We have seen how saying that a dream figure is “the same” as one we encountered before is different, both from re-identifying embodied persons in real life and from re-identifying characters in a narrative text. A problem is beginning to emerge here. Persons in the real world have an objective existence: they (or more precisely, their bodies) have a determinate spatial location and persist...
On what basis can we say that someone we encounter is “the same” as someone we’ve met before? I have discussed this in my last post, and we’ve seen that the answer will be very different if that “someone” is not an actual, embodied person, but a character we hear or read about in a text (such as, in a dream report). This should give us food for thought when it comes to dream figures that seem to...
Stepping into the shady interior of the old bookstore I passed an old man who was just leaving. I soon gravitated towards a shelf with the latest arrivals, picked a publication and immersed myself in its table of contents. Behind my back I sensed someone entering the shop; had the old man returned? What criteria do we use, in everyday life, to find out if, say, a person (one we don’t already...
Before we can go deeper into the notion of sharing (or, alternately, mirroring) psychological contents between the personified functions who produce them and the ego who becomes aware of them, we have to address another potential circularity — and this one is even more subtle. In my last post, I twice compared the false perspective of the ego with the more complicated reality we realized from the...
I recently looked at an interesting meditation from tantric Buddhism, as described by Jung: a meditation which works by visualizing one’s psychological functions as separate personified figures. In Jungian terminology (though Jung himself didn’t put it that way) we might call this “withdrawing projections from the ego”. Now with respect to the particular example we looked at (namely: the sense...
Just as a side-note, I’m going to point out a few interconnections. In my last post, I started looking at a technique of “withdrawing projections from the ego”, found in a meditation from tantric Buddhism as described by Jung in his lectures: a meditation which works by visualizing one’s psychological functions as separate personified figures. There is an interesting connection here with an...
In his Lectures on the Psychology of Yoga, Jung describes an interesting type of Buddhist meditation (which he finds in the Chakrasambhara Tantra). The goal of this meditation is awareness of one’s own psychology, and a separation of anything that’s going on there from the conscious personality (ego). The basic idea is to realize one’s psychological functions and then imagine them to be separate...
Life may seem chaotic on the surface, but there is a hidden meaning in it. This idea is not something we can find empirically — by intersubjectively verifiable observation of stable, repeatable phenomena —, nor can we deduct it inferentially from axiomatic principles or the totality of facts. It’s an idea that we arrive at psychologically: by experiencing it in a metaphorical way. The idea of a...
We are now in a position to make some connections. At the end of a much earlier post, I have posed the question whether there is a reason behind the fact that the archetype of a hidden meaning (the archetype of spirit) appears sometimes personified (as Wise Old Man etc.) and sometimes as synchronicity (whether that means as Jung’s supposed “principle” or simply as de facto appearances of...
My current excursion into ego theory started from an instance of perspective reversal in which Hillman suggested that “the shadow casts me”, that is, we might understand the ego as a projection from the shadow (in its original Jungian understanding). But we would be mistaken if we construed this narrowly, as the view that the ego is a projection only from the shadow. In Hillman’s thinking (as in...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.