Coagulated by Craig Chalquist, PhD,
author of Terrapsychology: Reengaging
the Soul of Place (Spring Journal Books, 2007)
and department chair of East-West Psychology at CIIS

- Celtic Deities Glossary - Norse Deities Glossary

- Jung's RED BOOK: Healing the Faustian Ego

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I collected these terms and concepts on my journey through Jung's letters, seminars, and Collected Works as well as from my studies in Depth Psychology. Terms defined elsewhere in this document appear in italics. You might also want to peruse my Glossary of Freudian Terms and some quotations by James Hillman and Alfred Adler. And of course we all need to get Horney now and then.


A-F

Abaissement du niveau mental: French psychologist Pierre Janet's term, elaborated by Jung, for a weakening of the ego due to an unconscious drainage of its psychological energy. A lowering of attention or consciousness. Often observed just before creative work or during those incubation periods when the unconscious prepares a new stage of growth form is composed of an endogamous tendency and an exogamous one. Power source for symbols, which convert it into useful forms. All processes whose energies aren't under conscious control are instinctive stories and their symbols reapply this libido productively. Work makes true individuality possible.

Absolute knowledge: the acausal foreknowledge, relatively independent of limitations of time and space, possessed by the unconscious and apparent in constellated archetypes and in synchronicity.

 

Acausal orderedness: the underlying interconnectedness of psychic and physical processes. Synchronicity is one expression. Time is a concrete continuum possessing basic qualities that can manifest simultaneously in different places, as the ancient Chinese thought.

 

Active imagination: holding an image in awareness while fantasizing and associating to it to bring it to life and discover its nuances and unconscious roots. Also focuses and unifies the four orienting functions of consciousness. Active imagination is the indispensable second part of any deep analysis and bases itself on the imaginal nature of the psyche.

 

Affect-ego: the modification of the ego or "I" by an emerging strongly toned complex. With painful feelings the modification can bring about a restriction, a withdrawal of many parts of the normal ego.

 

Aion: a lion-headed, snake-encircled Mithraic God-image of time (also called Kronos or Deus Leontocephalus) who for Jung represented death/rebirth and a psychological union of opposites like light and darkness, male and female, creation and destruction. "Eon," a long length of time, also meant for Jung the two-thousand-year Christian eon, which coincided with its astrological sign, Pisces, in which one fish represents Christ and the other its future opposite, the Antichrist. Below all this works the archetype of the hostile brothers; too, the astrological characteristics of the fish contain essential components of the Christian myth: the cross, the moral conflict and its splitting into two figures, the son of a virgin, the classical mother-son tragedy, the danger at birth, and the savior. For the alchemist, the fish also symbolized the Lapis; for Jung, unconscious wholeness.

 

Some history...

Two thousand years ago, the late Roman Empire saw a roar of libido emanating from the collective unconscious, an outpouring we can no longer imagine thanks to the psychological barriers erected by centuries of Christianity. The Roman gods were dying, foreshadowing Nietzsche and our era.

   Christian ritual and dogma contained and channeled the animal ancestral forces splashing across Europe and symbolized by the Colosseum, thereby exalting the individual, providing a new ethic, forging a new sense of community, giving people for whom the old religions and myths no longer worked a sense of purpose, and splitting spirit and nature so each could develop independently.

The result: modern civilization, standing on the ruins of Rome.

   Starting with the Reformation (which was helped along by an interest in antiquity inspired by the fall of the Byzantine Empire under Islam's onslaught and by the resulting spread of Greek language and literature through Europe) that broke the church's authority, eroded ritual, and splintered Christianity, religious and traditional containers for the instinctual-archetypal forces began to lose their meaning. "The bridge from dogma to the inner experience of the individual has broken down" (Aion)

   The Reformation coincided with the point where the ecliptic intersects the meridian at the second fish's tail. The enantiodromia (conversion into an opposite) from Christ to Antichrist falls midway between the two fishes, which was around the Renaissance. At that time Post-Reformation Christianity gave the bipolar Self expression (the Incarnation of God in us) but compensated for the Gothic overemphasis on spirit by further dividing spirit from instinct and matter, faith from knowledge.
   1750: Enlightenment - tail of second fish - reason replaces faith.

   Alchemy and astrology arose by way of further compensation and set the stage for scientific materialism, which could now oppose and control nature by reeling in our identification with/projections onto it.
   

The result of all this: the vertical development of spirituality gave way to the horizontal development of materialism. Jung speculated that the polarity of the God-image was behind the Reformation and the split of modern society into two armed camps.
   

Compensating for this: psychology, a symbol system potentially useful for containing and channeling the instinctual-archetypal forces and reuniting the God-image.

    Around and because of the French Revolution: an explosion of non-personal stuff piled up since the Enlightenment. The pagan in us got much stronger. The decay of traditional symbol systems increased.

    Ideally, the autonomous activity of the unconscious is zero; today it's higher than ever before. The freed surplus of libido also has caused inflation (because attributing things to the gods at least jibed with their non-ego status and because an archetype that loses its container becomes identified with the conscious mind) and activated various isms, utopian fantasies, psychic infections, and a longing for herdism and the State (as opposed to the earlier traditions and heirarchical orders). Too, collective ideals compensate the rise of individuality that began with the Reformation.

    Meanwhile the rise of exogamous libidinal tendencies (stranger-love) prompted a counter-reaction of endogamous (relative-love) libido that powers religions, sects, nations, and isms. Ultimately, however, only individuation can fuse the two tendencies and prevent the endogamous reaction from growing dangerously powerful. See cross-cousin marriage.

 

"A civilization does not decay, it regenerates." (Civilization in Transition)

 

Albedo: "whitening," the second of four alchemical stages. In it the alchemist cooks, washes, recirculates, and pulverizes the prima materia into a silvery ash ready to be reinfused with soul and spirit. This corresponds roughly to the anima/animus stage of individuation.

 

Alchemy: the ancient attempt to create the Philosopher's Stone and mutable gold. In the West, mainly of Egyptian origin and Arabic elaboration, but also with Gnostic roots, especially in the idea that the world soul was trapped in matter. Beginning with the prima materia, the alchemist heated, cooked, and washed the substance until it passed through the four stages of nigredo, albedo, cinitritas, and rubedo and became the Stone. In most texts, the basic idea was to divide up the four elements mixed up in the prime matter, refine and circulate them, and rejoin them in a heirosgamos or "chymical wedding" of opposites. Jung saw the opus alchymicum, the work of alchemy, as an unconscious projection of the process of individuation, which starts with an unconscious content (prima materia) and end with the realization of the Self symbol (Philosopher's Stone).

 

The alchemical process, which began in the spring and ended in the fall, was an extended act of active imagination (meditation) fired by awareness and libido. (See my "Cooking For The Collective Unconscious" for a summary of the parallel of alchemy with Jungian psychology.) Alchemy also bridged Gnosticism and psychology. Jung saw in it a historical counterpart to his psychology of the collective unconscious. Alchemy finally died out in the eighteenth century but became parallel to a combination of analytical psychology and astrology.

 

Note: for Dorn, producing the Lapis constituted only the second stage (for Jung the representation of the idea of the Self in visible form). The third: the union of the whole man with the unus mundus. Union with the Ground of all being. Identity or relation of the personal with the suprapersonal atman, or individual with universal tao. A perfect synthesis of conscious and unconscious

Ambitendency (or ambivalence): Bleuler's concept that every tendency is balanced by an opposite one. Applies particularly to all "feeling-tones" and the bipolar nature of libido, which flows forward and backward.

 

Amplification: using imagery to create a meaningful context around a symbol needing examination. Also known as elaboration of the symbol. In subjective amplification, a dreamer, for example, uses active imagination to associate to a dream symbol in order to grasp it better. In objective amplification, the analyst collects themes from mythology, alchemy, religion, and other sources to illuminate, or amplify, archetypal symbols produced in dreams or fantasy.

Anima: the feminine component of the unconscious male psyche and inner counterpart to the persona. Possibly she reflects a man's smaller number of female genes. Ultimately an archetype of Eros and of life itself, this "woman within" functions as a filter, bridge, guide, and mediator between the ego and the deeper layers of the unconscious. As long as she's not differentiated she stands for the unconscious; later, she stands apart, a daughter to the Wise Old Man who compensates her and sometimes mate of the shadow. Because she carries a man's "soul" and his "relatedness," she can be fully realized only with a female partner. "If a man cannot project his anima, then he is cut off from women" (Analytical Psychology).

 

First projected onto the mother and always mixed with the mother archetype, she usually appears after a man confronts and integrates his shadow. Unless he addresses her as an autonomous personality-fragment and gets to know her, integrating, not her, but her products, he will project her onto an outer woman and confuse the image with the external reality. (Jung didn't need to consult his anima once he'd learned to read the meaning of his dreams directly, without requiring a mediator, and to accept whatever surfaced from the unconscious. When she vanishes into the unconscious, the collective contents are constellated. The anima seems immortal until she "brings forth"; then she dies.)

 

Anima images are usually singular (as opposed to animus images) to compensate both the male habit of seeing a mate as one woman among many and the basically male faculty of discrimination, as opposed to the basically female faculty of unifying and synthesizing. (Jung felt that for the collective state to arise, the anima had to be suppressed.)

 

The anima passes through four stages corresponding with a man's maturity: Eve, Helen of Troy, Mary, and Sophia.

 

Animus: the male component of the unconscious female psyche. Like the anima (Eros), but he personifies "spirit" and "intellect" (Logos). His negative aspect gives a woman her irrational convictions and opinions. He's usually plural because women focus on one man only in conscious relationships. He also compensates the basic female faculty for unity. He seems to lack the anima's historical quality and is more concerned with present and future, which Jung saw as a compensation (it's women who think more about roots, the past, etc.)--but in his deepest qualities he is as history-oriented as the anima.

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He evolves through four stages: the physical man, the romantic man or man of action, the bearer of the word, and the wise spiritual guide.

 

Anthropos: the Original Man of Gnostic myth. Similar to Jung's concept of the Self.

 

Apocatastasis: a resurrection or restoration of an original wholeness.

 

Apperception: active (attention) and passive (fantasy or dreaming) types; process by which a new psychological content is articulated with similar, already existing contents in order to make it understandable.

 

Archaic Identity: a primitive consciousness in which subject and object aren't separated (see participation mystique).

 

Archetype: (from St. Augustine and Jacob Burkhardt's "primordial image"; also, a version of Levy-Bruhl's "representations collectives"): a constitutive prototype or form or Gestalt within the collective unconscious; a ruling "organ" of the psyche and Platonic blueprint for its activity. Complexes of the collective unconscious. Images and emotions (both must be present). The psychic form of preformed mechanism for the development of consciousness by ordering the chaos of perceptions into meaningful patterns. Instinctive behavior pattern grounded in the fundamental structure of living matter. Archetypes organize our perceptions, collect images, regulate, modify, motivate, and even develop conscious contents, plot the course of developments in advance, set up bridges between the ego and its instinctive and collective roots, lead the channeling and conversion of instinctual energy, and "represent the authentic element of spirit" and a "spiritual goal."

 

All of us inherit the same archetypes, the same invisible patterns or motifs built, like emotions, into the structure of the human psyche, but they manifest in personal and cultural experiences. Examples include the Hero, the Divine Child, the Great Mother, Transformation, Death, and Rebirth. The most important are the shadow, anima/animus, Wise Old Man/Wise Woman, and the Self, all non-personal, bipolar vessels extending up into the personal unconscious. Also, archetypes interpenetrate and are hard to tell apart.

 

Archetypes manifest in myths, dreams, tribal lore, fairy tales, visions, isms, scientific advances, numbers, religions, philosophies, historical developments, and schizophrenic hallucinations. Ultimately, they also drive individuation and provide a counterpole (the "violet end") to instinct (the psyche's "red end"): image and its dynamism. Instinct is felt physiologically and experienced as numinous images that seem to contrast to mere bodily sensations and mechanisms; so archetypes are instincts "raised to a high frequency," just as instincts emanate from an archetype's "low frequency." Just as instincts impel toward behavior, the archetypes impel toward certain kinds of perceptions.

 

Consciousness rests upon and is organized by its archetypal forms and foundations. Dig far enough into an intense inner experience and you eventually come to the mythological, ageless themes that indicate an activated archetype. Just as an instinct is activated by a certain situation it bears an image of, so is an archetype. Also, its psychoid base puts it beyond both matter and psyche, though it has qualities of both. Although archetypes are energic power sources, they need libido from the ego for their images to rise into consciousness.

Activated archetypes compensate for the one-sidedness of the times and provide preset ways to adapt. They show that a person's problem is also a problem of humanity, a basic human concern. It's healing to know the general human meaning of the problem.

Jung also thought archetypes were Lamarckian deposits of typical subjective reactions of repeated experiences. He also said they entered the picture with life itself.

Archetypal image: forms out of personal experiences and is the "visible" aspect of the permanently irrepresentable archetype. When an archetype constellates in a situation of need, it gathers associational material, which renders it visible and so capable of conscious realization. Archetypes want to return to life, to be shaped in conscious life, to pour energy outward. When their old forms wear out, the motifs cranked out by the collective unconscious always need new forms connecting them to contemporary consciousness, lest we find ourselves sundered from instinct. Some archetypes: life after death; the Hero (which developed from the primitive symbolism of light and who sacrifices himself voluntarily because he's an infant longing for mother); the Divine Child; the Mother; the maiden; rebirth (rituals for which evoke mother symbols to direct incestuous libido away from regression and toward new forms); crucifixion (=suspension of ego between the opposites) on a wheel; the hostile brothers; the Golden Age; initiation; the first ten numbers; the quaternity; the fifth (four plus nonego center), the father; the mother; the parents; the family; the syzygy; the Self (which includes all the archetypes); the witch; the coniunctio; the earth-mother; the sacrifice (which is an unconscious transformation of libido: beloved objects are given up so libido can flow into new forms); energy; its conservation; the sun; the moon; the prophet; the disciple; the horse; the archetypes of transformation (places, ways, and means); duplication; the dead who don't know they are spirits (ghosts).

Artifex: "artificer": an alchemist. Art: divides into psychological (personal) and visionary (collective). Art can never be reduced to psychopathology because visionary art is greater than its creator and draws on primordial images and forces. It stands on its own merits. It compensates for the one-sidedness of an era. Rather than a symptom or something secondary, it's a true symbolic expression, a reorganization of the conditions to which a causalistic explanation reduces it.

Assimilation: a mutual penetration of conscious and unconscious contents. Similar to "integration."

Association test: Jung's modification of a test devised by Galton; a predecessor of the lie detector. The subject hears a word from a list and must state the first word that comes to mind. Long reaction times, repeating responses, repetition of the stimulus word, faults, perseverations, use of sentences, use of foreign terms, slips, idiosyncratic responses, and physiological changes, which are deviations from the subject's median response time, can indicate a constellated complex.

Jung often supplemented this test with the reproduction method, in which he called out the words again and asked the subject to recall his original responses: responses not recalled can indicate a complex.

Assumption: bodily ascent into heaven of Mary in Catholic doctrine, a popular belief which the Pope Pius XII made official in 1950 and which Jung considered the most important religious development since the Reformation. Because of it the Trinity becomes a quaternity now containing its missing dark, feminine, material, earthly, or evil component. Expresses same fundamental thought as the mysterium coniunctionis. Its step beyond traditional Christianity was for Jung proof of the autonomy of the archetypes.

Attitude: one of two basic personality postures: introversion, in which a person is mostly inner-directed, his libido proceeding from object to subject; and extraversion, outer-direct-edness. Conscious introversion is compensated by unconscious extraversion and vice versa. A person's attitude combines with her most differentiated function to produce a personality type. Each of us alternates between the two attitudes but feels more comfortable in one. Autochthonous revival: the tendency of primordial motifs to appear in all times and places (as opposed to being transmitted between cultures). Axiom of Maria: Maria Prophetissa, a Neoplatonist alchemist of the third century who lived in Alexandria, famous in alchemy for her axiom--"One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth."--which also progresses from four (original quaternio ground plan) to three (a masculine number) to two to one. Four elements of the prima materia evolve to Mercurius' three manifestations in the organic, inorganic, and spiritual worlds; then to Sol and Luna; then to the One, the Lapis. Jung thought the numbers add up to ten, a number of high-level unity.

Canalization: the conversion or transformation of libido as it performs various mental activities. Transfer of psychic intensities or values from one content to another. Replaces "sublimation." Canalization sets up a gradient so instinctual energies can do productive work. It does so via the symbol, which offers a steeper gradient than the natural one. The transformation of instinctual energy is done via an analogue of the object of the instinct: a psychic mechanism imitates the instinct and thereby captures its energy (like a power station at a waterfall). The first achievement of this by primitive man is magic. Compare with psychization, which transforms an instinctual or sensory datum, rather than energy, into an experience.

The primordial images are the true force that shapes and channels instinct. Chthonic: of gods and spirits and the underworld; of the earth; for Jung, the dark, material side of the psyche.

Circumambulation: circling and concentrating on a center, as ego does with Self during individuation.

Citrinitas: "yellowing," the third of the four basic stages of alchemy. In it the purified ash of the albedo ("whitening") reunites with soul and spirit and acquires a golden color symbolic of growing consciousness. Corresponds roughly to the Wise Old Man/Wise Woman stage of individuation.

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Collective consciousness: mass-mindedness dominated by isms and out of touch with instinctuality. Similar to Freud's superego.

Compensation: the self-regulatory tendency of the unconscious. When consciousness is too one-sided, the unconscious uses its autonomy to compensate by pushing some of its contents upward in order to reestablish organismic balance. Example: a selfish man (conscious posture) suddenly indulges in an impulsive act of generosity (unconscious counterposition). The compensation is intelligent (if instinctive) rather than mechanical.

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Complex (or "feeling-toned complex"): from a term borrowed by the German psychologist Zeihen and used by Eugen Breuer, then Jung and Freud: a cluster of emotionally charged associations, usually unconscious and gathered around an archetypal center (and so a blend of environment and disposition). Repressed emotional themes. Complexes were first noticed by Aristotle, who in his Psyche called them part-souls, and behave like little personalities (and have unconscious fantasy systems), often even after partially incorporated into awareness. A more powerful complex will either blend with one less powerful or replace it, and its constellating power corresponds to its energy value.

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Complexes are the contents of the personal unconscious, whereas archetypes, their foundations, are those of the collective unconscious. Complexes, found in healthy as well as troubled people, are always either the cause or the effect of a conflict. The complex arises from the clash between the need to adapt and constitutional inability to meet the challenge. They originate in childhood, and their first form is the parental complex.

Jung thought women's complexes usually simpler and more often erotic than men's, which focused on work and money.

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Complex-sensitiveness: the tendency of an old complex to disturb associations when it's brought up with similar stimuli.

Condensation: borrowed from Freud, a term meaning the combination of several meanings into one dream symbol.

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Coniunctio ("conjunction"): an alchemical operation that combines two chemicals to produce a third, different chemical. Psychologically, this corresponds to an unconscious experience (say, savage lust) which, combined with consciousness, becomes something different (healthy sexual desire). Can also mean a synthesis of ego and unconscious, which generates the reconciling or unifying symbol and which explains its usually incestuous character. Also an alchemical correspondence to psychology's concept of the transference. Wholeness requires a coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites).

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Contamination: the tendency of unconscious contents to run together, making them hard to tell apart from one another. Discrimination of each falls to consciousness. As each personification from down under connects to awareness, it differentiates from the other figures contaminating it.

Countertransference: a type of projection. Dangerous when a therapist identifies with emanations from the client's manifestations of the collective unconscious.

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Creed: see religion.

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Cross-cousin marriage: based on the archetype of the quaternio, early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.

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Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe. See transference.

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Daimonic: from the Greek daimone, the half-divine interior being thought to instruct the wise, daimonic for Jung meant a conscious relationship with the psyche's imaginal-archetypal figures (e.g., the Philemon and Salome personifications he got to know in his dreams and fantasies). James Hillman accurately refers to Jung himself as a "daimonic man."

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Dementia praecox: old name for Janet's "psychasthenia" and Bleuler's term "schizophrenia" and Jung's "introversion neurosis" and encompassing several of what are now different mental disorders. Jung thought it caused by powerful complexes subverting the ego and speculated about an organic "toxin." Jung also pointed out that psychiatrists saw only the worst cases because these were institutionalized. Jung discovered mythological themes in the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenics and realized their similarity to dreams and so-called "primitive" myths.

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Developmental theory: roughly four stages of life:

In childhood, the baby at first isn't psychologically separate from parents and has no ego; he's also close to the collective unconscious, similar to the evolutionary stages in an embryo and whose numinosity the child projects onto the parents. First stage of consciousness: connection between two or more psychic contents. Then islands of consciousness which gradually join. Then with the continuity of memory the ego arises and is charged with energy. Just as the person biologically repeats the species' past stages during his embryonic development, the psyche does likewise. Identity with parents provides the basis for later identification with them; on it also depends the potential for projection and introjection.

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In the pre-sexual substage, the functions of nutrition and growth predominate (which is why when libido regresses past the sexual stage it reactivates the nutritive one), and the child uses rhythmic movements for pleasure. The libido first invests nutritive activity, then rhythmic activity, wanders over the various bodily areas and zones until it reaches the sexual zone but carries traces of previous areas with it. Freud's latency is the real beginning of sexual development. When libido lingers, the fixation lays the ground of mental disorder. The next substage is the prepubertal stage and goes from later childhood to puberty. The stage of maturity follows.

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The child's sexual interest: actually an attempt to develop thinking and concept-building, which open a channel for the libido to continue further development. Children are not polymorphous-perverse, but polyvalent. (Five main groups of childhood disturbance: backward children (low IQ), psychopathic children (organicity), epileptic children, psychosis, and neurotic children.)

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The youth substage (from just after puberty--the true beginning of the "I" as separate from parents--until middle life, from 35-40): the main problem is clinging to childhood consciousness. The person discovers his social being and differentiates his aptitudes, learns limits. Beginnings of a new stage--the "cultural" period--arising from the unconscious: the sunset part of life in which libido is directed inward toward inner individuation rather than outward toward adaptation.

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Old age: like childhood, no conscious problems because duality gives way to immersion in the unconscious.

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Jung usually analyzed parents because the child lived out in substitute form whatever they repressed, which is a form of interfamily compensation. Parents, in turn, are the children of the grandparents.

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Dominant: an archetype.

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Dreams: symbolic expressions of the unconscious (and of the total psyche). A phylogenetically older form of thought. The dream is a fact of objective nature and therefore not a disguise. (Sugar in the blood means sugar and nothing else.) It is its own interpretation and is only misunderstood when we don't fathom its symbols. The manifest aspect is the dream images themselves, and they contain the "latent" meaning. It's not what causes a dream, but it's purpose, that matters.

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Stages of the dream: the statement of place and protagonists (statements of time are rarer), the exposition, the plot development, the culmination or peripeteia, and the solution or result (lysis)(a few rare dreams lack this stage). Dream-ego: a fragment of the waking ego. In a dream with several scenes, each usually shows a variation of the working out of a complex. Recurrent dreams mean a recurrent conscious attitude.

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Jung distinguished between the dream's compensatory and prospective (diagnostic or anticipatory) functions. Compensatory dreams occur when the ego is more or less on track; when it's way off, prospective (a type of compensation) dreams seek to bring it back. There are also reaction-dreams, which are caused by trauma.

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Dreams have two levels of interpretation, the objective (analytical), in which the symbols stand for external realities, and subjective (synthetic; "hermeneutic"), in which they stand for aspects of the dreamer's psyche. If the person dreamed about is of vital interest to the dreamer, an object interpretation is probably appropriate.

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Archetypal symbols are the only "fixed" symbols and for assimilation need objective amplification by studies in mythology, folklore, comparative religion, archeology, language, and anthropology. The dreams primitive peoples call "big" are those with archetypal contents. They usually occur around key developmental periods. They also occur when we overlook the eternally human nature of a problem.

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Dream series: one in which the changes and recurrences of symbols appear against various backgrounds, much as an unknown word seen in different sentences becomes understandable. The series corrects misinterpretations in later dreams, setting up an ongoing dialog between ego and unconscious. It also shows the underlying development plan beneath the separate compensations. Using dream meanings to clarify existing problems is symbolized alchemically by bathing the substance in water (Dorn's "solution").

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The first step in interpretation is establishing the context through (a) careful recording of the conscious situation, especially of the previous day, because the dream compensates for it; and (b) subjective and objective amplifications that stay with the dream images rather than running off through free associations to the various complexes--because what matters is what's done with the complexes.

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Ectopsyche: the psyche's outer layer, oriented by the four functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.

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Ego: the conscious self; the "I"; the central, experience-filtering complex of consciousness (in contrast to the Self, the central complex of the collective unconscious)--and the most stable complex because it's grounded in the body sensations. A relatively permanent personification. The most individual part of the person. The ego divides into the ectopsyche and the endopsyche. It's an object in consciousness as well as a requirement for it. Its two main constituents are bodily sensations and memory.

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The ego's chief job is discrimination of the opposites (which is why the unconscious produces compensatory symbols of wholeness). Its necessarily narrow focus causes repression, which thrusts into unconsciousness what isn't compatible with self-image. It tends to identify with the dominant function.

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For Jung, the ego arose gradually out of unconsciousness--both in the infant and the species--and returns to it every night. (Group consciousness is the primitive form of ego consciousness. It goes on living in our family-consciousness.) The ego separates us from nature and replaces instinctive deciding, valuing, etc. It's a differentiated aspect of the collective unconscious (compare Freud's ego, derived from id). The ego, then, is a kind of projection or fiction devised by the unconscious. Without an ego, a perceiving subject, nothing is perceived.

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Electra Complex: term coined by Jung to describe the feminine equivalent of the masculine Oedipus Complex. When a little girl wants to possess Dad and get rid of Mom; instead, she renounces Dad and identifies with Mom.

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Emotion: has physiological innervations, unlike a feeling, as measured by the psychogalvanic effect. Same as an affect.

Enantiodromia: the tendency of one pole of an experience to change into its opposite (term coined by Greek philosopher Heraclitus). See compensation. For Jung, all life and energy are a play of opposites. To avoid falling into enantiodromia one must value both opposites (see transcendent function).

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Endopsyche: the ego layer to which the four functions direct information. Except for some memory recall, it's not under conscious control and is divided into memory, the subjective components of the functions, the emotions and affects, and the invasions, in order of conscious control. Below the endopsyche lies the personal and collective layers of the unconscious.

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Eros: the personal, relatedness element that characterizes a woman's psychology and a man's anima. See logos.

ESP: not an ab

 

Evolution (psychological): the Self unconsciously groping toward realization in consciousness. Goal-oriented like all biological processes (see finality). Jung also seems to have bought the Lamarckian idea of personal experiences affecting the organism over many generations. In terms of progress, we've made none morally but have developed the ego and its functions. Our will has developed. Technology has also developed. We've reeled in our projections, which helped science develop: no more gods or demons out there, and the end of our identification with nature. But our civilized layer is only a thin skin over the rest, and we've largely split off our instinctual roots, and our inflation endangers us all. See Aion.

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The evolutionary process of introjection: 1. Many gods. 2. A supreme God ruling the rest (Self archetype asserts itself). 3. God shares our human fate, is killed or dies, and is resurrected, with a feminine counterpart involved in God's fate. 4. God becomes man in the flesh; conscious begins to prevail against the unconscious. Matter and spirit split. 5. The metaphysical world is seen as a projection.

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Sacrificing the incest wish--to return to Eden, mother, instinctuality, unconsciousness--created civilization. (That backward longing = the death drive.) Libido bound up in mother and family bonds must be channeled into outside human contacts. The incest prohibition isn't only biological (because primitives don't know about gene pools); it's more an instinctive and accurate fear of regression to the womb/unconsciousness/instinctuality: back to death.

 

Fantasy: the creative matrix. For Jung creative imagination had immense importance. "Everything that the human mind has ever created sprang from contents which, in the last analysis, existed once as unconscious seeds" (Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche). It was bound up with the roots of human and animal instinctuality, unified the functions of consciousness, and liberated the spirit of play. Fantasy: a pre-stage of the symbol, hence the importance of the child's fantasy life. Play is the dynamic principle of fantasy. Fantasy breaks down into fantasm (complex of ideas without an objective referent) and imaginative activity. Making it concrete enforces study of it and lets its effects manifest fully.

 

Feminine psychology: Jung didn't say much about it, though his picture of the animus ("spirit") suggests that women are long on relatedness and short on logic and meaning. For him there were two basic types of women: the mother and the hetaira. (Tony Wolff added the Amazon and the medial woman.) But in "Women in Europe" he suggests that "masculine" professions, studying and working like a man, women did something not in accord with their feminine nature. He asks facetiously: could a man be a nursemaid or in charge of a kindergarten?

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Finality: the tendency of all psychic processes to strive purposively toward a goal. Life can't be explained only causally because it strives; for it, causes are a means to an end. Processes that develop are both a product and an originator of something to come. Elementary states aren't explanatory principles that let us grasp later, more developed states even though these derive from the earlier ones.

 

Freud, some theoretical differences from:

1. Subjective finalism vs reductive materialism. For Freud, religion = father complex.

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2. Libido as neutral psychic energy. Less emphasis on sexuality.

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3. Incest fantasies seen as gropings for unity and manifestations of kinship libido. Union of opposites. Urge to return to childhood. Only adults are capable of incest because of their formed sexuality, which regresses.

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4. Sublimation discredited because religious and cultural activities are authentic parts of psychological existence AND manifestations of an autonomous instinct to create, not derivatives of sexual impulses. Jung posited instead a transformation of psychic energy. Jung compared "sublimation" to the alchemical trick of turning lead into gold —"Unfortunately, the secret of converting energy without the consumption of a still greater quantity of energy has never yet been discovered by the physicists" ("Sigmund Freud In His Historical Setting").

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5. Reductive therapy is useful mostly for people in the first half of life.

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6. Id: the "red" or lower end of the psychic spectrum rather than the source of all psychic activity.

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7. Superego: smuggles in the image of Jehovah in the dress of a theory. Similar to Jung's "collective consciousness." Sum of all the collective beliefs, ideas, and values consciously handed down by tradition and undergirded by the primordial images. Also, the Self as long as it's unconscious and therefore projected onto public opinion.

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8. Drive theory: too soon to say what's biological and what's psychological.

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9. The unconscious isn't a thing, it's a process.

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10. We cure in spite of transference, not because of it.

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11. Nonpersonal forces aren't just "archaic vestiges."

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12. Death drive is just a play of opposites. Libido has two instincts or urges: to live and to die. The death part = incestuous libido harking back to unconsciousness, womb, instinct.

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13. The unconscious isn't just an appendix of consciousness. It also contains future developments and the archetypes.

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14. Dreams don't disguise (because nature doesn't); they are factual pictures that speak in a symbolic language our rationalistic minds have trouble with. The manifest disguise is just our lack of understanding of symbolic language. A dream can't produce a clear thought--that's the ego's job. Nor do they usually exhibit fixed symbols. Also, only some dreams are wish-fulfillments.

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15. The censor: for Jung, the exclusive directedness of conscious contents that excludes an unconscious content.

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16. Regression of libido isn't just incest, infantile sexuality, fixation, etc., but a vital process.

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17. Children aren't polymorphous-perverse, but polyvalent.

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18. The Oedipus complex isn't a cause of illness, it's a symptom. Wanting mom = regressive longing for her.

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19. Latency is actually the true beginnings of sexuality.

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20. It's not just a matter of getting in touch with the instincts, but also with the archetypes that give them form, meaning, and bounds.

normal perception, but an abnormal event originating in the unconscious and helped toward consciousness by a lowering of consciousness.

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Functions: four mental activities that orient consciousness. They are thinking, feeling (which informs through feeling-tones of the value of things), sensation (conscious perception), and intuition (unconscious perception; a sense of a situation's wholeness; includes anticipatory dreams and telepathy). One function tends to be highly developed, one a backup (the auxiliary function), and one or two mostly unconscious (inferior). Because the functions arrange themselves in opposing pairs, thinking types have trouble differentiating their feelings, and intuitive types their sensory experiences. In fact, to develop the inferior one must sacrifice the superior to free up libido. (The transcendent function operates between the superior and inferior functions.) If that doesn't happen, the inferior contaminates the repressing superior and fights back when the superior draws libido from the inferior.

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Thinking and feeling are "rational" because they evaluate (e.g., ethics are based mostly on the feeling function's diffferentiation); sensation (perception through conscious senses) and intuition (timeless perception via the unconscious, which can include paranormal phenomena) occur spontaneously and so are "irrational." The functions combine with the two basic attitudes, extraversion or introversion, to make personality types. The personal and collective unconscious, including its main archetypes, tend to hit a person through his feminine (in men) fourth function because it's contaminated with collective, etc. contents and brings the Self with it. The inferior function isn't grounded here and now because it's connected to the timeless, the ancestral/future. The third function also tends to be feminine in men and contaminated with the fourth function.

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You can tell a function's differentiation by its control by the ego, moodiness, independence, strength, stability, constancy, trustworthiness, and service in adaptation. For instance, undifferentiated feeling is feeling contaminated by emotion and therefore erratic, impulsive.

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All four work together: sensation shows what is, thinking lets us recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and intuition points to its possibilities beyond immediate facts. Also, keep in mind the blended functions: intuition leads to intuitive feeling, feeling to emotional feeling, sensation to empirical thinking, thinking to speculative thinking, etc.

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We tend to project the inferior function and attitude onto people who fit it. The inferior function too has an auxiliary function. Also, the three differentiated functions have unconscious counterparts.

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Gnosticism: ancient Christian heresy, arising out of it in the second century and eventually dying out. Believed in the antithetical dualism of the spirit, which is good, and matter, which is evil. Spirit (Nous) is trapped in us by matter (Physis) and we need to know that to restore the spark to the godhead. Can be thought of as an ancient counterpart to existentialism. Out of the pleroma (unconscious) arose the Demiurge (ego), who learns about its creator, the Anthropos (original man).

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Jung saw in it proof of the existence of the collective unconscious. But he found Gnosticism hard to study (few extant texts) and more speculative and philosophical than experiential. Zosimos was a connecting link between Gnosticism and alchemy.

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Continued next page 

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