throughout Jung’s writing: as Jung says, he had done the groundwork and Neumann put it all together into a more logical sequence. Neumann’s sequence begins and ends with the ‘Uroboros’, a serpent that eats its own tail, forming a circular motif. Jung was familiar with this symbol, as it occurs in various myths, as well as in alchemical literature. It symbolizes the creative and destructive aspects of nature, the endless cycle of life and death. The stages that the psyche follows through life are then described by Neumann as follows:
world creation
Great Mother
separation of the World Parents
birth of the Hero, i.e. the individual ego-consciousness – Jung placed this event at puberty
slaying of the dragon
rescue of the captive
transformation and deification of the hero.
This sequence describes the whole life cycle, from birth to death. In his book Man and his Symbols, Jung describes a sequence that is similar to this in some ways. It shows four specific stages in the evolution of the hero, i.e. the development of the ego-consciousness. These stages are derived from the traditions of the Winnebago tribe of North America:
Trickster represents the first and most primitive stage, where simple physical needs dominate behaviour. The infant has no purpose beyond gratifying these. His behaviour is cruel, self-seeking, cynical and unfeeling. This figure is often represented by an animal such as a sly fox.
Hare represents the next stage, where the individual is starting to become socially adapted. The symbolic figure is still an animal – in this case a hare, but elsewhere a coyote. This figure is often seen as the founder of human culture, even though he is still in animal form: he begins to modify the instinctual, infantile urges found in the Trickster cycle.
Red Horn represents the third stage. He is the youngest of ten brothers and has to pass various archetypal tests, such as winning a race and proving his great strength. His companion thunderbird ‘storms-as-he-walks’ makes up for any shortcomings and weaknesses on the part of the hero. Red Horn represents the struggles of teens and young adulthood, where the growing psyche has to come to terms with living in the outer world.
The Twins represent the final stage. They symbolize the dual aspect of man’s nature – the basic struggle between opposites – and once again they are commonly found in mythology all over the world. Usually they are forced apart at birth and the mythical task is somehow to reunite them. This reflects the work that needs to be done in order to integrate the psyche – working on the shadow and so on.
Jung explored the archetypal stages mainly through looking at myths and legends in this way. He says that understanding these archetypal stories can help us to understand how the psyche develops, because the individual psyche mirrors the cultural evolution of consciousness that can be traced back through recorded history. The myth of the hero is the most commonly recurring myth throughout the world and it also crops up frequently in people’s dreams. It varies enormously in its details, but the underlying theme is always similar, which suggests a universal archetypal pattern at work. For example, the hero has a miraculous but humble birth, shows early superhuman strength, rises rapidly in society, struggles with forces of evil, has human fallibility such as pride, and finally meets his death in the form of a human sacrifice through some sort of betrayal. A good example is found in the King Arthur myth. Jung says that this hero story has relevance for the development of individuals as they struggle to establish their own identity. It is also relevant for whole societies, as they establish their collective identity.
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Insight
You will probably have realized that the myth of the hero is still expressed in modern heroic adventures, such as those of Spiderman and Superman. The story reappears over and over again, basically unchanged throughout the millennia.
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For Jung, the hero in all these stories represents the emerging ego-consciousness and its efforts to develop and grow. In his struggles, the hero often has help from divine figures and other guardians, who give him advice about how to get through all kinds of superhuman tasks that he cannot manage on his own. In the Arthur myth, for example, this figure appears in the form of Merlin. These superhuman figures are symbolic representations of the whole psyche, which, with its access to the world of the unconscious, can supply the missing information that the struggling ego lacks. The hero’s final sacrificial death represents the achievement of maturity.
Like the mythical hero, we all encounter a new set of archetypal energies at each stage of our development. We need to integrate these, both in our personality and our behaviour. However, Jung points out that for most of his history man lived a simple hunter-gatherer existence, but recently we have evolved so fast that our archetypal pattern has not had time to catch up. This means that its programme is not always relevant to modern, mainly urban living. It does, however, equip us to follow the stages of growth basic to human beings all over the world: exploring our environment; learning who our family members are; learning family rules; getting to know the peer group; learning about social laws and beliefs; being initiated as an adult in society, and so on. All these stages are under the guidance of the Self. Other archetypal structures, such as those we looked at in the previous chapter – the ego, shadow, persona, animus and anima – also have their role to play in a person’s psychic and social development.
Individuation and the Self
Unlike most psychologists of his day, Jung insisted that the development of the psyche extends well beyond childhood and adolescence, even continuing into old age: we never finish the process of self-examination and growth that charts our journey towards individuation. Jung believed that this process can never become complete unless the individual confronts the monsters that lurk in his own unconscious. He discovered these in his own psyche during his midlife crisis, and they appear throughout myth and legend in archetypal themes such as slaying the dragon.
Jung gave an analogy for the limited way in which most people live out their lives, saying that they only live on one or two floors of a large apartment building, never venturing into the rest. This building represents the psyche, where the unexplored rooms are the vast unexplored areas of the unconscious. Most people totally ignore their unconscious aspects, but if they can learn to listen to the messages that the unconscious brings in their dreams and fantasies, they can use them to enrich and heal their lives. The unconscious conveys these messages in the form of imagery, signs and symbols – it is up to the conscious mind to work with these in productive ways. This is not always easy because, as Jung discovered on his soul journey, the world of the unconscious is confusing and at times frightening.
The first layer that is usually uncovered when we begin to explore the unconscious is the shadow. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is made up of all the parts of ourselves that we don’t really want to look at, or cannot consciously admit to – in other words, the aspects of ourselves that we do not like. The shadow is often projected outwards onto other people or groups of people. It can also be turned inwards and repressed, where it may cause neuroses or other psychic disturbances. Like all psychic elements, the shadow has both negative and positive aspects – the negative aspect can show us the darker sides of the
personality and things that we need to work on. The positive aspect can show us qualities in ourselves that we have not acknowledged and which can be very empowering. Jung said that his own shadow was huge, and it was too big a task to tackle the whole of it in one lifetime. All he could do was to look at it and try to take responsibility for it.
Taking responsibility for our less favoured aspects is the first task of the Self in the individuation process. Throughout this process, the psyche has to continually examine and confront what it produces. In terms of Jung’s own two conflicting personalities, we could say that analytical, conscious personality Number 1 is continually looking at and trying to understand unconscious personality Number 2, which is always sending messages to try and get Jung’s attention. The work is not easy, as Jung himself admitted, but it can have great rewards as it helps us to become more peaceful humans, better able to relate effectively to our fellow beings. That Jung himself largely achieved this daunting task is evident from the huge following he acquired later on in his life, having started out as a rather unpopular, bad-tempered youth.
Confronting the shadow is only the first task in the individuation process. Once we begin to know the shadow we reach the next layer in the psyche, which is the anima or animus – the opposite-sex image in the psyche. Once a man begins to understand and accept his anima, it will help him towards achieving a balance between the inner and outer aspects of himself. We can see this in the way that Jung began to achieve a balance between his own inner and outer selves. Until his midlife crisis, he had repressed the needs of personality Number 2. He then began to listen to his inner needs through creative play, building his tower at Bollingen, and seeking out the solitude he desperately needed.