A metaphysical theory is an account of which kinds of thing exist in the world and how they interact. Theories like that are generally considered to be a branch of philosophy; and especially when concerned just with kinds of existing things, they are also called ontologies. The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang...
I have referred to the mirror theory of eros once or twice now, but I realize that my argument regarding that view is somewhat scattered around this blog. Here is a précis that should help keeping the main points in mind. When a person is infatuated, a cluster of psychological contents which are all related to the love object forms, called a phantasma. The phantasma must partly be understood in...
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...
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...
Every question for which we have found an answer does also reveal, at the same time, some uncertain aspects — aspects that aren’t just unanswered yet, but somehow seem all the more difficult to figure out now since we know what we’ve learned. Questions, in a word, lead to answers which in turn always seem to lead to more questions. When we look at this fact of life from the perspective of...
We all occasionally find ourselves in conversations where we have the strong impression that the other person — the one we’re talking to — doesn’t even listen. They have tuned out; they’re absent. 1. They are absent, of course, only in a metaphorical sense: for obviously, they are present physically; and they are not entirely disconnected mentally, either: they can return to full presence in no...
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...
Loose talk in the mold of “I had a dream” leads us quickly into thinking that the “I” is the author or owner of the events and imagery in the dream — that we “dreamed it all up” in some sense. But there is a world of a difference between, say, a writer making up a conversation between two people and describing it in a novel, and a person having a dream about two people having that same...
In my reflections on the language of “having” dreams (fantasies, creative spirit, etc.) I briefly gestured to a certain blind spot in Hillman’s account of how the ego should be “subjected” to the dream (or fantasy etc.) images. There are two interrelated points I made, though in a rather too quick and compressed fashion. So let’s unpack them a little more. We can see where the blind spot is when...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.