Quest for the Self, Part 5

The final chapter of Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, the ongoing concern of my Quest for the Self series of posts, is about synchronicity. This topic is the single most controversial one in the theory of the human psyche proposed by the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung, over a very long and productive lifetime as a psychologist and psychological theorist, came to believe many hard-to-believe things about how the psyche is constituted. For example, he found there to be, in addition to the personal unconscious mind that each of us instantiates individually, a collective unconscious that is the same from one person to the next.

In this deep, universal realm of the unconscious psyche he found a set of potent personifications: divine infant, hero, king, queen, mother, father, etc. — along with powerful images that are not personifications, such as the mandala and the cross familiar in the East and the West, respectively, as religious symbols.

These images make their presence known in our dreams and myths, our stories and our art, in every time and place and culture. Where do they come from?

Basically, Jung said, they come from the Self.

The Self is the master of all the archetypes. Many images come directly from it, including hero, king, queen, cross, and mandala images. Any archetypal image whose basic meaning is "wholeness" or "growth toward wholeness" comes from the Self. Thus, when we dream of a tree, it is the Self that hides behind it.


The human task during the first half of our normal lifespan of 80 years or so is to manifest the ego, the center of our conscious mind. During the second half, this changes. We are then on a quest to realize the Self.

But what is the Self?

An archetype, yes. As an archetype, it is a source of numinous power. It is by means of this power that the Self and the other archetypes provide the unconscious psyche with their archetypal images, which then gather strength and invade the conscious psyche in the form of symbols.

Provide? Invade? Yes. For the archetypes, including the Self, lie outside the psyche proper, in a "psychoid" region that builds bridges between the mind and the body.

In fact, the Self — and here is where controversy arises — exists independently of the psyche of the individual person. It exists independently of the body of the individual. It pre-exists each of us, and it goes on existing after we die.

Within each one of us, the Self represents the image of God, the imago Dei. As a Being that transcends our own limited being, the Self is like unto God himself.


The transcendent Self, furthermore, is the basis for synchronicity.

Jung defined synchronicity as coincidence with meaning. Life is filled with uncanny coincidences between external, objective events and internal, subjective events. Here is one such coincidence. Jung wrote of synchronicity in an essay called "Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle." It appeared in a book co-authored with physicist Wolfgang Pauli, whose contribution was an essay called "The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Expression of Scientific Theories of Kepler."

Whence the synchronicity? Today I perused Stein's chapter discussing these two essays; last night, by pure coincidence, I watched an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series in which Sagan dramatized Johannes Kepler's life, spent in quest of an understanding of the planets' motion around the sun.

As of last night, I had no idea that Kepler's struggles were of Jungian import ... though I recognized that Kepler's original ideas, discarded only after a long, failed attempt to harmonize them with actual observations of planetary movements, were projections of Jungian archetypes onto the natural world.

Kepler spent his life trying to show how the world in its adherence to natural laws exemplifies ideas in the mind of God.

My watching a TV show about Kepler and the very next day reading of the importance of Kepler in Jungian discussions of synchronicity is itself an example of synchronicity: "the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state" (p. 211).

Put more simply, synchronicity is a "falling together in time" of two events in such a way as to produce a subjective sense that the falling together is meaningful in some way. Synchronicity is coincidence with meaning.


In my example, the falling together of two "Kepler events" means subjectively to me that I'd better put aside my ordinary skepticism and take synchronicity seriously, as a sign of the Self.

Stein puts it all this way:

Synchronicity is defined as a meaningful coincidence between psychic and physical events. A dream of a plane falling out of the sky is mirrored the next morning in a radio report. No known causal connection exists between the dream and the plane crash. Jung posits that such coincidences rest on organizers that generate psychic images on one side and physical events on the other. The two occur at approximately the same time, and the link between them is not causal. Anticipating his critics, Jung writes: "Skepticism should ... be leveled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right ... " (p. 210)

Synchronicity is acausal. The internal image, a fact in its own right, does not cause the external event. Nor does the external event cause the associated appearance of the internal image.

In my example, the external event is the coincidence of two apparently unrelated "Kepler events." The internal image is, I'd say, another way in which the Self presents itself to the psyche: as a world which, in Jung-speak, is more of an unus mundus than we normally give it credit for. Things that go on in such a close-coupled world have meaningful, if surprising, connections. They have hidden "organizers" that generate coincidences that are uncaused but meaningful.

The Self is chief among these hidden organizers. From a Jungian perspective, the Self is God.

Quest for the Self, Part 4

Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, my ongoing focus of late, was last taken up in Quest for the Self, Part 3. The Self is perhaps the most mysterious component of the human psyche as mapped by the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

The Self can be thought of as the most important of the "archetypes" of the collective unconscious shared by every member of species Homo sapiens. Each of the several archetypes we all possess within ourselves represents "an innate potential pattern of imagination, thought, or behavior" (p. 233), and, while this pattern itself remains outside our ordinary waking consciousness, it is capable of representing itself as images of various sorts that become symbols in dreams, myths, fairy tales, art, and religious icons.

One of the symbols the Self can employ in its ongoing mission to shape and reshape our lives is the mandala, such as the one pictured at right. Another is the Celtic Christian cross shown at left, or any other Christian cross. The Self uses such abstract symbols to transform our consciousness because they have a form that represents wholeness, symmetry, and balance.

When we start talking about the Self "using" images and symbols to provoke in us a greater consciousness and wholeness, things are admittedly getting really weird from the everyday rational perspective. In this post, I'd like to sort through some of these "weird" ideas.

Let me begin with this quote from Stein (p. 197):

... we can think of the self [note that Stein does not capitalize this and other Jungian terms, as I do] as a cosmic entity that emerges in human life and renews itself endlessly ... .

The Self is, Jung believed, an imago Dei, an image of God. The images that it introduces into the human psyche are images of this image of God.

One of these images generated by the Self from outside the psyche, but showing up in the psyche per se, is the idea of the Hero. Archetypal images can be personifications, as with the ideal of the Hero, or they can simply be transformative, as with abstract cross/mandala images, which if meditated on and otherwise taken seriously, can bring us to higher stages of consciousness and personal development.


The thrust of the Self as the prime archetype in the collective unconscious is, in fact, to bring itself fully into the light of consciousness. We start out life with very little consciousness indeed: what consciousness there is represents a sort of "participation mystique" in which we as newborn infants are unable to distinguish between our own selves and everyone and everything surrounding is in our immediate environment.

As we learn to make such careful distinctions, what Jung called the "ego" becomes the center of the conscious psyche. At this and subsequent stages of conscious development, it is necessary for the ego to banish huge portions of the original contents of the psyche into the unconscious depths. We lose touch with many of the things that are contained inside the mind, including the images and ideals of which the Self and the other archetypes — which, Jung showed, are actually working from a region outside and beyond the psyche proper — form the basis. Yet these images and ideals still make themselves felt, popping up in our dreams and fantasies, where they often become the raw material for myths.

The Hero ideal, a manifestation of the Self archetype, typically shows up for the first time while we are children. It personifies what our inbuilt expectations of the hero are. Mythic heroes and those of film, TV, and popular fiction — think Superman — typically adhere to these expectations. Each of us goes through several stages of life in which we are particularly susceptible to Hero images.


There are many stages of conscious development and associated archetypal images that reflect the guidance of the Self. Stein lists some of these (p. 194): "the divine infant, the hero, the puer and puella, the king and queen, the crone and the wise old man [are all] expressions of this single archetype." (No, I don't know what the "puer" and "puella" represent, but I do know these are the Latin words for "boy" and "girl," respectively.)

As we go through these various stages and respond to these images and the ideas associated with them, Jung said we cycle repeatedly through four basic levels of conscious development. I won't try to describe these levels and cycles in detail here, but I mentioned the levels briefly in Quest for the Self, Part 3. The four levels are defined by the five circles of available psychic wholeness: Anthropos, humankind's spiritual ideal, the highest circle of attainable wholeness; Homo, our everyday ideal of humanistic perfection; Serpens, the serpent, symbolically the root of all animal wisdom; Lapis, representing the integrity associated with plant life and mineral formations; and Rotundum, the position in the hierarchy of wholeness which roots the entire hierarchy in the abstract place where physical matter emerges from pure energy.

Rotundum and Anthropos, surprisingly, coincide. Thus, any ascent or descent through these (actually) five levels, as we grow in wholeness during the course of a lifetime, turns out to be a repeated circular movement through four stages. This fact of circular movement that has to be repeated over and over again adds immeasurably, of course, to the great mystery of the realization of the Self.


Again, the main point to keep in mind is that by "realizing the Self" Jung means bringing it, the Self, to conscious awareness. The ego, therefore, has to accommodate itself to the entry of the (capital-S) Self into the realm of consciousness. This is something the ego is not about to permit without a struggle. Jung characterizes the process of "individuation" by which the Self is gradually realized as, per Stein, "not fundamentally a quiet process of incubation and growth [but] a vigorous conflict between opposites" (p. 189).

The "opposites" which together form the psyche are the conscious mind, centered on the ego, and the unconscious mind, wherein the archetypal images form. These two realms are engaged in, says Jung himself, "open conflict and open collaboration at once." Jung's great desideratum is that consciousness and unconsciousness be allowed to engage in, in Jung's own words,

... a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given its chance of having its way too — as much of it as we can stand. ... It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an "individual." (Stein, ibid.)

This is why Self-realization through the process Jung called individuation has to proceed according to anything but a straight line. There are cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels. The Self feeds archetypal images and ideals into the hopper of the unconscious mind, which turns them into symbols that appear in our dreams and imaginings. The symbols alone are visible to ego-consciousness; the archetypes and their images remain hidden. If we respond to the symbols in the way that the Self, as the image of God, intends, we will in effect transform the hidden Self itself!

Jung schematized this Self-transforming process as a repeating cycle of letting each symbolized image or idea pass through the four levels of conscious development, ultimately arriving mysteriously back at the original level, in such a way as to cumulatively "change the originally unconscious totality [i.e., the Self] into a conscious one":

... an archetypal image enters the psychic system at the archetypal end of the spectrum [corresponding to both Anthropos and Rotundum as levels of conscious development] and an integration process ensues on each of the other three levels. (p. 195)

This integration process first arranges for the incipient idea corresponding to the archetypal image that generates it to "become clearer." Then this bright, shiny new idea shifts to the "shadow level," where it must be lived out in the real world — where the new idea inevitably "casts shadows" and provokes conflicts of a light-vs.-dark type. Other people, not given to accept the darker manifestations of the Self, are apt to start registering their disapproval of us at this point — as, I might add, are we ourselves. This seems to be why Self-realization is such a hammer-and-anvil affair.

If we can get beyond such tensions, the clarified and shadow-beset idea next descends to a yet lower level in the consciousness hierarchy, the "level of physis, which is extremely deep in the material substrate of the body, and the body itself begins to change" (p. 196).

Finally, at the fourth level, "the energy level itself is reached ... the submolecular and subatomic level of energy and the forms which shape it" are altered. Owing to the third and fourth stages, the imago Dei, if and when fully realized, is able to in effect move the proverbial mountain to Mohammad and generate the energy of a thousand splendid suns.

Jung, furthermore, likened the whole cyclic process, with its four repeating stages, to "a process of restoration and rejuvenation" — and not just of the individual human person as bearer of the imago Dei. Stein calls the Self, instead,

... a cosmic entity that emerges in human life and renews itself in its rotations through the psyche. Perhaps it relies on human individuals to become conscious of itself, to incarnate in the three-dimensional world of time and space, and also to rejuvenate itself and extend its existence. It subsists in the universe beyond the psyche. It uses our psyches and the material world, including our bodies, for its own purposes, and it continues after we grow old and die. We provide a home where it can emerge and reside, yet in our pride and ego inflation we take far too much credit for its genius and beauty. (p. 197)

Manifestly, this is the Jungian vision of God.

Quest for the Self, Part 3

I continue to work my way through Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction. In my last post, Quest for the Self, Part 2, I talked about five stages of consciousness that Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss theorist of the human psyche, posited we members of the species Homo sapiens are capable of traversing.

We start out, as infants, experiencing a "participation mystique" in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment.

In ensuing stages we become more and more "rational," as we learn to differentiate between ourselves and the outside world; as we stop projecting our inner sources of psychic energy, the Jungian "archetypes," out onto entities in our immediate environment; and then as we stop projecting them onto abstract entities such as religious doctrines about God or more secular bastions of allegiance, devotion, and fidelity.

Yet by the time we have become maximally rational, we often find the need to go a step further and deal rationally with all these archetypal fountains of inward energy. This, Stage 5 of the development of consciousness, is the mark of Jungian Self-realization. In this stage, we find it behooves us to interpret the meaning of the symbols that our unconscious mind throws out, into the light of consciousness, by way of our dreams, our fantasies, our preoccupations, and our myths.

Taking symbols seriously, we may even find our way to a conscious understanding of the prime archetype of all, the Self, which is the taproot and guiding force of Jungian "individuation." Individuation is the process by which we are able to become more and more complete as conscious human individuals.

But this level of consciousness, Jung's Stage 5, is not the be-all and end-all. Jung hypothesized that there may be two more stages. Stein writes:

Officially Jung stopped at Stage 5, although ... he contemplated further advances beyond it. There are suggestions in his writings for what could be considered a sixth and even a seventh stage. For example, in his Kundalini Yoga Seminar, given in 1932, Jung clearly recognized the attainment of states of consciousness in the East that far surpass what is known in the West. While he is dubious about the prospects for Westerners to achieve similar stages of consciousness in the foreseeable future, he nevertheless does grant the theoretical possibility of doing so and even describes some of the features such stages would have. The type of consciousness revealed in Kundalini could be considered a potential Stage 7. (Stein, p. 186)

Kundalini yoga is a system of meditation which seeks to carry the practitioner's awareness ever upward to higher and higher centers of energy, called "chakras" (see image at left). The highest chakra, Sahasrara, visualized as residing at the top of the head, represents ultimate consciousness — Stage 7 in Jung's hierarchy.

I envision the attainment of the Sahasrara chakra as mirroring the Buddhist goal of Nirvana.

Stein continues:

Backing up a bit, there is a type of consciousness that is more accessible to the West and would occupy the place between Stage 5 and this putative Stage 7. Later in his own life when he explored the structure and function of the archetypes in the context of synchronicity, Jung suggested that perhaps these apparently inner structures correspond to structures of being in the nonpsychic world. ... [A] possible sixth stage of consciousness would be one that takes into account the wider ecological relation between psyche and world ... a state of consciousness that recognizes the unity of psyche and the material world. (p. 187)

Synchronicity, says Wikipedia, is "the experience of two or more events which are causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner."

My mental model of synchronicity has to do with the death of my Uncle Ralph. In the early 1960s my father was not at home with us in Maryland when his brother was diagnosed with incurable cancer. Dad was on the Pacific island of Guam gathering information to write a report on the U.S. territory's public safety institutions. While Dad was away, over several long months my uncle declined steadily, in great pain, and Dad was heartbroken that he could not be with him. Finally, the end came. When my mother called Dad to inform him, Dad told her he had had the most uncanny dream the night before, in which all the burdens of life seemed abruptly lifted from his shoulders. He woke up joyously convinced that his dream had signaled the end of brother Ralph's great misery, at long last. And so it had done. Calculating the time difference between Maryland and Guam, my mother and father figured Dad's dream had occurred at just the moment that Ralph passed on.

Jung saw synchronicity as, alongside causality, a patterning of events in this world. The events that can only be explained by synchronicity are the uncanny things we encounter in life.

A world where synchronicity is real is a world, said Jung, where (in Stein's words) "apparently inner structures correspond to structures of being in the nonpsychic world." The archetypal potencies we find thrusting their way into our unconscious minds, first, and then via symbols into our conscious awareness are not just inner potencies. They exist in the outer, nonpsychic world as well.


Here, then, is the reason why Jung was careful to say that the archetypes are not actually contained in the psyche per se. They impinge on the psyche from what he termed the "psychoid" gray area between the physical body and the nonphysical mind. If there is indeed a "unity of psyche and the material world," it stands to reason that there must be some interface between the two. Jung's psychoid region is this interface.

To me, these ideas are earthshaking ones, that the patterns of the inner world of the psyche are also patterns hidden in the exterior world; and that these hidden patterns in the exterior world produce meaning through synchronicity, where mere causality as a mode of scientific explanation can produce none.

It is as if these ideas of Jung's about Stages 6 and 7 of the growth of consciousness imply that in Stage 6 the boundary between inside-the-mind and and outside-the-mind begins to crumble; as if the Beatles' lyric "Your inside is out, and your outside is in/Your outside is in, and you inside is out" makes sense. (This lyric is from "Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey" on the "White Album.") At Stage 6 we begin to see that. At Stage 7 we are completely sure.

It is as if Stage 7 consciousness has come full circle, back to the "participation mystique" of infancy in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment. The difference is that originally we did not understand the inner-outer distinction in the first place, while now we are fully conscious of having overcome it.

It is as if the same Beatles song gets it right when it says "the deeper you go, the higher you fly, the higher you fly, the deeper you go." To Jung, the highest circle of attainable wholeness is Anthropos, the spiritual ideal. Next lower in the hierarchy of circles of wholeness is Homo, our everyday ideal of human perfection, rooted in our ordinary ego-consciousness. Below that is Serpens, the serpent, the symbolical root source of all animal wisdom. The lower two circles of wholeness are Lapis, the integrity associated with minerals and plant life, and Rotundum, the circle which roots the hierarchy of wholeness in the place where physical matter emerges from pure energy.

A neat vertical axis of the growth of wholeness and unity, no? Well, Jung also illustrated it as coming full circle and having its South Pole, Rotundum, meet its North Pole, Anthropos (see Stein, p. 167). The deeper you go, the higher you fly, the higher you fly, the deeper you go.

Quest for the Self, Part 2

In Quest for the Self, Part 1 I talked about Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction. It's an easy-to-read summation of what the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung found concealed in the depths of the human psyche, during a long lifetime of investigation. Namely, Jung found that we all carry in the unconscious portion of our minds prefabricated images of reality that he termed "archetypes," among which the preeminent one is that of the Self. Other archetypes include that of the Mother, the Father, and the Hero.

The Self is the taproot and guiding force of Jungian "individuation," the process by which we become more and more consciously complete as human individuals. This individuation process has as its ultimate goal the conscious realization of the Self archetype.

In the first stage of consciousness, we as infants experience a "participation mystique" in which we have not yet become aware that we are distinct from everyone and everything in our environment. Then, during the ensuing second stage, we learn to differentiate external persons and objects from ourselves — and right off we begin outwardly projecting the contents of our inner unconscious mind, clustered around the universal archetypes. For example, we project the complex surrounding our Mother archetype out upon our own mother.

This second-stage emphasis upon differentiation and projection continues through most of our early adulthood, during which the main task facing us psychologically is to develop our ego as the center of our conscious identity, and along with it our persona as the mask we wear for purposes of social acceptability and inclusion. The second stage will often culminate in projecting our inner image of a perfect mate of the opposite sex — in a man, this image is called the Anima; in a woman, the Animus — out upon the person we fall in love with, marry, and have a family with.

It is the nature of Anima/Animus projection that it also underwrites all of our capabilities for enthusiasm and enchantment, and ideally we never fully outgrow the second stage of conscious development.

Yet our conscious development typically goes on to a third stage, one in which we stop projecting our unconscious contents out onto specific people and things. Instead, we begin to project our images of ideals out upon abstract entities. Such an abstraction carrying our inner archetypal projections is our idea of God, who as Our Father in Heaven receives the projection of our inner Father archetype. God can also be the recipient of our nurturing Mother archetype, when it is likewise projected abstractly outward; in my faith, this is the role of Mary, the Blessed Mother of God.

The third stage of consciousness is necessary for us to gain a capability for allegiance and fidelity, as they apply not only to ideas about God and religion but also to secular ideas such as our country, its military forces, its flag, our favored political party, etc. It is no wonder that for many Americans, allegiance to the United States of America and fidelity to God's word are part and parcel of the same worldview. This is why so many are insistent on keeping the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.

To my mind, Jung's ideas also explain why Americans of a traditionalist religious view are so emphatically against gay marriage and would like to see the Constitution amended to outlaw it. The combination of Stage 3 consciousness, as it relates to the importance of allegiance and fidelity, with Stage 2 consciousness as it emphasizes projecting one's inner opposite-sex ideal out upon an eligible mate and undergirds our capability for zeal is a potent one.


Jung held that never going beyond Stage 3 is not at all uncommon. Yet there is a fourth stage of consciousness, and a fifth. (There may even be a sixth and a seventh. I'll talk about the possible sixth and seventh stages in a later post in this series.)

Stage 4 consciousness has a bright side and a dark side; it can be, Jung admitted, downright dangerous. The fourth stage of conscious development is characterized by a seeming end to the erstwhile proclivity to project the energy of our inner archetypes out onto persons and things, whether they be concrete and specific (Stage 2) or abstract and general (Stage 3).

Instead of disappearing entirely, though, projections of unconscious images and complexes now have as their (secret) target the person's own ego. Even so, our center of conscious awareness is strangely not aware that it is, in effect, being elevated to the status of a god.

When we project, for example, our Father complex out upon our actual, physical father, we invest him with a godlike can-do-anything quality. At some point, usually during our teen years, we become disabused of this mythic identification, often to the point where Dad is now seen as unable to do anything right. But if our consciousness develops into Stage 3, we quickly come to project the same omnipotent, omniscient Father attributes onto our idea of God.

Then, if and when Stage 4 arrives, there is a tendency to think there is, after all, no God. We become atheistic, secular, relativistic, and "modern" in our outlook. In reality, Jung knew, what is happening is that we become our own God. The archetypes once projected out onto the Deity are now being stealthily redirected toward our own ego.

That's not necessarily bad, since for Jung the word "ego" doesn't have to have its usual undesirable connotations. The bright side of this stage of conscious development is, Stein writes, that "it is a real achievement when projections have been removed to this extent and individuals take personal responsibility for their destinies ... The person who has achieved the self-critical and reflective ego characteristics of Stage 4 without falling into megalomaniac inflation has done extremely well in developing consciousness, and is highly evolved in Jung's assessment" (p. 185).

In my estimation one of the prime exemplars of Stage 4 consciousness at its best is the late astronomer Carl Sagan, of Cosmos fame.

But the dark side of Stage 4 is the potential for "megalomaniac inflation" that Stein alludes to. An attitude of "If I want to do it and figure I can get away with it, it must be okay" can result from no longer seeming to have a God or gods to answer to. Another part of the unconscious mind, the Shadow, may take the opportunity to exercise its "seductive persuasions" upon the ego, which can be "easily led to indulge in the shadow's lust for power and its wishes to gain control of the world" (p. 184). At the extreme, this can lead an individual to sociopathic behavior.

Even if inflation of unconscious energies into the realm of the unbridled ego doesn't always go that far, Stein says, "many people cannot bear [Stage 4's] demands. Others consider it evil. The fundamentalisms of the world insist on clinging to Stages 2 and 3 out of fear of the corrosive effects of Stage 4 and of the despair and emptiness it engenders." Despite the fact that Stage 4's brighter aspect can further the psychological health and wholeness of some individuals, there is for others the possible "trap ... that the psyche becomes hidden in the ego's shadow" (pp. 184-185).


Thus, the first four stages of conscious development. Then there may arrive a Stage 5. This stage is what Stein refers to as "postmodern," in the sense that the "modern man's" anomie, meaninglessness, and lack of spiritual center, typical of Stage 4, gives way to an ability to take the once-hidden potencies of the unconscious mind — the archetypes — and bring them under mental scrutiny and into conscious acceptance. Stein writes of this stage:

To approach the archetypal images and to relate to them consciously and creatively becomes the centerpiece of individuation and makes up the task of the fifth stage of consciousness. This stage of consciousness produces another movement in the individuation process. The ego and the unconscious become joined through a symbol. (p. 186)

Specifically, Jung is referring here to one or more of the universal symbols of the Self such as the mandala (see picture at right). The Cross of Christ at left is a version of this same universal symbol.

In my previous post, Quest for the Self, Part 1, I mentioned that some years ago I was heavily invested in studying the recent scientific ideas about the "edge of chaos." Scientists first discovered that "chaos" is a big part of the natural order of things. Systems such as the weather are inherently unpredictable, beyond the next few days, because they are chaotic. Tiny perturbations can change their destinies in ways impossible to follow or predict.

Then there is the "edge of chaos," a regime where abrupt, unpredictable change is married to the graceful preservation of the novel forms thus engendered. This is where the "tree of life" symbolically grows, as novelty and stability are both imperatives of evolution.

I compared the continuum ranging from order to chaos, centered as it is on the fecund, life-giving edge of chaos, to an axis Jung drew into a diagram he made of the hierarchy of wholeness in the human psyche. One one side of this axis Jung placed Christus (Christ) and on the other, Diabolus (the Devil). In the middle, where I'm saying the "tree of life" grows, Jung placed the symbol of Serpens, the serpent.

The serpent-symbol, of course, is an ambiguous one to Christians. On the one hand, Jesus tells us to be "wise as serpents" — for serpents are ancient symbols of instinctual wisdom. On the other hand, it is in the guise of a serpent that the Devil tempts Eve and then Adam in the Garden of Eden. How appropriate, then, that the serpent-symbol is to the Christus-Diabolus line what the edge of chaos is to the order-chaos continuum.

The "tree of life" is another version of the tree as Self-symbol. In fact, Christ's cross is sometimes depicted as a tree.

Chaos, meanwhile, can be taken to symbolize the forces of the unconscious mind, just as order represents ego-consciousness. Jung's desideratum is to make one whole out of these two halves of the psyche. He wrote [per Stein, p. 189]:

Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too — as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil. Between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an "individual."

The "patient iron" must be beaten at least until we arrive at last at Stage 5 of consciousness, it seems. In this stage we begin to take the serpent seriously as, in its paradoxicality, constituting yet another vital symbol of wholeness — as does the "tree of life," as does the "edge of chaos."

Yet we cannot seem to get to this point unless we risk Stage 4 of the individuation process, with its attendant danger of losing our way and giving the ego over to the diabolical machinations of the shadow!

Quest for the Self, Part 1

At the bottom of this post there are a number of labels. If you click on any one of them, you'll see a list of earlier posts I've made. In many cases, the same posts show up in more than one list. That's because they all revolve around the thought of the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung mapped the depths of the human psyche. Among the things he found buried there, according to Murray Stein in his book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, are a "plurality of unconscious images and fantasies" (p. 153).

One of these images, or as Jung called them, "archetypes," depicts from the perspective of any male of our species an idealized bearer of humankind's feminine qualities: the perfect woman, so to speak. This female-ideal is the Anima (see Addressing the Anima). Jung's own Anima, once he had addressed it sufficiently and at great length — a process that took several years — led Jung to a interior experience of an even deeper archetype: the Self.

Stein calls the Self the "most fundamental feature of [Jung's] theory" of the human soul, as well as its "capstone" (p. 151). But the Self is even harder to describe than the Anima (or, in women, the Animus, an image of the masculine ideal which likewise serves its female possessor as a "spirit guide" to the Self).


The Self is, in fact, exquisitely hard to talk about precisely. Specifically because of what Jung called the Self's "transcendence," every correct statement that can be made about the Self is to some extent inadequate to conveying the Self's full truth in its entirety. (Stein, by the way, does not capitalize terms like "Self"; I usually do because I think it makes the discussion clearer.)

"Transcendence" is a term of convenience Jung used to suggest a realm of thought and experience past all opposites, beyond every either-or polarity. Jung thought of the Self as transcendent in this specific sense: if we say the Self is this, we naturally need to add that the Self could not also be that, where that is the opposite of this. But in the case of the Self, Jung taught, such conclusions are unwarranted, precisely because the Self is by its very nature a bridge uniting — or, again, transcending — all the various polarities of our human identity.

First of all, the Self lies beyond the usual subjectivity-objectivity divide, the conceptual opposition between our personal, subjective attitudes and what purports to be the objective truth about the world. For example, Stein writes:

For Jung, the self is paradoxically not oneself. It is more than one's subjectivity, and its essence lies beyond the subjective realm. The self [instead] forms the ground for the subject's commonality with the world, with the structures of Being. In the self, subject and object, ego and other are joined in a common field of structure and energy. (p. 152)

In Jungian terms, the "ego" is the part of the conscious mind we ordinarily think about whenever we say "I": it is what we believe (in the end, erroneously) to be the center of our being. Our own identity is intrinsically different, or so we think, from that of every other being, and any assertion that "ego and other are joined in a common field of structure and energy" is bunk. Hence, much of what we do in life is aimed at furthering the apparent needs of this supposedly unique ego which rules our individual consciousness, potentially at the expense of failing to serve or even opposing the true needs of our fellow men and women. We might be by virtue of our evolutionary heritage self-serving in the way any animal is self-serving, but we couldn't be truly selfish without having evolved an ego.

Yet Jung's interior experience, documented in his autobiography and in his many other writings, went beyond such ego/other oppositions to the realization that:

When the ego is well connected to the self, a person stands in relationship to a transcendent center and is precisely not narcissistically invested in nearsighted goals and short-term gains. In such persons there is an ego-free quality, as though they were consulting a deeper and wider reality than merely the practical, rational, and personal considerations typical of ego consciousness. (Stein, p. 152)

It is one of my preoccupations, in the many posts I've been making and continue to make about Jung in this blog, to try to peer into what his thought has to say about my Christianity, such as it is.

I say "such as it is" because it is regrettably an attenuated notion of God that I find I have in my personal experience, just now in my life.

Yet when I read books like Stein's and the several others I've mentioned in this group of posts about Jung, I find that contemplating Jung's ideas about the Self helps me regain something of the wonder and awe I formerly associated with my contemplation of a Judeo-Christian God.

Why? What's the connection? At a basic level, the answer is a simple one: Jung spoke of the Self as the imago Dei, the image of God within each one of us. Christian theology has it that we all bear such a stamp or spark of divinity, and Jung affirms the exact same thing in different terms:

At the most immediate level [in the hierarchy of agencies within the depths of the psyche] is the shadow, and over this the anima/animus ... stands as a superior authority and power. Presiding over the entire psychic government is the self, the ultimate authority and highest value: [Jung wrote that] "unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei." Jung contends that every one of us bears the God-image — the stamp of the self — within ourselves. We carry the mark of the archetype: typos [in Greek] means a stamp impressed on a coin, and arche means the original or master copy. Each human individual bears an impression of the archetype of the self. This is innate and given.

Since each of us is stamped with the imago Dei by virtue of being human, we are also in touch with [per Jung] "unity and totality [which] stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values." When needed, this intuitive knowledge can come to our assistance ... (Stein, pp. 158-9)

This idea that our intuitive, archetypal knowledge of God as imago Dei comes to our assistance when needed is like, to me as a Christan, the answer to a prayer.


Let me try to be as clear as I can: to Jung the Self is the imago Dei, a supreme, supernal archetype which in turn enshrines certain values above all others: unity, totality, and wholeness.

Bringing the Self into the field of conscious awareness takes power away from the unconscious Shadow by bringing it, too, into the province of ego-consciousness. The Shadow, which represents our "lower" nature — basically, the urges we inherit from our evolutionary forebears — is not destroyed, but it is "depotentiated" and brought into harmony with our other, "higher" nature, our spiritual destiny.

Realizing the Self likewise defuses the power of the Anima or Animus, in its destructive, negative aspect, to take over and ruin the personality.

In short, there is nothing in the psyche, no matter how unsavory at first blush, which cannot be redeemed through Self-realization. Parallels with the Christian message of redemption are obvious here.


Which leads me to the subject of Sin and Evil. (These words are not part of the Jungian vocabulary per se, but I am capitalizing them in deference to their importance in the Christian lexicon.)

It seems likely to me that many Christian theologians as well as lay believers would feel uncomfortable with the implications of Jung's theory towards traditional religious notions of Sin and Evil. In order to try to put my finger on why there would be such controversy, such resistance, let me begin by discussing Jung's thoughts about serpent-symbols.

According to Stein (pp. 162-168), Jung constructed an elaborate schema of wholeness as it pertains to the human soul. There are four levels represented by four three-dimensional double pyramids. I won't go into detail about those four structures, but these doubled pyramids, each pair having a single base in common, are bounded by five separating or terminating circles, each representing a level of attainable wholeness. It is the circles I want to concentrate on.

The highest circle of attainable wholeness is Anthropos, Jung's name for the spiritual ideal he identifies also as the ultimate goal of Self-realization. In Christian terms, Anthropos corresponds to angels, saints, and us after we die and go to heaven, or are redeemed and resurrected into a heaven-come-to-earth. Next lower in the hierarchy of circles is Homo, which corresponds to our everyday ideal of human perfection, rooted in our ordinary ego-consciousness. Below that is Serpens, the serpent, which is the symbolical root source of all animal wisdom and (perhaps surprisingly) deserves its own circle of wholeness on the diagram. The remaining two levels are Lapis, the wholeness associated with minerals and plant life, and Rotundum, the circle which roots the hierarchy of wholeness in the place where physical matter emerges from pure energy.

Of these five levels of wholeness which humans can know or experience, the serpent, according to Stein:

... symbolizes the self in its strongest and most blatant paradoxicality. On the one hand, it represents everything that is "snaky" in human nature: cold-blooded instincts of survival, territoriality, base physicality. On the other hand, it symbolizes the wisdom of the body and the instincts — somatic awareness, gut intuitions and instinctual knowledge. The serpent has traditionally been a paradoxical symbol, referring both to wisdom and to evil (or to the temptation to do evil). The serpent therefore symbolizes the most extreme tension of opposites within the self. (p. 165)

Christians know, of course, that Jesus advised his followers to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Yet it is a serpent who tempts Eve, and through her, Adam, in the Garden of Eden.

In his schematic diagram of psychic wholeness, Jung placed the Serpens circle on a line or axis whose extremes are labeled Christus and Diabolus, Christ and the Devil. To me this line is evocative of a very natural Christian ambivalence toward the serpent-symbol. One the one hand, we have Christ affirming the wisdom of serpents. On the other, the Devil disguises himself as a serpent to tempt humankind into original sin.


As a Catholic Christian, I am attuned to Catholic ideas about Sin and Evil, which are different in nuanced ways from Evangelical ideas. Yet as the son of (lapsed) Baptist and Methodist parents, I respond to Evangelical ideas, too. When Pastor Rick Warren, during his Saddleback Civil Forum (see transcript here), asked presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, "Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, do we defeat it?", I pricked up my ears.

As one who is interested in following Jung's recommendations for heightened Christian awareness through Self-realization, I find I am made uncomfortable by the does-evil-exist question. Upon reflection, I have come up with this as an explanation. Christians who are deeply concerned with how presidential candidates answer such questions are, I imagine, intensely concerned to stay on the safe side — the "Christ side" — of the Christus-Diabolus line.

I find that staying on the "Christ side" of the line and not worrying about straying over to the "Diabolus side" is of less and less concern for me personally, on the other hand, as my spiritual trajectory takes me more and more into a Jungian perspective.

The Serpens circle is right in the middle of this Christus-Diabolus crucial line, though, and out of it spring the higher levels of Jungian wholeness represented by Homo, and then, above that, Anthropos. In bringing Jung's ideas about wholeness into my conscious awareness, I find I have already had to get used to the idea that what we might term the vertical axis of wholeness, the one that passes down through Anthropos, Homo, Serpens, etc., is located as close to Diabolus as it is to Christus.

Some years ago, I found my imagination stimulated by the new scientific ideas concerning chaos and, specifically, the "edge of chaos." The latter is an abstract dynamical region between predictable order and unpredictable chaos; evolution takes place there. The unique dynamics of the edge of chaos are such that rank novelty can emerge gracefully there, embodied in new life forms, and then be sustained indefinitely as life evolves into forms of greater and greater complexity.

In those days I wrote incessantly about the edge of chaos and made repeated mental pictures of it. I now believe these word pictures and mental images were versions of a standard Jungian symbol of the Self. For I imagined the evolutionary "tree of life" as being planted smack at the edge of chaos. To Jung, the tree, in that it represents growth and ascent, is a Self-symbol.

I quickly got hung up, though, on what seemed to me an obvious problem: the edge of chaos is as close to chaos, which is seemingly bad, as it is to order, which is seemingly good. The symbolism, in fact, precisely mimics the notion that in Jung's wholeness diagram, Serpens is equidistant from Christus and Diabolus.

I'll deal with the implications of that in Part 2 of this series.

Middle-earth: It's a Jung World

According to psychologist Timothy R. O'Neill's 1979 book The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth is rife with symbolism. There is an intricate web of symbols in The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and Tolkien's several other books, O'Neill writes. They evoke the theme of Self-realization.

In the theory of the human mind advanced by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the Self archetype is a crucial component. Among the several archetypes in the collective unconscious, the Self is preeminent. To employ an Olympics metaphor, the realization of the hidden Self is the Jungian gold medal in the event of Life.

The Self is a King whose return is sorely needed. As the "potential controlling and organizing force of the personality" (p. 179), the Self starts out like Strider/Aragorn does in LOTR: without a throne. The conscious ego which seems to be the center of the personality is only a steward, à la the stewards of Gondor.

The ego-steward, however, is out of touch with the deep-seated forces of the unconscious. Left to their own devices, these deep-buried potencies can "inflate" into the conscious ego and, in combination with the ego which has become their puppet, rule the psyche in the way that Sauron as Dark Lord of Mordor did the wizard Saruman, and (were it not for the heroism of Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring) nearly did all of Middle-earth.


In particular, the most worrisome potency in the unconscious depths is the Shadow. This archetypal nucleus serves to cluster together the attitudes and attributes we don't dare admit into everyday consciousness, and certainly not into the facade we put up for other people's benefit, the one which Jung called the Persona. The traits we deprecate in ourselves and others often stem from urges we have inherited from our evolutionary forebears. If animals do it and humans aren't supposed to do it, it is held in the unconscious Shadow.

Frodo's Shadow is personified as Gollum, aka Sméagol. Once an ordinary Hobbit like Frodo, Sméagol chanced upon the long-lost Ring that Frodo now inherits as LOTR begins. The Ring's inscription

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

has the coda

... in the Land of Mordor, where the Shadows lie.

The Ring is emblematic of the power of the unconscious, for good or for ill. Those who merely covet its power to inflate the ego — the lust for which power has long since caused Sméagol to degenerate into the craven Gollum — wind up being destroyed by the Ring.

Yet the Ring, in its circular and golden perfection, is also a symbol of the Self in its ability to confer wholeness on the psyche, bringing all erstwhile oppositions into harmonious counterpoise. When Frodo destroys the One Ring in the Cracks of Doom, he "depotentiates" the destructive power of the Ring. Its health-conferring power remains, however, personified by the return of King Aragorn, crowned as Elessar to rule over the incipient Fourth Age of Middle-earth. (Elessar means "Elf-stone"; precious stones, jewels, and crystals, in their symmetry and perfection, serve Tolkien as symbols of the Self.)


O'Neill's is a lovely interpretation of Tolkienesque fantasy — to those of us who are inclined to believe in things Jungian, that is.

There aren't all that many of us these days. It is an interesting, and sad, commentary on the extent to which Jung's once well-received ideas have been declared radioactive by intellectual leaders of today and sealed off in watertight subterranean vessels of thought, that despite the massive popularity of the recent Lord of the Rings films, O'Neill's excellent 1979 book has not been reprinted by its publisher.

The basis of Jungian thought is that we, all of us, have certain inbuilt predispositions to response and belief. Jung called them "archetypes"; O'Neill relabels them "affect-images." O'Neill says in his glossary, under "affect-image":

A more contemporary name for the archetype; affect refers to the emotional domain of behavior, hence the term suggests the self-personification of an emotional complex. (p. 169)

A "complex," in turn, is "a cluster of thoughts, emotions and predispositions, which cluster together and share energy because of similarity" (p. 171).

At the center of each complex in the psyche is a particular archetype or affect-image, the source of the cluster's energy or numen. Jung called that energy "numen" to emphasize that it can seem to us an act of "divine will or divine power" (p. 176) when an archetypal complex emerges symbolically from the unconscious and becomes a source of conscious conviction and overt enthusiasm. Such irresistible powers are, indeed, the ones we are in the habit of calling "numinous."

So archetypes or affect-images are inbuilt numinous powers that predispose us to believe in certain things and respond in certain ways. They typically cloak themselves in symbols, in the way that God appeared to Moses behind a burning bush. There can be symbols within symbols: Jung called God or Yahweh — bush-covered or not — a symbol of the Self.


The things we believe in as a result of archetypal affect-images exerting influence over our conscious minds via symbols tend to be the symbols themselves, not the underlying archetypes: the Self-hiding Yahweh, not the hidden Self.

Most of the symbols we believe in — including, Jung thought, God as an incompletely specified symbol of the Self — tend to lead us down a garden path to "one-sidedness," unfortunately. O'Neill defines this as:

Over-emphasis on conscious pursuits, to the exclusion of unconscious creative promptings, which amounts to a denial of the non-conscious personal and collective personality, [that] produces a ... state of imbalance ... [which is] associated with disorder in Jungian theory. (p. 177)

Self-realization, per Jung, is the ultimate remedy to one-sidedness. It is achieved by a long, winding process of "individuation," the arduous task of becoming the unique individual one was "meant to be" — so-called because we usually start from a position of ceding too much power to the conscious Persona, the mask representing a collective, cultural, social idea of how we ought to behave, rather than the individual, personal imperatives of how we really are.


There is one other key potency in the unconscious mind. It is to me the most mysterious of all: the Anima.

The Anima is personified in Lord of the Rings by, among others, Galadriel, the royal Elf-lady who co-rules the forest realm of Lothlórien along with her husband, Lord Celeborn. In the early stages of Frodo's journey toward Mordor and the Cracks of Doom, Galadriel serves him as a sort of "spirit-guide" (p. 104), giving Frodo a look into her mirror that "reveals past and future" (p. 132).

Galadriel gives Frodo, as a talisman, a phial of light — a "beacon of consciousness" (p. 134) — which he will later use to good advantage "against the suffocating gloom" of the bloated arachnid Shelob, who tries to devour Frodo. (The female Shelob represents the Anima in its negative aspect.)

The light itself is symbolic of the male principle, but the vessel containing it is "associated with the female aspects of the [male] psyche, and reveals the transcending and guiding nature of the Lady of the Forest" (p. 132). In the male psyche, then, the Anima is the locus of the image of ideal femininity.

There is a parallel structure in the depths of the female psyche: the Animus. The Animus, in the depths of a woman's psyche, is the ideal image of masculinity.

So men have an Anima, and women have an Animus, and in both sexes the Anima/us is the gateway to the Self. We need to address our hidden Anima or Animus before Self-realization can happen.

When Frodo confers, late one night, with Galadriel, and looks into her magic mirror, he is addressing his Anima. Galadriel's "vision is long." As her mirror shows past and future to Frodo, she "peers into the unconscious with her all-seeing eyes" (p. 132). Here, "past and future" is symbolic of knowledge of the forgotten, unrevealed unconscious. When we have that, we are well on our way to Self-realization.


The Self-realization wrought by the sacrifice Frodo will eventually make at the Cracks of Doom is, alas, not to be his own.

Frodo and Sam make their way to the fiery mountain where the One Ring was forged, knowing that the only way to depotentiate (in Jungian terms) the negative aspect of its shadowy power and (in Tolkien's terms) to thwart Sauron is to return the Ring to whence it came. It must be consumed by the fire that made it.

As Tolkien relates the events, Frodo has to be helped by Sam even to get close to the Cracks of Doom, despite his erstwhile resolve. Then, at the last instant, he balks at throwing the Ring away ... as up pops Gollum, the personification of Frodo's own Shadow. Gollum tries to seize the Ring for himself before it ceases to exist. As Gollum and Frodo struggle, Frodo puts the Ring on his finger so as to disappear from view. Gollum proceeds to bite Frodo's finger off, and in so doing Gollum loses his balance and falls into the fire along with the Ring he has so haplessly claimed.

Symbolically, what has happened is that Frodo's Shadow, personified as Gollum, has perished along with the Ring symbolizing, potentially, the health-bringing, psyche-balancing, redeeming aspect of his own interior Self. In Jungian Self-realization, the Shadow is revealed to the ego and brought into balance with the other forces of the psyche; it is not destroyed or made to vanish. Accordingly, with Gollum gone, gone too is any hope for Frodo's own personal Self-realization.

This is why Frodo must depart for the Western Isles at the end of Lord of the Rings, along with Gandalf and the superannuated Elven folk. He must leave his beloved Shire behind. His sacrifice has made it possible for Middle-earth as a whole to find the peace and balance of Self-realization, under Aragorn's rule in the Fourth Age. Ironically, though, Frodo, though he is Middle-earth and the Shire's savior figure, must as a result of his heroism forever forego all hope of personal individuation.


We can respond to Tolkien's fantasy tales in Lord of the Rings and his other books as ripping good yarns, nothing else. We don't have to believe in the actual existence of Middle-earth, Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, wizards, magical incantations associated with rings, or any of the other counterfactual paraphernalia of the stories.

Yet Tolkien has charmed three-generations-and-counting with his renderings of what Jung called the archetypes of the collective unconscious. I do not count myself among the most susceptible, by any means. I never read or idolized Tolkien in my youth, the way some of my contemporaries did. I remember sitting in a theater in late 2001, not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, watching The Fellowship of the Ring. Next to me — our late-arriving group had had to split up into individual seats, owing to the vast popularity of the film — was a young woman, a stranger. She treated the scene where a dying Boromir admits that Aragorn, whose leadership he has resisted, is "My Captain, my King" as a three-hankie affair. In Jungian terms that I know now but didn't then, her archetypes were being "constellated." Translation: her buttons were being pushed, bigtime.

Jung mapped the deep parts of the soul where the buttons are situated. These are the very parts of the soul that Tolkien mined for his Ring trilogy and other Middle-earth tales. It's as simple as that.

Addressing the Anima

As I discussed in my Mysterium Coniunctionis series, the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung — that's him at left, on the cover of his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections — applied his theory of the human psyche to the healing of the contemporary Christian church.

Jung felt the church in his day was suffering from a pernicious "one-sidedness," which to him was tantamount to a neurosis. A neurotic person blocks the deep powers of the psyche out of conscious awareness, so these powers' energy — their inbuilt "numen," the root word of numinous — lacks adequate outlet.

Instead of having their built-up pressure tapped and vented by appearing in consciousness as the proxy symbols which typically emerge in dream, reverie, and myth, these archetypes of the collective unconscious can fester and grow septic. They are prone to erupt into our day-to-day attitudes and behaviors in unseemly ways.

As with individuals, so with institutions such as churches and other religious bodies. In particular, Jung felt the contemporary Christian church lacked adequate symbols for representing the individuated Self, that archetype of archetypes which, duly realized through the raising of the psyche's consciousness, replaces one-sidedness with wholeness.

Setting aside for the moment the question of whether Jung was right about Christianity's shortcomings, I'd like to say yet more about the hidden potencies of the human mind, à la Jung's theory. In particular, I'd like to begin discussing Jung's idea of the "Anima."


In Jung's view, the unconscious mind is populated by hidden powers which he called the "archetypes," of which the Anima is one. These serve as templates for images: durable, ubiquitous, cross-cultural motifs depicting universal human experiences.

For example, Jung said we all carry in our deep unconscious an innate image of what a mother is like. That mother-image is generated by the Mother archetype, and we all possess it identically well in advance of any personal experience we have of our actual mothers.

Similarly, we all have an innate idea of a Redeemer, of which Jesus Christ is the primary symbol recognized among Christians.

Some of the archetypes are not personifications. Thus, our archetypal images for Light and Darkness need not be symbolized as human persons. But the archetypes which are not personifications are generally, Jung said, "transformative." When we are fully in touch with their hidden powers — balanced and augmented by the powers associated with their polar opposites — our psyche is necessarily strengthened and enhanced.

The images and symbols associated with the Self, representing psychic wholeness, can be personifications. In fact, Jung held that the Christian God is a symbol of the Self.

The images and symbols of the Self can likewise be non-personal and transformative. The Self archetype, then, is both personal and transformative. God symbolizes the personified Self, Jung said.

If the Self symbol is a transformative, non-personifying one, it serves as an image of wholeness and balance. In that the soul's wholeness results from bridging between all pairs of archetypal opposites, including the seemingly unbridgeable distinction between God and Man, the cross of Christ, by its very form, symbolizes the requisite bridging of opposites.


Of course, there was a person on the cross, so in the crucifix we have a symbol that is both personifying and transformative.





If not personified, the Self can also be symbolized by the image of a mandala, a circular figure suggesting by its completeness and essential symmetry that, again, all pairs of opposites in the mind can be bridged and brought into harmonious balance.


Or, as already mentioned, the cross of Christ (especially a Celtic cross, with its mandala-like circle motif) serves the same transformative function, in that the center of the cross-and-circle where the vertical cross-member intersects the horizontal upright represents a point of perfect balance.


Thus, archetypes, images, and symbols exist or arise in the collective unconscious. The ultimate goal of psychological development is to realize the Self, to bring hat archetype-of-archetypes into the field of conscious awareness. But before that can happen, another hidden archetypal image must first be developed. This is, for male individuals like me, the unconscious structure which Jung called the Anima.

The Anima is a man's innate image of the feminine, of what it is to be a woman. It is a primordial archetype which may or may not capture what women in general are "really" like, much less what any particular woman is like, today or at any time in the past.

The Anima is not culturally derived, not learned. To the extent that it is sexist, it cannot be aligned with feminist thought. If it characterizes femininity as passive, yielding, and sensitive to personal relationships, while the masculine is seen as active, penetrating, and insensitive to personal relationships, so be it.

The counterpart in women to a man's Anima is her Animus. It too represents an innate image, this time of the masculine ideal, of what it is to be a man. If the development of the unconscious Anima is a man's gateway to Self-realization, the development of the equally unconscious Animus is a woman's.

The Anima/us archetype typically serves as the center of a structure or complex in the unconscious mind, called be the same name: Anima or Animus. I'm going to discuss the situation from the point of view of a man with an Anima, but an entirely analogous situation exists for a woman with an Animus. If the Self is ever to be "realized" — brought fully into conscious awareness — first the Anima or Animus has to be developed.


By "developed" Jung meant something very specific (if hard for a lay person to imagine). Take the male perspective: a man quite naturally builds the attitudes and attributes associated with masculinity into the outward mask of the psyche. The Persona, as Jung called this mask, contains the attitudes we men advert to socially and interpersonally. If men are supposed to be active and not passive, for example, this trait of activeness typically shows up in a man's conscious Persona.

But all the while, there is a bundle of attitudes and attributes associated with his hidden, feminine Anima of his. They don't go away, and neither does the power of the Anima. For many men, the Anima is apt to thrust its way into conscious behavior from time to time, resulting in bouts of sullen moodiness, even weepiness, as in "blubbering in one's beer." Though these particular attitudes do not characterize ideal femininity to the exclusion of other, more constructive ones, they are the ones that tend to surface in a man who is for the moment "in his Anima."

The nub of the problem is that his Anima, because it has been shoved into his unconscious psychic depths in favor of the complementary masculine attitudes of the conscious Persona, remains undeveloped. The "functions" of the Anima are, in Jung-speak, deemed "inferior." This is not meant to imply that feminine traits don't measure up to the "superior" masculine attitudes and functions in any absolute sense. After all, in a woman's psyche it is the masculine Animus which is "inferior" and the feminine attitudes and functions in the Persona-mask which are "superior."

When an archetypal image remains undeveloped and inferior, it stays "undifferentiated." What this item in Jung's theoretical lexicon means is a bit on the subtle side. Here is one way I have of explaining it to myself:

Starting in earliest childhood, men "project" their Anima outward upon just about anyone or anything which can duly reflect its image back to them. In the simplest case, the Anima image is projected on girls and women. Whether a male's mother is a candidate for Anima projection, I'm not sure. But little boys certainly project their Anima onto little girls. Teenage boys project their Anima on teen girls. And so on.


Falling in love could not happen, in fact, without Anima projection. And, of course, the same is true of the projection of their Animus by girls and women upon appropriate targets of the male persuasion.

It seems, furthermore, that we all project the Anima/us lurking within us onto recipients other than members of the opposite sex. I'm not here talking about gay relationships, a subject which I as yet know nothing of Jung's take on. Rather, I'm talking about anyone or anything about which we find ourselves feeling zealously enthusiastic. Jung showed that our passions and enthusiasms are generally speaking the result of Anima/us projection. And depression, he said, represents one's inability to project the Anima/us.

But, getting back to the idea that romantic love is an Anima/us projection on both lovers' parts, a potential problem soon crops up. What happens when it turns out, as it always does, that our lover is not actually like the unconscious image we have projected onto her or him?

If the romance is to survive, there has to ensue a dialogue about this reality. The lovers have to mutually face up to the discrepancies between their Anima/us ideals and the real personality of the other person. This dialogue is the means, Jung said, by which each participant begins to consciously "differentiate" the Anima or Animus — i.e., learn its features and how they differ from the actual features of the other person.

In so doing, each lover begins to "develop" the initially undeveloped Anima or Animus lurking within the soul. And this becomes the basis for the great Jungian desideratum of "individuation."


Individuation is the royal road to Self-realization, said Jung. The term comes from the word "individual." As we raise our conscious awareness of what lies buried deeply in the psyche, we become more unique as individuals.

This has to do with the fact that the attitudes and attributes of the persona are intrinsically collective, not individualistic. The mask we wear for the benefit of others is made up of socially approved traits which "everyone" is supposed to have. Quirks of individuality raise warning flags: perhaps this person is not reliably a part of the group.

When the differences between a person's visible attitudes and attributes rise to the level of being more than mere quirks, there can be social sanctions imposed, even ostracism or worse. In such a setting, it becomes hard to "individuate": to develop parts of the psyche, such as the Anima/us and ultimately the Self, which are not accepted by the Persona.


The above represents a brief introduction to the Anima/us, how it fits into the realm of the archetypes in general, and how its development is essential to individuation and Self-realization. In subsequent posts I talk more about the Anima/us and how it functions as a "spirit guide" for seekers of the Self.