Through a Jungian Lens

I have taken this photo before.  It became one of the “Tunnel Vision” photos late last spring.  Every time I drive to the city I see these two buildings as part of a larger farmyard that had been abandoned long before I came to this part of the province.  There is no doubt in my mind that they would fit well into the scenery of any dreamscape.  Dreams are funny things aren’t they?

Lately I have been a fair bit of dreaming, dreams that defy reality as we generally know it, dreams that are filled with improbable people.  I know that these dreams are busy informing my psyche of various issues that indicate some conflict between my conscious intentions or lack thereof, and what the psyche is expecting.  These are dramas that centre around various complexes that rule my inner and outer life.

The prime players of these dreams have myself as the leading man, a role that I am yet unsure of as being either protagonist or antagonist in these psychodramas; and in co-starring roles, a host of archetypal characters.  Archetypes have an autonomy as well as an intentionality that defies our conscious intentions or desires.  We can wish them away, deny them, or try to distract them; but, they continue their missions in spite of these strategies.

As Hillman says, archetypes are:

the persons to whom we we ultimately owe our personality.  In speaking of them, he (JUNG) says that “we are obligated to reverse our rationalistic causal sequence, and instead of deriving these figures from our psychic conditions, we must derive our psychic conditions from these figures … It is not we who personify them; they have a personal nature from the very beginning.”  (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975, p. 22)

Hillman quotes from Jung, CW 13 par 299).  It is here we see that archetypes exist out of the individual psyche.  Somehow, the individual psyche taps into the bigger image.  Here “mother” becomes more than one’s mother, more than our experiences of other mothers.  The “great mother” becomes the source of motherness that becomes acted out in each individual mother, all connected yet still separate.

We might disown, abandon and forget these archetypes, but they refuse to be forgotten and abandoned.  They will find a way to make their presence known and their power felt.