Scientists have discovered only fairly recently that of all our mental activity, only about 5% of it happens in the conscious mind. That means that a whopping 95% of our mental activity takes place in the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind comprises mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgements, feelings, or behavior. According to Freud (1915), the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior. Like an iceberg, the most significant part of the mind is the part you cannot see. But this is very real electrical energy that can get blocked behind dams or walls in the unconscious, usually caused by negativity such as pain, fear, trauma, or other kinds of stress. Medications can sometimes move these blockages around but they may treat symptoms rather than the causes of illness. And medications may only offer temporary relief, or have bad side effects, and can be expensive. The new biology of epigenetics is the study of cellular consciousness and the biochemical mechanisms of emotions that switch genes on and off. Learning to use our conscious mind to find and deal with our unconscious blockages is an effective healing processes. But since we don't see into the unconscious directly, one way to do this is symbolically using archetypes. The term "archetype" has its origins in ancient Greek. The root words are archein, which means "original or old"; and typos, which means "pattern, model or type". The combined meaning is an "original pattern" of which all other similar persons, objects, or concepts are derived, copied, modeled, or emulated. Carl Jung understood archetypes as universal, archaic patterns and images that derive from the collective unconscious and are the psychic counterpart of instinct. They are inherited potentials which are actualized when they enter consciousness as images or manifest in behavior or interaction with the outside world. They are autonomous and hidden forms which are transformed once they enter consciousness and are given particular expression by individuals and their cultures.In Jungian psychology, archetypes are highly developed elements of the collective unconscious. The existence of archetypes can only be deduced indirectly by using story, art, myths, religions, or dreams. So Jungian archetypes refer to unclear underlying forms from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the trickster, among others. History, culture and personal context shape these manifest representations, giving them their specific content. These images and motifs are more precisely called archetypal images.
"There are many Jungian archetypes, as they are called. Jung seemed to have some main archetypes, which he describes in his book Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. The archetypes include the Self,
which each individual might think is just their personality. However,
for Jung, the self is the unification of the conscious and unconscious
life of the individual. The self is created through a process called individuation,
in which all the aspects of the personality are integrated into a
unified whole. For Jung, the self as an archetype is best represented by
the mandala. The word mandala in Sanskrit means “circle” and
they are symbols which are significant in Hindu and Buddhist rituals and
spiritual practices, such as meditation. The psychologist David Fontana
remarks in his book, Meditating with Mandalas, that the
mandala’s symbolic nature can give an individual access to deeper levels
of their unconscious, which will ease the process of individuation."
....The mythologist Joseph Campbell, following in the tradition of Jung, would become famous for looking at the different myths, folklore, stories and religions from around the world and picking out the fundamental, universal elements to them. In his highly influential book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell discusses the journey of the archetypal hero. According to Campbell, all those famous stories involving heroes, such as the labours of Hercules or the life of the Buddha, share a basic structure. Campbell called this structure the monomyth and in short, it involves a call to adventure, a road of trials, the boon (or discovery), a return to the ordinary world and, finally, the application of the boon. This structure is clever because Campbell is able to apply it to history’s most famous stories, such as Homer’s The Odyssey and the life of Christ as depicted in the Gospels.
Campbell
seems to justify Jung’s idea that archetypes are something that we can
easily identify with and which evoke a strong emotional response from us
because they symbolise our evolutionary experiences. The hero’s journey
represents the primitive struggle of our ancestors in entering an
unknown world of danger, but overcoming the danger and bringing back to
the tribe or group some discovery or treasure that will benefit
everyone." - Sam Wolfe
Explorations into both the vast universe, and the nature of the smallest elementary particles that physicists study, seems to leave us with more questions than answers. Apparently all myths, epics and religions are linked in that they are cultural manifestations of the universal need of the human psyche to explain social, cosmological, and spiritual realities. The collective unconscious was the name that Jung gave to the wellspring of symbols and archetypes from which we derive human narratives. Archetypes represent fundamental human motifs of our experience and they evoke deep emotions which can serve to organize, direct and inform human thought and behavior. We often find that our feelings don't seem logical. Honoring your feelings isn't a sign of weakness and it doesn't mean you're giving in to them. Indeed, the process of acknowledging your feelings and working through them will leave you feeling more confident and freer. True objectivity can include intuition and emotional intelligence. Over a 100 different archetypes can be distinguished, the most well known are the following basic archetypes:
The Persona is a social mask that people use to make a good or bad impression to the outside world. Each archetype has a positive and negative aspect. The shadow archetype is the unconscious darker side of a personality that a person represses. So a shadow king or queen become tyrannical, the shadow child is a brat, etc. Examining both positive and negative aspects makes for a well rounded understanding and helps us deal with the fear of failure when setting goals. |
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Jungian Archetypes
