Jung frequently insists in his writings that the inner world has reality, and that as a person, we have to adapt to those inner realities just as we have to those of the external world. But adaptation as such is only one step on the path to individual self-development.
In our lived experience we navigate both an external world of objects and a subjective stream of psychological states. This is how the surface of reality presents itself to us. But both the external world of objects and the subjective stream of psychological states have a certain depth to them: they exhibit recurring patterns.
The problem with projections is two-fold: partly, they falsify the object; and partly, they contain pieces of the subject’s own personality which should be recognized as such and integrated. Or, to put it differently: projections complicate both knowledge of the outer world and the inner world — knowledge of the soul, or self-knowledge.
Today’s notion of “narcissism” as self-love, i.e. a conscious exclusion of any other as love object would fit, strictly speaking, the ancient Narcissus not after, but before gazing into the mirror.
A while ago, I have posted some reflections on “the mirror of Narcissus”, a phrase that Tim Wu uses to characterize the Instagram culture of mass self-presentation in pictures. That phrase implies some kind of narcissism. But is that just a vague association with an old myth, or is there a deeper connection?
According to Jung, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are psychological patterns. An archetype thus represents how we (human beings) typically live through and experience certain situations. What kind of situations?
Returning from his year-long stay on a Greek island, the protagonist of The Magus makes an intermediate stop in Rome. But he compares his impressions unfavorably with those he had in that other Mediterranean world: The sun shone as certainly, the people were far more elegant, the architecture and the art much richer, but it was as if the Italians, like their Roman ancestors, wore a great mask of...
What we see, when looking into the symbolic mirror, are those parts of ourselves which we would normally avoid to look at, and which we carefully also hide from others. These are part of the personal unconscious and make up, in Jungian terminology, our “shadow”. The false face that we show ourselves and the outside worlds (as long as we ignore the shadow), is called the “persona” (in the ancient...
Mirrors, when they appear in a story, can symbolize something very interesting: namely, a special way of knowing something about a person. What makes it special is that others can know this about us, whereas we ourselves may not know it. Let’s see if we can explicate the idea in a non-symbolic manner: can we give an account of this special type of self-knowledge without recourse to a story (where...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.