Sylvain Saboua
Conscious awareness, this late development of evolutionary biology, is merely a lightweight component working together with other parts of a greater whole. Jung was the first in our times to offer a sound and scientific approach to this psychological totality with his laying out of the Archetypes met upon the path to Individuation. In this piece, I shall take up and draw upon this perspective in order to lay out a basic -and proactive- ontology of awareness.
At the center of the whole psyche, we find the nucleus of awareness around which all other parts organize and develop. This nucleus called self is assumed to appear at a very early stage in an individual’s development, probably before birth during the shaping of the nervous system and the brain, which ends up around the fourth week after conception[1]. In the womb, this self goes on progressively getting strengthened as the embryo develops, as well as experimenting a proto-separation from the surrounding environment of the mother, which if everything goes well foresees the natural birth and delivery of the newborn.
A Child’s Play
In line with the Cosmic Balance requiring that every action finds its reaction, major archetypes develop as pairs, one conscious and the other unconscious (or subconscious). Apart from specific cases of major trauma, a baby’s self remains mostly wholesome, nonetheless we could take certain events to constitute the premises of the development of a major component of a healthy psyche, namely the I, polar complement to the self – the most significant, and sometimes traumatic, of these events being birth itself. The I is simply the same nucleus of pure awareness as the self, inasmuch as it is considered from its own perspective of being the proactive center, instead of being considered from the point of view of the meta-ordering totality of the Self. The I as an individualized complex fully develops thus later during childhood and young age and is a sine qua non requisite of effective magical operations, [3] especially when practiced in a non-dual state.
A healthy conscious development at this age requires healthy upbringing schemes on the part of both parents (and, may we add, it requires both parents), as each parent will imprint on the toddler’s psyche the basic complexes for the archetypes of the Shadow, as the same-sex parent, and the Anima or Animus, as the other-sex parent. This deserves a longer development than what we can afford here, but one can make a few general statements. [4] First, the baby and toddler should experience the couple both as parents taking care of him, as mother and father separately, pairing with one parent in contrast to another according to each parent’s role, and later on as a pair against which he can differentiate and individuate. The mother provides the primordial fusion and a principle of identity, while the father provides a more innovative aspect and a principle of differentiation and individuation. The child’s experience should go back and forth between all possible combinations, thus the attitude of the father and mother will both lay out basic schemes for the Animus in little girls and the Anima in little boys respectively.
Here it is necessary to come back to Jung and lay out the case for psychological healing from development imbalances. Indeed, regardless of whether the scope of Jung’s model for the structure of the psyche is limited to unhealthy patients or extends beyond them to the majority of individuals, one can observe that during youth most individuals tend to develop reactionary and challenging attitudes to what has informed their development up to now, be it their upbringing and/or “society”. If we were to take up Jungian themes to make sense of this we could say that this marks a time where the Shadow or personal subconscious comes into play against the Ego or constructed image of oneself. The Shadow, in general, is constituted by all the content which the individual can’t accept to see in himself, which could be because of its reprehensible aspect but also because one doesn’t feel worthy of praising oneself for positive qualities.
Indeed, one of the main functions of the self as threshold of awareness is to act as a filter which selects that which the I is used to or solid enough to experiment, and of which it will be informed, whereas that which would submerge it is maintained by the “filter” outside its field of awareness as much as possible – swept under the rug to be cleaned up later. Therefore an individual little by little “integrates” the norms (emergence of the personality, ego, and persona) required by the collective functioning and develops complexes (development of the subconscious, shadow and anima/animus) taking root in the emotions suppressed by this very filter function in reason of their intensity or foreignness.
Given that the shadow/ego pair is known under one form or another by most people suffice they have some kind of awareness of basic psychological principles, I won’t expand more concerning these specific archetypes. If one wants to read more, Jung outlined his view about the Shadow and other archetypes in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, and the internet is full of more or less pertinent texts about Shadow work. I find that the other subconscious archetype deserves careful study, however, as it runs deeper and is quite less expanded masterly on, namely the syzygy or male/female subconscious pair. Whereas the shadow, gateway to the personal unconscious, functions on relatively the same mode for both sexes, we will see that the contra-sexual archetypal couple, as Jung called it, functions differently for each sex, which is a very natural proposition given that the Anima and Animus mainly relates to gender and in that, to the opposite one.
Anima and Animus
The Anima is roughly defined as “the feminine in man”, while the Animus is “the masculine in a woman.” To go further, the Anima is an inner image of women, or an ideal woman, which every man carries within him shaping and shaped after his relationships. The Anima or feminine is held by Jung as being responsible for the erotic function of the psyche (Eros) which manages relatedness and affects. The same goes for women, and the Animus or masculine is held as being responsible for the reasoning function of the psyche (Logos) which manages knowledge and opinion. The prime materia for the establishment of those archetypes is the (infantile) relationship with the other parent – the experience with the parent of the same gender nourishes the Shadow – the unfolding of the Anima based on mother in men, and the Animus based on the father in women, deserves a whole article of its own. [4] And this is as far as the symmetrical analogy applies: indeed, the process of encountering, coming to grips with and integrating one’s contra-sexual different bears both similarities and discrepancies depending on the individual’s gender (among other idiosyncratic determinations).
Jung has said: “It seems to be a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women to have irrational opinions.” [5] Far from praising or being indifferent to this state of affairs, he was actually diagnosing a civilizational immaturity that can be witnessed in ordinary relationships as well as plays a key role within them. And it is difficult to argue with him, for up to recently and in his time have not “virility” been commonly praised as macho and unsentimental however occasionally expressing itself in outbursts of violence, and “femininity” as a candid and emotionally frivolous yet dependent on the former to feel fulfilled? This complex entanglement has persisted for a long time because both require the other to coexist in a strange but fulfilling harmony[6].
We can lay the groundwork for a healthier, more mature psychological kind of relationship, however, one in which both partners are more aware of and have integrated their own archetypal complexes. As it has been noted, one needs to have a conscious relationship with archetypes in general, otherwise, it is a case of possession by the subconscious. We can also recall that the sexual archetypes are the instruments enabling projection in general, as they are loaded with what the subject has the least conscious acquaintance with. The integration of these archetypes and the acquiring of a conscious relationship to them is done by consciously engaging with their qualities… as well as their projected lacks.
For men, for instance, it will consist in detecting and uprooting the emotional attachment that is subconsciously invested in viewing and criticizing others from an allegedly impartial and detached perspective – in other terms, if something in another individual conjures up so much unease or annoyance, it is probably the reflection of a tendency of their own nature which they have not learned to recognize yet, and which consequently manifests as unbearable. Women should get an awareness of their own “grand opinions” and recognize the absence of rationale for being so attached to them despite sincerely believing them objective and thoughtful – in other terms, if in the course of a confrontation of opinions of any sort, it sounds that you are unilaterally right and your opponent is despairingly wrong, it is the time to reconsider your view and balance it, for instance by trying to pretend that it is erroneous and make an argument for that case. Both will require that one bears particular attention to self-observation at all times. The keyword is attachment as well as investment. In other terms, one wants to look at that which perniciously makes him or her lose control over the smooth flowing of one’s own emotional and relational life, as well as one’s own thinking and reasoning process.
Self
Whereas the first part of this essay could be said to expose filtering mechanisms on the part of the self/I dyad, the second part treating the contra-sexual archetype relates mainly to the projection mechanism as espoused by Jung. Indeed, the contra-sexual archetype, with its content relating primarily to the Other, is the main vehicle responsible for projection within the individual psyche, projecting the contents of both subconscious archetypes, the Shadow and the Anima/Animus.
Bringing to awareness the contents of one’s own projections allows to engage in a conscious relationship with the subconscious archetypes, that is, to be aware of their intervention and influence in real time in everyday life. When one is used and eased enough with that process, finally the I is redeemed and the Self can become a common friend and ordinary sensed reality. For Jung, Self is an Imago Dei and has for the main function to ensure the union or bridging together the conscious and unconscious which, by virtue of its unifying and “whole” aspect, heals the fragmentation of the whole psyche.
This allows perhaps to pave the way for a reconciliation of Jung with another immense thinker and author, namely Julius Evola. Indeed, the former has at time required collaboration with the latter, however Evola declined for two reasons (as we can speculate) : firstly, he personally wanted to void anything to do with the academia which he saw as decadent, and secondly, he saw psychology as nothing less than a field opening the psyche to the influence of its own basest and muddiest elements. “Alchemy has nothing to do with the delirious productions of mentally ill patients,” he would say, fervent critic of the whole psychoanalytical current and the exaltation of the subconscious.
However, I want to argue that Jung’s laying out of the structure of the psyche seems like a more integral and spiritual view than that of his psychoanalysts colleagues, and if we see the Self as what it is, namely a supra-conscious archetype, this makes the case for a conciliation with a more Evolian-magical approach. And I hope that this essay has made the case for the living presence of the archetypes in ordinary life, as well as for the necessity of being fully conscious of their influence or engaging on the path to Individuation and self-realization.
[1] Confer embryology and neurological studies. It is suspected that one of the phylogenetically eldest parts of the brain, the reticular formation, could be nature’s devised tool for channeling awareness.
[2] As studied by Stanislav Grof laying out the Perinatal Birth Matrices (PBM).
[3] As stressed by Julius Evola in his first period of writing (Magical Idealism and the Gruppo di UR).
[4] For a complete development, see (in French) Marie-Claire Dolghin-Loyer, Les Concepts Jungiens, pp 294-316
[5] Aion ch. The Syzygies: Anima and Animus
[6] See Bernardo Sena, The Lilith Complex
