Jungian Wholeness, Part 5

My personal search for a spirit of Christian solidarity, the ongoing theme of this blog, has led me in the direction of the pursuit of Jungian Wholeness. In this continuing series of posts on that subject, I have recently been exploring Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction.

The human mind unfailingly organizes its activity with respect to patterns and images, some of which come pre-fabricated within the psyche. These pre-existing patterns are the Jungian archetypes: the archetypal mother and father; the hero image we all respond to; the archetype for wholeness, called the self; and many others.

The self archetype is key. It is the central source of all the archetypal images, the ground of our innate psychic tendencies toward structure, order, and integration. It lies (alongside much individual, personal content) at the core of the ego — the ego is the "I" structure at the center of our consciousness:

The ego's core is archetypal as well as individual and personal. This is the still, small point of reflection, the center of the "I." The archetypal side of the ego's core is pure "I am," a manifestation of the self. It is simply "I-am-ness" ... .

On the personal side, however, the ego is permeable to influence from external forces. Such influence makes its way into the ego and pushes aside this pure "I-ness" as the ego identifies with the new content. This is the ego "learning." (p. 114)

One of the sets of things the ego learns to identify with, early in life, is the bundle of traits Jung called the persona. The persona is a sort of actor's mask which represents how we want others to see us. For instance, I want everybody to think of me as being a normal, upstanding, moral sort of guy — which means that the sexual kinkiness I have come to realize that I have must not appear in my persona. Instead, it appears in the "shadow" cast by my ego upon the rest of my psyche, as the ego identifies with my persona. This perhaps deleterious split in my sexual personality is something my ego has learned is advisable.

By no means is the learning done by one's ego necessarily deleterious. But it does tend to be one-sided:

We learn our names. After that we become our names, we identify with the sounds of them. When the ego is identified with the persona, it feels identical to it. Then I am my name; I am the son of my father and mother, the brother of my sister. Once this identification is made, I am no longer simply "I am that I am," but instead, I am Murray Stein, born on such-and-such a date, with this particular personal history. This is who I am now. I identify with memories, with a construction of my history, with some of my qualities. In this way the pure "I-ness" — the archetypal piece — can get obscured and go into hiding or disappear from the conscious altogether. Then one is truly dependent upon the persona for one's entire identity and sense of reality, not to mention one's sense of self-worth and belonging. (p. 114)

Of course, no one who has read the Book of Genesis' story of Moses' encounter with God behind a burning bush will fail to recognize where phrases like "I am that I am" come from. "I am that I am" is how the Lord God identified himself to Moses; the initial letters, transliterated from Hebrew to English, are "YHWH," which is why the unnameable God of Moses and the Jews is referred to as Yahweh.

When God identifies himself to Moses thus cryptically as "I am that I am," Jung takes this cue to mean that the archetypal self in the human psyche represents, in Stein's words (p. 102), "Jung's God term." That is to say, our search for God is identical with our quest to restore our simple, original "I-am-ness" to the center of our consciousness.