In everyday parlance, when we refer to a person’s “shadow”, we often simply mean some grim, dark streak of their personality, perhaps even a violent or evil element. But what Jung meant by the “shadow” is a little more complex than this habit of our everyday talk suggests.
To integrate archetypes into consciousness is not without risk. The danger lies in mistaking this process of integration for a victory of consciousness over the unconscious.
Spirit, the archetype of spirit a pre-existent meaning in the midst of chaotic life, has been morphed, over the course of centuries of human history, from of a separated form of being into an integrated function of human consciousness. But precisely how does Jung think such an “integration” might have worked?
In an earlier post, I mentioned Jung’s view that spirit, the archetype of the built-in meaning in our world, was originally a separate being, “facing” us humans, and then over the evolution of the human psyche has become “integrated” into consciousness. What does that even mean?
Synchronicities are something that "appears” in an individual person’s life, usually at some particular stage or around some event. Therefore, we can assume that there are certain patterns in people’s lives when archetypes are triggered, resulting in greater likelyhood of experiencing synchronicities.
The notion of projection is a broad umbrella which covers a variety of different ways in which unconscious contents might appear, to a subject, as something they notice in the external world. Presumably, some archetypal structures are best expressed in personified form, whereas others lend themselves to a different, more abstract representation: as relationships, as connections.
Jung says that synchronistic phenomena appear when an archetype of the collective unconscious is triggered (or ‘constellated’). He also points out that this usually goes along with projections. Interestingly, the mirror theory of eros arrives at a similar result.
When a person becomes infatuated, their soul is dominated by the phantasm that represents the loved one; the phantasm cannibalizes the entire psyche of the subject. In such a case, the unconscious image (the phantasm) acquires an astonishing power and autonomy.
A word about this “spiritual mirror” business. It is called spiritual because in Ficino’s views, the notion of “spirit” is central, and among other things, the spirit acts as a mirror through which the soul can access what the senses take in from the external world. The setup is similar to an old-fashioned camera, with the eye (and the other senses) corresponding to the lens, the psyche (the...
1. Suppose a subject becomes enamoured with another person. In that situation, we can assume in the subject’s mind a cluster of ideas, perceptions, presumptions, etc., all of which have the other person (the “love object”) as their content in some way. For example, there may be memories (“When we first met, she looked like this …”), general ascriptions of personality (“He’s a very attentive...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.