Through a Jungian Lens

This is an Eastern Kingbird, a fairly common bird around this area of the country.  The distinctive white band on his tail makes him easy to spot and recognise.  The scene, a typical Canadian prairie farmland scene where the only trees to be found are those that mark someone’s farmyard or serve as planted windbreaks.  In a way, this is a “plain Jane” kind of scene on the prairies, one that easily gets lost and overlooked because of its “commonness.”

I know that I am guilt of frequently overlooking that which is right in front of my face.  This is a common occurrence in all of us.  We tend not to notice things until the moment they do something extra-ordinary to catch our attention.  A simple example:  a crude oil pipeline can sit still in a field near a stream for decades so that it blends in and becomes part of the scenery until the day it springs a leak and becomes headline news on all the media; a telephone wire cuts the view from balcony for so long that one learns to focus passed the wire except when the wire holds a chirping bird that catches our eyes and ears.  And I know that I have done this with people, made them disappear from my conscious presence.  And, I think that this is a common happening.  So many humans being overlooked until the moment that do something extra-ordinary.  Unfortunately, most of those extra-ordinary acts make the news in shocking ways.

“We need more understanding of human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself.  He is the greatest danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it.  We know nothing of man, far too little.  His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.”  (Jung in a BBC interview with John Freeman in 1959)

I don’t blame the devil, Satan, the great deceiver for what is dark in the human psyche.  I know that the darkness of my own self is not always contained.  I have my little secrets of darker deeds from childhood years and life since then.  I wish that I could have “believed” in a Lucifer who tricked me so that I could blame him, go to confession, say a few prayers of penance and in the process be totally absolved from those dark deeds.  But that is the easy way out, and as I have found out many years later, there is no absolution to be had from an “other” when the “self” knows about the presence of that inner darkness.

Jung was right, we need to know more of men and women and their human psyche.  I need to know more of my own psyche so that I can get a clearer view of who I am deep down inside, the “me” that is lost in commonness.