The key to an understanding of the nature of the conscious life of the soul
lies in the sphere of the unconscious.
Overview
This chapter explores theoretically the imaginary and its relations with subjectivity through the outlook of analytical psychology. The view that the imaginary is essentially symbolic is discussed with the help of Jung’s theoretical concepts, and anthropological arguments and examples. In this framework, social imaginaries and subjective imagination are seen as having the same basic origins: the unconscious psyche, its archetypes, and especially its symbolic function—which is the typical mode of unconscious functioning, called symbolic-, dream-, or fantasy-thinking, responsible for imagination, dream, and fantasy. Subjectivity is understood as being constructed in the dialectics between social imaginaries, the subject’s own historical and individual context and actions, and the unconscious psyche.
2.1 The Concept of Imaginary
The concept of (social or collective) imaginary has been studied in depth by a number of authors from the social sciences and psychology (Bachelard, 1942; Castoriadis , 1975/1987; Corbin, 1964; Durand , 1963, 1994, 1996; Jameson , 1981; Maffesoli , 1988; Taylor , 2004; Wunenburger, 1997). To offer a definition intentionally broad, the concept of imaginary refers to the world of images and representations and its relations with imagination (both collective and individual): how human beings imagine, organize, and represent meaning through images, representations, symbols, and myths.
Collectively or culturally, we have social imaginaries: the ensemble of typical symbolic forms that are shared socially. These symbolic regimes or templates articulate collective mentalities and their typical forms of representing and signifying experience: distinctive social imaginary configurations that shape social structure, action, and processes, give social bonding and provide social cohesion, and generate social identity and inclusiveness. Anthropologically, they correspond to the social group’s mythic narratives, its symbolic or imaginary wealth: the imaginary forms that define that given culture, that prefigure and express its collective reality, and therefore ground, shape, or condition how the individual is socially inserted, her/his identity, and how she/he imagines, organizes, understands, and assigns meaning to her/his life, experience, and world.
In this sense, Xiberras (2002) provides a succinct definition when she affirms that the imaginary represents the typical psychological forms through which we construct reality: “The imaginary is at the same time an individual and collective creation and representation. Reality is constructed in, through and with images, symbols, and myths. (…) we cannot distinguish reality from the imaginary anymore” (p. 11). Such typical forms are based on “un dynamisme organisateur des images” (Thomas, 1998, p. 15) that is also typical, or universal (Durand, 1994, 1996).
2.2 The Symbolic Imaginary and the Collective Psyche
In Jung , such dynamism that originally underlies both cultural and individual imaginary creations is essentially symbolic and rests on the same psychological foundations: the unconscious psyche and its characteristic symbolic function. In cultural form, its imaginary productions will appear as myths, religious narratives, fairy tales, legends, and so on. In the individual, it appears chiefly in creative fantasy and imagination, in visions and delirium, in the child’s psychological functioning—and in dreams.
The unconscious psyche is formed by two realms: the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. Let us explore the concept of collective unconscious first.
2.2.1 The Unconscious Psyche: The Collective Unconscious
The collective unconscious is formed by instincts and archetypes: collective or suprapersonal psychic elements that are common to all human beings. Instincts and archetypes correspond to two sides of the same dynamic, the somatic and mental poles of the psyche, indissolubly connected (Jung, CW16, §185), and as such represent an a priori factor in all human activities.
Instincts are defined as collective patterns of behavior. They represent psychic factors, more connected to our biological foundations, that function as a compulsion or impulse to act or react in determinate ways: they are typical, “uniform and regularly recurring modes of action and reaction” (Jung, CW8, §273). As such they correspond to the drives for certain basic forms of human behavior: self-preservation and hunger, sex, knowledge, creativity, activity, religion, reflection, and so on. As impulses, they can be understood as the unconscious vis motrix, blind and compulsive, that expresses a specific energetic quantum, or libido.
Libido is the concept of psychic energy in Jung. Returning to the original sense of the word, it means energy conceived as desire, or appetite (Jung, CW4, §567). However, the libido does not have a dominant quality (such as sexuality, in Freud); it is analogous to the concept of energy in physics: energy can assume different qualities and does not have a preponderant one. In the same way that the instinct is irrepresentable in itself and can only be perceived through its manifestation (as typical forms of behavior), libido, as psychic energy, can only be perceived as images, as representations. “Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical with fantasy-images” (Jung, CW7, §345; e.a.).
2.2.2 Instinct and Archetype
(…) the way in which man inwardly pictures the world is still, despite all differences of detail, as uniform and as regular as his instinctive actions. Just as we have been compelled to postulate the concept of an instinct determining or regulating our conscious actions, so, in order to account for the uniformity and regularity of our perceptions, we must have recourse to the correlated concept of a factor determining the mode of apprehension. It is this factor which I call the archetype (…) the instinct’s perception of itself, or as the self-portrait of the instinct. (Jung, CW8, §277)
As a perception or representation of the instinct, the archetype provides it with a telos, a direction manifested as meaning. Being a nucleus of meaning (Jung, CW9i, §155)—which appears as a motif, for example, “mother”, “marriage”, “spirit”—it organizes the material of experience, its images, according to a specific meaningful configuration. Therefore, in relation to behavior, whereas the instinct corresponds to compulsion or impulse, the archetype represents intention, goal, and meaning. Being images of the instincts, archetypes signify and evoke them (Jung, CW8). As such they represent the bridge, the necessary connection with the primitive, instinctual psyche—with Nature itself. “They are thus, essentially, the chthonic portion of the psyche (…) that portion through which the psyche is attached to nature” (Jung, CW 10, §53).
2.2.3 The Archetype as Image and Idea
They are ideas ante rem, determinants of form, a kind of pre-existent ground-plan that gives the stuff of experience a specific configuration, so that we may think of them, as Plato did, as images, as schemata, or as inherited functional possibilities. (CW6, §512)
As an autochthonous, a priori structure of apperception that defines cognition and that, in shaping knowledge and perception of world and subject, conditions all experience, the archetypes correspond to Kantian categories. However, two particularities should be borne in mind. Differing from Kant, whose categories are essentially static and immutable, Jung confers the archetypes a historical value: they represent the whole history of humankind in us, but as a possibility, a virtuality. That is because the archetypes are not inherited ideas, which is an impossibility, but “innate possibilities of ideas, a priori conditions for fantasy-production” (Jung, CW10, §14; e.a.), “an inherited mode of psychic functioning” (Jung, CW18, §1128). As a facultas praeformandi, an empty form of apperception (Jung, CW9i, §155), the archetype itself is transcendental; it determines the (typical) form, not the content of the representations, and as such must be distinguished from its apprehensible manifestation, the archetypal image or primordial image. The primordial image is the synthesis of the a priori archetypal form (type) with the individual’s experience, that is, the empty form filled by subjective, experienced content. The archetypal image is, therefore, historical—like the psyche and the body.
[M]en have always talked about two kinds of reality: one that we see with our eyes and touch with our hands, and one that cannot be experienced with our senses. Here two different principles show. The Aristotelian will say: the archetypes are ideas derived from the experience with real fathers and mothers. The Platonist will say: fathers and mothers have only come into existence out of the archetypes, as those are the primal images, the pre-images of the manifestations, stored in a heavenly place, and it is from them that all forms come from. That is the origin of the term archetypos. (Jung, SCD, p. 72)
In Jung, our psyche is both: a dialectics between sensory and individual experience (which is historic and sociocultural) and the a priori conditions for image formation (which are also historic and represent the condensations of human culture across time as a virtual scheme), the suprasensory.
2.2.4 The Archetype as Image: The Primordial Image
The organism confronts light with a new structure, the eye, and the psyche confronts the natural process with a symbolic image, which apprehends it in the same way as the eye catches the light. And just as the eye bears witness to the peculiar and spontaneous creative activity of living matter, the primordial image expresses the unique and unconditioned creative power of the psyche. (Jung, CW6, §748)
The primordial image thus orders and organizes sensory perception and inner perception, in what one could call a creative (and unconscious) act of comprehension, through a determined meaning that will govern and direct action. Seen from an opposite and complementary viewpoint, the psyche projects3 the primordial image (and all its characteristics) upon the environment. Because it is connected to the instinct (it is an expression, as image, of the instinct), it will give definite emotional color and affective value to the exterior perception—which correspond to the libido expressed by and contained in the representation. As a mythic image, it is naturally and typically fascinating, enchanting, tremendous, and so on. That is due to an essential characteristic of the archetypal image in its empirical manifestation: its numinosity and fascinating power (Jung, CW8, §414).
Numinosity refers to the concept of numen, elaborated by Rudolf Otto (1917). In his phenomenological studies, Otto proposed the numen as the essential element that underlies all religious experience, all the “states of the soul” related to the experience of the sacred, the holy. The numinosum, or numen innefabile, is characterized as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, wherein the mysterium represents das ganz Andere (the totally Other), what is qualitatively different, and presents two possible elements: the tremendum, which causes fear or terror, and the fascinans, which attracts and fascinates. According to Jung, the numinosity characteristic of the primordial image corresponds to the specific value of an archetypal event; it is its libidinal charge, derived from its connection to instinct. Being numinous is therefore a distinguishing feature of the archetype: it is felt as something extremely significant that attracts, fascinates, convinces, and overpowers (Jung, CW9, §11); at the same time it can be perceived as tremendum, originating fear, dread, and reverence, or as something suprapersonal, transcendent, spiritual (or daemonic), irresistible, immediate, ineluctable, and autonomous. In this sense, if every primordial image refers to a transcendental, mythical reality, then the experience of the world will be painted with such enchanted colors—as it has been for millennia, and still is in the natural products of our imagination.
2.2.5 The Archetype as (Precondition for the) Idea
an idea which differs from all other concepts in that it is not a datum of experience but is actually the underlying principle of all experience. The idea derives this quality from the primordial image, which, as an expression of the specific structure of the brain, gives every experience a definite form. (Jung, CW6, §750)
In this sense Plato sees the idea as a prototype of things, while Kant defines it as the “archetype [Urbild] of all practical employment of reason,” a transcendental concept which as such exceeds the bounds of the experienceable—“a rational concept whose object is not to be found in experience4”. (CW6, §733)
In the same way that Kant interposes a subject of knowledge between the empirical world and the formulation of knowledge itself—a way in which the role of distancing and orienting the subject vis-à-vis empirical reality is assigned to the ideas—, Jung [in CW6] revisits the same subject, adding, as archetypes (or primordial images), a linkage with instinct, feeling, and sentiment.
Against cold, purely abstract reason, such proposition rejoins the ideas with their imagistic and emotional origins. For Jung, beyond being mere components of reason, as archaic ideas they come to shape philosophical ideas “that influence and set their stamp on whole nations and epochs” (CW18, §547); their origins in primordial images explain, or at least help us understand, the emotional (and at times religious) attraction of certain ideas.
Therefore, with the theory on archetypes and the collective unconscious, Jung proposes a common archaic basis for all mental activities and phenomena—for all that is imaginary: from fantasy and dream to fairy tales , religions, and myths, to ideas and science.5 Next, we will see that such psychic foundations are symbolic: their natural expression is the symbol.
2.2.6 Archetypal Image as Symbolic Rite
Anthropologically, a rite represents one of the primary formations of a social imaginary. As such, it illustrates some of the main theoretical premises related to our discussion of imaginary and symbol: how the primordial image (archetype) manifests itself as a symbolic product; how such symbol transforms the instinctual libido and is translated into a symbolic narrative, the rite, which organizes and mediates action and perception (i.e., experience); and how what is imaginary (the symbolic rite) institutes culture.
They dig a hole in the ground, so shaping it and setting it about with bushes that it looks like a woman’s genitals. Then they dance round this hole all night, holding their spears in front of them in imitation of an erect penis. As they dance round, they thrust their spears into the hole, shouting: “Pulli nira, pulli nira wataka!” (Not a pit, not a pit, but a cunt!) (…) Before and during the whole ceremony, none of them may look at a woman. (CW5, §214–216)
We can easily see that the instinct would be naturally directed to sexuality and procreation, to its original object: the female (in fact, to the female genitals). In a natural state, the primitive merely follows the instinctive current and does not produce “work” proper, but simply fulfills his animal needs (sex, food, shelter, etc.). What transforms and canalizes libido into an analogue of the object of instinct is the symbol. In this case, an archetypal symbol, the expression of the primordial image: the earth as woman, and the whole act or rite as a sacramental mating, the hieros gamos or holy marriage, between the earth (woman) and the spear (phallus, the men’s procreative masculine energy). Typically, the symbolic images6 offer a wealth of meanings and cannot be reduced to any single one.
The rite occurs in a very emotionally charged atmosphere, the dancing representing a mating-play: through the ecstatic atmosphere created by shouting, dancing, and branding the spears, the men are immersed in the imaginary view of the hole as vulva (and earth as woman). In order to guarantee that the libido will not be disturbed and “flow back” to its original object, they cannot look at women. In perceiving the field through the symbol (or, by projecting the psychic symbol, the primordial image, upon the field—which is the same), the earth is endowed with a special psychic value, an expectation analogous to the primary object (the woman and the sexual act).
Our example is a very simple one; it is a basic form that will eventually develop into more elaborated religious practices and narratives. In them, Nature and earth will be symbolized as goddesses, with their specific fertility rites and forms of worship: they will be seen as numinous, or sacred, as feminine deities related to cultivation and fertility.7 That corresponds to the motif of the “Great Mother” or mother-goddess, the mother archetype.
If one generalizes from this simple rite to more elaborated imaginary constructions, it can be affirmed that the symbolic is what gives meaning and value (and sacredness) to the world and the human action in it: what becomes numinous and sacred is not merely the earth (and thus Nature), but also the role of men as cultivators, as active participants in a sacred rite (in communion with the sacred earth), and later their activity in the field, their work—in fact themselves, their existence, and the world share in sacredness, and therefore in dignity.
Such numinosity is an expression of the libido contained in the archetype and expressed symbolically. As such, it will appear in every imaginary form connected to an archetypal symbol; it represents an archaic concept of psychic energy. In physics, the concept of energy comes from the idea of ένέργεια, which has its ancient roots in the primitive notion of “extremely powerful or efficient”, which underlies all religious forms. The numinosity characteristic of the archetypal symbol is what Mauss, Marett, and a generation of anthropologists saw as mana . Hubert and Mauss, in Mélanges d’histoire des religions (1909), had already affirmed—avant la lettre—that the idea of mana corresponded to what Jung would call an archetype: mana represents an “unconscious a priori category of understanding” that directs “habits of consciousness” (Shamdasani, 2003, p. 295).
In abstract form, symbols are religious ideas; in the form of action, they are rites or ceremonies. They are (…) stepping-stones to new activities, which must be called cultural in order to distinguish them from the instinctual functions that run their regular course according to natural law. (Jung, CW8, §91)
In our example, the symbol, as pure representation (a symbolic image), is an expression of a primordial image (earth as procreative woman, or feminine); as a complete rite or myth, it is the symbol as narrative (a symbolic narrative). Those are the two forms of perception, of cognitive organization of experience and act, that are typical of the archetype: as image and narrative, through the symbol.
2.2.7 Symbol, Imaginary, and Culture
Therefore, it is a symbolic and religious act, through a rite, that founds and is the foundation of culture. Indeed, myth and rite are omnipresent occurrences across cultures and history; culture, symbol, and myth seem to be inseparable phenomena. From the primitives to the Middle Ages, all existence was mediated by rites: for hunting, agriculture, birth, death, marriage, and so on. Instinctual life functioned through symbolic systems, or symbolic imaginaries, that defined, limited, and signified both individual and sociocultural life.
In this view, culture thus stems from nature—for the collective unconscious, as instincts and archetypes, is Nature in us—and at the same time is opposed and autonomous in relation to nature as mere instinctuality—for the natural instinctual impulse, and its inertia, are transformed and redirected through the symbol.8
The symbol is therefore what renders possible the transcendence of our mere animality, mere nature (what the Roman and Renaissance humanists9 called feritas, or barbaritas—brutality), and its refinement (cultivation) into culture. Thus, it defines what is human (humanitas). Jung associates such capacity to a self-regulatory, developmental telos in the psyche, the regulating principle of individuation. “Multiplicity and inner division are opposed by an integrative unity whose power is as great as that of the instincts. Together they form a pair of opposites necessary for self-regulation, often spoken of as nature and spirit” (Jung, CW8, §96). The human child is never born as tabula rasa; a newly born is already endowed with a whole instinctive disposition, but also with all the ancestral differentiations, which are historical and hereditary. “Thus every child is born with an immense split in his make-up: on one side he is more or less like an animal, on the other side he is the final embodiment of an age-old and endlessly complicated sum of hereditary factors” (§98). That means that we are all born with the split nature-culture (and history) as our mental configurations; such conflict, or contradiction, is the tension that expresses our psychic energy. Again, in Jung, the psychic element that expresses such energy by uniting and whereby transcending the conflicting opposites through a synthesis is the symbol.
2.2.8 Symbol: Definition and Difference
As a representation , and therefore a psychic content, the symbol is seen in analytical psychology as the natural product and expression of the unconscious psyche. “As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols. Every dream is evidence of this process” (Jung, MHS, p. 64). However, in Jung such process is vital: the symbol-creating function represents the most important function of the unconscious (CW10, §25).
Jung provides a synthetic definition: “a symbol is the best possible expression for an unconscious content whose nature can only be guessed, because it is still unknown” (CW9i, §7, 10n). That means that a symbol always expresses an unconscious (unknown) quantum, and, being an unconscious product, is autonomous. Another characteristic is that it unites opposites: “symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures” (CW11, §648). Jung is referring to the Greek etymon: sym bollom, from syn- “together” + ballé “to throw”, hence “to throw together” the opposites, into one image. As such, the symbol represents synthesis, the very possibility of dialectics. It is the psychic mechanism that brings together two (or more) heterogeneous natures into one homogeneous image, a whole, according to a determinate meaning. It can be said that it is the prime expression of meaning by the unconscious. As noted by Schelling, the word in German cannot be clearer: symbol is Sinnbild, the image of meaning (or meaning-image). Another form of understanding the symbol is that it is the union of the sensory (appearance) with the suprasensory (the transcendental, i.e., the archetypal). Gadamer (1975) expresses it almost poetically: in the symbol “the idea itself gives itself existence. (…) A symbol is the coincidence of sensible appearance and suprasensible meaning, and this coincidence is (…) the union of two things that belong to each other” (p. 67).
The symbol as a totality, a whole in itself, is perhaps the most important idea here; Jung inherited it from the tradition of Kant, Goethe, and Schelling (see Vieira, 2003). Its manifold meanings—which, being (at least in part) unknown or unconscious, are not given a priori—are contained in its image; the image is its own meaning. “Image and meaning are identical and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs no interpretation; it portrays its own meaning” (Jung, CW8, §402). Being a whole, in the symbol both image and meaning, signifier and signified, are inextricably united . G. Durand (1963, p. 20) put it simply: “le symbole présuppose homogénéité du signifiant et du signifié au sens d’un dynamisme organisateur”. And so did Gadamer (1975, p. 67): “the concept of symbol implies the inner unity of symbol and what is symbolized”. As a dynamism, the symbol is precisely the motor and expression of such (re)union of signifier and signified—its unknown unconscious content, an invitation to knowledge, a call to consciousness.
2.2.9 Distinction from Allegory and Sign
Considered in this way, the symbol is what defines the human unconscious psyche, and—as consciousness springs from the unconscious—therefore the whole psyche, which is the source of social imaginaries and culture. Ergo the symbol defines what is human: homo symbolicus (Cassirer ). It is therefore necessary to distinguish the symbol from the other forms of representation, especially in relation to the sign; for in this crucial difference rests the mutation of imaginaries, and ultimately the anthropological and cultural mutation that this work studies.
The concept of a symbol should in my view be strictly distinguished from that of a sign. Symbolic and semiotic meanings are entirely different things. (…) Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as an intentional paraphrase or transmogrification of a known thing is allegoric. (Jung, CW6, §815)
The symbol is not a sign that disguises something generally known. Its meaning resides in the fact that it is an attempt to elucidate, by a more or less apt analogy, something that is still entirely unknown or still in the process of formation. If we reduce this by analysis to something that is generally known, we destroy the true value of the symbol. (Jung, CW7, §492)
Whereas the symbol is always more than what can be understood at first, for it is a totality that includes the unconscious, irrational element (and is created by it), the sign is always conventional and less than what it refers to—it is a reduction, by definition, and something artificial and not spontaneous. If the symbol is a unity, a (re)union of differences into a totality that simply is what it is, the sign represents a split, a schism between signifier and signified. As G . Durand (1963) defines it: “signe: convention arbitraire qui laisse étrangers l’un à l’autre le signifiant et le signifié” (p. 21).
Although signs and allegories are common forms of representation, they are not the only ones. As we have seen, the symbol is the primary, vital form of psychic representation and must be taken and understood in its specificity: as a psychic form of irrational and autonomous nature (i.e., unconscious) that contains a wealth of meaning indistinguishable from its own image—not as something whose meaning is given a priori and intentionally constructed. In this definition, it is impossible to consciously build or create a symbol, for then it would be an allegory or sign. “A symbol is never an invention. It happens to man” (Jung, SNZ, p. 1251).
The opposite is to propose or even engineer a sign as if it were a symbol, or else to always, by definition and a priori, construe the symbol as a sign. In fact, that is precisely what characterizes postmodernity and consumerism: the Reign of Signs, which nevertheless considers everything “symbolic”. Producing a sign as if it were a symbol requires and means to “disguise it [the sign] as a ‘symbolic’ phantasmagoria. No matter how fantastic the trappings may look, it would still be a sign hinting at a conscious thought, and not a symbol” (Jung, CW18, §482; e.a.). As the sign is by definition a designation of a thing known a priori, “destroying the true value of the symbol” means destroying what is unconscious, the unconscious expression and its signification, and substituting a phantasmagoria for the unconscious discourse—or superimposing a given discourse (an ideology) upon the original symbolic discourse. It means a denial of the reality and creativity of the unconscious, and therefore a denial of psychic reality.
If we return to the example of the rite, to see it semiotically—as a sign—would simply obliterate its sociocultural aspect, its value: the whole rite, and therefore the whole of culture, would be nothing but an epiphenomenon—or worse still, a perversion, a symptom—of the sexual instinct, of primitive, animal desire. A debasement into crass feritas: no possible dialectics. In other words, what is typically human—the cultural, spiritual element—is destroyed when the symbol is erased or substituted artificially by the sign.
2.2.10 Imaginary Function in the Subject: Symbol and Fantasy
As the example of rite discussed above demonstrated, such social imaginaries—as rites, myths, religions, and so on—are genuinely symbolic and have a collective nature; they are formed by collective symbols.
In his works and practice, Jung discovered that certain individual symbolic products, such as dreams, fantasies , imaginations, delirium, and so on, also presented certain common symbolic patterns (motifs) that were similar to the mythic symbols; they were isomorphic between themselves or else had the same patterns in meaning.10 As in many cases the hypothesis of cultural transmission would not hold (as, e.g., in European children’s dreams, or deliriums of psychiatric patients, that presented cosmogonic motifs found in ancient pagan and Eastern religions), Jung proposed that their similitude was due to their stemming from the same source: the collective unconscious and its typical symbolic function.
That is the origin of the theory of the collective unconscious as a symbolic matrix for humanity and the subject. If the individual imaginary product, a symbol, derives from such source, it follows that one will have to compare it with the historical symbolic production of humanity, in myths, rites, fairy tales, religions, and art—with the manners in which the symbol appeared culturally—in order to establish parallels and understand it. That corresponds to the hermeneutic method of amplification: it presupposes that the symbol—like its source, the unconscious—is historical.
However, in such individual imaginary products, the symbol can also assume an individual, more subjective character (as opposed to a collective and archetypal one). Dreams and fantasies can have impersonal, collective contents and narratives; yet, more commonly, they have a more personal character, referring to the subject’s individual psyche, his particular trajectory, problems, and psychological configuration.
The symbolic image as a product of the individual’s psyche, whether it has a collective or personal character, corresponds to the image of fantasy: as an inner image, it is a homogeneous product, with its own wealth of meaning, appearing autonomously and spontaneously. Its relation to the exterior object is indirect; its significance cannot be reduced to the exterior object. It expresses primarily the situation, at a given moment, of the unconscious psyche: its autonomous portrayal of itself, of its energies (libido) and their dynamics—in relation and possible union with the conscious situation—represented as symbolic images. Such autonomous functioning of the unconscious psyche appears in every individual as symbolic imagination: as fantasy.
2.2.11 Imagination as Symbolic Fantasy: Symbolic Thinking, Dream-Thinking
For Jung, fantasy corresponds to the natural imaginative activity of the psyche. As imagination, it represents the reproductive or creative activity of the mind in general. “Fantasy as imaginative activity is, in my view, simply the direct expression of psychic life (…) it is identical with the flow of psychic energy” (Jung, CW6, §722).
The natural flow of libido corresponds to the autonomous functioning of the unconscious. Indeed, already in 1912, Jung (CW5) proposed fantasy as our unconscious natural form of thinking, which he termed fantasy-thinking, or dreaming-thinking. It is complementary to another general type of psychic functioning, more familiar to us, which he called logical or directed thinking. Both can be seen as modes of cognitive functioning: of ordering experience, assigning meaning, and constructing reality.11
Logical, directed thinking is directed at outward reality, has an objective character, is productive as regards adaptation, and depends on consciousness and effort (and hence is not continuous but intermittent). As it functions through language and verbal concepts, it is also called linguistic thought. Being directed by an idea or principium, it aims at communication, differentiation, and empirical reality; as such, it is the instrument of culture.
Symbolic thinking, the function of imagination or imaginary function, is continuously happening underneath directed thinking. It is the archaic mode of thinking typified by fantasy: it is directed inwardly, has a subjective and associative character, is spontaneous, effortless, and imagistic; it works through emotionally charged images. Being the characteristic form of unconscious thinking, it appears in all those situations in which there is an abaissement12 of consciousness (in dreams, reverie, intoxication, certain psychopathologies; or even when one gets very tired) or when consciousness is still incipient (in primitive peoples and children), that is, when what we consider as our regular state of focused consciousness gives way to a more or less unconscious state. Then the unconscious foundation once again conduces the process of thinking through fantasy, which becomes the primary form of perception. Guided by the unconscious imagery, as bundles or trains of images and sensations associated by contiguity, fantasy leads away from empirical reality, for the apperception of the external object is then defined by the inner unconscious form of representation, which is characteristically symbolic: it associates typical images with their correspondent emotions and sensations. Moreover, there will be the characteristic projection of unconscious contents upon the environment, which becomes animated and characterized by them (i.e., it is perceived or imagined as such). In sum, it perceives reality according to subjective unconscious motives; it is a dream-like perception, hence dream-thinking (Jung, CW5, §25).
If we recall what was discussed above in relation to symbol and archetype, we shall conclude that fantasies and imagination speak a typical language, symbolic and pictorial, “the emotionally charged picture-language of dreams” (Jung, CW18, §464), a dream-language, to which we shall return in the next chapter. Again, the psychic roots of such language are to be found in the archetypes. That is why such language (and functioning) is universal: it is the language of the unconscious, the language of the instincts, which is the basis or origin for all languages (a view found also in Cassirer ) and thought (for fantasy-thinking precedes logical thinking). As Wolfgang Pauli once wrote to Jung,13 “the archetypal concepts (or, as you once said, the ‘instinct of imagination’)” (Meier, 2001, p. 33) are what conceive such imaginary products. While its cultural expressions—myths, religious narratives, and so on—unveil the unconscious dispositions and typical characteristics of a culture, its individual expressions—fantasies , dreams, imagination—will reveal the unconscious subjective dispositions, the individual inner reality, in symbolic form.
Because the archetype is numinous by definition, such expressions of symbolic thought are always ultimately connected to a magical-religious thinking. Anthropologically, such fact can be seen both culturally and individually. If symbolic thinking naturally and autonomously produces numinous symbols, which originate religious practices and systems, then the psyche must be naturally religious. Jung referred to such dynamism as the autochthonous religious function of the psyche (CW12, §12; see also Xavier, 2006).
For the individual, the vital importance of such thinking and its language consists in the fact that, as the symbol connects consciousness to its instinctive foundation, “through fantasy-thinking, directed thinking is brought into contact with the oldest layers of the human mind, long buried beneath the threshold of consciousness” (Jung, CW5, §39). It is the connection of individual ego consciousness (the I, the subject) with its psychic roots in the archetype and instinct. To summarize and conclude, both cultural and individual forms of imagination have its roots in the imaginary symbolic function inherent to the unconscious psyche. Its foundation corresponds to the archetypes and its typical symbols.14
2.2.12 The Transition from Natural Symbols to Cultural Symbols
In the life of a Roman farmer every act, however specialized, had its specific religious meaning. There was one class of deities—of Di Indigites—that watched over the act of sowing, another that watched over the act of harrowing, of manuring (…). In all agricultural work there was not a single act that was not under guidance and protection of functional deities, and each class had its own rites and observances . (Cassirer, 1944, p. 97)
In such example, every facet of the cultural activity (in our example, agriculture), and the ways in which it was thought and understood, was inextricably connected to and organized by a religious system and its rites; therefore, one could say that every major aspect of life was connected to symbolic thinking and functioned through it.
Such typical images, narratives, and rituals, through endless historical differentiation and conscious elaboration, come to constitute a culture’s imaginary wealth, its typical psychological functioning: the original primordial images (or natural symbols) turn into collective representations, and these, in their differentiated and elaborated forms, become cultural symbols (Jung, CW18, §579). In analytical psychology, that represents the other part of the collective psyche, which Jung called collective consciousness, and its collective representations.
2.2.13 The Collective Consciousness: Représentations Collectives
Jung took the concepts of collective representations and collective consciousness from Durkheim , via his studies of Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss (Shamdasani, 2003). For Durkheim (1912/1995), collective consciousness was made up of collective representations of a social and historical nature: the typical ways in which the collective aggregation, the social group, shared symbolic forms such as myths, legends, rites, and religious narratives and practices. Meaning, social bonding and structure, thought, and action were predicated upon such collective mentality, which presented a specific “psychical individuality ” (Durkheim, 1895/1982, p. 129)—the particular imaginary configuration that instituted and characterized a society in its specificity.
In his Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, Durkheim (1912/1995) inaugurates the study of the role of imagination and symbolic forms in the constitution of social life among primitives. He finds such role inextricably connected to religious forms. “Religion is an eminently social thing. Religious representations are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of these groups” (p. 9).
Lévy-Bruhl (1910/1985) clarifies Durkheim’s concept of collective representations. He agreed with Durkheim in many regards: représentations collectives conform the mentality of a certain social group and are common to all the group members, appearing as rites, beliefs, mythical narratives, and so on, shared by the group; they are socially determined and historical and function as collective categories. However, Lévy-Bruhl focused more on their specific functioning: their feeling-tone, their emotional and affective character. For him, what defined collective representations was that they are contaminated or permeated by emotional and motor elements. As categories, they are interposed between the subject and the object or empirical reality. Then the resulting image (the representation as primitive “idea”) of the object is never “objective”, but always mingled with sensations and emotions. Therefore, the representations and their accompanying emotions are what configure “reality”, and they can be impervious to experience, to the point of openly contradicting it (Vieira, 2003). However, the affective elements are not subjective in the sense that they pertain to the individual. The contamination of the representations follows a collective pattern, shared by the whole social group or people (Lévy-Bruhl , 1910/1985), and is in fact what defines the group’s mentality, the way the whole group experiences reality. As such, the représentations constitute an object of faith which is not reflexively considered; they are taken for granted—for the primitives, they are their reality; their existence and their world are predicated upon them.
Like Durkheim , Lévy-Bruhl found that such primitive imaginary was essentially religious. For the primitive, the representations always commanded respect, fear, and adoration (Lévy-Bruhl , 1910/1985). That is why he called them mystical: they constitute a mentality founded on imaginary, invisible, immaterial forces and influences. As mentioned before, Marcel Mauss (1903) found in the concept of mana the archaic idea that underlay all such magic, mystical representations, and was their form and condition—the element common to all primitive symbolic imaginaries. In other words, the “contamination” expressed by Lévy-Bruhl corresponds to the representations’ mana , their mystical character and general functioning. As a category, mana functions as a psychic quality15 that conditions knowledge and representation and thus configures collective and unconscious “habitudes directrices de la conscience”—the group’s mentality and behavior, its categories of identity and otherness. Indeed, it represents an archaic form of all other mental categories, that is, a primordial image or archetype: “But mana isn’t only a special category of primitive thought, and today, by way of reduction, it is again the first form assumed by other categories always functioning in our mind, those of substance and of cause” (Hubert & Mauss, 1909, p. xxx).
Jung affirmed that all such “mystical” collective representations originally spring from religious forms, the archetypes. They are projections of the unconscious psychic structure—its archetypes—upon reality and symbolic systems. Their mana corresponds empirically to their numinosity: the ability to command “respect, fear, and adoration” is the very definition of numen. As numina, they are emotionally charged and hence embody collective forms of feeling and valuing.16 Such collective forms—collective feeling-values—are not restricted to the primitive mentality; they somehow reach our modern mentalities and underlie collective psychic contents.
2.2.14 Collective Consciousness as a Social Imaginary
general ideas and value-categories which have their origin in the primordial motifs of mythology, and they govern the psychic and social life of the primitive in much the same way as our lives are governed and moulded by the general beliefs, views, and ethical values in accordance with which we are brought up and by which we make our way in the world. They intervene almost automatically in all our acts of choice and decision, as well as being operative in the formation of concepts. (Jung, CW16, §247)
That means that the contents of collective consciousness are also interposed between the subjects and empirical reality; they function as typical and collective mental categories for seeing and experiencing reality, and thus shape how the world and oneself are imagined, represented, sensed, signified, felt.
Of course, in comparison with the primitive, in us all of that supposedly happens in a much more differentiated, rationalized, secularized, modern, and civilized way. Nonetheless, what is important for this work is the archaic modes of psychic functioning, and its needs, do not simply disappear, no matter how secularized, a-symbolic, and rationalized a culture and its subject are. As Lévy-Bruhl affirmed, opposing Durkheim , such primitive ways are not “phases” that simply go away, superseded by reason and logical thinking; prelogical thought and collective feeling continue to live in modern (and even postmodern) women and men. If we follow Jung’s theory, we must acknowledge that the unconscious psyche, as the depository of such archaic ways, is our very psychic foundation, and therefore never disappears; its instinctual necessities and primeval emotionality have always needed expression through symbols, primordial images, and myths.
In the contemporary social imaginaries, certain systems of ideas and values seem to fulfill such deep-seated needs. For this work, it is necessary to highlight those elements that, though being neither truly symbolic nor religious, still function as représentations collectives and correspond, in one way or another, to the old forms of symbolic thinking—to mythic, religious imaginaries (and as such are best understood through their comparison with anthropological material, as argued in this chapter).
Now religious ideas, as history shows, are charged with an extremely suggestive, emotional power. Among them I naturally reckon all representations collectives: everything that we learn from the history of religion, anything that has an “-ism” attached to it. The latter is only a modern variant of the denominational religions. A man may be convinced in all good faith that he has no religious ideas, but no one can fall so far away from humanity that he no longer has any dominating representation collective. His very materialism, atheism, communism, socialism, liberalism, intellectualism, existentialism, or what not, testifies against his innocence. Somewhere or other, overtly or covertly, he is possessed by a supraordinate idea. (Jung, CW9i, § 125; e.a.)
As supraordinate ideas, such ideological systems function like the collective representations did for the primitive: as cultural “categories of the imagination” (Jung, CW8, §254), they condition how reality—both inner and outer reality—is experienced and represented; as mass phenomena, they are commonly taken for granted as self-evident truths; they exude a “mystical” aura, a somewhat magical power or enchantment, derived from the feeling-value of their ideas and images, which elicit collective feelings and emotions.18 “These are the magical representations collectives which underlie the slogan, the catchword” (Jung, CW7, 231)—and the propaganda, the advertisement. Such fascination originates identification, for it touches the primal, collective roots in each subject. Accordingly, such collective ideas will govern the prescribed modes of behavior and shape the habitudes directrices de la conscience. Therefore, these social imaginaries, as with the primitives, will be typified by a characteristic mass psychology, a mass mentality.
In our present century, the ism, the ideology that characterizes our social imaginary is the one studied in this work: that of total capitalism and total consumerism.
“Each culture or epoch produces a new interpretation of archetypal motifs, trying thereby to establish a link with those structural elements that are the roots of consciousness in human nature” (Vieira, 2003, p. 57). This new interpretation, as the mythological aspect of collective consciousness, corresponds to the specific imaginary of each culture. As stressed before, the archetypes of the collective unconscious represent the connection of the psyche with Nature, and at the same time the foundations of what is human, for they characterize the specifically human modes of perceiving, acting, fantasizing, and imagining. Therefore, the way the imaginaries articulate expressions of such fundamental basis is crucial, for they will represent the connections to our foundations and at the same time shape and configure the individual psyche and subjectivity.
In this section, the collective realms of the psyche—collective unconscious and collective consciousness—were discussed in their relations with the imaginary. The next section will discuss the personal realm: how subjectivity is shaped through and in such symbolic imaginaries, in (possible) dialectics with the individual’s own will, agency, history, and imaginative-symbolic function.
2.3 Subjectivity and the Imaginary: The Personal Psyche
In analytical psychology, the concept of subjectivity corresponds to the personal part of the psyche: the personal unconscious and its complexes, and ego consciousness.
2.3.1 Ego Consciousness
The ego, or in fact Ich, the I, corresponds to a psychic complex that is the center of consciousness. As such, it is the subject of all personal acts of consciousness (Jung, CW9, §1). As the center of the conscious personality, the “I” is equal to our conscious subjectivity, our continuous sense of identity: to what and how we think, sense, feel, and imagine we are consciously; it represents “the subjective factor” (Jung, CW8, §77). What distinguishes the ego—in relation to the other complexes—is consciousness. In a manner similar to William James’s, consciousness is defined as a quality, not as a substance (Vieira, 2003); it is the quality that characterizes the contents that are in relation to the ego. In opposition to unconsciousness, which means undifferentiation, consciousness means precisely differentiation, discrimination, distinction—“the ability to distinguish between the objects of the imagination and especially to distinguish between them and the subject” (Meier, 1989, pp. 21–22; e.a.)—and subsequent assimilation (into a relationship with conscious contents, whose center is the ego).19 As such, it is related to decision, choice, and thus to freedom: the more conscious one is, the more one has free will, at least theoretically; if one behaves unconsciously, that implies no decision and hence has no ethical value. That means that only ego consciousness is capable of agency proper, of acting ethically (cf. Hannah Arendt’s concept of action, as opposed to mere behavior).
The process of formation of consciousness is an immensely complicated one. In this work I shall be content with pointing out some of its basic elements. Ego consciousness is constituted partly by the inherited disposition (the character constituents) and partly by unconsciously acquired impressions and their attendant phenomena (Jung, CW17, §169). Starting from such basis, consciousness is enlarged by the gradual assimilation of materials from experience—as contents and representations—in a historical process, that is, during the subject’s lifetime. Such assimilation refers to experiences of the external world as well as of the inner world; ego consciousness mediates their dialectical relationships, acting as a “connecting system both for them and between them” (Meier, 1989, p. 18). To return to our themes of image, representation, and imaginary, ego consciousness is at once the mediator for, the result of, and what gives meaning to the dialectics between the unconscious psyche and collective consciousness, or the social imaginaries. This idea is formulated in Kant’s definition: the ego is the “transcendental synthesis of apperception” (ibid., p. 29).
However, ego consciousness is intermittent: underneath it, there flows continually the unconscious psyche. Consciousness arises out of such depths, in the child, but also in us every morning.20 As discussed, such unconscious depths function as fantasy- or dream-thinking, whose dynamics can happen every time we are in a more or less unconscious state, or (put differently) unconscious of something. In the child, however, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: ego consciousness and subjectivity emerge gradually out of such primitive, primary state of unconsciousness, just as they did in the primitive.
2.3.2 Participation Mystique and Unconscious Identity
It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. This identity is founded on an a priori oneness of object and subject (…) [on] the original non-differentiation of subject and object, (…) the primordial unconscious state. (Jung, CW6, §781, 741)
Such state is archaic in the sense that it is prior to the formation of a distinct subject: whereas consciousness means differentiation, what characterizes the primitive unconscious mentality is undifferentiation, indistinctness from the object. The object here can be concrete, or a person, but also an image or an idea: “an identification with a thing or the idea of a thing” (Jung, CW 6, §781), that is, with something imaginary. It means that both object and subject are perceived through the imagination. Such dynamics can happen to us whenever we are in a more or less unconscious state. “Unconscious identity is a well-known psychological and psychopathological phenomenon (identity with persons, things, functions, roles, positions, creeds, etc.), which is only a shade more characteristic of the primitive than of the civilized mind” (Jung, CW11, §817, note 28).
Identity implies that the subject becomes bound to the object; it is as if the object, or its idea, became part of the subject. The key point here is the idea, or representation. The subject identifies with the idea, the meaning, and the value seen in the object: because this is a perception conditioned by the unconscious, the subject sees the object as a symbol. That is why participation mystique as original identity involves projection: in identifying with the object, the subject projects some part of her psyche upon the object, as a symbol—it is the projected symbol that constitutes the bondage. “It is an irrational, unconscious identity, arising from the fact that anything that comes into contact with me is not only itself, but also a symbol” (Jung, CW11, §389). Therefore, what are projected are psychic (unconscious) contents, as symbols, through which the object is perceived. As we have seen, that is characteristic of symbolic thinking, of imagination and fantasy. “Participation mystique is a characteristic of symbols in general. The symbol always includes the unconscious, hence man too is contained in it” (CW11, §337, note 32). The symbol projected is an expression, a representation, of an unconscious content and its corresponding meaning and affective value (its quantum of libido). With projection, the object will carry the symbol, will be its depositary; inasmuch as the unconscious content symbolized is emotionally toned, or charged with libido, the object will therefore be perceived as fascinating, or numinous; it will be charged with “mana”. Again, that is why it is mystique; the object acquires a mystical, numinous character. Its objective reality is contaminated by the subjective content: its image or representation is endowed with an archaic imaginary quality. Being symbolic, the object is always more than what it is concretely; it has acquired layers of meaning, symbolic meaning. Jung agrees with Lévy-Bruhl (Segal, 2007) in that such primitive thinking is indifferent to contradiction, both as regards identity and projection: the primitive can believe he is a parrot or other sacred bird, and yet he knows he cannot fly; the object can be absolutely banal and yet be perceived as mana, sacred, numinous.
This archaic identity or indistinction means that the primitive psyche, being unconscious, is always projected, remaining in a state of fusion with the outside world: “the psychic and the objective coalesce in the external world” (Jung, CW10, §128), the inner world and the exterior world are one. In this state there is no individual subjectivity proper, for the “subject” here is still collective, or indistinct from the object. One cannot speak of individuality, or an I: ego consciousness is still nascent, and the unconscious psyche is projected and mingled with the environment.21
Therefore, in participation mystique, one only finds collective relationship (Jung, CW6, §12). Moreover, if the psyche of the primitive and the child is projected, their relationship to the world, and to themselves, will be completely imaginary. Their psychic functioning corresponds to a fusion with the imaginary.
Here we can recall the other concept of Lévy-Bruhl that characterizes primitive mentality. Such symbolic projections and corresponding contaminations of the object are not arbitrary. They are collective and specific to the social group: as a symbolic system, they correspond to the représentations collectives, the ways the collective psyche has been projected into symbolic productions. As mythical narratives, rites, religious forms, and so on, they condition the specific forms of projection and identity for the whole social group and each of its members. It is through such imaginary and its primordial images that the primitive’s unconscious psyche will be projected; if the symbols are the channels for libido, then their specific cultural configurations will direct her/his libido and therefore her/his life and the way she/he perceives the world. The primitive’s psyche will correspond to such collective system, projected, with which she/he identifies at the same time.
For the primitive and infants, whose psyches are projected upon people and things, the world and life will be enchanted, impregnated with a mysterious, fascinating, terrible, sacred character, derived from the symbols that express the archetypal foundation. They both live a symbolic life in a primeval symbolic world, in archaic union with both world and instinct—but undifferentiated from them, without individuality, without conscious reflection: unconscious. They live in and through affects and emotions, and their corresponding images—the symbolic images of fantasy and imagination. They live in a dream.
This description corresponds to our archaic functioning, which underlies all conscious life. On the other hand, the more the person is dissociated from such symbolic life, from the symbol and hence from instinct, from nature—the more she/he will dream of returning to such state of wholeness, of primal unity. This form of existence—as whole, but unconscious, united to affects and symbol—will then correspond to the “paradise of childhood” (Jung, MDR, p. 272).
2.3.3 Personal Unconscious and the Complexes
With the progressive formation of ego consciousness, the child’s (or the primitive’s) psyche is gradually differentiated from collectivity, and subjectivity or personhood begins to form. Such differentiation from the collective psyche (both the collective unconscious and collective consciousness) also implies the formation of a personal unconscious. The personal unconscious is constituted by the contents derived from the individual’s personal experience and therefore depends on his/her particular history, attitudes, and decisions. Such contents can become conscious, that is, they are incompatible or infantile individual factors that ego consciousness has either repressed or simply never acknowledged. As such, they correspond to an unconscious subjectivity.
As distinct from the contents of the collective unconscious (the archetypes), the contents of the personal unconscious are called complexes. A complex can be defined as an image (representation) of a specific psychic situation imbued with strong emotional content. Such image is charged with libido, that is, with a strong emotional tone (feeling), and functions as a nucleus of meaning, around which an ensemble of other feeling-toned ideas is organized. The most important complexes—for example, the mother and father complexes—are based on archetypes. The complex has inner coherence, is a “whole” in itself, and is relatively autonomous in relation to consciousness. Empirically, complexes appear projected as partial personalities: in the child, as imaginary beings; in the primitive or in schizophrenics, as spirits, magical or terrible beings, and so on; but also in the normal products of our imagination—in fantasies and dreams, our psychic contents appear as personalities, as people, or voices. They correspond to the different voices within us. Following Duarte (2000), who put this theory of Jung’s in dialog with Bakhtin (1929/1984), we might affirm that our subjectivity is polyphonic. Together with the conscious subjectivity (i.e., the ego’s identity), the complexes represent our “many subjectivities”. As complexes are unconscious by definition, they also attest to the dissociability of the psyche. In Jung, the subject is relatively dissociated.
As distinct from the archetypes, which are collective forms given a priori, the complexes are personal: they are formed in the dialectical relations between the individual’s life history and conscious choices, his cultural context—the social imaginaries that inform him—and the archetypal foundation. That means that complexes and the personal unconscious are sociocultural—and at the same time individual and subjective, given that they depend on the individual’s unique life history and context, and his (possible) agency.
2.3.4 Two Typical Complexes: Shadow and Persona
Let me illustrate such theoretical propositions with two examples of complexes that are important and will be useful later: shadow and persona.
The shadow complex corresponds to the aspects of the personality that are opposite to ego consciousness (the I): the neglected, inferior, non-developed unconscious contents of subjectivity. As a complex, it usually appears personified (e.g., Mr. Hyde, the primitive barbaric shadow of the one-sided rational scientist Dr. Jekyll) and is projected upon people or things or ideas.22
The persona corresponds to the social mask we put on; it serves as a function for relating to others and to the world. It represents the collective role, the ideal social identity, a representation of subjectivity given by the social imaginary, which the subject adopts and more or less identifies with. However, being a mask, it merely denotes an appearance that represents collective consciousness ; as such, it is partial and superficial, or two-dimensional. By definition, it only feigns and simulates individuality (Jung, CW7); it refers to what one (the individual) is not, but that oneself and others think or believe one is (Jung, CW9i, §221).
The persona as such is necessary for social relationships; the problem is the extent to which the subject identifies with it. The more identified the subject is, that is, the more she/he thinks or believes she/he really is the persona, that it is her/his identity or subjectivity, the more she/he becomes collective and artificial, that is, not individual: massified, identical with a parcel of the collective imaginary (e.g., the ruthless lawyer, the coveted celebrity and the lifestyle, the sex symbol, etc.). Correspondingly, the more the shadow—the repressed and neglected individuality, which is left unconscious—will compensate. Against such superficial or one-sided identity, the inner world (the hidden unconscious depths) usually reacts, with the shadow-figure becoming more primitive and activated23 (Mr. Hyde). This produces a schism in the personality, a split subject. As a complex, the shadow will be projected upon the environment: whereas certain people, or places, or ideas are seen in a terrible light, the ideal imaginary embodiments of the persona (celebrities , etc.) are seen as Olympian gods or sacred creatures. Of course, none of such perceptions correspond to objective reality: here we are dealing with the dynamics of unconscious projection and identification.
2.3.5 Complexes and Projection: Participation Mystique
One can readily see that , as unconscious factors, the complexes follow the dynamics of participation mystique: they tend to be projected, and the subject to be bound to them emotionally by partial identity. To recall the dynamics: part of one’s psyche (subjectivity) is projected; the subject becomes attached to the object upon which the psychic content (through a symbol) was projected, that is, the subject identifies with it; being unconscious, the projection acquires a compulsive and repetitive character; objective reality is “contaminated” by the projection, by the emotional value that was projected; and, instead of experiencing empirical reality, the subject perceives his/her own unconscious contents projected.
One can perceive the specific energy of the archetypes when one experiences the peculiar feeling of numinosity that accompanies them—the fascination or spell that emanates from them. This is also characteristic of the personal complexes, whose behaviour may be compared with the role played by the archetypal representations collectives in the social life of all times. As personal complexes have their individual history, so do social complexes of an archetypal character. (CW18, §547)
2.3.6 Complexes and Archetypes: An Unconscious System of Projections
Jung’s theory establishes that the unconscious psyche precedes consciousness and is by definition limitless and inexhaustible: consciousness can never assimilate the whole of the unconscious psyche. That implies that we always have unconscious factors (as complexes and archetypes), that is, we are always unconscious to some extent. If we follow the axiom that everything that is unconscious will be projected (for there is no differentiation between unconscious contents and the environment, by definition), a second conclusion is that the complexes and archetypes will form and function as a system of projections, in which what one perceives is not the object or objective reality, but one’s own projected contents as images. Such system, in a manner that is analogous to the primitives’, is partially and collectively shaped by the culture’s collective representations, its imaginary forms. In other words, our psyches always function through such categorical filters. However, the difference lies in the possible attainment of consciousness. The more the subject is unconscious, the more her apperception, experience, and so on will be conditioned-mediated by both her culture’s collective representations and her own projected psychic contents. And, the more unconscious the subject is, the more such dynamics resemble primitive psychology: as participation mystique is the opposite of consciousness and individuality, the more her (unconscious) psyche is projected, the more the subject remains collective, immersed in and indistinguishable from the outside world (which is not experienced objectively either, but as a reality contaminated by unconscious contents).
The implication is that such unconscious state always means alienation: from oneself, and from the world. An alienation that incurs in a fault, an ethical blemish, for one is not being oneself in the world. If the complexes represent substantial parts of the subject’s individuality, or her subjectivity, when projected they produce an emptiness, an inferiority: a portion of the subject’s psyche—meaning, value, emotion: a complex part of subjectivity—is severed from her, and she, alienated from herself, becomes unconsciously bound to the object onto which it was projected. The Narcissus myth expresses such fundamental psychological dynamics in a radical way: what is projected in the myth is the whole personality (as self-image).
If we all have complexes, such dynamics are bound to appear continuously during our whole life. Again, in Jung’s theory, the subject is dissociated, consisting of multiple subjectivities; the personality is a disjointed agglomerate, not a whole. However, contra the postmodern creed, for Jung such state (of unconsciousness) represents an ethical fault, and therefore an ethical task. That is due to the empirical fact that the personality has a tendency to differentiate itself, a tendency toward consciousness and individuality, with which we must reckon. Against the unconscious inertial tendency—to projection, partial identity, and non-differentiation—Jung ascertains an opposite inner tendency to differentiate what is individual from what is collective; to recognize in the projection a subjective content and synthesize it with the conscious personality—a synthetic process mediated by the symbol. Such tendency, as a lifelong process, he called the process of individuation.
2.3.7 Individuation and Subjectivity: The Desires of Social and Individual
Individuation is defined as “the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology” (Jung, CW6, §757). It represents the progressive psychic differentiation (from the collective) into a wholeness, a totality: the formation of a dialogical unity out of the multiple voices, personalities, and collective contents that constitute us. A unity that composes an in-dividuum: an indivisible, non-atomizable subject.
Against the inertial, natural unconscious functioning, individuation is based on an opposite telos of the psychic system: it corresponds to what was mentioned before regarding the collectivity as the “principle of individuation” (principium individuationis), the spiritual principle of differentiation that seeks development and cultivation, through the symbol, in opposition to mere instinctuality—but functioning in the individual. The progressive actualization of such principle in the individual—which is never completed: it is a lifelong process—is the meaning of individuation,24 the “legitimate realization of the individual entelechy” (Jung, 2002, p. 191).
Seen from a collective or social standpoint, such telos is contained in archetype and symbol: the striving to form culture through differentiation from mere animality-instinctuality (feritas). Seen from the standpoint of the individual, the spiritual telos corresponds to individuation, the impulse toward differentiation from what is collective and unconscious. It can be said that it is the telos of what Jung called Self25: the center of the unconscious and at the same time the (virtual) center of the whole personality. Both sides of the spiritual telos (the cultural and the individual ones) depend on the ego, on individual consciousness, for their complete actualization. Only the individual consciousness is capable of autonomy, ethical effort, and agency, and—through them—of differentiation in relation to the unconscious and to what is collective.
Seen from an energetic standpoint, such principle implies that libido, or desire, has two possible finalities. One is the natural inertia: to remain instinctive, close to animality, unconscious, undifferentiated. The other finality, mediated and directed by archetype and symbol, is a desire for differentiation and synthesis: the desire for individuality and culture. Miriam Freitas (1991) rescues in this dual face of desire a plea for the consideration of the virtual uniqueness and singularity of each human being. In her work, such inherent telos of the personality, of its libido, is seen in an analogous way to Espinosa’s conatus, and translates into a subjectivity based on an unalienable dialectics between the desire for the social and the desire for the individual,26 and their strict interdependence (Freitas, 1991, pp. 149–151). The desire for individuality corresponds to a telos for being unique, for a singular identity, for being whole. The other face of such desire corresponds to the fact that we humans are social, plural beings (or, as Hannah Arendt put it, based on Kant: the human condition is that of plurality). That is the desire for the social, the collective: not merely for social insertion and relationship, but for acknowledging, and relating to, the other as also unique; for one’s uniqueness is perceived in the (necessarily different) uniqueness of the other. The interdependence of the desires means that the subject’s humanity is a virtuality: it represents the life task of realizing socially her or his individuality. Hence, a truly human society, the plurality, corresponds to the social actualization of equality among uniques (p. 94).27
Jung posits that the actualization of such desires requires an ethical effort, against a natural gradient or inertial force. That represents first an opus contra naturam: socially, there has to be an endeavor, mediated by the symbol, to constitute culture against the natural instinct. Analogously, the individual has to stand against the natural tendency to project and identify with the object, and to remain unconscious, in an infantile, primitive state.
If it is possible to say that culture emerges from an opus contra naturam, today we may add that the establishment of a healthy relation with men’s nature will inevitably require an opus contra culturam. (…) It is only going against the grain [or in the opposite direction] of the capitalist logic’s desires that we will find the realization of the desire for the social. (p. 138)
As we have seen, the primordial expression of the relation (and possible unity and synthesis) between nature and culture appears as a symbol. Without the symbol to give it direction and meaning, instinct (nature) remains a blind compulsion; without the symbol, there is no refinement and no cultivation toward culture and consciousness, and no connection to our archetypal foundations. Confrontation with and integration of the unconscious can only happen through the latter’s symbolic productions. Such process engenders consciousness and individuality, and a symbolic life.
Those are some of the reasons why this work proposes a study of the nocturnal, natural source of symbols in us: the dream.