Guerrilla Psychology: Jung
| Category: Personal Development For Marketeers | Date: 2002-08-12 |
Jung's theory also divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Closely related is the personal unconscious, which includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious is how most of us understand the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the instincts that Freud would have it include.
It is his third part of the psyche, the collective unconscious, that separates Jung from Freud. The collective unconscious is our "psychic inheritance," a reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.
Some everyday examples of the collective unconscious are the experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths. according to Jungian theory, these experiences the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.
The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. Archetypes are a key point of Jungian theory.
The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" for our experiences. It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory: At first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which, nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie.
It is the archetype that gives meaning to experiences and experiences give substance to the archetype.
An important point is that these archetypes are not biological things, like Freud's instincts. They are more spiritual demands. For example, if you dreamt about long things, Freud might suggest these things represent the phallus and ultimately sex. But Jung might have a very different interpretation. Even dreaming quite specifically about a penis might not have much to do with some unfulfilled need for sex.
For example, in primitive societies, phallic symbols do not usually refer to sex at all. They usually symbolize mana, or spiritual power. These symbols would be displayed on occasions when the spirits are being called upon to increase the yield of corn, or fish, or to heal someone. The connection between the penis and strength, between semen and seed, between fertilization and fertility are understood by most cultures.
[Note: It must be remembered that Western culture has a very strong Puritan streak in it, which comes out of, IMHO, our Judeo-Christian belief in original sin. Freud's psychology of the id, like much of Marx's economics, is not a valid methodological tool, but rather an excellent description of Western culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries]
Jung does address sex and life instincts in general. They are a part of an archetype called the shadow. It derives from our pre human, animal past, when our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren't self-conscious.
It is the "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of is often stored there. Actually, the shadow is amoral -- neither good nor bad, just like animals.
Humans define an animal as being incapable of "rational" choice. It just does what it does. It is "innocent." But from our human perspective, the animal world looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for the parts of ourselves that we can't quite admit to.
But I have seen some recent animal behavior studies, especially of "higher" animals like apes, whales and porpoises that cast some doubt on that conclusion. Another one of our cultural prejudices, I suspect.
Another important Jungian archetype is the persona, your public image. The word is, obviously, related to the word person and personality, and comes from a Latin word for mask. So the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself to the outside world.
At its best, it is just the "good impression" we all wish to present as we fill the roles society requires of us. But, of course, it can also be the "false impression" we use to manipulate people's opinions and behaviors. And, at its worst, it can be mistaken, even by ourselves, for our true nature: This is what I have refereed to in past articles as "image,"
A part of our persona is the gender role we must play. For most people that role is determined by their physical gender. But Jung, like Freud , felt that we are all really bisexual in nature. We learn our gender roles during the process of socialization. And the specifics of each gender role differ from culture to culture and even within a given culture, they change slowly over time. Look at the role of women in Western culture an how it has changed over the last two hundred years..
In all societies, the expectations placed on men and women differ. Jung felt these expectations meant that we had developed only half of our potential. This is actually a very Eastern concept - yin and yang are seen as two halves that only together make up the complete whole. Jung uses the term anima (female), animus (male). and syzygy for the two as a whole.
The dynamics of the psyche
Jung gives us three principles fro how the psyche operates, beginning with the principle of opposites. Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have a good thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the opposite bad thought. One cannot understand good without juxtaposing it to evil.
According to Jung, it is the opposition that creates the power (or libido) of the psyche. It is the contrast that gives energy, so that a strong contrast gives strong energy, and a weak contrast gives weak energy. Good and evil are a strong contrast and they, as history has shown us, create a lot of energy.
The second principle is the principle of equivalence. The energy created from the opposition is "given" to both sides equally. But most people will choose one pole or the other. So what happens to the other energy?
Well, that depends on your attitude towards your unfulfilled. wish If you acknowledge it, face it, keep it available to the conscious mind, then the energy goes towards a general improvement of your psyche. You grow,
But if you pretend that you never had that evil wish, if you deny and suppress it, the energy will go towards the development of a complex. A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts and feelings that cluster -- or to us Jung's term "constellatory" -- around an archetype.
The final principle is the principle of entropy. This is the tendency for oppositions to come together, and so for energy to decrease, over a person's lifetime. Jung borrowed the idea from physics, where entropy refers to the tendency of all energy to become evenly distributed. That's why a fireplace will heat up the whole room. Or why the universe is expanding, if one accepts the "big bang" theory.
How does this apply to the psyche? Children, developmentally speaking, tend to have lots of energy. That is because they see things in terms of very strong opposites. Everything is either black or white, no shades of grey.
As we grow older we learn to see the grey through experience. We learn that there all two sides to everything This process of rising above our opposites, of seeing both sides of who we are, is called transcendence.
The goal of life is to realize the self. The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally.
So, now you have a basic background in the two major schools of psychological theory. First, the Freudian that sees humans as basically animals driven by instincts but trying to use will power to learn to control those instincts in order to survive in a mechanistic, deterministic universe.
Then there is the Jungian school that sees the universe and the psyche as being driven by some higher purpose. Jungians see humans as spiritually oriented beings with our future goal as being some form of integration into the collective consciousness.
This article is copyrighted by 3R Marketing. All rights reserved. It may not be reprinted without the express consent of the author. Used with permission of the author.
About the Author
John Botscharow is the owner of 3R Marketing.REAL HELP FROM REAL MARKETERS Unconventional Tactics For Conventional Profits! We PREACH, TEACH and PRACTICE Guerrilla Marketing. 3r-marketing.com
Would you like to receive John's syndicated guerrilla marketing articles for use in your newsletter or on your web site? Then sign up for the 3R Marketing Publisher's list syndication@3r-marketing.com
info@3r-marketing.com
http://www.3r-marketing.com
It is his third part of the psyche, the collective unconscious, that separates Jung from Freud. The collective unconscious is our "psychic inheritance," a reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.
Some everyday examples of the collective unconscious are the experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths. according to Jungian theory, these experiences the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature.
The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes. An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. Archetypes are a key point of Jungian theory.
The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an "organizing principle" for our experiences. It works the way that instincts work in Freud's theory: At first, the baby just wants something to eat, without knowing what it wants. It has a rather indefinite yearning which, nevertheless, can be satisfied by some things and not by others. Later, with experience, the child begins to yearn for something more specific when it is hungry -- a bottle, a cookie.
It is the archetype that gives meaning to experiences and experiences give substance to the archetype.
An important point is that these archetypes are not biological things, like Freud's instincts. They are more spiritual demands. For example, if you dreamt about long things, Freud might suggest these things represent the phallus and ultimately sex. But Jung might have a very different interpretation. Even dreaming quite specifically about a penis might not have much to do with some unfulfilled need for sex.
For example, in primitive societies, phallic symbols do not usually refer to sex at all. They usually symbolize mana, or spiritual power. These symbols would be displayed on occasions when the spirits are being called upon to increase the yield of corn, or fish, or to heal someone. The connection between the penis and strength, between semen and seed, between fertilization and fertility are understood by most cultures.
[Note: It must be remembered that Western culture has a very strong Puritan streak in it, which comes out of, IMHO, our Judeo-Christian belief in original sin. Freud's psychology of the id, like much of Marx's economics, is not a valid methodological tool, but rather an excellent description of Western culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries]
Jung does address sex and life instincts in general. They are a part of an archetype called the shadow. It derives from our pre human, animal past, when our concerns were limited to survival and reproduction, and when we weren't self-conscious.
It is the "dark side" of the ego, and the evil that we are capable of is often stored there. Actually, the shadow is amoral -- neither good nor bad, just like animals.
Humans define an animal as being incapable of "rational" choice. It just does what it does. It is "innocent." But from our human perspective, the animal world looks rather brutal, inhuman, so the shadow becomes something of a garbage can for the parts of ourselves that we can't quite admit to.
But I have seen some recent animal behavior studies, especially of "higher" animals like apes, whales and porpoises that cast some doubt on that conclusion. Another one of our cultural prejudices, I suspect.
Another important Jungian archetype is the persona, your public image. The word is, obviously, related to the word person and personality, and comes from a Latin word for mask. So the persona is the mask you put on before you show yourself to the outside world.
At its best, it is just the "good impression" we all wish to present as we fill the roles society requires of us. But, of course, it can also be the "false impression" we use to manipulate people's opinions and behaviors. And, at its worst, it can be mistaken, even by ourselves, for our true nature: This is what I have refereed to in past articles as "image,"
A part of our persona is the gender role we must play. For most people that role is determined by their physical gender. But Jung, like Freud , felt that we are all really bisexual in nature. We learn our gender roles during the process of socialization. And the specifics of each gender role differ from culture to culture and even within a given culture, they change slowly over time. Look at the role of women in Western culture an how it has changed over the last two hundred years..
In all societies, the expectations placed on men and women differ. Jung felt these expectations meant that we had developed only half of our potential. This is actually a very Eastern concept - yin and yang are seen as two halves that only together make up the complete whole. Jung uses the term anima (female), animus (male). and syzygy for the two as a whole.
The dynamics of the psyche
Jung gives us three principles fro how the psyche operates, beginning with the principle of opposites. Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have a good thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the opposite bad thought. One cannot understand good without juxtaposing it to evil.
According to Jung, it is the opposition that creates the power (or libido) of the psyche. It is the contrast that gives energy, so that a strong contrast gives strong energy, and a weak contrast gives weak energy. Good and evil are a strong contrast and they, as history has shown us, create a lot of energy.
The second principle is the principle of equivalence. The energy created from the opposition is "given" to both sides equally. But most people will choose one pole or the other. So what happens to the other energy?
Well, that depends on your attitude towards your unfulfilled. wish If you acknowledge it, face it, keep it available to the conscious mind, then the energy goes towards a general improvement of your psyche. You grow,
But if you pretend that you never had that evil wish, if you deny and suppress it, the energy will go towards the development of a complex. A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts and feelings that cluster -- or to us Jung's term "constellatory" -- around an archetype.
The final principle is the principle of entropy. This is the tendency for oppositions to come together, and so for energy to decrease, over a person's lifetime. Jung borrowed the idea from physics, where entropy refers to the tendency of all energy to become evenly distributed. That's why a fireplace will heat up the whole room. Or why the universe is expanding, if one accepts the "big bang" theory.
How does this apply to the psyche? Children, developmentally speaking, tend to have lots of energy. That is because they see things in terms of very strong opposites. Everything is either black or white, no shades of grey.
As we grow older we learn to see the grey through experience. We learn that there all two sides to everything This process of rising above our opposites, of seeing both sides of who we are, is called transcendence.
The goal of life is to realize the self. The self is an archetype that represents the transcendence of all opposites, so that every aspect of your personality is expressed equally.
So, now you have a basic background in the two major schools of psychological theory. First, the Freudian that sees humans as basically animals driven by instincts but trying to use will power to learn to control those instincts in order to survive in a mechanistic, deterministic universe.
Then there is the Jungian school that sees the universe and the psyche as being driven by some higher purpose. Jungians see humans as spiritually oriented beings with our future goal as being some form of integration into the collective consciousness.
This article is copyrighted by 3R Marketing. All rights reserved. It may not be reprinted without the express consent of the author. Used with permission of the author.
About the Author
John Botscharow is the owner of 3R Marketing.REAL HELP FROM REAL MARKETERS Unconventional Tactics For Conventional Profits! We PREACH, TEACH and PRACTICE Guerrilla Marketing. 3r-marketing.com
Would you like to receive John's syndicated guerrilla marketing articles for use in your newsletter or on your web site? Then sign up for the 3R Marketing Publisher's list syndication@3r-marketing.com
info@3r-marketing.com
http://www.3r-marketing.com
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