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The Psyche => Depth Psychology => Jungian Psychology => Topic started by: Matt Koeske on December 21, 2008, 01:30:19 PM

Title: Meditations on Reestablishing the Validity of the Self Concept
Post by: Matt Koeske on December 21, 2008, 01:30:19 PM

A great deal has been written by Jungians on the Self.  We come back to it again and again, perhaps as a method of worship or as a meditation that helps us center ourselves in relation to the psyche.  Most of what has been written has been written in observation or even celebration of the Self's numen.  I don't mean to deny that these works are valuable (even if there is a religiosity to the tone and attitude behind them that I often worry is not compatible with a scientific psychology) . . . but what I would like to reconstruct in this essay is an argument for the use of the term and concept Self in a more scientific discussion of psychic structure and function.

This argument and meditation begins for me in my own affective reaction to reading some of the contemporary literature from the field of neuroscience.  As I have remarked on elsewhere, I noticed that neuroscientists who specialize in memory (like David Linden, who wrote the excellent layman's guide to contemporary neuroscience, The Accidental Mind) are starting to grant the construct of memory increasing amounts of "soul" via the dynamic and adaptive complexity that both memory and our neural networks exhibit.  I believe that as this complexity is increasingly attributed to the brain and its memory by scientists, what neuroscientists call memory will be recognized (at least by depth psychologists) as what depth psychologists call psyche or the unconscious (or even the Self).  Material science is discovering the depth of the psyche (and brain) on scientific grounds, but it is largely the same object of study that depth psychologists have amassed a great deal of valuable (if often sloppy and somewhat tainted) data on.  Neuroscientists are not in an attitudinal position currently to valuate depth psychology no matter how much data it might have to offer . . . and my guess is that they never will be.  But I do think that if depth psychologists make a more scientific and concerted attempt to valuate neuroscience and the scientific method in general, relatively minor revisions and tidyings of depth psychological theories can become a viable bridge between the two fields.  The alternative as I see it (and as I have often stated) is that neuroscience and memory specialists will gradually reconstruct a scientific depth psychology of their own, but with less sophistication and dimension than they might be able to without the assistance of depth psychologists.  Meanwhile, depth psychology will die out, except perhaps as a kind of New Age or occult religion or metaphysics.

In the hope of throwing a pebble toward the bridge building option, I would like to begin redeveloping the Self concept in terms that are more compatible with neuroscience.  I don't expect to be able to do this successfully (or to the satisfaction of either tribe, for that matter), but I would like to start working toward a scientifically viable Self construct, that although still metaphorical can perhaps be useful along with a scientific language of memory and the brain.  Much of the current scientific and quasi-scientific language describing complexity and memory is already metaphorical . . . and as a worker in language (more so than a psychologist), I think the functionality of this metaphorical language leaves a great deal of room for improvement.  For instance, although it seems that neuroscientists mean the same thing with their "memory" as we do with our "psyche", the neuroscientific concept of memory is still overly reductive and its metaphorical descriptions are not very accurate.  Science depends on the most accurate metaphors and constructions possible in order for its hypotheses and theories to be viable.  As Jungians are well aware of (and often prejudiced toward), neuroscience can miss a great deal of the psyche's complexity by simply adhering to a belief system of strict positivistic materialism that prevents looking at the object of study from other viable angles.  The scientific materialism that Jung decried (and which still exists, although it appears to slowly be "ripening") is every bit as much a totemic and dogmatic belief-based attitude as Jungian spiritualism is.

But instead of assaulting the Other for its beliefs, I propose we take the opportunity Otherness provides us of reflecting on our own . . . and perhaps revising them a bit.  I am not, for instance, recommending that we approach science and materialism with a feeling of inferiority.  We do need to better understand (or reestablish) the value of our own experiences, ideas, and observations.  But we need to better understand these things in regard to their communication to an audience distinctly Other to us.


The Self as Other

To begin, I feel (and I think this feeling is accurate) that contemporary neuroscientists are by no means ready to accept (or probably even contemplate) what they would see as a metaphysical or philosophical concept like the Jungian Self.  Additionally, the typical Jungian arguments for the "scientific validity" of the Self are not generally stated in scientific-enough language or with scientifically viable arguments.  But, as is obvious from my tendency to use the term Self in my psychological writing, I do feel the term itself is functional and although imperfect, worth keeping . . . even in a merger with science.  To simply substitute another name for the same phenomenon would decrease the accuracy of the term . . . and therefore decrease its scientific usefulness.  Yes, Self is a very abstract word and concept, vague and indistinct.  But if memory is going to be better identified and studied, I believe it will have to acquire some of the "personality" that the Jungian Self has.  There are two main reasons for this that I can think of.  First, our phenomenological experience of the Self often includes personification or the perception of an intelligence that is Other (and typically superior) to our own.  I don't suggest that we therefore declare that Self is personified by nature, that it is a priori personified, or that it is a kind of soul or brain-transcending fragment of divinity or super-intelligence.  We should, I think, strive to recognize that human psyche as we experience it always includes some (and usually a considerable) degree of personification or egoic projection.  We inherently liken any sign of agency or intelligence we perceive to our own sense of consciousness.

But what we should strive to preserve of this perception scientifically is that the structure of Self or psyche we perceive resembles agency enough for this resemblance to be duly noted.  To assume that we can ignore the seeming agency of the Self, simply because we have a hyperactive agency detector is not scientific.  Our intelligence for agency-detection is not an evolutionary mistake or a kind of senseless delusion-proneness.  Although, it does seem to encourage animism, the way we induce agency in not illogical.  That is, we do not generally invent the qualities of agency we perceive.  Our animistic "error" is in inducing a flawed construction from these perceived agentic qualities.  More specifically, in our perceptions of the Self, the fact that this Self is generally perceived as Other is not, I would argue, something to be dismissed as delusion without first studying it more carefully.  We do not have sufficient evidence to assume this perceived Otherness indicates a supernatural or metaphysical Otherness that infests the human brain.  But we should not do away entirely with the hypothesis that our experience of psyche or consciousness is one that includes the perception of Otherness.  We know that we can sometimes experience parts or aspects of our body as Other.  Most obviously, this would be the experience of our inner organs and autonomous, self-regulating physiological processes.  But there are times when our brains play tricks on us, and outer body parts can seem, at least temporarily Other.  Part of the physiological function of consciousness is the attribution of selfhood and otherness.  For a common example, take the phenomenon of a limb that "falls asleep", perhaps from being compressed while we slept.  When we awake and touch or are touched by this limb, our initial reaction is that it is not ours.  We are perceiving this limb without perceiving some of the physical qualities we are used to experiencing when we perceive the limb.  Our brains tell us that the limb therefore possesses qualities of a foreign limb, and until we can provide the brain with more information (e.g., verifying that the limb is indeed attached to us and looks like the limb we know to be ours, or the gradual return of physical sensation to the limb), we react to the limb's foreignness.

We can deduce from this sort of experience that the perception even of our self-ness is constructed by a more quantum (and generally unconscious) set of perceptions that must add up collectively to allow our brains to properly identify a thing.  We perceive minute qualities of things and recognize them only when these qualities cumulatively fit in with a pattern we are familiar with.  But without the right accumulation of these quantum qualities, the "whole" we perceive (in the example, a limb) can seem foreign or part-foreign.  My suggestion, therefore, is that we do not dismiss the seeming Otherness of the Self as a pure delusion.  We should take note of the significant amount of psychological data that experiences the Self in this way.  We should no more dismiss the Self's Otherness as delusional and fantastic than we should dismiss the cultural phenomenon of religion as merely delusional and fantastic and without purpose.  There are many viable and scientific reasons to assume that religion is an expression of human culture rooted in biological and instinctual expressions of sociality and identity formation.  To allow the observation and usage of such data (as some evolutionary biologists and psychologist have started to do . . . even as groups like the New Atheists have argued that religion is largely delusional and "accidental") is the most scientific attitude we can take toward them.  Blanket dismissal or assumption that they are delusional fantasy byproducts is an attitude governed by belief more so than science.

For now, the idea that the Self is somehow Other to our egoic perceptions of ourselves should be a working postulate and one seen as not contradicting scientific observation.  We do not need to understand exactly what this means on a material level right away, but we should expect there to be a material factor to this phenomenon (just as it is likely that there is a material factor driving religion that is based at least partly in human instinctual sociality).  In fact, in a species like ours that is so distinctly social and dependent upon its sociality for its survival and evolutionary success, it should hardly be surprising that the construction of Otherness or of something superseding individual egohood would be a prominent feature of human imagination and being.

The second reason that a Self concept containing a sense of personality or personifiability is viable is that the psyche demonstrates volition or drive apart from that of our conscious sense of ourselves.  We could equally say that our conscious volition is clearly not the only volition in our bodies or Selves.  This is one of the original psychoanalytic thrusts, but instead of following the psychoanalytic paradigm of psychic structure, I wish to merely acknowledge that there is a source of volitions or drives and self-regulations in our person that is autonomous or possess distinct autonomous elements.  And what is perceived as volitional or living is perceived by our consciousness as possessing the qualities of personality.  What seems volitional and is clearly not determined by our conscious minds is perceived as an Other intelligence or drive, one in which we can only participate relationally.

Therefore, I am suggesting that the common perceptions of the Self we have as an entity of volition, Otherness, and personality or an ordered kind of intelligence should be treated as accurate-enough perceptions of a thing itself and not merely fantasies or projections.  When we perceive the Self, we perceive something . . . and do not merely hallucinate or concoct it.  Even though our perceptions are accuracy-impaired, they are not entirely delusional.  They might not directly tell us what something is, but there is sufficient corroborating evidence for us to hypothesize that something non-egoic in our psyches (and perhaps bodies) is there and should not be dismissed in the name of a science (that is actually unscientific in its prejudicial construction of matter as simplistic and "overt").


The Self as Organizing Principle

Another one of the most common perceptions of the Self includes a sense that it is organized, that it is an organization.  And not just any organization, but an organization that is very complex.  This complexity compliments the Otherness previously mentioned in a way that the two properties are not really distinguishable from one another.  The Self is perceived as complex and Other.  I would argue that every time we perceive complexity, it seems Otherly to us.  Moreover, we have an innate and very distinct emotional reaction to complexity when we perceive it.  This emotion is what we Jungians generally call numinousness and it feels like being in the presence of divinity.  I don't mean to suggest that every time we read an essay on complexity theory we are helpless to feelings of ecstasy.  I mean that when we experience complexity as a phenomenon (not as an idea or term necessarily) in relationship to our sense of self, it evokes emotion in us.  Part of this emotion is an inability to fully "wrap one's mind around" the perception.  The organization or pattern of coming together that we perceive is perceived not as what it is, but as a symbol.  This is what we see portrayed in mandalas or in sacred geometry.  I would guess that it has to do, partly, with a valuative jolt behind pattern recognitions in which something that initially seemed chaotic suddenly has been recognized as having clear order and organization.

We innately attribute such organization to intelligence.  I would suggest that this is a projection and not necessarily an accurate one.  But the numinous epiphany of recognizing order our of chaos is one in which something incomprehensible becomes in some sense understandable, something beyond intelligence suddenly becomes available to intelligence.  And so, not illogically, we perceive this as intelligence coming into chaos and giving it order.  We do not necessarily see the order as preexisting our organizational epiphany, although in most testable cases, it can be shown to have preceded our recognition of it.

As Jung said, the Self is what conventionally carries the God image in our psyches.  Because it is Other, because it is complex, because it has volition that is different than ours, and because its organization appears to both demonstrate intelligence and also to pertain or relate directly to us (i.e., the relationship with the perceiver, with consciousness, is seemingly personal on some level), the Self carries the qualities we have often attributed to a godhead.  Yet none of these qualities need to be spiritualistically constructed, nor do they transcend scientific observation.

From these observations we can make an initial hypothesis that the Self is a systemic organizing principle in our psyches.  We know from neuroscientific studies that the brain (and memory) are also seen as complex organizations, organizations that appear to bear a very close resemblance to that of the Self as observed phenomenologically.  Although we cannot map Self to brain in any precise way, we can hypothesize that the brain-like organization of the Self is one thing that suggests a complex materiality is being perceived in our perceptions of the Self.  But this complex materiality is being perceived with or through two additional factors: emotional valuation and egoic projection.  Both emotional valuation and egoic projection are factors that are scientifically accepted as brain-produced phenomenon.  What the body of phenomenological observation of the Self that depth psychology has to offer suggests is that our perception of our own complex and materially-based cognitive organization parallels and compliments the detached scientific observations of the brain and memory that can also be made.  When what we perceive (with a little dedication to perceive as unbiasedly as possible) is so very similar to what we can scientifically observe, there is a reasonable precedent to add these phenomenological perceptions to the bank of data used to understand the thing being studied.  To dismiss these distinct similarities between Self and memory (and brain) organization would be unscientific.  Which isn't to deny that the functional use of psychological data will ever be easy or free of error.  It is merely to say that, having to choose between a blanket dismissal of psychological data and a difficult acceptance of its consideration and qualification, scientific reasoning would have to include the observation and consideration of the psychological data.


The "Self" as Term

Although it smacks of a kind of romantic poeticism more associated with psychoanalysis and depth psychology than neuroscience, I feel the term "Self" is still the best moniker we have for the phenomenon in question.  I think it is compatible both with depth psychology's "psyche" and with neuroscience's "memory".  In psychology, the term "psyche" lacks the personal connotations of Self that cannot be detached from the concept without losing its essential quality.  Still, in some instances, they are used interchangeably and can be said to mean the same thing.  The main difference is that the psyche is not something we can relate to directly.  It is more abstract.  It has no face for us, no specific emotional recognition value.  If we equate psyche with soul (as Hillman and other archetypal school Jungians have at times), it takes on some personality, but this personality is a more limited one than the Self suggests.  For instance, the soul that Hillman champions owes a great deal to the construction of the anima.  And even though I would argue that the anima (along with the animus) is an original representation of the Self, the two figures are typically distinguished in the psychic phenomenology they are drawn from (e.g., in dreams and artistic fantasies and works).  Therefore, it would require a conscious abstraction or intellectualization to equate soul and Self absolutely . . . and my feeling is that abstraction should never be added to the names of things beyond what is absolutely essential and accurate.

In neuroscience, the construction of memory does not yet possess the kind of sophistication and detail necessary for all of its behaviors and structures to be well understood.  Although I appreciate the complexification of memory happening in neuroscience, the term is really not accurate as it implies merely what is remembered and therefore does not actually (accurately) describe either the psychic components that are inherited (like instinctual drives and organizational processes) or the reorganized and reassociated complexes of the psychic system.  Of course, this is not lost on the neuroscientists . . . which is why memory is becoming a bloated term and has been approaching the level of a symbol (probably to the embarrassment of some neuroscientists).  The word will eventually have to be discarded for something more complex and substantial like "psyche".  My guess is that there will be a good deal of egoic and affective resistance to any such change in the field, and this battle with affect and prejudice will delay any such change at least until respectable neuroscientists are willing to endure the shaming and clucking of their colleagues and stump for a new (or old) term to describe what they are observing.

That term will not and should not be "Self", though.  Again, with Self, we are talking about a phenomenon that we can relate to in a more or less personable way.  Self seems to exhibit volitional intelligence.  Memory and psyche are both stuff, soup and do not imply form or personification.  But in order to talk about and study psyche, we need to deal with its personifiable aspects.  Even to call them drives or urges or psychic trends or movements is really not adequate, because they seem to us (and can best be understood by us) as manifestations of intelligence outside of our direct control.  We may be able to determine that they are complex currents of organization . . . but we must also describe them as intelligences that affect us and to which we relate.  If we want to talk about patterns of organization or currents in a body of water, we can speak of fluid mechanics in impersonal terms, but when these organizational currents are in us, are us, and when they generate emotional responses for us, such non-personified descriptions become inadequate.  This is not to say that we should concretize and believe in the personifications as we experience them.  We do need to understand them as complex, organizational movements in a very sophisticated and dynamic system . . . but we cannot lose sight that these organizations are our experience of being and should not be reduced and simplified to the degree that our constructions of them are no longer functionally accurate.

Self with the capital S also helps us remember that 1.) we are not talking about the I, about ourselves, our sense of self, the ego, yet 2.) this Self we are observing is definitely something contained within or equivalent to our whole person.  In some sense, even though it is larger than us, we are this Self.  It is us.  I do not think that some of the spiritualistic and metaphysical qualities Jung attributed to the Self are scientifically viable or necessary.  For instance, the implication that it is transpersonal or that it exists outside of space and time or that it possesses some kind of innate spiritual wisdom, or than anything like primordial but inherited images are somehow stamped like blueprints in it.  The study of the Self does not have to be a parapsychology or a metaphysics.  The complexity and value of the Self are not dependent upon these spiritualistic assumptions and projections.  This means that, if we were to prepare the Self concept for scientific use, such religiosities would have to be sacrificed.  I know this would be hard for many Jungians to do . . . and I even expect many Jungians to be incapable of such a sacrifice.  Spiritualistic Jungians have the tendency to be incapable of differentiating value from literalization of fantasy.  This is a purely religious attitude, and valuable though it may be in the construction of a religious belief system or tribal dogma, it has no place in a scientific psychology.  On a more emotional and personal level, speaking as one who has made these sacrifices (rather than one who never believed in such things), I have found that they did not decrease the power and meaning and value of my experiences of the Self in any way.  No wonder was lost, no humanity, no depth.  I came eventually to see these spiritualisms as affectations.  If we cannot do away with these spiritualisms (at least as far as our scientific claims go), then we have no right to think of Jungianism as anything but a religion, a belief system.  And then our scientific interests and claims would be shams.  We would be hypocrites.

Using the term "Self" helps us realize that the thing we mean to describe is a "Me that is Not I".  To the degree that the Self is a phenomenon based in materiality and the structure and function of the brain, this is in fact what we should expect.

Additionally, we should look upon the true implications of Jung's construction of Self.  Even though he used the small s (and this leads to a great deal of unnecessary confusion), Jung was the foremost researcher and scholar of Self phenomena.  Perhaps Jung has been raked over the coals academically and his name sullied, but he named this phenomenon Self, and it is without any doubt that no one has had as much to say about the phenomenon as Jung did (and I am including Jungians within Jung's tradition).  Despite the few luxuries Jung took with the Self construct, he contributed an immense amount of data to the study of this phenomenon.  And what scientists should recognize (even as it galls Jungian spiritualists) is that the Self concept Jung proposed was incredibly radical for its atheistic and materialistic qualities.  The Jungian proposition of the Self assert a replacement for the spiritualistic idea of God.  It places the experience of God within human, psychological, and personal, bounds.  It is inherently non-metaphysical.  It anchors God in matter, in the brain, and in affective fantasies.

This horrified many theologians who accused Jung (rightfully) of psychologizing God.  And Jung took great pains to discuss and argue theology with many of these theologians.  But what is equally viable is that atheists and materialist could have recognized that the experience of God did not have to require spiritualistic or metaphysical assumptions.  Jung effectively prepared the ground for materialists to experience God.  Regrettably (at least in my opinion), this equally viable potential did not take.  On one hand, Jung disdained rationalistic, scientific materialists of his time (and the 19th century specifically), and on the other hand, he very much courted the more romantic, irrational thinkers, artists, and theologians whose company and support he seemed to value more than that of the rationalistic materialists.  This courting (and the romantic, spiritualistic affectations and interests Jung exhibited in his writings) was received by the scientific community with understandable prejudice and rejection.  Jung the scientist was never given much of a chance . . . and I often suspect that Jung was not entirely happy with his own scientific leanings.  He over-promoted them in many of his writings, exaggerating the empiricism of his arguments in a pueristic fashion.  But at least as often, he tore into rationalism and science with a kind of greater than reasonable ire.  He was definitely conflicted over the issue.  Jung was a scientist in conflict with his own science (and scientific method), and this conflict ( I feel) was part of what characterized his genius.  He was driven by two centers, and neither center was satisfied with the thinking of the other . . . but together (at best) they honed one another, sharpened the blade of Jung's intelligence.

Jungians have taken to Jungian psychology rather religiously and have not been inclined to promote its scientific and especially its atheistic leanings . . . but I would argue that this approach has been lopsided, unconscious, and prejudicial.  We have not continued to hone Jung's thinking.  When he died (and probably some years before that), we stopped bothering with the sharpening . . . but instead of taking up where he left off on this project, we decided to take the half-sharpened blade as is and throw away the sharpener.  Since then we have been hacking away with this blade and it has grown duller and duller.  But sharpening has become against our religion, so the very idea of taking up this obligation offends and terrifies us.  But there is, despite this prejudice, a great deal of room in Jungian psychology for atheistic valuating that does not need to be spiritualistic.  The concept of the Self is perhaps the most innately atheistic aspect of Jungian theory . . . and this is actually what makes it the most compatible Jungian concept with science.  Jung may have had spiritualistic beliefs and felt there was a God somewhere or somehow beyond the Self, but his Self concept does not require such a God in any way.

Title: Re: Meditations on Reestablishing the Validity of the Self Concept
Post by: Matt Koeske on December 21, 2008, 02:06:15 PM

Self as Whole and also as Center

One of the complications and annoyances of Jung's Self concept is his characterization of Self as a twofold entity.  It is the center point of the psyche and also the totality or circumference of the psyche (encompassing the ego).  This sounds a bit too philosophical to adapt to any scientific approach.  I understand what Jung was getting at, and I am willing to indulge the possibility that such twofold description of the Self is inevitable, but I do think we need to find a less philosophical way of stating this.  One way in which (within a complex system) a thing can be both the whole and the center is if we understand the "center" not as something simplistic like the hub of a wheel but more along the lines or an organizational principle.  This principle governs the behavior of all the parts of the system, but not in an absolute or simplistic way.  Within this principle of order, there is a great deal of opportunity for variation and plasticity.  But some general rules are always in place.  For instance, the rule of anxiety.  Anxiety can be seen as the reaction of the system to obstacles to its homeostatic interrelationality or "dynamic flow".  When something impedes the dynamic equilibrium of the system, pathways overload and can even rupture.  If anything decreases the efficiency of the system, the coherence of the system is injured and anxiety is increased.  Anxiety (like pain in general) is a feedback mechanism that encourages a re-coherence effort in the system.  It specifically encourages consciousness to respond to the decohering system.  That is a rule of psychic organization, but within the confines of that rule, a great deal of variability is possible.

It becomes complicated when we try to make any detailed examination of Jung's Self paradox (as center and whole).  When we try to imaging the Self as the whole psyche or even whole being, we get into a realm of metaphysical abstraction.  How is my elbow part of the Self?  One of my nose hairs?  Or even a specific apparatus or module in the brain?  Imagining the intelligent Self into "unintelligent" pieces of our body becomes an act of faith . . . not science.  It is difficult for us to reconcile the physicality or materiality that the Self exhibits, its bodilyness, with our perceptions of our own physicality.  I'd like to reiterate that the construct of the Self is a product of our personification or projection onto the complex, self-regulating system that we are.  When we identify the phenomenon we call the Self, it is not as the purely corporeal body, but the body (or body-image) that seems intelligent to us.  In other words, we recognize the Self only to the degree that we "recognize" intelligence in the physiological systems of the brain and body, an intelligence that is non-egoic and yet close enough to our sense of consciousness that we can project a kind of egoism (or superior egoism) onto it.  This projection of superior egoism onto the Self is what has classically been called "spirit" (especially as it has been differentiated from soul and body).

The argument I will make (and which I feel is entirely compatible with a scientific psychology) is that the Self is not, in fact, ego-like at all.  We merely perceive its complexity, dynamism, and drive/volition as the quantum components of egoic intelligence and construct such intelligence based on these qualifiers and our own projections.  Studying the phenomenology of the Self (as Jung and other Jungians have done commendably), we see many indications that the Self is non-egoic.  For instance, in our cross-cultural dreams, fantasies, art, and literature, Self figures are often depicted as animal or half-animal/half-human.  I suggest (by no means originally) that the degree of foreignness in these animal images corresponds to our ability to see/project intelligence in the quantum traits of the Self.  So, if the Self image is a snake or dinosaur or crocodile, anything coldblooded, we do not see very well how its system of intelligence might correspond to the human system of egoic intelligence.  Such reptilian Self images can occur in dreams even as other Self images occur, perhaps more anthropomorphic ones.  We can deduce from this that we are able to perceive the Self from different perspectives simultaneously, and from some of those perspectives the Self might seem like a snake, but from another perspective it might seem like an animi figure or a child or a wise elder or parent or grandparent.  The human mind breaks up perspectives into personifications based on sortable qualities, even when the thing being perceived is actually one.  We are the proverbial blind men describing the elephant by its various parts.

Of course, discriminating Self images from dreams and fantasies is not easy.  Not only would a novice (such as a neuroscientist who has always disregarded the meaningfulness of dreams) not have a very good chance of differentiating an animal Self figure from some other animal in a dream, from what I've seen, even among well-equipped Jungians, understanding what figures in our dreams are Self figures is frequently bungled.  There is no simple rule like "all animals = Self".  We have to coordinate this observation with other, often more subtle, observations.  Two of the most important complimentary determinates of Self figures in dreams would be 1.) intelligence or anthropic behavior, and 2.) nature of relationship to the dream ego.  Detecting intelligence or anthropic behavior in Self images is not usually very difficult.  At the most overt level of such anthropomorphism we can see the spirit, helper, or doctor animals of various traditions, animals which belong specifically to the individual on a spiritual or soul level and can usually speak or behave humanly.  But often enough, Self animals in dreams are silent and exhibit little or no anthropomorphic behavior.  They might even appears distinctly hostile or dangerous to the dream ego (or to the ego's attitude).

This means that understanding the nature of the relationship between the ego and the Self (which is different at different stages of ego construction) is ultimately required to be able to understand which figures in dreams are Self representations.  And this understanding requires a fairly high level of psychological expertise . . . and arguably, a good bit of experience dealing with these Self images and the effects they have on the ego.  But this Self-detection is not a matter of some magical intelligence or intuition.  It is quite logical (although it may seem magical until its logic is established and studied).  There are some fundamentals.  For instance, the ego and the Self are always in some kind of relationship.  Therefore, the Self is always Other.  In this relationship, there is a great variability of familiarity and cordialness.  The Self (as mentioned above) can seem hostile or dangerous to the ego from certain perspectives (and rightfully so), while from other perspectives the Self can be perceived as intensely familiar.  On the opposite end from snakes and crocodiles we have the animi, mentor figures, and parent or grandparent figures.

Generally, the Self images will first appear as the less familiar type (especially in the dreams of adults), and as they are valuated and observed with increasing interest, they will become more familiar.  What I call the animi work is a process that begins when the ego starts to have an intense interest in and attraction to a familiar aspect of the Self and develops an identification with a heroic redeemer attitude that desires to redeem the animi-as-Self from the symbolic state of decay, Fall, darkness, or imprisonment it is subject to.  This identification with the heroic redeemer attitude also tends to polarize the ego against an attitude associated with its previous construction that is in favor of stasis.  That static attitude is typically portrayed in a figure that I call the Demon of the Complex.  In alchemy, this is similar to the Old King who the New King seeks to replace (although the alchemical old King is more robust, usually containing Self qualities as well as Demonic ones).  There is typically confusion between the Demon figure and the Self figure at least at first.  The Demon and the Self are the two most powerful forces in the psyche, and very roughly, the Demon stands for law, ossification, imprisonment of "dangerous" insurrectionist attitudes while the Self advocates dynamism, change, adaptation.  Sometimes the Self-redeeming process is portrayed as a cure of an old (often tyrannical) being by some new, revitalizing "elixir" or attitude . . . which we could interpret as a cleansing of the Demon-infested Self image, a differentiation of the Self from the Demon.  Each one represents a kind of order, but the Demon is defensive, fortifying, and covetous while the Self is fluid, homeostatic, and vegetal.  The conflict of these incompatible orders comes to the fore in the animi work.

The Demon is largely a product of socialization or environmental construction of personality.  Culture, which constructs personality through the introjection of laws, beliefs, and standards acceptable among the group is not, of itself, dynamic in the way living nature is.  An informational or cultural law is a kind of linguistic rigidity, an agreement made among members of a group that helps facilitate group coordination, indoctrination, and ideally, mutual survival.  But such laws are not made of flexible stuff, and they can just as easily thwart adaptive dynamism in the psyche as facilitate it.  To the degree that our socialization and environment constricts or even oppresses our instinctual, physical, and dynamic nature, our adaptability, it will come in conflict with the complex and dynamic organizational principle of the Self.

This Self, Demon, heroic ego/animi (syzygy) construction I have been using is very complex, but I can't go into it any further in this essay.  I have addressed it in more detail elsewhere on the site and will soon prepare a more comprehensive explanation, as well.  It would likely require a entire book to explain these constructions to neuroscientists (as well as to Jungians, as they do contain numerous revisions of Jungian theory).  For now, I'll move on to simply say that the relationship between ego and Self that must be understood in order to identify Self figures in dreams requires an understanding of the Self, Demon, syzygy dynamic of psychic organization and adaptation.  Despite the poetic and Jungianesque terms I use for these constructions, I do feel that they are entirely compatible with a scientific and materialistic understanding of psyche . . . and even that the employment of such poetic and personified construction is the easiest way for us to understand psyche without sacrificing scientific accuracy.  That is no easy case to make, of course, which is why it would require at least a whole book to elaborate the argument and analyze the data.

There are two poles on a continuum of relational positions of the ego to the Self.  At one extreme, the ego is entirely identified with or possessed by the Demon (the unconsciously acquired, socialized, rigid and static construction of psychic order).  At the other extreme, the ego upholds the heroic attitude of Self-facilitation or redemption and offers its plasticity to the adaptive and dynamic organization processes of the instinctual Self.  The representation of the Self in dreams is related to the location of the egoic attitude on this continuum.  But it is important to point out that the ego can never actually become the Demon, nor can it become the hero.  Both Demon and hero are non-ego structures or attitudes.  To be Demon-identified would be similar to an identification with a Freudian super-ego, to become a sort of non-individual who behaves as a force of collective ordering or law-enforcement.  There is no room in this position for consciousness or individual adaptability.  The Demon-identified or -possessed individual will behave as though part of a collective force and therefore in a way that is abstracted from all ethical concerns for the Other.  All plasticity and interpretation is removed from decision-making.  All decisions are decided by a kind of fundamentalism.

Hero-identification has a different set of complications to it.  On one hand, the ego that abides by the heroic attitude is the one that belongs to the healthiest psychic system.  But if the ego believes it is the hero and that the hero is not an ideal attitude but a persona to be assumed, the effectiveness of heroism in the personality is destroyed.  Taking the heroic attitude as a persona and NOT an attitude to guide by often results in some degree of possession by the Demon.  In other words, in static and stagnant imprisonment by a tribal law and the component loss of consciousness, ethical choice-making, and openness to the Other.  The assumption of the heroic persona by the ego is what Jungians generally call inflation . . . but it is more accurate to see this as a possession of the ego by the Demon, which is assuming the heroic costume but in the name of fortification and stasis.  Such hero-impersonating inflation is most likely to occur as a backlash against the beginning of the valuation of the heroic attitude that occurs along with the onset of the animi work.  It is as if the ego gets a taste of the heroic attitude and falls covetously into a trap where it imagines the heroic persona can be used as a way of fortifying the preexisting (Demonic) ego position.  Put on the hero's costume, stick out your chest in heroic fashion, and chase away the things that threaten to penetrate and change you.

Again, this is far too complex to delve into and argue effectively in this essay, but it is also an element necessary to understand the ego/Self relationship . . . and is helpful (perhaps essential) in the identification of Self symbols in dreams.

Another (much easier) quality to look out for in dream images of the Self is the affective response of the ego to the Self figure.  This can range from irrational (or rational) terror to numinous ecstasy, and whether the affect the ego feels is terror or numinousness, we again have a continuum or responses to the same thing.  If the ordering principle of the Self feels terrible and reptilian/devouring/coldblooded to us, the complexity of that order is alien and threatening to the (more Demonic) ordering principle the ego abides by.  The numinous response to self symbols typically comes when we are able to personify or to some degree identify with the ordering principle of the Self.  When we perceive a human-like intelligence to the order, instead of terror, we experience numinousness, epiphany, transcendence.  Yet, one who has experienced these affects often enough that they can also be observed with a simultaneous (or retrospective) bit of detachment, also knows that such numinous ecstasies are also terrifying, obliterating, devouring.  They are every bit as "saurian" as terrors of devouring creatures like sharks, crocodiles, and carnivorous dinosaurs.  The primary difference is the attribution of anthropomorphic intelligence to the Self-driven affect.  Also, with numinous ecstasies, there is an increased conscious valuation of the affect that could be experienced as pleasure, a pleasure of connectivity or interrelationality, a sense that a complex system is functioning efficiently and coherently (or is capable of such functioning), or that the dissolution of the affect is, even if excruciating, a functional precursor to progressive change or transformation.

Of course, if we dream of a terrifying crocodile that we run away from or try to defend ourselves against, even if it can be said to be a Self symbol, there is so little functional relationship between ego and Self that not much can be discerned from that relationship.  I would also argue that dreams of ecstatic union with a portrait of divine ordering are, although powerful emotional experiences, not necessarily helpful for their lack of differentiation and humanization or personalization.  Which is to say that, even as the non-human Self image is felt to be powerful and important, this undifferentiated affect only becomes languagable and understandable (as well as scientifically studiable on a more complex level) when qualities of human intelligence and personality are increasingly attributed to the Self.

This, then, is the great paradox in the study of the Self that we must reckon with.  It is just as challenging for the seasoned Jungian as it is for the fantasy personage of an interested neuroscientist I have constructed.  The paradox essentially states that although the Self is not, in itself, a personality or egoic intelligence but rather a complex, dynamic, and adaptive natural and material system, we can only study its intricacies to the degree that we can project a kind of humanness upon it.  The Self needs to be familiarized in order for it to be differentiated by human intelligence.  Which means that the study of the Self requires us to simultaneously indulge in our projective anthropomorphism and also realize that this projection involves a very distinct margin of error.  We must fantasize the Self into familiarity while also fantasizing the ego as a margin of error that corrupts (but doesn't entirely invalidate) the data.  This use of the egoic margin of error or "personal equation" in scientific observation is already an important aspect of the scientific method, but in the scientific study of psyche, this process becomes all the more complicated and ethically demanding.  Still, I do believe it is possible and should be aspired to.  It can produce scientific results.  And I would argue that it is not the unmanageable "softness" or indeterminability of depth psychology that turns off "harder" scientists so much as the incredibly severe ethical demands that a scientific psychology places on the scientist to "know thyself".

Jungians have stumbled ethically and this ethical failure has cut them off from functional scientific contribution . . . but neuroscientists have not even begun to recognize the true complications and ethical demands of studying "memory".  I feel that if Jungians could learn to muster the ethicality required to bring Jungian psychology into scientific fitness (and into the 21st century in general), they could build a bridge to the biological sciences and even help orient neuroscientists and memory specialists to the ethical demands of studying the psyche.  Jungians are far better prepared to acquire this ethicality than neuroscientists, because they have actually been struggling with its complexities for some time.  But it would require a reorganization of Jungian thought to bring us through the threshold of initiation and into an ethical and scientific attitude toward our psychic studies.  So, where neuroscientists lack knowledge and experience of the psyche, Jungians lack courage and intellectual integrity.  As a Jungian (and not a neuroscientist), I am concerned with developing that courage and integrity in the quest to know, in the pursuit of what is.

Title: Re: Meditations on Reestablishing the Validity of the Self Concept
Post by: Matt Koeske on December 21, 2008, 02:58:16 PM

If Self, then Ego . . . If Ego, then Self?

Another major complication of using the the Self construct in a scientific psychology is that the construct of Self is codependent on a construct of ego . . . and both are poetic or metaphorical paradigms used to describe something which is not as differentiated or neatly constructed as the terms and constructs would seem to imply.  A significant ingredient in this complexity is the favored paradigm of depth psychologists that divides psyche into conscious and unconscious dimensions.  In one of the videotaped interviews Jung did at the end of his life, I recall him commenting that "the unconscious is really unconscious".  But this does not comfortably accord with the many things he said regarding making the unconscious contents conscious.  He is not consistent or clear on this subject, but he sometimes seems to imply that the contents of the collective unconscious are inaccessible while only the contents of the personal unconscious can be made conscious.  And yet, the study of archetypes is a study of contents of the collective unconscious.  I'm sure there is a kind of Jung-logic in which all these things fit together nicely . . . but this construction is not adequate scientifically.

As has often been pointed out (even by those who don't understand Jung's theories very well), the collective unconscious is a hypothesis, an induction.  This is especially so in the event that we assume the contents of the collective unconscious are inaccessible to consciousness.  Jung gets very abstract on the issue of the nature or essence of the archetypes and the collective unconscious.  Are they images?  Pre-images?  Patterns to which images must conform?  What is their basic structure and essence?  Jung says we cannot know, but the construction of a pattern or structure that governs the expression of archetypal images and dynamics that cannot in itself be known (or studied) is not a suitable scientific hypothesis.

Cognitive science has redoubled the recently fading psychoanalytic paradigm of an unconscious that is vastly larger than our consciousness.  Certainly there are plenty of things that we are unconscious of, from the intricacies of our thought processes to our body-systems' self-regulating automations.  But we can, unquestionably, become conscious of these processes and even our physical self-regulating processes to some degree.  I suggest that we need to lose the archaic Jungian paradigm of a "heroic" ego that redeems or steals precious treasures from the unconscious and brings them into consciousness by acts of will like a Prometheus.  There is this sense among Jungians that the ego must (if it wants to be either wise or healed) descend into the foreign waters of the unconscious and make order out of chaos.  It makes the unconscious a bordered property and the ego a kind of poacher or invader.  This paradigm of the conquering hero is a romanticism, and it is not one that really accords all that well with what we now know of human cognition and memory.

Perhaps there is a Freudian inheritance in this construction, where the unconscious is a hinterland of dangerous secrets and disguised codes and the id is a ravenous animal/infant that has no capacity for intelligence or compassion or organization of any kind.  But the idea of a consciousness and unconsciousness evolved to be so romantically opposed to one another is not really scientifically conscionable.  Cognitive science and neuroscience are approaching a more functional paradigm in which the cognitive process always functions with a high degree of order, while a point of consciousness and working memory moves along or throughout the process assembling higher level constructions.  Jung did at times describe consciousness as such a mobile point of focus . . . so he is typically self-contradictory (or "complex", in more euphemistic language).  But Jung's paradigm of the collective unconscious, which seems to be a land of potential or even Platonic or Kantian forms is confused (by both Jung and Jungians) with a psychic structure . . . a foundational psychic structure.  The mistake Jung made (perhaps out of a kind of Platonic spiritualism or Kantian philosophical influence) was asserting that the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the psychoid realm, was foundational rather than emergent.  The anthropic projection here allows us to believe that potentials are a priori forms to which actualizations conform more or less.  This is how Jung constructed the psyche.

But it is no longer scientifically viable to say that a priori forms exist in a non-material part of our genes, brains, or souls.  Complex form in nature is emergent.  Every quantum component can have its own, seemingly "self-centered" program, but in coordination with numerous other similar components, complex form emerges.  In terms of archetypes, this would imply that there is no a priori pattern, but many quantum agents that tend to fit together in a way that we recognize (with our intelligence) as an ordered pattern even as these components are not "self-aware" or coordinating into that pattern.   The stumbling block for Jung (aside from the fact that modern ideas about complexity did not widely exist in Jung's lifetime) was the problem of the archetypes' relationship to instinct . . . and therefore to matter and biology.  It is obvious that instincts are inherited and that they influence the behavior of whole species or even larger groups of lifeforms.  As inherited and ancient phenomena, they must come before birth, before ego development, before environment.  If Jung could have denied the materiality of the Self and the archetypes entirely, he could have avoided this problem.  But he was scientific enough to follow the data rather than the spiritualistic or philosophical assumption.  That left us with self-contradiction.

But if complex form is an emergent potential rather than an a priori blueprint that defies our understanding of matter, the construction of the collective unconscious and the archetypes as "unknowable in themselves" and "really unconscious" is absolutely unnecessary.  We don't need to construct a psychic hinterland, nor do we need to construct a heroic ego that descends either mightily or sneakily into that hinterland to pilfer its divine treasures.  We do not need a construction of the unconscious that has "off-limit" areas, No Man's Lands (that only Herculean heroes can penetrate), "No Egos Allowed" zones.  What appears to be inaccessible to the ego (as far as the psychic process goes) is merely what it cannot construct because it does not know the ingredients, the quantum components that must be assembled to give language and image to a (typically affective) psychic phenomenon.  This constructing is like making an emergent mirror that reflects back a movement in the psychic process in an egoic or "intelligent" way.  By giving egoism or intelligence to psychic processes, we give them a language in which to be consciously seen and maybe understood.  But like all language, it is a representation or translation, never equivalent to the thing itself.

It is true that there are subsystems in the body that work autonomously, and many of these cannot be very usefully constructed in consciousness.  But many of the brain's subsystems or modules can be constructed consciously as "intelligent" or as contributing to intelligence as we recognize it.  Still, constructing body parts or subsystems as intelligent (the stomach and heart are the most conventional ones outside of the brain) involves an extensive degree of egoic projection and therefore margin of error.  Even in the brain's subsystems it is difficult to attribute intelligence accurately to subsystems.  The theory of complexity tells us that there is no need for subsystems (and especially the quantum components of these subsystems) to be intelligent of themselves.  That kind of intelligence is an emergent coordination of elements.  More to the point, the construct of the Self is a reflection of this emergent intelligence on which the ego is founded or abstracted.  Sometimes all we can recognize of the Self is a primal affect it generates in us, but the Self-concept is better known as the complex principle of organization into intelligence.  If a primal rage or fear or volcanic, seemingly "animalistic" affect is the stopgap between our sense of intelligence as egoic and the recognition of the Self's more complex and material intelligence or organization, then that affect or the images is generates for us will take the place of the Self-image until that devalued reptile or beast can be valuated into a more human and intelligent-seeming Self figure.

In Jung's fascinating Seminar on Dream Analysis (http://www.amazon.com/Seminar-Dream-Analysis-C-G-Seminars/dp/0691098964/) (1930), he discusses a dream in which the dreamer sees a crocodile in an African hut and must chase it away.  In a later dream in a similar venue, the dreamer sees a vessel filled with crosses and crescents.  I agree with Jung that there is an indication of progression from the earlier dream to the later dream.  But we must also be leery of taking up a conquering egoic attitude toward the Self-saurians in our dreams.  We may be tempted to battle them or beat them over the head (as the same dreamer does in a later dream of a giant tortoise in a bed), but this approach can sometimes backfire.  It is just as likely that these Self-saurians are things we must merely sit with and observe with interest and tolerance, or respect from a safe distance . . . or at times (as with Jonah's whale) be devoured by.  When we "beat a tortoise over the head", it is not merely the tortoise that is alien, reptilian, barely recognized by the ego.  The ego's approach is equally and reflectively primitive and reptilian.  We could say that, when the Self can only be recognized as a giant tortoise by the ego, then the ego's only means of communication with it is beating it with a blunt instrument.  In that dream, a child is born from the tortoise's mouth after it is beaten/subdued by the man . . . so we might guess (along with Jung) that the human, familiar, more-intelligent image of the Self can be born from ancient, reptilian one.  The entire seminar provides a wonderful look into both Jung's dream analysis method and his method of "holding court".  A somewhat under-investigated trend (in my opinion) in the extensive analysis of one man's dreams is the opinion of the man's analysis that the dreams are reflecting back to him.  One must wonder if the beating of the tortoise (which was found in a bed) over the head with a blunt object to produce a child from its mouth was not a kind of commentary from the Self on the man's analysis with Jung.  There are many other such "comments" throughout the dream series, which Jung often gets around to remarking on, but only a little too late (and after more mythic and digressive, "amplification" revelries).  What is perhaps most fascinating about this text is that it not only provides us with the best portrayal of Jung's dream analysis technique, it also (through the man's dreams themselves) provides what seems to be a commentary by the unconscious Self on Jung's method.

Of course the intelligence and attitude of that Self must be constructed consciously in order for consciousness to have a perspective on it or relationship with it, but there is a clear indication of an attitude or position attributable to the Self in that dream series (and in many narrative dreams).  Dream work attempts to elicit the intelligence of the dream by reconstructing it in a more familiar language . . . ideally more of a translation than an interpretation, per se.  Jung felt that this dream intelligence was distinctly compensatory, and although this term can sometimes be used more or less accurately to describe it, compensation is perhaps a bit too simplistic to describe the intelligence of dreams.  A better term (in my opinion) would be "reorganizing" . . . which can often seem to compensate a previous attitude or organization.  Dreams (especially as translated through dream work which elicits the feeling-based associations to the images) do tend to be distinctly critical of the ego position, generally much more critical than the ego is of itself.

This would make a lot of sense, especially if dreams are attempts at reorganization of the coordination of memory complexes that attempt to make those complexes more fluid, efficient, and functional (as far as they might be used to facilitate reactions or comprehensions of information related to those complexes).  That is, it would be an innate feature of the dreaming process to seemingly "criticize" dysfunctional or inefficient/obstructed/overly-static or compartmentalized organizations.  This would not require a true egoic intelligence, merely a dynamic organizational force or principle directed at increased interrelationality or systemic robustness . . . which is a self-regulation as well as an adaptive movement.  Yet, the ego could experience such a force (through projection) as an intelligent critique of its own egoic attitudes.  Yet, to simplify drastically, the ego position could be little more than a clog in a pipe that restricts flow from the "perspective" of the Self as organizing principle.

Even if the unconscious is reconstructed to mean those psychic aspects that can be rendered as intelligent by the ego, we should still, I think, allow for the use of the term "unconscious" (as well as "conscious") in psychology.  Even if something psychic has not been adequately languaged, the potential for it to be increasingly well-languaged is always there . . . and that which cannot be in any way languaged is that which cannot have intelligence attributed to it.  And what cannot have intelligence or language or personality attributed to it cannot be related to (except as a non-intelligent component that serves as a quantum component in a complex system).  But as far as languaging the unconscious goes, there is a great deal of untapped potential.  Also, as culture changes over time, language (the main vehicle of culture) changes and requires the way we language to change.  What, for instance, was once said by the Gnostics in one language was later relanguaged by the alchemists and then by the Jungians (to hit only a few points along the continuum).  All these languagings attempted to describe some of the same things.  We will never stop relanguaging the psyche and the Self.  There is always room for revision, innovation, discovery.  There is no ultimate truth in languaging that will become the final Word.  We will always be adding complexity and accuracy to our metaphors.

In the psychic continuum that stretches between ego and Self, there are no clear cut borders.  I see the ego as an emergent organ of Self that has evolved to facilitate adaptation to the human environment (an environment that is primarily informational or cultural).  We are beginning to realize that other animals (and not merely the great apes) show signs of egohood, of self-differentiation and self-interest or self-preservation that are not qualitatively different than our own.  Animals are not merely "unconscious", but must be motivated by their instincts to behave adaptively . . . and must have a kind of "perspective" on those instincts or relationship to them.  In an ideal environment (of evolutionary adaptedness), the individual animal can facilitate its instinctual behavior coordinations without much individual or "egoic" input.  But animals displaced from their environment of evolutionary adeptness, especially when they are abused or prevented from living by their instincts, become neurotic just like humans.  I suspect there is a direct correlations between such neurosis or dissociations from instinct and observable "egohood".  Neurotic animals exhibit more of what we might call self-consciousness or individualized personality that drives irrational behavior.

No animal on this planet is more displaced, dissociated, and dissociable than humans.  It is not only our large brains that allow for significant ego development or emergence . . . but also (and perhaps more significantly) our dissociative neuroses that come from living in an environment that does not facilitate instinctual living (and is radically unlike our environment of evolutionary adaptedness).  What I mean to say is that the modern ego is not merely an emergence of divine or superior intelligence from a complex, big-brain system.  It is a product of this system's response to the feedback of human (especially modern) culture.  Jung (like many of his time and before) made the mistake of thinking "primitives" or pre-modern tribalists had no or very little ego . . . and that this "childlike" state of participation mystique demonstrated a lack of cultural evolution.  But I would revise this to say that we only have as much ego as we must develop in order to cope with the dissociating feedback of our modern cultural environment, and that despite advances in technology, our culture has not actually "evolved", nor is living in exaggerated egohood any kind of accomplishment of will and human ingenuity.  We are merely reacting quite naturally and instinctively to instinctual dissociation and environmental displacement.  Our great achievement in cultural intelligence, the ego, is a byproduct of our anxiety and not some heroic conquering of instinct or transcendence of our animalism.

Jungian psychology actually recognizes this to a fairly high degree . . . but it has not yet fully digested and comprehended it, in my opinion.  Most distinctly, it has not offered up a viable solution or treatment for this problem . . . that I call the Problem of the Modern.  The Problem of the Modern dictates that the "swelling" of egoism through cultural feedback and increased anxiety due to environmental displacement will logically determine an increasingly differentiated image of Self.  And this Self will exhibit an attitude or sense of organization that is highly sophisticated in its method of adaptation.  Reassociating the modern ego with its instincts, in the modern world, is a very complex problem, because the external environment does not provide suitable imprinting opportunities for these instincts.  In order to make modern culture instinctually suitable, it must be reimagined or reconstructed by the ego, given a new language, a new interpretation.  That is, a new fantasy or fiction that acts as a bridge between ego and instinctual Self.  This bridge is what I call Logos and what the archetypal school of Jungianism generally calls soul.  Hillman's "soul-making" is much the same as my Logos-building or languaging . . . although Hillman's notion is more based in fantasy and does not have a well-defined factor of discrimination.  It lacks a sufficient "gnostic principle" or scientific method to soul-making.  Hillman's soul-making also lacks the kind of logical structure and sense of functionality or orientation of survivability that I feel would be required of a real and truly adaptive Logos-building.

For example, Hillman's method is not really compatible with scientific thinking or orientation (which he is, not surprisingly, critical of).  Also, Hillman focuses on a soul-making that is very imaginal and oriented to "what I can make/imagine".  I see the construction of Logos as oriented to what is, much like science.  Therefore, the Logos is always oriented to the Other and to the recognition and valuation of the Other . . . and less toward the ego-as-creator/imaginer.  In the construction of a personal Logos, the individual accepts that language is highly arbitrary and relies on inescapable fictions, yet it never stops seeking the Other and revising its fictions based on the input or reactions of that Other (the Self).  The Logos-oriented individual would not be an advocate of "art for art's sake" to the same degree as the Hillmanian soul-maker.  Soul-making is a more aesthetic (and in Jungian terms, "thinking type") enterprise.  Despite the connotation of Logos as rational or logical, in my use of this term, I mean to imply a more practical and directed use of fictional or linguistic plasticity.  The what is orientation evokes the "sensation function", while the focus on adaptation, survivability, and valuation could be seen as related to the Jungian "feeling function" (although I really think these terms are overly reductive in this case).

I also disagree with the romantic conceptualization of soul-making as a kind of emotional and spiritual/psychic enterprise.  It is a languaging that can't admit it is a languaging, because this would burst its grandiose puer bubble.  Also, in the pretension that the ego can actually "make soul", the association of the soul with instinctuality and Otherness is commingled with a kind of egoic inflation.  Yes, soul is constructed, but it is constructed as a kind of byproduct of the dialog between ego and Self-as-Other . . . and this construction is determined entirely by the input of the Self, which the ego does its best to translate.  In the event of inadequate translation, the Self will protest or request revision/reorganization, and to the degree that the ego is receptive to that revisionary process, Logos or soul can be constructed.  But the other connotations of "soul" complicate and muddy Hillman's program.  Soul has often been associated with what we call anima (more so than the animus) . . .  and anima is not consciously constructed by the ego, but is rather the product of an unconscious recognition of and attraction to the familiar aspect of the Self.  Only after this animi work process is complete and the animi figure as mediator depotentiated can the construction of the Logos by the ego be embarked upon.

Title: Re: Meditations on Reestablishing the Validity of the Self Concept
Post by: Matt Koeske on December 21, 2008, 05:52:20 PM

Demon/Self Confusion

Despite the adamant statements of Jung that there was a dark side to the Self and the godhead that we need to recognize, Jungian psychic structure theory remains a bit muddled and vague (and perhaps metaphysical) about where that "darkness" lies or why.  To begin with, the very notion that we would have a biologically based Self (that has therefore evolved through natural selection to be adaptable to the native environment of our species), yet this Self would be "half good and half evil" is a clear egoic projection and in no way scientifically tenable.  Good and evil are relativistic concepts assigned by socially constructed moral beliefs and are not derived directly from universal truths.  We might say that the Self is both good and evil, light and dark, but this would be a projection of our relativistic morality unto a natural, biological life force.  What's more, even insomuch as we identify "evil" in behavior and belief, attributing this evil to the Self (as opposed to the ego) is impossible.  Even if we look historically and cross-culturally at human moral opinion regarding animals or Nature, we will see many different assessments of animal or natural ethicality, from the severe anti-naturalism of the Christian Church to the various paganisms, tribalisms, and romantic naturalisms that often place animal "intelligences" above the human.  Overall, we have no evidence by which to declare animal behavior "evil" . . . and therefore it seems more likely that whatever we call "evil" is specific to the unique traits of the human species.  These traits would be its civilization and its egoism.

I don't mean to equate egoism with evil.  I mean merely to say that, if the Self is natural, material, even somewhat "animal" (as I have argued it is and as Jung himself often saw it to be), then whatever morally light and dark sides it has are not innate to it but are human, egoic interpretations that are generally prejudiced by their opinions of anything natural or animal.  Aggression, sexual desire, self-defensiveness, fear, paranoia, rage, dominance, etc. are not inherently evil and are found in many species.  What was not know or well-accepted in Jung's time but is starting to be better understood today is that along with these instincts, empathy (the foundation of ethics) exists in other ape species (and perhaps in other mammals as well).  So we cannot claim that human morality is the civilizing force that makes us ethical.

I sympathize with Jung's desire to debunk the privatio boni (in Aion) and get some needed shadow into the Christian concept of God . . . but this is a theological endeavor of Jung's and not a psychological one.  The efforts to counterbalance and heal the dissociations caused by Church doctrine were much better treated by the alchemists, who attempted to return valuation (as "spirit") to devalued matter (which included instinct, the body, and the Feminine, or "Earth", in their construction).  Although the alchemists did not feel a need to create an evil God along with the good (as the Gnostics did), the alchemical opus was filled with confrontations and even assimilations or transformations of dark and horrific images (dragons, wolves, monstrous hermaphrodites, drownings, dismemberments, poisonings, death, etc.).  More importantly, some constructions of the magnum opus depict an Old (often somewhat corrupted or ill) King who was renewed by or transformed into a New King.  This is an obvious parallel of the Old and New Testament Gods and the fact that the Christ symbol was commonly associated with the Philosopher's Stone and the "resurrection" at the end of the opus thus comes as no surprise.  The alchemical "theology" would perhaps have seen the renewal of God the Father in the descent to earth and into human form of the Son . . . who had to "die" into that earth or in an earthly and corporeal way, only to be regenerated or resurrected from it.

The most compelling argument for the dualistic Self comes from Donald Kalsched, author of The Inner World of Trauma.  In his construction of a daemonic self-care system that helps protect children from severe traumas sometimes by re-terrorizing them to keep them in fortified patterns of self-organization, Kalsched offers a viable explanation for the "Good Self" that behaves "Badly".  I will not be the first to point out that, even though Kalsched focuses on sufferers of early trauma, evidence of such a daemonic self-care system can often be found in the non-traumatized, as well.  I had begun developing my construction of the Demon of the Complex before I read Kalsched's book, but reading his book helped me make some important differentiations.  Also, it is no mere coincidence that we both independently chose the word "demon" to describe this phenomenon.  Although I have some objections to Kalsched's (not unreasonable) term "self-care system", there is no better term than demon or demonic to describe this personage and psychic principle.

My primary differentiation from Kalsched is a matter of not feeling that the Demon is an aspect of the Self.  I do admit, though, that there are sound arguments both for and against that theory.  The most demonstrable reason I have for differentiating the Demon from the Self is that, during the animi work and later in the individuation process (which I call the Work), the differentiation of the Demon and the Self becomes an essential part of the mythic drama of individuation.  The beginning of the animi work shows the differentiation of the heroic ego and the animi figure (together, the syzygy), but as the syzygy is oriented toward the redemption and valuation of the Self, it becomes increasingly opposed to any factors in the psyche that hinder or devalue the Self and the Self's push for renewal and reorganization of the psychic system or personality.  The embodiment of the old, broken, diseased, or static system is the Demon of the Complex.  This figure shows up commonly in the dreams of those engaged in the animi work as well as those who have been traumatized or have suffered what could be interpreted as a depotentiation or wounding of the hero.

The hero and the Demon are always opposed to one another, and the rise of the hero (during the animi work) is marked with the increasing opposition of the ego and the Demon.  Which means the increasing differentiation of the ego and the Demon.  Those who are overwhelmed by the Demon (typically trauma-sufferers) have lost the heroic "faith" to live for the Self, to live in a state of natural dynamism, fluidity, adaptivity.  We need to be more aware that the hero archetype (or what I also call the heroic ego) is the champion of such dynamism, fluidity, and adaptivity.  The heroic personage that fortifies, conquers, controls, overpowers, etc. is not the same psychic function.  That personage is what I call the "conquering hero", and it is generally a Demon-possessed and inflated egoism.  It is common for the possession of the ego by the Demon to result in some degree of such conquering inflation.  This Demonic hero is serpentine and protean and can assume any form as a kind of doppelganger.  Sometimes it is next to impossible to differentiate this attitude or persona from the real hero, as it will assume any facade of holiness, even humility, in order to empower itself slantwise.  There is one pretty reliable rule of thumb for differentiating the hero from the Demonic conquering hero impostor, and that is simply that any expression of the Demon will always be self-fortifying, in favor of stasis, perhaps even imprisoning . . . while the true hero is always succumbing, empathic, flexible, dynamic, and capable of or the champion of constructive change.

The self-empowerment of the Demon in the personality is achieved in very much the same way that any disempowered personality tries to assemble some power of its own (when no empowerment is directly available to it).  It will tease power out of situations deceptively and clandestinely.  It is much like a child battling for its autonomy in a world of adults, perfectly willing to use whining, tantrums, deceptions, persistent badgering, and so forth to get whatever it wants and to obtain a little power.  And like some children (and many disempowered people) it can become power-mad . . . so the instant it gains a little more power than another being (especially if that being can be seen as a competitor), the Demon will attempt to abuse and dominate that other simply because acting abusively helps fortify its sense of empowerment.  And so the Demon will exercise its power whenever it can, and as horrifically as it can.  The demonstration of power is always seen by the Demon as a suit of armor, a preemptive strike that wards off any possible penetration of its defenses.  The Demon is characteristically infantile despite the menacing uniform it likes to wear.  It lacks empathy, flexibility, tolerance, and wants no genuine relationship with any other, because relationship with an other is a dangerous influence that asks one to alter oneself.  The Demon is the proverbial dragon asleep on a golden hoard that it has no real use for.

We see the Demon in fairytale and myth all the time, and so it is very familiar to us, but only in this venue.  What we have a hard time seeing is the existence and function of this Demon within us.  On much more subtle levels it governs or influences many of our day to day and minute to minute decisions and attitudes, but we rarely if ever reflect upon it.  Often enough we think the super-egoic influence of the Demon on our beliefs and feelings is a sign of moral fortitude or heroism or civilization.  We reward the Demon by giving it credit for our social and personal achievements.  It "picks us up by the bootstraps", it makes us stick to our diets, pay our bills on time, get through medical school, rise in rank in our gangs and tribes, kill off what stands in our way, keeps us from depression and embarrassment, tells us "who we are" and where we belong.  It isn't the only factor behind such decisions, but it is a significant one.  The dogma of the Demon tells us that if we didn't punish ourselves into right or successful behavior, we would turn into lumps of hopeless jelly or be overpowered by our animal instincts into doing horrendous things.  But the reason we feel vaguely capable of horrendous acts is that the Demon, our master and mentor, is absolutely capable of doing any amount of harm to another who impedes its self-empowerment.

But we are not inherently made out of jelly and incapable of mustering the drive to live or morality to correct ourselves and value others.  That is Demonic propaganda.  It is based on the way the Demon "feels" deep within itself.  It is a helpless infant that can never grow up.  The Self has functional and healthy instinctual urges that help us live, relate, feel empathy, question and correct ourselves, even succeed or fight.  These traits have evolved in our species and many other species over many millions of years, honed by natural selection, making us fit (at least for our environment of evolutionary adaptedness).  We did not heroically muster these resolves by force of will, by civilizing ego-fortification.  The super-ego vs. id construction that Freud handed down to us (from the Judeo-Christian tradition) is fallacious and prejudiced in anti-naturalism.  Modern civilization is not the force that makes us moral.  It's the force that accentuates our propensity for Demonism and egoism.  We have by no means stopped doing horrendous things to one another since we "went modern" (as any mildly unbiased account of world history will easily demonstrate).  As power is distributed to fewer and fewer people, overt atrocity is the benefit of that power.  But the "masses" who have very little power (especially to stand against the few and mighty) are left to take out their Demonic abuses on the sly.

I have to reiterate Jung's frequent cry that we all have shadow and are all capable of evil.  And things have not gotten better since Jung's death.  We still remain extremely incapable of recognizing and treating our capacity for evil.  But as Jung made evil an abstract and theological principle more so that a personage (which, again, we must see it as in order to identify and understand it), his crying was mostly in vain.  And the undifferentiated Jungian idea of shadow is not helpful, because in this shadow we find elements of Self, of personal shadow, and of Demon . . . but have no theory that helps us to tell the difference.  This failure of differentiation (for which Jung's successors must take more blame than Jung himself, as they have not improved upon his initial theories) encourages confusion between Self and Demon . . . and that intense confusion is indicative of a failure to engage in the animi work (the Demon/Self differentiating process).

I don't mean to claim that such a differentiation is easy.  It takes both powerful insight and great moral effort.  The Demon and the Self represent two opposing principles of psychic order, and ordering principles are what any system needs in order to cohere and survive.  The Demon promises survival (at the price of obedience) . . . and this is a fact that Kalsched clings to in his self-care system construction.  But the Demon's idea of survival is not a natural one . . . and in many cases not even a very effective one (unless one can empower him or herself and find a way to dominate and manipulate others).  It is a kind of survival that does not really derive from the instinctual realm.  Instincts are perceived as dynamic and Other.  They promote change and adaptation.  This simply won't do for the Demon.  The only instinct it can work with is the instinct for self-protection, the fight/flight response, and it can "sublimate" that primal fear/rage into a process of self-fortification just as long as it can cast all Otherness as oppositional or manipulable as a source of empowerment and fortification.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Demon preys upon the flight/fight response, because in that "primal" state of reaction, we lose all self-reflectivity, all plasticity and flexibility, all tolerance for otherness, all empathy.  If the Demon can terrorize the ego into this state often enough, it can dominate the ego into serving the Demon's infantile self-empowerment program.  The ego thus-dominated feels that it must abide these demands of its master or it will crumble.

Kalsched essentially states that this is an accurate perception (especially among the traumatized), that the ego will crumble unless it adheres to the Demonic imprisonment and domination.  But I feel this is not entirely true, that it is one of those half-truths the Demon is always whispering to the ego.  The Demon will always tell some of the truth, and this is its most deadly strategy.  But it will never tell the whole truth.  It might say (to the trauma victim), "If you don't obey me, then you will fall to pieces, go insane, find yourself incapable of living."  And whenever the ego gets a rebellious urge to test the bars of its cage, this is often exactly what happens . . . and as soon as the ego glimpses its frailness, it immediately "realizes" that the Demon was right.  Each failure redoubles the fear and imprisonment of the ego.  And only gradually does the pain of imprisonment and domination build up enough drive in the ego for it to make another attempt at escape.

Such escape attempts are always incredibly dangerous.  It is often not possible to escape the Demon's imprisonment (among trauma victims) until the ego accepts absolutely that the risk of death and utter annihilation is worth it for the gamble on escape.  That is a heroic revelation, the willingness to accept death in order to embrace change.  Without that heroic decision, the Demon can not be slipped away from and depotentiated.  But when we accept a kind of death in exchange for escape from the Demon, that new death presents serious problems in itself (as the Demon always told us it would).  We are not prepared for it.  When we escape the Demon, we are likely to find that we don't know how to live, how to survive.  We are frail, impotent.  We are exactly what the Demon always shamed us into being.  And we have to be willing to live like this for some period of time before we find a new source, a regenerative and reorganizing source.

As we search for this new source or order, the Demon will walk along beside us offering "help" or chastising us.  To survive this really does require heroism.  But most of the time, the Self is offering help, although this help will seem quite foreign to the ego, especially at first.  One common manifestation of the Self at this point is the revelation of the new order as symbol or Goal.  This is what we see in the idea of biblical or mystical revelation from God: the burning bush, Ezekiel's wheel, and so forth.  These revealed Self-symbols are generally vague but powerfully numinous.  They can give us an injection of affective valuation for the new principle of organization . . . but they don't accurately depict what that organization will be.  They promise salvation in some sense . . . but they don't tell us up front that, in the end, we will be saving ourselves and not receiving that salvation as providence from God.

For every loophole in the symbol of the Goal, there is room for the Demon to twist and pervert it.  If it is vague or esoteric, the Demon can call it "nothing but a fantasy" . . . or equally, it can prey on the ego's hope in the provident revelation and convince the ego to become a holy "soldier for the Lord" who never thinks, but always acts as commanded (where the Demon eagerly slips into the Lord's guise).  Any instance of pride in the ego's newfound path can be shifted into ossification and self-defense by the Demon . . . while every moment of weakness and hesitation can be used to turn the ego into a false heroic path that turns rigid and unreflective.  Most of the "divine revelations" we experience result in failure and possession or re-possession by the protean Demon.  That is, they become totemic belief systems and not transitional journeys or transformable fantasies.  And as the Goal begins to feel all the more abstract and unreachable, we are tempted all the more to pretend we have already reached it . . . or, alternatively, to identify with the ever-seeking/never-finding antihero who is a kind of Cain marked, punished, and exiled by God, forever walking an endless and fruitless circuit, even a kind of Sisyphus . . . but for the honor of the Lord, because the Lord wishes it so.  There is nothing so challenging and impossible as a spiritual redemption quest.  And what is perhaps worst of all is that these quests are not ultimately meant to be "won".  We never get to literalize the original fantasy of the Goal.  The depotentiation of the Goal in favor of genuine (not imitated) self-satisfaction is the final and most difficult step of all spiritual strivings.  The acceptance of the transitional object as transitional, the divestment of mana from the once-worshiped totem.  It is felt (at least at first) to be taboo-breaking, a kind of god-murder, a terrible sacrilege.  All spiritual progress requires movements of atheism and not merely movements of faith.  Faith is often a much easier thing to come by than sacrifice.

All of this personifying talk about the Demon would no doubt turn off a neuroscientist, but again, I stand by the same principle as elaborated for the Self's personification.  We need to allow the metaphor of personification for some of these psychic contents in order to truly understand them.  When we are discussing subatomic particles or chemicals or geology, we can afford a kind of detachment.  There is no possibility of relationship with the object of study.  But in the matter of psychology, the object of study is always something we are in direct relationship with . . . and that relationship cannot and should not be avoided.  To study psyche in its natural condition and habitat, we must include our own conscious (and unconscious) participation with the psyche as part of that natural condition . . . as problematic as that might be.  This means that we not only study psyche as an object we are detached from but simultaneously as something we are relating to and even are.  The personification of psychic contents or dynamics like the Demon or the Self, and the way we personify them are also objects of psychology study.  We can say, "objectively" that the Demon is a psychic ordering principle that organizes through fortification, stasis, and compartmentalization, but this doesn't capture the real experience of the Demon, nor does it actually explain why we feel about or portray the Demon (in fairytales, for instance) the way we do.  It doesn't tell us what to do about it or how we variously relate to it or what these modes of relationship indicate.

The best we can do is to state that although we know and can demonstrate that the Demon is a specific kind of organizational principle in the psyche and not in fact a true, autonomous character, our experience of it and the opportunity to study it closely and in its natural condition can only be found in its personification.  Therefore, to scientifically study the Demon, we must personify it while also trying to understand the personification as a metaphor and a margin of error.  I believe this argument can be elaborated and justified in the introduction of Jungian psychology to the biological sciences . . . and that this should be done conscientiously and in lieu of wagging our fingers at "rationalists" for "missing the soul".  This may seem an odd recommendation from one who does so much finger-wagging himself, but I am not opposed to finger-wagging in the name of cleaning up our own shit.  I also feel we should not foist our shit on others in the name of righteousness.  Although I'm not calling for dressing ourselves up over-humbly as a pathetic offering to a superior power, I do think we need to strive to overcome and see-through our tribal prejudices in the name of progress and healing, in the name of knowing.  When we wrestle with the old Christian saw, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone", not only should we not cast that stone we were meaning to cast, but we should also take the chance to reflect on our own desire to cast and our propensity to "sin".  That is all I stand in favor of.

As to what the Demon "really is", I have the beginning of a theory that is, I believe, tenable, but would certain require more study, revision, and elaboration.  To begin with, the presence of the Demon appears to be most pronounced wherever (or whenever) the ego is most pronounced.  In other words, the modern, in promoting and accentuating the ego, simultaneously accentuates the Demon (which in turn, eventually accentuates the differentiation of the hero as egoic attitude that opposes the control of the personality by the Demonic brand of order).  If the Demon and the ego are closely related phenomenon that are produced or accentuated (rendered emergent) by the same conditions, then those conditions should be closely studied to see what they have in common with the Demon and the ego.  As previously mentioned, I feel that the Problem of the Modern is generically a matter of having to live in an environment that is not entirely suitable for our instinctual imprinting . . . and therefore, to live in a state of decoherence, anxiety, and neurosis.  But I don't see the development of modernity as a "mistake" or Fall.  It is an inevitable development, because modern and proto-modern social organization allow for the more successful perpetuation of the genes of our species.  Perpetuating genes, though, do not make us, as individuals happy in itself.  And it is possible that what works fairly well for such evolutionary fitness does not always work so well for the equilibrious satisfaction of human organisms.  In many ways, as moderns, we live longer, healthier, and often more luxurious lives than we might have as tribalists.  But we live in conflict with our instincts in many ways . . . which results in a state of dissociation or decoherence or impaired system robustness.

But the more genetically successful the development of modernism became for our species, the more we have had to contend with the emergent environment we indirectly created.  As we often say, this environment is "alienating", and the thing we are alienated from is our environment of evolutionary adaptedness.  Perhaps the root of the problem (again, very generally) is that we do not create culture consciously or intentionally.  It is for the most part a byproduct . . . even when culture is driven by leaders who wanted to create specific civilizations and even when we more or less consciously devise innovations and technologies that will or are even meant to alter society, the forces that contribute to the actual construction of culture are primarily unconscious and only indirectly oriented toward cultural creation.  What is perhaps even more important, though, is that culture creates us, and we are created by it every bit as unconsciously and unintentionally as we create it.  It is due to this two way unconsciousness of culture that, should culture develop emergent forms as is common in any complex system, those forms could be very much unlike the unconscious input of human individuals into the cultural sphere . . . and yet, they would likely have just as much impact on human individuals as the less-emergent and alien cultural constructions, because we simply don't (and generally can't) discriminate cultural constructions consciously.

Cultures are complex, dynamic systems.  As we contribute to them bit by bit, person by person, we do not know and cannot usually predict how these small, quantum contributions will affect or alter the whole system.  I am not ready to adopt the notion of some mimeticists that attribute a kind of "volition" to the informational constructions of culture (memes) that use us as unwitting hosts for their propagation.  But I do feel that this metaphor is describing a genuine phenomenon . . . albeit with too much unconscious ego projection tainting the data.  Rather than a misplaced genetic self-propagation metaphor, I think it would be more accurate to use the behavioral dynamics of complex systems to construct what is happening in acculturation and ego formation.  Cultural "memes" can be seen (in the complex systems metaphor) as forms of feedback, where something the systems of individual organisms transmit is fed back into the system in such a way that the originally transmitting systems are affected and altered.  But this feedback is also altered (before it is fed back into individuals) by association with other information in the cultural/informational sphere.  Perhaps more easily assessed is the way cultural transmissions from one individual are taken into another, altered by that individual's system, and retransmitted in that modified state . . . on and on in massive iteration and ever more complex associations and interrelations.  We don't need to make these memes volitional or magically self-motivated.  It is the complexity of cultural transmissions that gives this quality or appearance of sentience or volition . . . not unlike the way complexity creates this effect in other dynamic and adaptive systems.

But what some memeticists overlook (in a kind of believer's zeal) is that information does not merely go in one ear and out the other or ride human brains like donkeys.  Information is a kind of currency for our species (increasingly), and its use, acceptance, and transmission can enable us to express personal and instinctual drives.  We are not the vehicle through which information acts, it is a vehicle through which we act, behave, and become.  These transmissions or languages are not (as postmodern philosophers of language have told us) innately meaningful, but acquire meaning (and purpose) through their social usefulness.  Language then can be like the Taoist bowl whose usefulness or Tao is found in its empty space rather than its solid form.

I also suspect that we evolved as creatures who are meant to be constructed by our cultures to a significant degree.  Cultural creation and indoctrination or absorption are factors of our natural selection, they are a staple of our environment and were during our evolutionary process.  But the cultural environment we evolved within is no longer the one we live in, and so the culture that feeds back into us individually has curious and often disruptive effects on our culture receiving and imprinting apparatuses.  These apparatuses cannot be turned off.  The feedback we receive presents great challenges to our self-regulating systems, which are forced to reorganize in order to adapt and develop a good-enough homeostasis.  Yet, we are equipped with an inherited adaptability for shifting environments . . . as we would have to be in order to have evolved in an environment that was partly (if not largely) cultural.  Although we might see our various cultural environments as a continuum, I suggest that we reimagine them as separate and that we must therefore adapt to various environments throughout our lives.  For instance, the environment of the mother that the infant first imprints with and seeks to adapt to is different than the environment of peer competition and conformity that exists from fairly early childhood into adolescence.  And the adolescent environment in which various personal and biological transformations reawaken an individual sense of self that is in conflict with both the socially constructed self of the peer environment and the infant sense of self from the maternal environment.  The great turmoil of the adolescent environment must be resolved or somehow dealt with in order to help the individual transition from the drama of this self-absorbed conflict into a sense of adult social responsibility for the tribe's welfare . . . yet another environment.  Parenting might be said to require another adaptation.

In other words, these life stages we have always speculated about can be seen as transitions between different cultural environments that require adaptive reorganizations in the psychic system.  And these stage of life environments, each of which requires a transitional adaptation and systemic reorganization, indicate that as a species, we develop with the capacity to adapt to these environments within our individual lifetimes.  Yet, any adaptation creates a polarization in response to the demands of that adaptation.  Change is never easy, and even as it may be natural, we are torn at transitional times between two worlds, two environments.  The old adaptation resist the threat of the new . . . but the instinct for adaptation (which I have sometimes called the super-adaptive instinct) drives the psychic system through the state change.  My theory of the animi work is that the animi and the hero (the syzygy) are the representations of the instinctual drives that mean to actualize the state change from adolescence into adulthood.  There are many pieces of supporting evidence for this theory (as I have described elsewhere and will revisit in my book about the anima work).

The Demon is a representation of the force that resists these instinctually driven phase transition adaptations to cultural environments.  It seeks to carry over the old paradigm or organization to the new environment and force that environment to fit its paradigm rather than adapt the paradigm as needed.  The more humans have "conquered" nature and developed civilization, changing their environment radically so that they could continue living in the paradigm they were most comfortable with, the more the modern ego was accentuated and essentially dissociated from the otherwise dynamic system of Self.  With these cultural "advances" toward modernism, the definition of the life stages was blurred and the transitions were increasingly muddied.  Along with this cultural development toward modernism, the newly developing culture was feeding back into the individual systems . . . and this feedback increasingly disintegrated or disemboweled/desacralized the cultural rites of transition for these stages.  Perhaps the most important cultural transition is the rite of passage between adolescence and adulthood.  It is the one in which human consciousness becomes an essential contributing factor.  The ethical contribution to the tribe (or as a parent to one's children) requires a heroic movement toward consciousness and the sacrifice of the residual infantile sense of entitlement to providence.  Only very recently was the maternal environment the infant adapts to disrupted, but it would have persisted out of necessity in most cultures.  The childhood peer environment gives us important preliminary negotiations of individual status, but these negotiations are so unconscious, and yet so powerfully driven by instinct, that no ceremony would likely be required to reinforce them.  But the transition from adolescence to adulthood appears to be fraught with greater complexity.  It seems to have always required ceremony, a conscious investment of valuation through ritual, to actualize.

On a more social level, the status hierarchies created in the childhood peer environment, though self-organizing (from a detached perspective), are not innately functional as a survivable social dynamic.  The tribes of humans that would have succeeded and achieved evolutionary fitness most effectively would have been the ones that suffered from the least amount of egoic infighting and developed the most efficient method of communal coordination.  One in which a sense of valuation for the welfare of the group could be seen to trump most individual concerns.  But the fact that humans had to develop (often deeply terrifying) ceremonies of initiation to mark the transition from adolescence to adulthood is itself an indication that the transition is by no means an easy or automatic one for us.  It marks a threshold where we are weak, where the "flesh" or instincts do not self-organize the group adequately.  This weakness is probably an indication that our newest trait, our plastic or highly conceptual consciousness had to serve as an overburdened tightrope for us to cross over on.

Why this might be is definitely worth studying.  I would guess that it might have something to do with the fact that, among our species, some of the most fit (or socially useful) members of a tribe are not always the most dominant, aggressive, or strong ones.  In many species, an injured or "defective" young might be eaten or abandoned, prevented from passing on its genes or burdening the tribe.  But human children who are born with various defects or weaknesses (physical and mental) or who are crippled early in life, cannot only become socially useful, they have sometimes even become shamans in their tribes.  The way humans value members of their tribes can be complex, especially as our various transitions can result in unexpected ways of transforming.  Additionally, those tribe members who seem uniquely equipped to pass on information of tribal or cultural significance, even if they do not achieve significant status in the peer environment, might become important assets to the tribe and even to the future generations of the tribe.  I am thinking of artists, poets, storytellers, and priests . . . who needn't be good hunters or particularly beautiful in order to make extensive long-term impacts on tribal welfare and organization.

However these things came about, what we face today is an environment in which the rite of passage into adulthood (though still superficially identifiable in many cultures) no longer functions as a method of helping people become conscious of and ethically involved in the welfare of the greater modern society.  If these rites do still have social impact, it is only within the tribal structures that they are enacted . . . and therefor do not have much of an effect on the modern individual whose adult environment is the modern (multi-tribal) world.  What this suggests is that the infant and peer-environment status-monger are not depotentiated to the degree they would have been in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness.  These untreated previous adaptations or organizations of personality still linger on and influence our way of living in the environment . . . and the more they have influenced the construction of culture, the more the feedback of cultural construction into the individual has been dissociating.  This feedback overemphasizes the infant and the status-monger, and this empowers the Demon significantly, whose drive is essentially infantile and whose strategy is essentially fortifying or defensive against others and otherness.  The negotiations of status tend to result in a non-penetration among others . . . an isolation that is one of the factors treated with the initiation into socially conscious adulthood.  When status is one's main concern, others are only tools and obstacles to selfish and self-protective desires.  The other either stands in my way, or if s/he is more powerful than me, can best become my vehicle of promotion and protection (if properly appeased).  This is precisely how the Demon "thinks".

My suggestion, therefore, is that the Demon is accentuated by the modernization of culture that dissolves the of rite of passage into adulthood.  And that the modern ego is as bloated as it is for having to receive and be constructed by this Demon-accentuating cultural indoctrination . . . a kind of hyper superegoism that is in conflict with Nature both in the physical environment and within the individual being.  Instinctual nature and the modern cultural environment are like two great waves that crash into one another and push up a new form between them, the modern ego.  But even as the Demon is accentuated and empowered by modern cultural feedback, it does not seem to begin as a foreign element.  Although I don't think it is accurate to call it a manifestation of a self-care system, I do suspect it is an inevitable development of personality rooted (albeit indirectly) in instinct.  Kalsched's observation that the Demon is greatly empowered in trauma victims makes sense within the theory I am working with.  Trauma is a massive and powerful invasion of an environmental factor into the individual psychic system.  It takes feedback to a terrible new level and may even function like a kind of puncture or port, a solidified pathway into which much future experience is poured and conformed.  All the while, the Demon strives to keep this punctured scar tissue as permanent and inflexible as possible.

Title: Re: Meditations on Reestablishing the Validity of the Self Concept
Post by: Matt Koeske on December 21, 2008, 06:46:19 PM

Hero/Self Confusion

Although Jungians have generally differentiated the archetype of the hero from that of the Self, there is a significant amount of conflation between the two in Jung's own writing.  Sometimes this is reflected in Jung's description of the Self as a kind of union between conscious and unconscious aspects of personality through the transcendent function.  The conflation of hero and Self is, I feel, not so much an invention or original error of Jung's so much as an unfortunate inheritance from Christian dogma . . . where the archetypal hero as represented by Christ is conflated with God, a Self figure.  Of course, there was tremendous infighting and even tribal splintering over this issue of what exactly the relationship of Son to Father was, most famously addressed at the Council of Nicaea (325) , where despite Constantine's efforts to force a definitive decision on the matter, no real conclusion or consensus could be made.  Slippery theology prevailed, and even to this day (regardless of any official Church dogma) the relationship between Christ and God the Father is extremely muddy.

Analyzed from a psychological perspective, this muddiness seems to indicate an inflation.  The hero is not the Self, and not only are the two figures dissimilar, the relationship between them is distinctly dependent on their differentiation.  The heroic attitude cannot mistake itself for the Self and still be heroic, as that attitude is defined by its commitment to the facilitation, valuation, and redemption of the Self.  Although it could be seen as valid to say that the heroic seed (as the divided syzygy) is planted by the Self to motivate the ego, and that the hero (as archetype) is a non-egoic and therefore Self-based attitude, in the actual experience of the heroic attitude, the ego feels oriented and devoted to the Self, and not identical with it.  This whole dynamic is actually described relatively well in the Christ myth, where Jesus acts as the facilitator of the Self-God in the world, yet he is one that is also alienated from that God and subject to His Will.  Jesus only fully accepts this when he is on the cross, first asking why he has been forsaken and then accepting his fate and offering up his spirit (and we might say his own will and volition) to the seemingly unknowable God the Father.

It is Catholic dogma that created all the confusion about the nature of Christ and his relationship to God . . . this confusion does not exist significantly in the myth.  Jung had a dangerous tendency to confuse dogma and myth in his theological analyses of Christianity instead of sticking to a more viable and consistently "Jungian" interpretation that would see myth as less an object of intentioned propaganda than Church dogma.  His failure to differentiate the two is either indicative of an extreme naivete or some manifestation of a complex (or both).  But perhaps it is inevitable for us to see the hero/Self relationship foggily due to our unconscious and inherited Christianization.

Where we see heroic identification in an individual that is characterized by a belief that, as messenger of God or the Self, the hero is also exalted . . . or is like the Catholic priests and bishops or the Church itself, the representation of God on earth (and of course, God's gatekeeper), we should be able to recognize that this is not the genuine heroic attitude.  Rather, it is the Demonic attitude of covetous petrification and fortification.  The hero is never the Self's earthly form, is not some kind of avatar.  The heroic attitude demands a great submission to the Self and the acceptance of a kind of custodial serving role in relationship to it.  Despite the various miracles and impressively arcane and seductive parables put in the mouth of Jesus in the Gospels, we are also told that he who would lead must serve, the last must be first.  God cannot be borne into the world gloriously . . . as the alchemists very well knew (their Stone being found on the dung heap).  Nor gloriously born, as the story of the birth in the manger shows.

The Demonically inflated aggrandizement of the hero (made over into the conquering hero) that was passed on from Church dogma to Jung had an even older cultural source in the Jewish messiah cults from which Christianity took some of its prehistory and trappings.  The original fantasy of the messiah was of a holy conqueror sent by God to destroy the occupying Romans.  This messiah fantasy was essentially Yahwistic in character, a chip off of the old block of tribal war god, Yahweh who crushed all enemies of the tribe in the name of righteousness.  The faith in this God and his messiah-general could have been largely responsible for driving the Jews into unwinnable military conflicts with the Romans (if we are to accept the obviously partisan but not necessarily illogical argument of Josephus, for instance).  The most bitter irony of all may not have been the defeat in the Jewish Wars, but the fact that Romanized or Pauline Christianity took up the zealous demonization of the "non-righteous" or Hellenized Jews, turning this violent rage back on the now scattered and devastated Jewish peoples of the Roman Empire through an increasingly anti-semitic religiosity (which, colloquially manifested as the belief that "the Jews killed Jesus").  Such an outrageous development could have hardly been concocted by the most imaginative novelist.

Predating even the Jewish messiah cults of the first century BCE, we can see in various Greek and Roman myths and legends certain precedents.  Perhaps the most relevant is the portrayal of the "revenge" of Dionysus in Euripides' play, The Bacchae.  To the non-believer, The Bacchae stands as one of the most significant precursors (and likely influences) of the Christ myth.  One can at least see the very distinct opportunity for syncretism between this story and the mythologies of the Jewish Messiah cults.  In The Bacchae, Christ-like Dionysus is slighted by Pentheus (and the whole royal house of Cadmus who have denied Semele's claims that her son is the son of Zeus) resulting in an outbreak of madness that leads to the horrific death of Pentheus at the hands of his crazed mother.  It is a fascinating story about spiritual inflation (subtly evoking the mysterious Jesus Barabbas, "Son of the father", and Jesus Christ dichotomy in the Christ myth) where the Fall of Pentheus is brought about by his inability to respect Dionysus properly, instead trying to imprison and overpower the god.  Yet Pentheus develops a kind of strange obsession with Dionysus and his Mysteries.

The figure of Dionysus occupies an in-between space where human and god meet: the ecstatic.  In the Bacchae, he seems to represent the problem of the ecstatic . . . especially when it is resisted (by the ego).  If we psychologize this ecstatic union between human and divine, we might say it is the experience of epiphanic knowing of the god and the realization of humility in that knowing.  We can take two general attitudes toward such ecstasies: either surrendering to them or hardening ourselves against them.  In that hardening or fortification, we can fall into possession by the Demon, which encourages us to become obsessed with the resistance to the transformative and humbling ecstatic  This obsession, though, is simultaneously a seduction by what seems to the ego a kind of dangerous but exciting shadow Other.  There is a great fear of identification with that Other, and even a temptation to identify that the fortified, "Apollonian" ego struggles mightily to combat.  This particular fantasy of the terrifying and seductive Dionysian ecstatic seems to be one that derives from particularly "Apollonian" personalities.  We could equally say that such personalities have the true hero in the shadow, where, utterly undifferentiated, it mixes chaotically with other archetypal currents and powers, allowing it to become a numinous object of fascination and threat.

The fear of this personality is that this shadow-hero will castrate, dissolve, or disintegrate the ego.  The Apollonian personality self-identifies by the unbudgable cohesion of its ego, which it fantasizes that it has glued or compacted together by some force of conquering will over the "chaotic" forces of instinctual nature.  We see this construction in the Freudian psychodynamic where the id and superego essentially vie for dominance over the ego caught between them.  The Apollonian personality invests so much energy and power into its self-fortification against Dionysian elements that it actually runs a very real risk of "cracking" and falling into an enantiodromic identification with its Dionysian fantasy, therefore proving that it is in fact every bit as unmanly and fragile as it had always desperately feared it was.  This kind of enantiodromia marks a huge victory for the Demon in the personality, and is very likely to result in madness.  The Demon can then feed off of that fall into madness by telling the ego that this was inevitable because the ego was always an effeminate or childish weakling . . . and it deserves to wallow in this dissolution, like a punishment of damnation for its sins.

But what this personality, even before it is consumed by such madness or psychosis, doesn't sufficiently realize is that the reason it was so breakable was that it had allowed itself to become radically Demon-dependent.  Its fortified, rigid ego was constructed with a brittle and dysfunctional architecture . . . because it had granted so much power to the Demon to define it.  The only way out of this dramatic brand of psychosis is to depotentiate the whole fantasy, to realize that the Dionysian was a shadow fantasy brought on by a Bad Faith identification with the Apollonian.  This includes (among other things), an acceptance that regression or dissolution is natural and not a grand failure, an openness to what is generally called "The Feminine", which could also be the homoerotic in some men, and the realization that the Demon is not a functional guide or governor for personality formation.  Generally, this can only work if the Apollonian is not (enantiodromically) seen as a great failure and sign of weakness.  That is, this product of Demonism needs to be detached from to some degree and digested or accepted as a wrong turning rather than an indication of innate defect or degeneracy (as will be the strongest temptation).  The Demon is infamous for tormenting the ego with accusations of degeneracy.

But if the ego can learn to valuate the Dionysian for its dynamism and fluidity and come to see these forces as healthy, to essentially learn to let them be like the Taoist learns to do without doing, then the true hero can emerge from the shadow.  As the hero sheds its contamination with the shadow, it will become less identified with the dangerous ecstasy god of Apollonian fantasy, and the heroic ego and Self will begin to differentiate.  The hero will move increasingly into the surrendering or sacrificing mode as the facilitator and caretaker of the Self.  This was, in fact, what Dionysus was originally calling for in The Bacchae.  Pentheus refused to make any sacrifices to the god.  When we refuse to sacrifice to the dynamic, ecstatic, changeable organizational principle of the Self, we make a monstrous fantasy of it.  Since it is always moving and shifting, we develop the paranoia that it is "out to get us", chasing and tormenting us . . . we must stay hyper-vigilant in order to make sure it never invades us.  It is like a dream symbol of termites or mice, the little sub-human things that scurry around in the dark or in the walls and steal food or damage or taint the possessions and sanctity of the ego.  There is a great dream Jung discusses in the previously mentioned Seminar on Dream Analysis in which the Apollonian dreamer faced with the inflation temptation of dissolution is doing his "spiritual" exercises in a crib, which breaks under his weight.  A mouse scurries out from underneath it, and his wife insists that he kill it . . . but his blunt attempts to do so (with the "bars" of the crib's side!) prove too imprecise to accomplish the task (and the mouse escapes into his son's room).

What I'm calling the Apollonian personality here exists in all of us to varying degrees.  It is a product of modern socialization, an aspect of the modern ego, and a chink in our armor where the Demon can seize and poison.  More accurately, this can be seen as an Apollonian/Dionysian dissociation, and once dissociated, either split off mode is dysfunctional and perhaps even delusional.  We should not, therefore, seek the Dionysian as remedy for the Apollonian.  Either orientation reinforces the same complex.  This is something that is not adequately understood in Jungian thinking (yet we are well-positioned to study this dissociation).  Jung was in part a product of the Germanic romanticism of his time, a romanticism that was rebelling against the Apollonian "ignorance" of positivistic materialists and rationalists.  This romantic movement embraced things like occult mysticism, Eastern philosophies, spiritualism and ESP, mythology and various forms of neoprimitivistic "nature worship".  Yet, we can see in Jung's own approach to these things a kind of obsessive curiosity that resembles the attitude of Pentheus to Dionysus.  This Apollonian personality cannot always indulge in the Dionysian romantic fantasies without the danger of "going native" . . . of enantiodromia, which is very seductive yet also willfully resisted (often as a point of pride and self-definition).  It is hard to sell Jungians on the shortcomings of this romanticism in areas like the occult, mystic, and Eastern . . . but it is not hard for all of us to see how this Apollo/Dionysus dissociation affects Jung's ideas about so-called "primitives", "Negroes", and children.  Jung saw these people as romantically unconscious, existing in an almost non-egoic state, in participation mystique, in the abaissment du niveau mental.

I don't deny that socialization into modernity constructs a specific kind of egoism, of course . . . but Jung's attitude toward the "primitive" is fraught with the Apollonian, elitist, and colonialist prejudices of his own culture.  These prejudices are every bit as unconsciously effective as other, more tribalistic forms of participation mystique and abaissment du niveau mental.  To Jung's credit, he wrestled with greater than average integrity with both the Apollonian and the Dionysian . . . managing not to satisfy many people who worshiped either extreme more devotedly.  This dissociation continues today in the Jungian community, where the New Age mystical factions of Jungianism have fallen into the Dionysian fantasy identification and often feel Jung was inadequately mystical or "feeling-oriented" (or else they imagine him to have been the Dionysian guru they want him to be).  On the Apollonian side, we see the post-Freudian influence of the object-relations or developmental school of Jungianism that aspires to be more scientific, scholarly, and academic, yet doesn't necessarily achieve this due to its inability to entirely shed the haunting Dionysian fantasy, or otherwise due to an attempt to build "a dam against the black tide of mud . . . of occultism" (as Freud himself called it, according to Jung) that is driven by Bad Faith.  That dam-building is a truly Penthean project.

The rash of romantic spiritualism in Jungian thinking can be attributed to an Apollonian way of "going native" into Dionysian enantiodromia.  This means that Apollonian attitudes are still pervading Jungian spiritualism, which has become brittley identified with its own Dionysian romanticism.  But that Dionysian romanticism is used like an archetypal Breast by the Jungian spiritualist and the relationship of the spiritualist to the Dionysian fantasy is infantile and covetous.  The conception of spirituality in this mindset is limited, placing more emphasis on the totemized providence of the fantasy than on the valuation of or meaning of that fantasy.  The fantasy, in other words, is not a motivator toward reorganizational dynamism.  It does not activate or utilize the hero/animi syzygy.  Rather, it is dependent on preserving and enshrining the totem fantasy and using it to ossify a belief system.  That such spiritualism occurs is not surprising or uncommon.  But in the Jungian community, this ossified and infantile form of spiritualism requires its advocates to ignore, deny, and radically misunderstand the other half of Jung's psychology.  Ultimately, we are not following in the path of the Jung who struggled with and made progress in the treatment of an Apollonian/Dionysian dissociation, the Jung who's genius came out of the effort required to "hold the Opposites together" enough to allow each perspective to critique the other functionally.

In losing the hero into our shadow, we have given its visage to the Dionysian fantasy of the Apollonian mind.  And in this fantasy, the hero is an ecstasy god that brings madness and possession to those who would devalue him.  Yet, we remain in denial of our possessions, of the imprisonment of our obsessions that so often keep us frozen in the posture of totemic worship when we should be engaging, wrestling, confronting . . .  insisting on a Good Faith, redemptive relationship to shadow-mired Self.  While we bask distantly in the rays of the Dionysian hero that we believe is intuitive, spiritual, magical, and supernatural, we continue to unconsciously worship the Apollonian ego as conquering hero.  This egoic figure does its "spiritual exercises" in its crib, improves itself, obsesses over the Dionysian fantasy while also fighting "heroically" against the threat of madness that fantasy holds up as bogeyman (the scurrying mouse hunted with a blunt instrument).   This conception of the hero transcends, conquers, keeps the lids tight on the right Pandora's Boxes, knows what aspects of the Self are "good" and "bad", and generally assumes the static posture of the Jungian ideal.  But the problem with the Jungian ideal is that it is nothing more than a tourist in the depths of the psyche.  Its approach to the Self is a flirtation with going native like Jung's expedition to Africa . . . a colonialist study of the "primitive".  We congratulate ourselves for not taking an absolutely dismissive attitude toward such primitivism in ourselves.  We make a gilded cage inside ourselves for this exotic bird . . . and we close our shutters against the crows that peck at the outside of our house.

The hero remains, because of the dissociated Apollonian/Dionysian fantasy, unreachable, exotic, grandiose, divine.  A Dionysian Christ in its light half that we must sacrifice to or go mad.  And in its darker half, it is the great Demonic conqueror of the unconscious, beating the reptilian head of the primitive Self with the club of consciousness until it gives birth to the soul.  There is too little humility in this construction, too little Foolishness, too little personal servitude to the Self or valuation of what has been lost to the dung heap or shadow.  Jung proposed in Aion that the Self-construct of the Christ required an additional construct of an Antichrist to complete it.  Perhaps that is the necessary first step out of this dissociation . . . but I would argue that the "need" to make Christ an Antichrist counterpart is a product of conflating the hero with the Self in the first place.  When the hero is conflated with the Self, it must go through a dissolution or dismemberment, a scapegoating of death ritual, in order to reorient the hero to its facilitating role regarding the Self.  By thrusting the figure of the hero into the ether, we have necessitated the appearance of the dangerous, Dionysian dark-hero in the shadow.  The mistake following this fissure is in the belief that the heroic act is the beating down of the dark-hero's inflation and temptation to self-deify.  That fight cannot be won, no matter how it seems to turn out.  It is an Orwellian "endless war" that imprisons the personality in a static, Demon-controlled state of organization.

The depotentiation or resolution of the Dionysian fantasy in Jungian thinking or mindset will require a more genuine and mundane use of the heroic attitude.  Some of our precious, golden things, our dragon treasures, our Holy Breast will have to be sacrificed.  We will have to willingly pass through the threshold of initiation and reorganization we have tried to ignore or devalue.  We have to learn how to live through the heroic attitude rather than make it into an object of worship (and temptation).  We need to recognize that that obsessive Dionysian fantasy and the Apollonian egoic stance are part of the same complex.  This is not news, or at least it should not be.  Jung suggested much the same . . . but his writing is also filled with episodes where he gets caught up in either the Dionysian or the Apollonian pole of the complex.  Ultimately, it seems that Jung did not resolve this complex . . . and his failure to do so (despite making some progress) has left us with a dangerous inheritance . . . and the accompanying heroic task of differentiating the Old King in Jungian thinking from the New and actualizing the redemption/renewal process.

The reason that the concept of individuation has grown so vague and (at times ) problematic for us is that our relationship to the hero is diseased or broken.  We do not know well enough what it is or what it is for.  We have all the necessary data and information . . . but it is mixed in with a lot of delusion and misunderstanding.  The hero has not been adequately differentiated by Jungian psychology . . . and even as many Jungians have hoped to put it aside (perhaps as an archaic remnant), it has continued to plague and haunt us.  It cannot be permanently ignored or left in its muddled, complex-ridden state.