Archive for the ‘Jungian Concepts’ Category

I doubt my Grandpa has ever finished fifth grade. Yesterday, June 30th he would be 97. Born in Polignano a Mare, a village in the eastern coast of the Italian boot, moved to Brazil where he worked since he was a child, leading a very hard life. Back to Italy for the military service, he married and built a family, until he had to emigrate again to Brazil in 1950.

He betrayed my Grandma once, during the time they lived apart, she with the children in Italy, he in Brazil working to gather the money for their tickets. Evidently, the extra conjugal relationship continued after Grandma arrival, and went on until the day she suspected something, as he walked out in the Sundays afternoon, well dressed and perfumed (he was Italian!). Grandma took her two daughters by hand, my Mother and my Aunt, and the three women of the house followed him. When his mistress opened the door to welcome him in, Grandma – who also didn’t completed elementary school but was no fool – shouted, from the other side of the street: “Shame on you! How could you, a married man, with children! What a shame!” And various other adjectives in dialect I could not repeat. Read the rest of this entry »

We know ourselves through people, things, and situation we like and dislike. Projection is the way the psyche interacts with the outside and distinguishes itself from it. It can be positive and negative; above all, it’s a general and perfectly normal psychic mechanism (Jung).

We projects the traits we admire (but believe they don’t belong to us) on heroes and public figures, or simply on the classmate, the neighbor or the friend. We create idols and shining potent people from our own psychological “blood and flesh”. We empower them with our own power, because they are “what we, unfortunately, are not”.

The thing about worshiping idols is that we don’t need to get up and go for it. It takes a lot of effort to make a dream come true, to change a pattern, or be whatever one wants to be. Idols, like stuffed animals, are likable, they can stand on a shelf and remind us that a beautiful life does exist… But let’s now go back to the couch, to relax and munch popcorn!

The same applies to negative projections. We get rid of what is unpleasant to face throwing it onto somebody else. We literally wear the other person with our own fantasies. That’s another way to create a comfortable world: we have the idols on one shelf and the evil on the other. And what about us? We can comfortably stretch our legs out on that same sofa and…!

To turn projections into a resource of self knowledge one must do the sweaty process to look at oneself and enact a psychological work. The less self conscious a person is the more their projections will be like giant balloons, floating far away from reality. However, there’s a hook. The objects of our projection do have something to do with it.

We are not crazy people who see a horse and project on it a monkey. The idols do have some of the qualities we give them. The evil person does have a bad character. The point is that an unconscious projection creates absolute. Thus idols become The Idols, and a bad person turns into The Evil. This is the childish part of this story.

Once you become conscious of your projections idols and evils continue existing, but you are not so much bothered by them. You stop being a pious follower of new idols or a gossiper of the bad guys. Growing out of projections is a form of freedom. Now you understand why those people are what they are while you learn something important about yourself. Then you simply move on.

C. G. Jung discovered a psychic figure that stays between the ego’s world, where our identity resides, and the unknown and unconscious world, beyond ego. The figure is called Anima in men and Animus in women.

Anima and Animus, primarily, assume the images of our parents. The boy, being a men, will identify, at the ego level, with his father, and he’ll have his mother related to the internal figure of the Anima. His mother’s personality will mark the main characteristics of his Anima, that is, his way to deal with women and feelings.

Distant, ambiguous and treacherous mothers will have sons who do not give themselves to sentiments, fear and avoid them – although they might be desperate for them. Manipulative mothers will have sons who use feelings as a way to manipulate their companions and whoever has a sentimental relationship with them (their children, for example), being ambiguous and complicated in their way of loving. Moralist and scared mother will be banishing from their sons a daring and confident attitude towards life. “Good” and indulgent mothers will have sons who seek for the same availability and comfort by their own wives.

Because we, human beings, are much more than our ego can imagine, there are other factors that influence in the partner choice, and I have observed some of them. For example, I’ve noticed that a men can “instinctively’ look for a woman who is apparently the opposite of the feminine model his mother represents. That doesn’t mean that what I just wrote is wrong. If we get closer, we’ll see that, the man with a manipulative mother married the nice and simple girl, but he found in her the same available attitude to love him and consider him important as his mother used to do. Or, a man with a treacherous mother finds a trustable woman because he himself has other inner aspects he’s not aware of, but eventually he will treat his wife as if she were that same woman who betrayed so many time his expectations about love.

We need to observe individual realities in a holistic manner in order to really know what have been “lost” of the old model, and what have been “kept” of it. Relationships are made by several “dovetails” on different levels. Therefore, to truly understand them, we must give up rush and superficiality.

In the women’s case, the Animus acts in a similar way. The father represents a viewpoint on the world, the dimension of ideas, and an ideology about life every person, being aware or not, has. Because, unfortunately, there are a few thinkers and philosopher, the ideas in a family tend to be standards and/or rigid. As we know, changing mentality is very hard, requiring powerful events – which, as earthquakes, shake the bedrock – and/or a strong and mature personality. Generally, common places prevail. The media reinforces them and generally school hollow them. After all, who are men as individuals? They are people who, basically, work to support their families. This requires a lot of time and energy, not remaining much for other activities, such as thinking about life. The daughters of these men will have a way of thinking based on the repetition of common places – if they are their neighbor, social class or race’s commonplaces, it doesn’t matter. They’ll still be trivial commonplaces. It’s not by chance that women tend to be more conservative than men.

A staunch ideology when internalized since childhood stops the fresh and creative exchange with the inner world, that is, with what the woman is within herself, her originality, inventively and what makes her unique. And it does so for two reasons: first, because a limited masculine model turns a person insensitive to new ideas. And second, because this model undermines the confidence towards any internal news. Women’s self esteem will be pegged to this model’s approval (her inner father), which, because of the characteristic I showed earlier, will only accept her if she conforms to it. Thereof the enormous difficulty women have to state themselves and say what they think!

To better understand Intuition it‘s important to report the thoughts of the psychologist who studied this phenomenon and who related it to the psyche as a whole and to its way of functioning.

Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatric and psychotherapist (1875-1961) introduces “Psychological Types” (1921) the psyche typology and its dynamic, based on his understanding of the psyche.

The psyche works with four functions, he says, by which means it deals with the world. The number four represents in many cultures the idea of totality. Intuition is one of four ways the psyche knows the world and find its successful way to live in it.

Jung achieved his conclusion after researching for several years why people studying the same phenomenon get to such different conclusions. The first example, coming from his experience, was the psychoanalysis and the theories of Freud, Adler and Jung himself. But Jung, as his usual, didn’t stop there. He undertook a long study of historical figures in philosophy and theology and their theoretical differences. Jung’s conclusions led to his theory of the four psychic functions: Sensation, Intuition, Thinking and Feeling.

Intuition is then a psychological function, it’s a tool to better manage life. Thus, it is not a crazy thing someone can have, like a mental disease. It’s not about an unbalanced mind. Intuition does have a legitimate place in the psychic life, that is, in our life as a positive way to deal with reality, overcoming challenges and reaching our goals.

The Persona is a useful and practical Jungian concept, easy to understand. The adaptation to the world demands a determined “format”, that is an ensemble of attitudes, choices, believes, feelings and even thoughts. This “configuration” is necessary to fit in the ambience in which we are born and live.

Since childhood, there is a subtle but firm expectation coming from parents, environment and school leading to a defined direction and “way of being”. It is considered “normal” anticipating that children will adjust to the images their parents carry in their minds and that probably is in there since many years before children were born. This picture has to do with parents identity, story and unaccomplished desires.

The child will have this one ton “armor” weighing over her development, getting to have many times some comprehensible breathing respiratory problems (both symbolically and physically). This happens mainly when the parental model is far away from what she carries within herself.

At school, children will find a second series of models – templates – to have their being formatted by. Evidently they will instinctively choose the ones that carry on what they had learned at home or, on the contrary, the ones in direct opposition to their family‘s when they still have the roaring voice inside claiming to be listened to.

Once grown up, already tamed and molded, they’ll choose the professions that personify the learned model or part of it, or even the aspiration intrinsic to it. The utmost attempt of self-understanding is electing to study psychology in college.

The Persona is the final product of a series of adaptations between what the outside world demands, starting from the parents, and what we have inside. The result is not always the best. For example, a person who suffered at home a great deal of repression will end up identifying with the repressive model. Others will become a rebel, and sadly waist a big hunk of their youth until they’ll bend his head to fit in the system. And there are those who will look “non adapted”, unsuccessful people not good at school, who take time to find their professional path and maintain a childish attitude towards life.

The Persona sinks basis in some characteristic of our personality, but not always revealed in their best shape. It’s like when an ingredient that in one food is formidable in another in excessive doses gets an awful taste. Therefore, we must always consider the person’s context in a broader perspective in order to faithful to the truth (which it doesn’t mean being indulgent).

It’s clear now, that the Persona is the mask we wear to penetrate in the theater of the world. Its most powerful justification of existence is that we need to be accepted to belong to a group, starting from the first one, the family, to society. We also want to be loved and to succeed. All legitimate wishes. But the price we pay is having small or big parts of us amputated.

The partial truth the Persona embodies is destroyed by its own partiality. And that’s when we loose “the soul of the business”, ourselves.

True relationships are those between souls. Let’s quick define what we mean by that, not to slip into cheap romanticism. A soul relation happens when you look into the other person’s eyes and you don’t see veils. The vision is not blurry, you feel the other person and the words he or she says are in perfect harmony with what you feel (and he or she makes you feel) when he/she speaks. In a soul relation the schizophrenia between what you feel and what you hear, what you sense and how he/she acts does not exist.

This is a very common situation between men and women. Men (not all of them, of course) are like this: they love you, you know they do because you feel it, but they did not say it. They can even deny it or pretend they are too “busy” and “insensitive”. I believe that at least half of the women who are reading this are saying, “True! Ah-ha…”. Men do so because they fear their feelings and you know how much you touched them by how much “detachment” they exhibit.

Women are like this: they want to look nice, being friends with everybody, mainly being “liked”. The feminine gender has a huge need to know that they are “liked”, and women can do almost anything to achieve that. (Not everybody, of course, there is a percentage of the population with consciousness and dignity) Therefore, women will tell you that they like your mother, sister and car. They’ll love your new hairdo and will praise your earrings. What they really think only God knows.

Each one wears a mask to fit in expected social roles. Their Persona stick to their skin with such determination that he cannot realize the deepness of his love or panic, and she doesn’t see her own good intentioned lies and can even have lost contact with what she really thinks.

In this kind of transaction the soul is gone. For soul can only stay where truth happens: panic, love, hate, fear, anger, discomfort, enchantment. These things are true. Poses and acts are lies – even when convenient and well disguised.

Without the soul’s engagement, the relationship everybody is looking for, sung in any language of the world, cried out and acclaimed, is hopeless. There can only be a half-kind-of-relation within the criteria mentioned above. Each one, wearing a mask-Persona can only give to the other a limited spectrum of him or herself, which will leave both of them with a feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction. Fighting or drinking is worthless. Open eyes are the solution.

The atrophied and deformed relation between Personas can happen in any sentimental relationship because when feeling is involved (affection, love, friendship, companionship, sympathy, etc.) one wants to share that deep communion that gives the feeling of plenitude. It is this experience that holds any relation, between parents and children, lovers or friends. Besides this, we are left with uniforms, used roles and empty words.