Archetypes

1. Persona-the social mask or the public personality which we adopt in order to protect ourselves from being too exposed in the social world. We both have this as a structure and we develop one. We have a pre-structured belief that people have a social mask so we see other people not as pure people but as creatures hiding behind a mask and we construct one ourselves. What we generally do is we pick some archetype to use as a public mask. If you think about famous people, you can think about what kind of archetypes they have. What are archetypes? They are recreations or structures of repeated human experiences. So we have an archetype for mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother, son etc…clearly these are things that have been repeated throughout human experience, so they are in our minds. We also have many other similar kinds of things. We have:

Wise Old Man or the Sage
The Great Mother, the Wise Old Woman or the Crone
Hero
God
Energy
Various Animals
The Joker or the Trickster
The Idea of Rebirth or Spirit or Prophet
Prophet and Disciple in various situations
The Eternal Triangle or a case in which there is one person loved by two others and there is jealousy

So we can adopt any archetype as a Persona as a public role we play to hide our true complexity and vulnerability


Examples: John Wayne would be the Hero
Madonna is the Seductress
Ronald Reagan Wise Old Man

2. The Shadow-the remnance of our animal history. Whatever is left over from our pre-human days is concentrated into the shadow, or our animal instincts, which contains all of our reprehensible thoughts and feelings. For example: the desire to rip out the throats of our enemies etc. He said that the shadow gives light to the personality. The animalistic nature is something basically necessary to human beings. This is also the archetype that we project into religion in various ways, sometimes into the idea of original sin; we are born with something awful within us or sometimes into something like the devil or an enemy. These are all actually structures within us rather than states in the actual world.

3. Anima and Animas-the archetypical masculine and feminine. Throughout history human beings have related with both men and women so we have archetypes for both masculine and feminine. We need to balance them both in both aspects in order to develop ourselves.

4. Self-the midpoint of personality. It is between conscious and unconscious. It is the point of stability in the middle of all personal polarities. Anytime you have a tension, the Self is actually in between the two poles of the tension. Development of the self is in some ways the goal of our personal development.

The most important part of personality or character of mind is the Collective Unconscious. We also have a:

Personal Unconscious: an unconscious that is composed of all of the repressed, suppressed, forgotten, weak and unimportant thoughts, impressions and feelings. It is vaguely like Freud’s Pre-Conscious. His understanding is that we can get at all of that. We can look at the contents of our Personal Unconscious although we very seldom do, mostly because we either find it uncomfortable or uninteresting. We organize information in our Personal Unconscious so that we have a personal mental organization as well as a collective one. We form:

Complexes: a personal way of understanding. They almost always form around an archetype and sometimes other archetypes, thoughts memories, and experiences are all understood in relation to that archetype. For Example: the guy who could no longer have sex after his mother died. Jung would say that he had a mother Complex. That mother in his mind was very closely associated with sexuality so when mother died, sexuality disappeared. Most people do not associate sexuality with mother in quite so close a way. So a complex is a personal organization of understanding of our lives in the Personal Unconscious.

Ego was basically our consciousness. The Ego for Jung was not like the Ego for Freud. For Freud the Ego was the most active part of the mind trying to reconcile, or a controlling factor. For Jung, the Collective Unconscious is seeking its own fulfillment. The consciousness if often controlled by the Collective Unconscious which often makes the decisions sometimes in spite of all of the plans of the Ego or the conscious mind.

Consciousness kind of sits on top of these things generally following the lead of the Collective Unconscious, but not always. The truth is that development is often painful and unpleasant. Most people are unwilling to go through the rigors involved. His sense if of being led on and not of particularly having choice. In essence, human choice is to face the truth or to avoid it. The truth is that we have to do what our Collective Unconscious tells us or in some way we are stunting our growth and denying our self.

The archetypes which he called the deposits of constantly repeated experiences of humanities, differ from our ancestral past. Jung said we have, “racial, tribal, and family archetypes over and above the universal ones”.



Bowlby diverged from Freud in a very distinct way. Freud thought that we have two basic instincts, survival and procreation (sex). Whereas Bowlby is adding something that is built into us, an instinct which is different from Freud’s conception of instinct. It supposes that there must be some kind of structure built into us before we are born that is not developed, as Freud suggested, through our associations to the satisfactions and frustrations of our basic psychological needs. Freud’s approach, that is building everything up from a few basic building blocks is called an Atomistic Approach. There are several alternatives. Another theory is called:

Teleology: Rather than a causal point of view, or the past causes the present, the future causes the present. This is not causality in the same sense. Sometimes it is described as causation by design. You can think about attachment in that way. If you did not know that we had an attachment instinct, you would not be able to predict a baby’s behavior at about age one when it develops stranger anxiety becoming more upset upon separation from parent, hence developing the secure base phenomenon. It is only because we have this idea that this is the way children are going to become, that we are able to better understand children’s behavior. You will recall when the Robertson’s first observed these things; they couldn’t understand them and tried to fit them into a Freudian framework that simply did not work. This is why Bowlby had to step outside of that framework to create the theory of attachment to make it work.

Teleology assumes that humans are already built complex and what we have are potentials for growth. In psychology, the potentials for growth are in our mind. Similar to when we are born, we have the capacity to grow to a certain height and grow in a whole variety of ways. Jung argues that we are very complexly structured from birth and what life is about is bringing into fruition these very potentials. In some ways this is a modernistic approach. That is that it is an approach that the humanists adopted a few decades after Jung.

Is this true? Think about the contrast. If the past causes the present than you would not be able to see any structures in human beings that were not brought about by commonalities in their environment. Whereas if we are more pre-structured in some ways, then we will expect to see some things emerge regardless of environment. This is kind of like the last aspect of instinct from the ethological point of view; it appears in muted or altered form even when normal opportunities for its expression are absent. Attachment is actually a teleological argument rather than an atomistic argument.

Do you believe in a certain kind of biological predestination? Do you believe that you are born with certain potentials? Was Beethoven predestined to be a composer? Was Michelangelo predestined to be a sculptor? Are you predestined to have certain traits or characteristics? Do you see the world in particular ways because of the way you were born? Are we born with different talents, tendencies and abilities to perceive?

Question: What about environmental influences? Answer: We are talking specifically about just the genetic component. It is not that environment does not have an effect, what we are arguing about is, are we simple and everybody pretty much the same built up in reaction to the environment, or are we very specifically different?

It is clear that we are born different. It is not the case that we all learn the same things easily or with equal difficulty. So the question then becomes, in what way are we structured? How would you go about finding out? What in general are the structures with which human beings are born? What mental structures or potentials are we born with? One way to find out would be to look at other species and find ways that we are different and we are pretty different even from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans. We are similar in many ways, particularly physical ways, but they do not create culture in the same way or certainly not to the same degree that we do.

How far does this go? Is your whole life and every move predestined?

Example: Movie Predator-The alien has different kind of eyes than we do. The alien sees infrared instead of visible light. It sees things the same as long as it were the same temperature. If not, then for instance, it can see the heart beating in the lizard for instance. Cannot see Arnold at all.

Example: The Dalia is a big showy flower that is pinkish-purplish, or is it? If we were a bumblebee seeing in ultra-violate light, it would not look like all one color. You would see bulls eye or spiral patterns. Which does it really look like? What is reality? Are we connected with reality?

The truth is that we have a piece of it and we think that it is real. This is because we are born with a particular potential. We discover in the world, in some sense, what we are predestined to discover. We see things the way human beings do which is only part of the story. There are many things that we do not see.

Cats use their sense of smell mainly and we use our vision. We are a visual dominant animal. We adjust everything to fit the way our vision sees it like with the bar at the Exploritorium

Not only are we born with potential, but also the world into which we are born is already born in us. Jung said, “The world into which man is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image.” That is, what we have the capacity to experience is a potential with which we are born and is not in reality itself. If we give this, that human reality is not the reality, but only a piece of it, what else can we say about human potentials and human interior design? What are our potentials?

One way to sort it out is that we can look towards universal human potentials and we can do this. We know one of human beings most unique properties is the degree to which humans create culture. So we can look at culture across time and space. We can look at different groups of people separated by years and miles. What we find when we do this, and Jung spent years and years studying this, is we find marked similarities. He suggested that the things that are reproduced by people separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of thousands of years must in some way be built into human beings. So just like our perception, culture is also built into us in some way or at least the potential for culture, and culture develops in a limited number of possibilities, which are determined by the structure already born into the human mind.

How many structures are born into the human mind and what are they? Nobody has ever developed a catalogue of them. Jung’s claim is that there are hundreds of them if not thousands. Do we have hundreds of possibilities built into our minds? According to Jung’s we are predisposed or born with the idea of things like circles, triangles and squares. So it is very easy. Little kids can pick these up very early on whereas some animals cannot.

Question: Is this like Socrates Forms?
Answer: No. Reality is somewhere else and the forms are in our minds. These forms are not reality, they are in our minds. Jung once said for instance, “if you find out someone’s belief about God, it tells you almost nothing about God, but lots about the man.” We can look at the way we perceive and think, and it tells us more about us than it does about the world itself.

We must be born with some structure. The structure for all of these potentialities Jung called:

__________________
Sarfraz Mayo