Last week we started talking about the intersection of Jung’s theories of the self and fantasy literature. If you haven’t seen last week’s start, I strongly recommend you read it before proceeding; it contains all the disclaimers, parameters, and provisos anyone could want. Now we begin at the meat of the stuff. And I’m throwing this out one more time: I am writing about Jung’s theories as I understand them to be, and from my perspective as a reader and a writer, one long unpublished but hoping that will change before too much longer. I am not a psychologist; I don’t even play one on tv. Ready? Here we go:
The Architecture of the Mind
Freud had his famous tripartite structure of the human mind: id, ego and superego. Yes, I’m sending you to Wikipedia. Its article provides a decent basic introduction, and Freud is a sidelight—I just want to mention that Freud’s theories about the Self exist and are important, although for tonight they’re beside the point.
Jung also has a three-part division, but his structure lies more like layers: the conscious, the sub-conscious and the unconscious. All together, the three components make up the psyche. The conscious mind is, obviously, consciousness—what we’re aware of.
So far, so good. The Unconscious is trickier. It underpins everything, and it’s where most of tonight’s discussion focuses. The subconscious lies between the two, and mediates. To me, a helpful metaphor is a stretch of open water under a warm sun. The conscious is the top layer of water, the layer where it’s comfortable to swim, where you can look around and see to a certain distance what’s below and what’s approaching. The subconscious is the rather thin matrix where the cold below and the warm above meet and mix. It’s where things from the unconscious enter consciousness. And the unconscious—well, that’s the cold depths you know are there but you can’t see. If colorful clever fishies swim in the warm water, the cold dark water might hold monsters, powerful, slimy, green monsters. Those monsters could be dangerous, or they could be benevolent. We don’t know; we can’t see them.
Same goes for the unconscious. Enormous, deep, dark and inescapable. But what, exactly is it?
The Archaeology of the Self
Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, so we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists. By “history” I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal. (1. p. 57)
This makes sense, when you think about it. Like the other organs of the body, the brain has an evolutionary history. It might be inaccessible and mysterious to us, but it’s only sensible to consider as probable that it exists. After all, the human embryo in development sheds a tail; gill slits become the organs of speech and hearing, and we suspect that both tonsils and the appendix still play some role in the immune system but their presence is moving toward vestigial remnants of once-independent organs. We know that by the seventh month of development, a fetus spends much of its time in REM sleep: what has a brain that has severely restricted experience and incomplete physical development got to dream about? We just don’t know.
Human beings are not born as blank pages, but contain a history of evolution, from our DNA to our fingertips. Once upon a time researchers asserted that we are born tabula rasa, as blank slates and lacking instincts, but that theory has pretty well been put paid to. Just try to tell a new mother who’s heard her baby cry that what she feels isn’t instinctive. Or that your fight-or-flight reaction to danger in a dark alley on a cold night isn’t instinct asserting itself.
If instincts have survived, why should we assume that that’s all that survived our long evolution? Recently, researchers at Emory University discovered that mice can pass fear of certain specific threats on to their offspring, inherited threat-responses that can endure for at least two generations. Comparing lab mice with human beings is a dicey business, and I’m not suggesting that our species experiences so close a correspondence, but it’s not out of the question either that our ancestors’ experiences are encoded into our brains, and there are things in our unconscious that go way back into our evolutionary history.
This was Jung’s theory, anyway—that at least part of the unconscious is composed of instincts and instinctive thought-patterns, patterns passed down through generations and across cultures, knitting all humanity at its base into one species, one common biology, one repository of traits that define us all as uniquely human: the collective unconscious.
This is an essential concept in Jung; it forms the ground of archetypes and archetypal thinking. Archetypes rise from the collective unconscious, which is why they’re universal.
“The psyche is more than consciousness,” Jung writes. “Animals have little consciousness, but many impulses and reactions that denote the existence of a psyche; and primitive [people]s do a lot of things whose meaning is unknown to them” (p. 64). The compulsive aspect of “primitives’” actions isn’t limited to “primitive” people—we all do things without understanding why we do them, whether it means adhering to superstitions or following religious dogma, or dominating a conversation, or lying spontaneously. According to Jung, these impulses rise from the unconscious. Our instincts live in the unconscious. So do all the things we don’t want to think about, the malice we don’t want to recognize, the unpleasant observations about our selves and those around us that we repress, the anger we can’t acknowledge, etc. It all goes into the individual unconscious, where it stews along with the collective stuff to form the base of personality — who we are and why we are the way we are.
We’re not aware of these impulses and forces. If we were, they wouldn’t be unconscious (naturally). Not only is this stuff unconscious, but we actually work at keeping it that way. “Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown” (17). For myriad reasons, but mostly to keep ourselves comfortable, we repress the unconscious.
But this stuff won’t stay repressed. Especially in times of stress, it comes bubbling into the subconscious, appearing in forms that we can accept, and in places we can manage. The unconscious speaks in a particular language, a language accessible to everyone—it speaks in symbols, and it speaks in dreams.
The Language of the Unconscious
What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us...
[A] word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason….
Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend… Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams. (pp. 3-4)
What does this mean? A symbol is something that we recognize as a common item or term (often) and yet it carries additional weight. Consider, for example, the number 13. The symbol itself is widely considered unlucky—so unlucky in Western European tradition that hotels renumber their floors to excise the thirteenth floor; collectors of Mason-style canning jars, all numbered on the bottom, especially prize “13s” for their rarity, because moonshiners regularly smashed the jars rather than risk carrying them on hooch-runs. Or consider the bunny rabbit, and why it would be a symbol of the Resurrection and the Life of Christ. As you explore the symbol, it takes you “to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.” Many religious symbols fall under this umbrella. So do culturally-important symbols (the ankh, the infinity symbol, the snake devouring its tail, the swastika) and, possibly pop culture symbols that may in time cross into the unconscious (like Pepe the frog) although this is still up for grabs.
The unconscious cannot speak in language. Language is the provenance of consciousness. The unconscious speaks in symbols, and it speaks in dreams. According to Jung, dreams express things that the conscious mind needs to process and recognize; dreams are the subconscious pulling at your elbow and saying, “Hey! Pay attention.” Their symbols (some of them, anyway) rise from the unconscious—powerful, unaccountable, memorable. The pig that turns into a giant owl and perches on your hand; the strange house where you’ve never been before but you know the way through; the stranger who scares you even as it urges you to undertake a journey.
Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts. (p. 37)
Images that belong to the individual’s experiences may come from the individual’s unconscious, but they remain intensely personal. Jung calls them “personal complexes.” And he is careful to remind us that not all dream symbolism rises from the unconscious; in fact, most dreams don’t. Instead they’re the work of the subconscious, processing the pressures of daily life and steering the consciousness toward what needs attention.
It’s not my purpose to discuss dreams; I’m interested in the relationship between Jungian psychology, especially archetypes, and fiction. We can do a side trip into dream analysis, if you like, since much of Jung centers on dream analysis. I’ll leave that to a general vote at the end of this diary. But for now, let’s finish up tonight by starting to talk about archetypes.
Images, motifs that turn up apparently spontaneously across the world, across varied cultures and in different times — these symbols are archetypal — redolent with meaning, power, and authority. They start in dreams because they speak from the unconscious (and by definition you can’t access the unconscious directly). Having been vividly dreamed, having risen into the subconscious, they become things that you can deal with.
[W]hile personal complexes never produce more than a personal bias, archetypes create myths, religions and philosophies that influence and characterize whole nations and epochs of history. (p. 68)
An archetype is not an image; it’s more powerful than that. It’s not a symbol, but a framework, a pattern, a structure.
I am aware that it is difficult to grasp this concept, because I am trying to use words to describe something whose very nature makes it incapable of precise definition. But since so many people have chosen to treat archetypes as if they were part of a mechanical system that can be learned by rote, it is essential to insist they are not mere names, or even philosophical concepts. They are pieces of life itself – images that are integrally connected to the living individual by the bridge of the emotions. (87)
Images that are by their very nature invested with meaning—those are archetypes. One of the most famous is the anima/animus — the complementary principal that, with the conscious mind, creates a whole personality. For most men, the “other half” of the mind presents as a sometimes seductive, sometimes threatening and ultimately benevolent female figure, a guide, an anima. For women, that compensatory other half is usually male, the animus. Either can take different forms, both human and animal, and don’t always express as reliably male or female, but often come bringing instinctive wisdom to a mind that needs it.
This is a good place to stop, on the threshold of the archetype. Until next week, when we’ll go deeper into archetypes. After which, we may or may not talk about dreams. If you’re reading along, I’m going to draw from Man and His Symbols, Symbols of Transformation and Psychology and Alchemy, all of them rewarding reading. I might not know much about psychology, but I know how this stuff works in literature. And it’s fun, too.
Reference
1. Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols, eds. Carl G. Jung and M.L. von Frantz. NY: Laurel, 1968, pp. 1-94.