Through a Jungian Lens

Just a hint of colour, Hong Mei Park

Passion, rawness, sex, lust, love – so many words that call to the basic instinctual command to couple as a species.  There is no room for logic or consciousness, just a throbbing of the loins to mate.  When we begin to think about what our bodies command, we begin to travel a different road, one that often contradicts nature.  Nature compels us to mate, to preserve the species as it does for all other species, a biological command.  However, being human brings forth a different dynamic, one that both embraces and confounds the urges and demands of nature.  I want to return once more to Gao XingJian’s book, Soul Mountain to have him speak of this dynamic from a “Chinese” scene.

“Young women in groups of five or six come to the river-bank, some standing in a circle and others holding hands, and begin calling their lovers.  Melodious singing rapidly fills the vast night.  . . .

. . . It is totally instinctive, uncontrived, unrestrained and unembellished, and certainly devoid of what might be called embarrassment.  Each woman exerts herself, body and heart, to draw her young man to her.

. . .  I am suddenly surrounded by an expanse of passions and think that the human search for love must originally have been like this.  So-called civilization in later ages separated sexual impulse from love and created the concepts of status, wealth, religion, ethics and cultural responsibility.  Such is the stupidity of human beings.

. . . I see her expectant eyes in the darkness, unblinking and fixed on me.  My heart starts pounding and I seem to return to the long-lost trembling of my passionate youth.  I am drawn to her . . . I see her lips moving slightly although she doesn’t speak again and just waits, and the singing of her companions grows soft.  . . .

I’ve never encountered this style of love.  It’s what I dream about but when it actually happens I can’t cope.

. . .  I’m afraid of shouldering the responsibility of even pursuing momentary happiness, I’m not a wolf but I would like to be a wolf, to return to nature, to go out the prowl.  However, I can’t rid myself of this human mind.  I am a monster with a human mind and can find no refuge. (Gao, Soul Mountain, pp 228-229)

This is a Yellow-Crowned Euphonia, a bird I have never seen before.  I managed to get its photo yesterday morning when I took a solitary walk in mid-morning.  There is no doubt that this bird’s colours seemed to animate the otherwise flat intense light of the morning’s walk.  It was a walk that produced a few surprises in terms of photographs and in terms of good thinking time.

I have been spending a bit of time thinking about anima, about soul.  I am finding that as I do so, I invite her presence and in return, my life becomes more animated, my life has more colour, more passion and more joie de vivre.  Is it simply the switch from the cold of the Canadian Prairies?  Is it simply the intense heat of the sun here in Costa Rica?  Likely it is neither of these and both of these.

My partner has noted the difference in my way of being, has commented on how I have somehow left the darkness and lack of ambition and passion that I was experiencing on the prairies.  Instead of waking up lethargic at 8:00 am as I did in my Canadian home, here I am up somewhere between 4:30 and 5:30 every morning.  The difference shows up in many ways, especially in my increase in enthusiasm to do things.  I have become more animated.   These are sure signs that I am taking care of my soul.  Now for a few words from Daryl Sharp on the topic:

Jung had a number of descriptions and definitions of the anima, such as soul-image and archetype of life itself, but in this essay he focuses on her as the “projection-making factor” in a man’s psyche.  She saves a man from being a stick-in-the-mud, prods him to adventure and the taking of risks, alternately enlivens and maddens him.  And everything she does to him inside is reflected and amplified, through projection, in his activities and relationships in the outside world. (Sharp, Jung Uncorked:  Book Two, 2008, p. 12)

Now, if you have noticed, I have been taking risks here in terms of transparency and authenticity.  I guess I could blame the influence of anima for this.  It is as if I am being submersed into a cauldron where the heat is being turned up so that the transformation process pace speeds up – literally and figuratively.  Are the manifestations showing up here influencing my relationships with the outside world that meets with me on this blog site?  Are the manifestations showing up in the physical space where I am now found influencing my relationships?  I can answer the last question without hesitation – yes!  It is too early to say whether or not these changes are welcomed or acceptable in the “other,” but that is for time to work out one way or another.  But for this space?  I honestly don’t know.  Only you can answer that question, and only in terms of yourself.  I look forward to your responses.

My work on the SoFoBoMo project is coming along though not at the same speed.  Yesterday I only added one photo page with its accompanying text page into the layout. That being said, I don’t have any worries about finishing on time as ten photos are in place with only only four days of project time used up.  It’s the text that is slowing me up, following a rigid template, that of the hero’s journey.

Today is day five and I have already added one more photo, this one, which I feature here along with it’s accompanying text.  The photo was taken on Thursday as I went driving in search of more Saskatchewan photos that might “fit” into the story.  All stories are situated in “place.”  The place for the hero journey for my story is Saskatchewan, Canada.  I struggled with the idea of using other kinds of photos, those of people or urban scenes or abstracts.  However, in the end, I decided to keep true to the setting for the story, the open prairies of Saskatchewan.  This photo is representative of the fifth stage, “the belly of the whale.”  Only twelve more stages to go in order to complete the story and book.    And now, the text.

- – - – -

Man and Women, One

His return to childhood

Abdication of power

… sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility.  .(Jung, CW vol. 10, “The Individual’s Understanding of Himself,” paragraph 538, 1958.)

Strange how life turns, how relationships change.  Falling in love, being a man on top of the world, building a new life with a partner.  Then as years pass, slipping into a comfortable role.  Decisions in the home shift to the wife-mother leaving the outer world of work as the domain for husband-father’s control.  Relations become strained as passion is buried in business.  His need for comfort, her need for control and the end result, he becomes like a child building  yet another wall between their union.

What is more strange is how the “self” begins to slowly disappear as the years go by, how the “fusion,” the joining of two into one, becomes more about loss than it does about gain.  Husband and wife cease being “individual” people in “relation” to each other as they become united as a couple, as parents.  Marriage ceases being a partnership of equals.  Too much and both are caught in the sticky web wondering who is this stranger that they had married.

… individual psychological development – individuation – is not possible without relationship, it is not compatible with togetherness.  Individuation requires a focus on the inner access, ego to unconscious.  Togetherness blurs or obliterates the boundaries, because it aims at the commingling of one ego with another. (Sharp, Daryl, The Survival Papers: Anatomy of a Midlife Crisis, p. 70, 1988.)

What does this commingling feel like?  Being swallowed, like Jonah had been swallowed by a whale.  To find one’s undiscovered self, one must be freed from the belly of the whale, and one must do this on one’s own by destroying the monster, the anima-mother complex.