I would say that in our Western society, in spite of the protective instincts of the parents, today's child is taught to separate from the parents even while the same parents urge their children to be obediant. This is because of the myth of free will and individual responsibility. We teach our children not to lie, not to steal, not to hit (except maybe in self-defense). We teach them that they are to blame when they do something wrong. We teach them, if they are Christian, that they are directly accountable to God and not via another agency. We have to go bodily to school, pass the tests without help with the answers (we are assessed not for our ability to get the answers but to reproduce them with our memories), we get punished as individuals, rewarded as individuals.
Chris, to me these things you mention are indoctrinations into ordered social behavior. They are designed to keep the tribe coherent, not to promote individual expression or responsibility. The very notion of abiding by laws (where violation is punishable by the tribe) is a relief of moral choice-making from individuals. That is, an individual doesn't have to contemplate his or her actions based on their consequences or fairness to others; they merely have to obey laws unconsciously. Law is an expression of tribal Eros in a concretized or totemized form. The purpose of the law is to benefit and protect the tribe. In our case, to benefit society. The notion of individual rights and freedoms is still a relatively new one, one that denotes the modern . . . but these laws generally were created to increase tribal or inter-tribal cohesion.
That is, people (who weren't empowered, white males) or groups fought for their rights to vote or own property or live and travel where they wanted to. Their fighting/activism eventually made it clear that they deserved these rights and that society as a whole would function more smoothly with these rights given to the underprivileged. In our capitalist society, the bottom line in these modernist progressions was often money. People with more rights can buy and own more things. Even prejudice can't withstand the libido of economy indefinitely (in the modern world).
I know you feel that the modern myth is the myth of free will, but I half-disagree. Yes, the belief in free will is important to us, but I don't think it is a "myth" proper, not in the Campbellian or Jungian sense. That is, I don't think free will is rooted in instinct like myths have always conventionally been. Therefore, my half-disagreement would have it that the modern myth is the myth of the individuant . . . which is what we see in most of the popular religions in fully modern cultures. Buddhism is probably the most self-evident, but Christianity is definitely a myth of the ideal individuant, although this individuant figure, the godman, is often worshiped as a god instead of used as a model to emulate.
In stating that this is a myth, I mean to differentiate it from something we merely believe in. Free will is something many moderns believe in . . . but the myth of the individuant is an unconscious driving force in our story-making. A myth doesn't have to be realized. As Kafiri said previously, myths can live us when we are unconscious of them. One of the problems with the myth of the individuant is that we don't have an singular sacred text that brings this into modern language. And so what we see today in the spiritual front is eclecticism and syncretism. We might take a little Christianity, a little Eastern philosophy, a little existentialism, a little rationalistic science, a little democracy, etc. But there is no one source that brings the myth together completely. Yet, the very fact that we can formulate our myths and tribal affiliations in this eclectic fashion evokes the idea of the individuant. That is, we are unconsciously striving for the "perfect" realization of this individuant within us . . . but we don't have functional guideposts.
As for free will, I think it is an illusion, mostly. It is a belief that we are masters of our instincts, that we have transcended Eros and instinctuality. I agree with the Jungian tradition here in seeing this attitude as dissociated and neurotic. The more individuation Work we do, the more we are confronted with our lack of egoic freedom . . . or at least with the lack of value in such freedom/dissociation. That is, the more we individuate, the more we live for the Self and the less we live for the ego. On top of that, unconscious egoism tends to be especially tribalistic. In such unconsciousness, we do not actually transcend our instinctual roots, but remain ignorant of them . . . and therefore, we remain ignorant of how "determined" our behavior is by forces other than the ego (like instinct and social conditioning).
We are ironically marketed to as individuals by indicating (to everyone) that if they used product X it would be an expression of their individual inclinations (even while the commercial uses not-so-subtle associative suggestions about just how much everyone will like you when you are using the product in question). All of this is a teaching that we are not defined as part of a whole but as a separate being.
What you refer to is called "lifestyle marketing" and it is one of the contemporary "genius strokes" of the PR industry. This industry very consciously figured out that people will buy individualized "identities" based on the tribes they identify with. In our modern existence, these tribes tend to organize around "lifestyles", what we like to do, who we like to hang out with and absorb identity from. Like many "advancements" in the PR industry, this came from the application of the psychology of the unconscious to the task of manipulating people out of their money. This particular psychological tidbit and family jewel is simply our unconscious drive toward tribalism. We very much like to live in or belong to tribes. We extract our beliefs and identities from these sub-collectives. Lifestyle marketing is profiteering based on the sale of tribal identity indicators (converting tribalistic libido currency into monetary currency . . . but not for the survival and betterment of all; instead this wealth is used to benefit those outside the tribe who have incorporated in order to remove it from tribes it was instinctually intended for). See the BBC documentary,
The Century of the Self for more on the history of the PR industry and its use of psychology.
The problem here is that there is a difference between true individualism (or individuation) and tribalism. Lifestyle marketing still conforms more than it promotes individualism (and by a huge margin).
Today's rituals are the practical rituals of test-passing (school exams, driver's license tests, college entrance exams, etc...)and experience and skill acquisition (riding a bike, driving a car, first kiss, etc...). They are not so much sacred as they are practically necessary and indicative of our worship of conscious experience. They are sacred if you consider that this is all predicated on the idea that we each must prove ourselves to some greater body that holds us in judgement. This abstraction of accomplishment goes towards the sense of self as an abstract quantity. It is a patriarchal dominance that forces us into relationship with the abstract, the Logos and we sink or swim under that collective, separative conditioning.
I'm not sure I would call these things "rituals" . . . simple because they are
not sacred, and rituals are meant to be sacred. That is, rituals are meant to bring instinct into culture in an organized and constructive manner. The things you mention here are, again (in my opinion), merely items of indoctrination into cultural conformity. But they do not incorporate instinct ritually or in an organized fashion that emphasizes the numinousness of the ritual and its function as transformative aid or adaptivity.
This is simply what it is like to live in a world that embraces its consciousness as an experience rooted in the individual human body. But I think it is easy for us to forget that this is an accomplishment of centuries in the making in spite of all of the problems that go with. Because of this excessive separative, patriarchal orientation of the collective we have wars based on principles enacted on bad data (Iraq war/freedom/weapons of mass destruction).
I don't see how these elements of modern society are different than pre-modern societies . . . nor how the things you mention could be seen as progressive.
In spite of all that is wrong about the world today, I still want to acknowledge that the heroic archetype is the central archetype of an early phase of our conscious development and that it was a natural process, one that we cannot judge except in how we wish to continue forward with that in further consciousness.
It's true that children feel the heroic archetype and tend to identify with it in their fantasies and relate to it in the stories they hear and see. But I'm not sure that the hero is really the culture-creating archetype. I think the sociality instinct is the culture creator. Sociality instinct + adequately sustainable environment + time = modernism. The heroic instinct that children identify with is, I believe, an ego-modeling instinct. Basically what I mean when I use the term super-adaptive instinct. Children love the hero because the hero can not only survive, but flourish. The hero is not destroyed by the world, but is, essentially, the raw spirit of life or individual libido.
But young children don't really understand the hero in an organized way (such as Campbell provides). They only feel or intuit the generalities of the hero. As the child is indoctrinated and socialized, the hero becomes depotentiated and marginalized. We all know this to be true . . . and so we look back at our heroic ideals, fantasies, and aspirations from childhood as "foolish" or simplistic or wrongheaded. I mean to suggest that the hero and tribal cohesion/indoctrination are forces often at odds with one another. In the modern world where we believe the myth of free will and think we are culturally constructed (or egoically constructed), the idea of the anti-hero has become prominent. The anti-hero is like a shadow hero. S/he does not integrate properly into society . . . is a "mutant", is culturally dysfunctional. But it's just the flip-side of the hero archetype, and it demonstrates that in modern society, the hero has been cast into the shadow.
That means that any individuating we do must be done through the shadow and in defiance of cultural expectations and tribal affiliations. By the standards of modern culture the archetypal hero has no place in society. And this has an ancient tradition is the hero-as-shaman who is not allowed to live entirely within the tribe, but must remain on the outskirts. The shaman as individuant is, in this sense, tabooed.
But of course, the archetypal/mythic imagination of humanity can't be beaten out of us. We still have heroic models galore in our fiction and films. We yearn to believe our sports start are heroic (and so are always very disheartened when they turn out to be morons or assholes). But these fantasies of the hero often deviate from a truly archetypal structure . . . probably because there are ulterior motivations behind their conceptualization. Hollywood might build its heroes to appeal to a specific (uninitiated) demographic. Individual writers might concoct their heroes based on their own psychology, complexes and all. Even the Jungian and Campbellian notions of the hero (I would contend) are not entirely adequate for modern language . . . and do not allow us to fully comprehend and valuate the hero as a psychological influence.
The places where the hero shines through in a more complete light are in the collective texts like fairytales. These manifestations of heroism have been revised again and again as they adapted to the environment of the oral tradition . . . perhaps like Dawkins' memes or mind-viruses, but in a more positive form. Of course, sometimes individual artists have a very powerful and contemporary vision of the hero and are able to bring this to life in their art. That is, I'm not suggesting that individual creation of myths is impossible by any means . . . but collective creation does tend to flesh out archetypes better on average.
I would contest that we simply have no coherent and complete modern hero archetype modeled for us . . . and that all of the old models are obsolete in one way or another. Children's heroes seem like good ideals to use as models, but these models prove to be ineffective as the children approach adulthood. And we tend to get dismayed by this and conclude that heroism is a pipe dream of ignorant youth. But I disagree. We just need to re-myth the hero and give it new, more contemporary, more complex expression. This is precisely what we who follow spiritual disciplines are trying to do. And so we give up old constructions like the conquering hero (which prove maladaptive), and we refine our notion of the hero to be an individual who is not only determined and strong, but flexible, empathetic, forgiving. Instead of transcendence, we recognize that harmony with others and our environment (and within ourselves) is a more functional and adaptive goal. And we seek this goal just as heroically as ever.
Whenever we do something "good" (even as it contrasts with our selfish desires or "better judgment"), it's the hero that orients us. It's the hero on which we model our action. I think of the archetypal hero as like an alchemical substance in a mixture. The idea is to extract that substance from the other substances in the mix, because these other substances are "contaminants". In other words, they are egoic desires, projections, selfishness, fear-driven defenses, and imprisoning anxieties largely based on what we are expected to be by the Tribe. The expressions of the hero archetype we see in our cultures are more or less purified mixtures. Sometimes they only contain 10% hero. Other times, maybe they have 70% hero in them.
The goal of archetypal orientations like Jung's and Campbell's is to be able to differentiate these kinds of expressions based on a knowledge of what the pure heroic substance really is. This allows us to understand that the 10% hero mixtures are not really good models. They are not adequate expressions of the true hero. The conquering hero, I'm arguing, is one of these too-diluted expressions of the hero. It's one that is contaminated with a lot of egoic nonsense and "propaganda". This might appeal to certain egos and even to certain cultures that tend to worship the ego . . . but it constitutes a usurpation of the heroic instinct and a misunderstanding of the heroic archetype.
Matt, it seems to me that you are dismissing over a century of comparative anthropology, mythology and depth psychology in saying that the hero archetype is a problem to be solved and not at all an important process that brings us to the greater developed conscious perspective that we have. My guess is that you find yourself overwhelmed by the evil of it all, how hurtful, painful, cruel and destructive this process has been. And no doubt it has been a living hell for millions. All of these tragedies serve to feedback into our self-awareness as motivations for the next heroic contribution to our collective.
All I'm saying is that the "contaminated" notion of the conquering hero is not a genuine manifestation of the heroic archetype. The heroic archetype as I have been defining it is (I think it is evident) something I hold in very high regard.
My disparagement of the conquering or egoic or ego-inflated hero is actually in complete accord with conventional Jungian thinking. It was, I think, my initial concern that, despite this disparagement of the egoic and uninitiated hero in Jungian thinking (that Kafiri noted in his quotation of Beebe), there was still too much embrace of this egoic hero in the Jungian shadow. My feeling is that there needs to be a better language for differentiating this ego-driven "hero" from the archetypal/instinctual hero. With Beebe, Kafiri, the Jungians, and the Men's Movement there is good recognition that this egoic pseudo-hero is totally incompatible with individuation and initiation by the animi . . . and I agree with their attitude on this issue.
But I worry that the baby could be thrown out with the bathwater, because I see the heroic archetype (in its "true" and undiluted form) as something that is every present as the one and only mediating "mindset" or "attitude" between ego and Self. Essentially, in my definition, the hero archetype (or heroic ego) is a representation of the ego's healthy relationship with the Self. This kind of hero should not be "initiated away". Rather, initiation brings one into closer accord with the heroic attitude. Although it is bound for symbolic death and self-sacrifice, it is just as bound for resurrection. To do the Work, we must be eternally heroic. That is, we must, in order to listen to and honor and facilitate the Self, do so through the heroic attitude or heroic ego. This heroic ego is surrendering and flexible, though, not rigid, transcendent, and conquering.
One aspect inherent (but not entirely conscious, I think) in the Jungian oriented groups of the Men's Movement is an over-valuation of the senex (which means the undervaluation of the puer). I see this as a dissociation. The puer-senex is really one thing psychologically speaking. We do not start as puers and evolve into senexes (as is often implied in the mythopoetic Men's Movement). The senex is a deacon of tribalism . . . and so would reject "heroism" as a "puer antic" and nuisance. As Robert Bly has said, the puer lives on the vertical plane while the senex lives on the horizontal. But the world of instinct is a spherical, three dimensional place. Bly values the horizontal over the vertical, but I see this as dissociated, a valuation of one Opposite over its Other. I am looking toward the Third Thing in this equation (and its three-dimensionality).
The archetype of the puer-senex coniunctio is the Fool. The Fool is the prima materia or the evolving Stone of the Philosophers. It begins in baseness, on the dung heap, but grows to encompass the hero and wise woman/man. And therefor it is the Heroic Fool that can unite the Opposites of puer and senex. In holding this attitude, I have a major gripe with conventional Jungian thinking, which polarizes puer and senex . . . thus, thrusting the puer into the shadow. This gives us Jungians the tendency to wear the senex robes of wisdom and groundedness while leaping for every star. We say, "No, no! You didn't see me leap! Obviously you are unconscious. You are inflated. You don't understand the Self, the unconscious, the anima!" But we are, I feel, our own underminers. Because we have not learned to effectively value the puer (and Fool), we have blinded ourselves, condemned ourselves to an Oedipal quest which we call "individuation". But because we have made this fundamental mistake, we end up "marrying the Mother" and "murdering the Father".
Here, the Mother is the unconscious as represented by the anima, and the Father is something like biological instinctuality. This Father is a Saturnine Will that isn't really complete without the Son. So instinctual Will starts off as a kind of prima materia trapped in Matter (and in the maternal conception of the unconscious). The Son is the heroic ego that redeems the Father by alchemically extracting his Will from Matter, from its imprisonment in unconsciousness and chaos . . . purifying it (with the Logos) . . . and re-infusing it into Matter (into instinct) so that this Matter/instinct is redeemed/animated/made adaptive. In other words, the ego learns to become the instrument of the Self through a process of valuation and surrender . . . and that is the stuff of the Hero's Journey.
As Freud saw, Jung indeed had some of the Oedipal dynamic driving him . . . and I feel he never completely resolved it. Our inheritance as Jungians is a maternalized portrayal of the unconscious or Self and a dissociation between the puer and senex poles of the ego. A dissociation that means the hero is fractured.
That's my general take on the hero as it relates to Jungian thinking.
Now, at the same time, I do recognize that in Campbell's Hero's Journey, the elements are slanted in the direction of a masculine psychology. I think one of the most important areas of continuing Jungian research has been the efforts to uncover what might be a complimentary "heroine's journey". This has been a theme that I have pursued since I have undertaken a serious study of Jungian psychology. What a better understanding of a feminine psychology will bring, i suspect, is a complimentary view of the Hero's Journey as the adventure of both the rescuer and the rescued, the prince and the princess. The anima and the animus tales combine into the fuller picture that we, each of us, experience though I think we also preferentially identify with one or the other side.
This is a project whose valuation I share with you. But it has been my experience thus far that the Heroine's Journey is very much the same as the Hero's, and that individuation has less to do with sexual identity than with ego-orientation to the Self. As the alchemists envisioned, this is a movement toward a psychological "bisexualism". The individuation process tends to portray the separation of Masculine and Feminine as a dissociation or illness. In my opinion, the lack of understanding of "Feminine psychology" in Jungian thinking is a product of this dissociation and of the bias given to masculinity. This bias seeks to associate consciousness and egoism with masculinity and unconsciousness with femininity. I see this as rooted in patriarchal constructs of culture rather than in some biological or instinctual reality.
This fracture in Jungian thinking is just as much a product of the conventional Jungian conception of the anima (as object of worship) as it is a devaluation of the animus. I see it as all one issue, two sides of the same coin.
Also, do not too quickly dismiss the whole for its parts...for example, all Christians have to come to terms with the following if they are conscious students of the Word:
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/But_to_bring_a_sword:
Jesus taught not to be a simple minion of authority but to stand up against even the desires of one's parents and family members and hear the truth that He was giving. This is quite explicit here.
This is one of those key passages from the original Christian texts that is, I feel, essentially Gnostic . . . and therefore it is rejected and even tabooed in Catholicism. What the Gnostic idea here is saying is that the Logos-as-Christ, the model of the ideal individuant, is a force that will differentiate the individual from his or her tribe. Tribal affiliation must be sacrificed to follow the path of individuation and to find the Kingdom within. This the Gnostics saw as the initiation into Christ, the baptism into the Holy Spirit . . . and those initiated were called Pneumatics.
But why then did the Catholics keep such a dangerous and contrary idea in their texts? Because the original notion could be reworked to mean something entirely different (one of the problems with parables). The Catholicization of the parable of the Logos sword holds that the greatest and most fundamental tribe is the tribe of the Church . . . and no bonds, no affiliations of any kind can supersede the affiliation to the Church. It is a totalitarian appropriation of the original Gnostic idea. This propaganda was especially "necessary" during the period of the early Church, because the Roman Empire was primarily pagan. Even after Constantine, the forced conversion of the pagan population to Christianity was slow and bloody (i.e., there was much resistance).
So, used as Church propaganda, this "severing of ties" with family and older tribes was really a way of destroying tribal ties to paganism (and to a lesser degree, Judaism) and its diverse gods, rituals, and beliefs. But these ties were meant to be reattached to the Tribe of Christ, whose sole institution on earth was the Church. So instead of the tribal separation that the Gnostics envisioned, the Church made this a tribal purification. One Tribe, one empire . . . the perfect totalitarian ideology.
Also, I am pretty sure that Wagner was an anti-Semite (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wagner#Controversies). But are you dismissing the mythical value of the opera because of this abhorent fact? I would understand a personal decision not to explore that work for that reason, but I would be careful about devaluing that work for that reason.
My hesitations with Wagner's version of the Sigfried myth can be represented by my comments above about the "percentage" of genuine instinctuality or archetypal foundation in his rendering. The original story is very similar to Gilgamesh and is, I feel, a story of the conquering hero, the culture builder, the patriarchal, egoic superman . . . and not a true Hero's Journey myth. But the original casts this as a tragedy (like Gilgamesh and Oedipus) where the hero's egoism finally leads to his early demise. This demise is always due to the "Dark Feminine" either directly or indirectly. That is, psychologically, this egoic hero was unable to see-through the darkness projected onto the Feminine, and it eventually became his downfall. It is like the heel of Achilles, the fatal flaw. The fatal flaw is always the undoing of the egoic hero . . . whereas for the true hero, the Foolish hero, the flaw is the gateway to transformation.
I don't know the Wagner version that well, but I had the feeling that the alterations he made to the original story of Sigurd cast the conquering hero in a more glamorous light . . . and showed his death as less a "comeuppance" than a betrayal by baser evils. These edits encouraged the embrace of Wagner's epic by the Nazis whose ideology was the Cult of the Will. The notion of such a cult is that egoic will triumphs over all base obstacles (like Others) by its "divine right". Essentially, they are not getting the "moral of the story" of Sigurd . . . which is that the fatal flaw will ultimately destroy all striving that tries to transcend it. The Cult of the Will is a patriarchal fantasy about "perpetual erection". As long as you can "keep it up", you can conquer and be dominant and potent. But this is not the way of nature. The phallic ego cannot stay in the ascendant mode . . . nor should it, because such ascendancy always comes with the cost of externalities. In order to keep it up, the ego must keep the shadow down. But the libido that goes into repressing the shadow grants the unconscious shadow immense power over the ego. And that tends to erupt in some kind of mania or purging of Otherness that can never be quenched since the projection emanates from within.
In order for a child's ego to develop through adolescence, no conquering is necessary . . . and I would argue that any feeling of conquering is an illusion, perhaps even a delusion of inflation.
Your last sentence strikes me with a tone of sadness. I can appreciate the equanimity behind it, but I think it is naive in the extreme. We all have our fears and our hopes and our desires and I can't imagine those without also imagining a place for the experience of conquering, of attaining against the odds, of sacrificing something if needed to get that sense that "I have done it...I have accomplished this...I, myself!" There must be some room for this without it being merely a "delusion of inflation". We cannot all progress without stepping on each other's toes, having to abandon whether it will hurt someone else if we do this, setting aside some kind of good sense in order to risk something of value to get something we value more. There just isn't human life without room for this selfish urge.
I would prefer to differentiate between striving and conquering. I simply see no room in individuation or in the spiritual quest for conquering. And in this attitude, I think I am in agreement with all the mysticisms and spiritual systems of human history. The one overriding theme to spiritual pursuit is the surrender to the god. And to think we can conquer this god is an inflation and a delusion.
But I don't see surrender to the god as a kind of ultimate sacrifice of will and libido. Nor do I think we should overly-punish ourselves for our hubris and conquering fantasies. The gods will do plenty of that for us. There are many things that can be mastered in life . . . skills, philosophies, devotions. But I think the true master of any of these things understands that mastery is not conquering. It is not a domination of resistances, but a harnessing of natural libido, a being in harmony with instinctual or natural expression. And that harmony or equilibrium always requires a sacrifice of the egoic desire to determine the thing to be learned. Only as the minister of natural skill or attitude or inclination can we achieve "mastery". All other kinds of mastery are delusional.
When I think of all of the things I've learned to do well or with greater than average accomplishment in my life (and there are not many), I can see that each achievement required relinquishment of egoic determination. When I taught myself how to pitch and hit as a baseball player, I did not predetermine forms and insist that my skill as a pitcher and hitter be fitted to those forms or paradigms. Instead I tried to follow what was natural motion, elegance, essential simplicity . . . and I constructed the paradigm for these forms based on what worked, what produced results. And this meant I was always experimenting, trying different ways to see what "Nature preferred". As a learning writer, my training was much more elaborate, but essentially followed the same pattern. I had to discard rule after rule I was told to follow (by my teachers) until I reached a level of pure access to the instinctual unconscious, which I then allowed to determine the form and function of what I wrote. I didn't say, "I am a sonnet writer and must write sonnets." All of this "mastery" took a lot of seeing-through and a lot of surrender to an Other-guided process.
This is, I think, the common experience of learning a discipline . . . especially a complex or mental discipline. As the alchemists might say, only Nature can work effectively against Nature. But egoic will is never more than an obstacle to the acquisition of a discipline. It is perfectly fine to
want to master a discipline . . . but in order to actually master that discipline this desire must always be sacrificed to the Nature of the thing that is to be mastered. And to speak in annoying alchemical doubletalk: only by being mastered can we master. Perhaps a little too "koan-y", but this is the fundamental principle of spirituality, I think.
A child must conquer his or her fear of the night, of the boogeyman, of any number of manifestations of the unconscious. A child must conquer his or her fear of rejection, of making a mistake, of looking like a fool, of being the focus of an embarrassing situation.
Such "conquering" can only be achieved by surrendering to the fear, dissolving into it, and recognizing that it doesn't actually have the power to destroy us that we projected into it. We will never overcome the fear of rejection until we have been adequately rejected (and
known rejection). We will never overcome the fear of making mistakes until we have made so many mistakes that the fear has been depotentiated. None of these things can be accomplished by egoic will and determination in some sort of abstract act of reasoning. We must experience in order to learn . . . and without experience, we only deceive ourselves if we think we have accomplished anything.
No less so is it true in the psyche that conscious development requires repression, suppression even incipient neurosis, depression or anxiety than it is that life forms require the death of other life forms to survive. It is a dirty, wicked game or you are not playing it.
I think consciousness (individuation) only requires such things as repression in order to experience them and recognize how they undermine consciousness. Depression, anxiety, and neurosis are the symptoms of conflicts which are part of living and growing. They are not "enemies" or opponents competing for our valued resources (although in the West we definitely tend to imagine them as such). I'm not sure we can accurately draw a parallel between these things and the competition of species to survive. We are not the predators of the unconscious. It is not the Garden of Eden Cafe here to sustain us in all of our egoic appetites and indulgences. The only thing "wicked" about individuation is that it always sets us against the Tribe and severs us from tribal Eros. That is usually seen as wicked by the Tribe . . . and we often can't help but feel wicked in the grip of those projections.
My experience of the psyche and the Work is simply nothing like this. What you seem to be prescribing are the attitudes that I have found to stall and obscure the Work.
So having said all this I hoped to strike a tone that I think should be in the repetoire of all serious students of the psyche. Oftentimes it is a kill or get killed world "in there" and we have the right as ego-complexes, to consider the option of removing our inner enemies. We just can't let the inner bullies to keep taking our libidic lunches away from us.
I have never met one of these inner enemies in my psyche. The only opponent I've encountered has been my own egoic attitudes and resistances. There is a lot of "blame the anima/animus/shadow/puer" talk in Jungian psychology, but these concepts are all foreign to me. What reason would our instincts have to undermine our adaptivity? We (as egos) are not ever the recipients of "libidic lunches", in my opinion. When we think that the thing we feed is the ego, we are deluding ourselves. The ego can't have its cake and eat it too. The common idea behind egomania (that the ego is separate from and independent of the instinctual unconscious) is a fallacy, I think. In its dissociation from instinct, the ego merely doesn't have consciousness of how its attitudes and desires are being determined. But this unconsciousness tends to result in "infantile" behavior . . . so infantile as to often be radically maladaptive (in adults).
Also, I recognize that all of this is part of the very problematic knots that we each get tied up in. It is as if in the rush of the necessity to get out of the womb and grow up and live in this world we, of necessity, create as many problems for ourselves as we solve in that achievement. That is the heroic cycle. Later we must move to uncover our inner despot and make him or her more civilized, more in relationship to the other inner characters. For women I suspect that this is often reversed...too long has the young feminine ego learned to manage the greater connectivity of inner (and outer) individuals at the risk of the accumulation of libidic power for her ego. While the stereotypical male ego might be described as all power and no civility, the stereotypical female ego can be seen as all civility no power.
And so the early animus experience is often of the invader or criminal coming in and blandishing a destructive (separative) power over the feminine ego and her world. The animus, all power no discretion, is easily dismissed as an evil, disruptive male influence. But the problem is that the feminine ego hasn't taken on the patriarchal role as separate individual and stood alone in passionate defiance of the innumerable, but reasonable, suppliable demands put upon her. While young men are allowed to be selfish, young women are chastised for this. And so men grow up to be "pigs" who take, take, take while women become "bitches" because they dare to complain and without what they could just give. Obviously these are extremes and stereotypes. But my favorite place, sometimes, to look for the truth is in the banal.
So I say, let's learn to get along and then break out your hockey sticks and let's RUMBLE!!!
I just don't see any good coming from this polarization of "psychosexuality". The paradigm of Opposites you are applying here sounds like a step backward to me. In contemporary, modern society, the Opposites have moved closer together and begun influencing and transforming one another. There is still far to go, but the movement so far has been progressive. To break out the hockey sticks would be like a retreat back to the original positions (19th century? earlier?). We, individually, all have a greater or lesser degree of dissociation in the Feminine/Masculine dynamic, but I think the answer to this conflict is always found in the movement toward integration and synthesis (coniunctio). That is, I feel that there is no fundamental dualism here. The appearance of dualism is, in my opinion, non-essential. It is the product of dissociation of something that is fundamentally one.
I agree that an act of differentiation is the beginning of the process of consciousness. But this kind of differentiation is more a learning to recognize that any extreme position necessitates its Opposite. Valuation starts to flow to the nether pole where the Other resides. But that valuation is a kind of gravity that pulls both polarities toward a union in the middle. So we differentiate and recognize the inevitability of Opposites, but next we must see-through the illusion of Opposites to their synthesis.
To even claim to be, to exist is a great inflation! Who are we to say we have a divine soul, that we have the right to live in this universe so much grander, more powerful and more important than any or all of us? Part of the human condition is hubris and I will accept and even enjoy it even as I guard against it. There I go being mystical again...
We certainly belong in the universe as much as anything else does, but the notion that this is our "right" is, I feel, essentially a fallacy (although, a fallacy that expresses what is fundamentally an instinctual libido in totemic form). That is, it is a projection of libido into a concretized belief. As far as our desire to say we have divine souls, yes, I definitely see this as hubris. Of course, as an atheist, I don't adhere to this belief. Although I think it is the hubris of it even more so than the irrationality that "offends" me. So I would say that to exist is not an inflation, but to claim that our existence is extraordinary or blessed or governed by divine right is most certainly an inflation. It isn't one seen-through very often . . . even among atheists who reject this concept in word, there is a tendency to see humanness as a state of entitlement.
I think hubris is an obstacle to both contentment and to gnosis . . . but it isn't as much a sin as many make it out to be. At its root, this hubris is an expression of our biological libido . . . and hubristic beliefs shared among humans (like the ensoulment and divine right stuff) are expressions of tribal Eros. That is, our beliefs of blessing and entitlement allow us to better bond together to express communal libido and survive and flourish. The more we believe in our right to be and even to "conquer", the more libido we will invest in our tribe's success. But in the modern world, all these expressions of tribal entitlement become counterproductive, even as survival drives. Our survival success and adaptability now are more a matter of learning how to effectively cooperate despite our tribal differences. The ability to see-through these differences is one of the quintessential products of individuating consciousness.
And at some point, ultimate sustainability will, I believe, require a reevaluation of our sense of speciesistic (as well as tribal) entitlement and divine right. At its base, this entitlement is the advocacy of the conquering of Nature. But today we face the limitation and backfiring of our conquering and devaluation of nature and matter. If we do not learn how to better live within Nature and its ecosystems, we increasingly run the risk of destroying that which has been sustaining us (in our unconsciousness). Even the "supreme and divine" godlings of the Earth are ultimately dependent on the very thing they have so long felt entitled to take, use, and abuse with impunity. I see in this encroaching predicament the confrontation of humanity with its own religiosity and spiritualistic hubris.
Perhaps humans are like gods in the power they wield. But if we can't learn to carry the conscious responsibility of gods as well as lay claim to their power, we will continue to rush headlong to our "just" self-destruction.