The Eros theme

The part played by projection in practical psychotherapy hav­ing interested me for a long time, I finally made up my mind to investigate it. As I began to look into the subject more closely, it became clear to me that the word projection does, to be sure, describe a set of facts that in practice are easily enough demonstrated, but at the same time this concept leads into borderline areas where there are still unsolved problems. For some of these problems I am unable to suggest solutions; the purpose of this work is therefore limited to an attempt to shed some light on those questions that are still open. A study of these problems brings us up against a mysterious quality of human consciousness, that of mirroring the world. If nothing but epistemological considerations were involved, perhaps we could let the matter drop; but the phenomenon of projec­tion is also an eminently moral and practical problem, which I have therefore tried, by circumambulation, to clarify a bit, with special attention to the theory of demons in antiquity. Given the demons in our present world, perhaps one or more readers will be induced to reflect seriously on these matters, which in my opinion we all need to do.

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Unless we are possessed of an unusual degree of self-awareness, we shall never see through our projections but must always succumb to them, because the mind in its natural state presupposes the existence of such projections.

. . . In a comparatively primitive person this creates that characteristic relationship to the object which Lévy-Bruhl has fittingly called "mystic identity" or "participation mystique."

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The need for the dissolution of this identity arises at the moment when it becomes disturbing, that is, when the absence of the projected content substantially interferes with adaptation, so that the integration of the projected content into the subject is desirable.

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If one wants to prevent such a renewal of the projection, the content must be recognized as psychically real, though not as a part of the subject but rather as an autonomous power.

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Since projection is a preconscious, involuntary process, in-dependent of consciousness, it is to be expected that the pro¬cess itself will be depicted in products of the unconscious, such as dreams, waking fantasies, and mythological tradi¬tions. This aspect will therefore be given special attention in what follows, so that the still-open question of exactly where projections come from may perhaps be somewhat clarified.

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The gods are representations of certain natural constants of the unconscious psyche, of the ways in which the emotional And imaginative elements of the personality behave. As is well known, Jung described these constants as archetypes. These are innate irrepresentable structures that always and everywhere on suitable occasions produce similar thoughts, mythological images, feelings, and emotions in human be¬ings, parallel to the instincts, those impulses to action that are characteristic of the human species. These archetypal symbol-forms were in principle assumed to exist in a visible material or invisible spiritual outer world, but the notion that they issued from an inner psychic space unknown to man gradually took hold in late antiquity.

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When an archetype is immediately and intensively constel-lated, the experience is like being hit by a projectile sent by an overpowering being that transfixes us and brings us into its power. At the same time we are assailed by fantasies and imag¬inary images experienced either as proceeding directly from the inner world (for example, as an obsessive idea) or, more often, as caused by an outer object. An attack of aggressive hatred, for example, is felt by us as coming not from Mars but rather from an "evil adversary" who "deserves" to be hated (shadow projection), erotic passion not from Cupid but from a woman who arouses this passion in a man (anima projection). Ultimately, however, it appears that projections al¬ways originate in the archetypes and in unconscious complexes.

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Nothing but a step forward along the road to self-knowledge through discrimination and individual differ¬entiation will lead one out of this situation. The inner mental image, the object-imago, must be recognized as an inner factor; this is the only way in which the value or the energy invested in the image can flow back to the individual, who has need of it for his development. This difficult moral task makes it impossible for any relatively conscious person to want to improve other people and the world.

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This understanding of sickness is dominant in arctic and sub-arctic shamanistic cultures but is also found sporadically in America, Africa, Indonesia, and Oceania. There is also evi-dence of it in Europe.

Both "loss of soul" and an "invading spirit" can also be observed today as psychological phenomena in the everyday lives of the human beings around us. "Loss of soul" appears in the form of a sudden onset of apathy and listlessness; the joy has gone out of life, initiative is crippled, one feels empty, everything seems pointless. Close observation, especially of dreams, will reveal that a large part of the psychic energy has flowed off into the unconscious and is therefore no longer at the disposal of the ego. This quantum of energy is in most cases attracted by an unconscious complex that is thereby heavily charged (corresponding to the belief that the soul has been taken by a spirit or by the ghost of a person who has died—that is, by the complex). If one perseveres long enough in this condition, in most cases the complex that was acti¬vated by the energy attracted to it appears in consciousness; an intense new interest in life emerges, an interest that now strives in a direction different from the previous one. In very many endogenous depressions one can observe beneath the crippling stagnation of the personality an especially intense desire of some sort (power, love, expansion compulsion, ag¬gression, and so on), which the depressed patient, however, does not, for a variety of reasons, dare to allow to come to the surface; in this respect he is like the fabled fox who finds the grapes too sour.

Seen psychologically, the "invading spirit" presents a rather different picture. In this case it is a question of relatively sudden psychic alterations in the personality, brought about by an autonomous complex breaking through from the unconscious. Although such an invasion of the personality appears to happen suddenly, one can nevertheless quite often observe it in process of constellation, well in advance, with the aid of the patient's dreams and fantasies, until one day it reaches the threshold of consciousness.

Both of these age-old ideas of "loss of soul" and of the invading spirit" are therefore, like the idea of the projectile, closely bound up with the phenomenon of projection. To the extent that, in projection, a piece of one's own personality is transferred to or relocated in an outer object, it is at the same time a loss of soul. [...]

When an archetypal structure remains latent in the uncon¬scious, it is recognizable. But when it is activated, it often appears in double form: on the one hand, as an inwardly experienced flare-up of emotions and affects and, on the other, as a fascinating image that is, however, regarded as belonging to the outer object. Still, this duality is a special case and need not always appear. Psychic powers are often also experi¬enced as a pure inner image. In this event the doubling, alter¬natively the projection of the image onto an outer object, does not take place and the image itself is directly perceived within. [...]

One suspects that in many cases Freud is right when he assumes that the phenomenon of projection onto outer ob¬jects is connected with the fact that our attention in general is directed more toward the outer world and that we are there¬fore inclined to overlook inner psychic events. Introverted and introspective people can, however, perceive events in the inner world directly, without the detour of a projection onto an outer object.

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The fourth stage, in which the reality that had hitherto been believed is explained as nonexistent, could be described as the stage of apotropaic reflection. In contrast to this, the fifth stage of reinterpretation represents an act of assimilation through reflection, through which the psychic energy of the projected content flows back to man and raises the level of his consciousness, as this was achieved for the first time in the Stoic interpretation of myths.

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This fourfold exegesis corresponds quite amazingly to the theory of the four basic functions of consciousness that Jung developed, purely empirically, through observation of his pa-tients and with no knowledge of the above methods of in-terpretation. According to his description, the functions of consciousness, reduced to their simplest formulation, may be divided as follows:

1. The sensation function, which ascertains facts, that is, sees, hears, smells, and so on, what is
2. Thinking, which brings what has been perceived into logi¬cal connection
3. Feeling, which evaluates what has been perceived, in the sense of pleasant-unpleasant, to be admitted-to be rejected, better-worse
4. Intuition, which represents a kind of faculty of divining ) and orients us as to whence what has been perceived came and anticipates whither it goes

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From the point of view of cultural history the idea of the collective unconscious is, as we have already indicated, a new formulation of the archetypal conception of a "world-spirit, as it was postulated by the Stoics, or of a "world-soul" that animates the universe and flows from the divine or demon' "in-fluences" (in-flowings) into the human subject. The Gnostic idea of a prosphyes psyche (an "on-grown" soul) was a precursor, in the form of an intuitive hunch, of what today we would call the collective unconscious. The expression "on-grown" is an especially good choice, inasmuch as it can actually ge-demonstrated that the realization of the objective psyche originated historically in the process, here described, of the gradual withdrawal of projections. In fact, as Jung em¬phasized, nothing was "thrown out" of the psyche originally; rather, the human psyche as we know it today developed via a long series of acts of introjection. It is only later, after a piece of the psyche has been experienced and recognized as an inner factor that one can speak, in the past tense, of a projection, of a transfer of inner elements to things external.

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it is precisely myths and mythical religious systems that are the first and foremost expression of objective psychic processes.

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Jung uses the concepts "symbol," "allegory," and "sign" in rather different ways. A sign, for him, is a mark or token something of a concrete or psychic nature that is generally known; this also applies to allegory, with the difference that half-unconscious mythical associations often surround and cling to allegorical images. Both allegory and sign are to large extent consciously created or developed. (A good deal that is allegorical, however, is still partly unconscious and is an image whose meaning the interpreter believes he con¬sciously knows and has exhaustively described but which nevertheless contains other aspects still unknown to him. The border between allegory and symbol is therefore often fluid.)

A symbol is an image that expresses an essential unconscious factor and therefore refers to something essentially unconscious, unknown, indeed to something that is never quite knowable.8 It is "the sensuously perceptible expression of an inner experience."

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The more significantly a symbol expresses an unconscious component that is common to a large number of people, the greater its effect on society.

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projection is an essential part of the process by which the archetype assumes a determinable shape.

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An analogous process can be observed in the case of the archetypal structures in the collective unconscious: an external emergency, such as epidemics or famine, can suddenly "charge" the fantasy of a healer-savior, in itself always present in a latent state, in the collective psyche of a group or it can intensify pessimistic fantasies of the end of the world. Internal shifts of energy within the field itself can also occur in the collective unconscious when, for example, an active-masculine stance and a tale -sidedly extroverted attitude toward life, with their corre-sponding values and ideals, have been dominants in a society lot quite a long time, then complementary or even counter tendencies may spontaneously be activated and come up from the unconscious, perhaps a tendency toward introver¬sion or toward a more feminine outlook on life. In both cases, whether prompted from without or from within, the law of compensation or complementarity seems to dominate, that is, tendency to establish balance or wholeness (wholeness achieved by two logically incompatible opposites, in the strict sense of the word complementarity, as used in physics).

These self-regulatory processes in the psyche seem to be controlled by the archetype of the Self [the "I"], the supraordinate center of the collective unconscious, and appear to be independent of ego-consciousness [the "personality"] and of the will and all its exertions; they are therefore also to a great extent unpredictable. One usually recognizes their compensatory character only later and marvels at the strange and curious byways and detours by means of which the compensatory function of the uncon¬scious accomplishes its ends.

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We know today that when the person affected opens up a way, through active imagination, to the inner anima-image and comes into direct contact with it, the image that appears externally in projected form begins to fade. The recognition of this phenomenon inclined Freud to the assumption that only repressed material is projected. This is not always true, however, because experience shows just as often—indeed, even more often—that the impermeability is due not to any kind of repression but simply to the fact that in consciousness the means of reception necessary to the admission of something new coming from the unconscious are missing. This is seen most clearly in cases where a creative inspiration or fantasy is making its way up from the unconscious.

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The mathematician Henri Poincare describes in detail in Science et methode how, through a revelation from the uncon-scious, he discovered what today are called automorphic functions. It took him a good half hour to write down in logical sequence the vision he had seen in flash. He declared rightly, that this vision would have led to nothing if he had not been striving—in vain—for a long time to reach a solu- tion. Through this exertion his consciousness created, as it were, a net to catch the new conception, so that what he had seen could be put in its proper place.

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Only an inwardly open, "naïve" attitude to the unconscious on the one hand and an honest, conscientious, and painstaking devotion on the part of ego¬consciousness on the other can bring the creative contents of the unconscious matrix successfully over the threshold into consciousness. Play, with neither plan nor purpose, is the best precondition.

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The form and the meaning of instincts are represented in the images produced by the archetypes. The archetypes, therefore, are collectively present, unconscious preconditions or innate predispositions that act as regulators and stimulators of creative fantasy activity. Their effect on the human ego is numinous-magical and is felt as something spiritual, even - on the primitive level - as a spirit or spirits.

Archetype and instinct are "the most polar opposites imaginable." This is most clearly illustrated by comparing a man who has fallen under the domination of instinct with one who has been seized by the spirit. Yet extremes can meet and can even change into their former opposites.

[...]one would look for those phenomena where it is no longer a question of impulses coming from without but rather of inspirations, of being seized by archetypal spiritual insights or images that, just as much as drives and instincts, can overcome the freedom [...]

The polatization of the psychic middle range, between the two consciousness-trascending poles of matter and psyche, is only a means, however, for our consciousness to describe its psychic experiences a bit more exactly; "outward-material" and "inner-spiritual" are only characteristic labels that tell us nothing about the real nature of what we describe as "matter" nor about what we call "spirit", except that both move and affect us psychologically.

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All the stronger instinctive impulses and all creative spiritual experiences and realizations are linked with emotions. E-motio of course is what "moves outward." Archetypes, as we have noted, have a "specific charge", that is, they develop numinous effects that manifest themselves as affects. These affects lift one content, which occupies the forefront of consciousness, into super-normal clarity but at the same time darken the rest of the field of consciousness. This brings about a lowering of the orientation to the external world and therewith a relativization of space and time.

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It is in the moments when an emotion-charged archetypal content is influencing consciousness with unusual force that so-called synchronistic events often tend to occur; concrete events take place in the individual's outer environment that have a meaningful connection with the inner psychic contents that are constellated at about the same time. An activated archetype behaves rather like a whole "situation," or "like a circumambient atmosphere to which no definite limits can be set, either in space or in time."[/b]

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A mistaken judgment in such a case has, how¬ever, very serious consequences. "A wrong attribution," as Jung writes, "may bring about dangerous inflations which seem unimportant to the layman only because he has no idea of the inward and outward disasters that may result."36 "The effect of inflation is that one is not only 'puffed up' but too `high up.' This may lead to attacks of giddiness, or to a ten¬dency to fall downstairs, to twist one's ankle, to stumble over steps and chairs, and so on,"37 to say nothing of megalomania or Messianic fantasies. But if one fails to attribute to an indi¬vidual a content that belongs to him, the opposite of an infla¬tion takes place—a loss of soul, as described above, that is, a depressing decrease in the whole individual life-potential; worse, the rejected content turns up again in a new projection in the individual's environment.

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Such schematic repetitions of situations or exaggerated dependencies belong to the kind of disturbances in adaptation discussed previously, that indicate the desirability of withdrawing the projection.

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a masculine-collective con¬scious attitude that controls the feminine, the Eros principle, and holds it prisoner.

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In the treatment of such "devilish" states of possession resulting from a negative father complex in a woman, I have often been impressed by the fact that the woman's ego is for a long time not strong enough to confront such an inner devil directly; for the time being nothing but methods of repression or avoidance are possible, literally "flight" through evasive measures. The disturbing factor has to remain outside the circle of the subject's life and can be neither conquered nor integrated. One can only advise the patient to stay away, as far as possible, from situations and areas of concern that could touch the complex.

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The will to live and to become whole conquers the temptation to fall, fainting, into the jaws of the evil demon, that is, to be "possessed." Whether the pursuer is essentially good or evil is apparently not the main consideration; it is the state of possession in itself that is destructive.

The spirit-world of the Yakut, for example, includes both the lower, evil spirits and the higher spirits of light, but pos-session by the higher spirits leads to madness, just as posses-sion by evil spirits does, and can be cured only by a shaman.' The shaman has this power because during his initiation he has overcome his own states of possession. "The shaman," writes Adolf Friedrich, "is the incarnation of that type of religious man who is able to master the spirits who beset him - that is, his psychic struggles—and who therefore can help others whom the spirits threaten. The person possessed, however, is not able to help himself but is delivered over to the storm of divergent and one-sided powers; he needs the help of an exorcist who can liberate him."8 Friedrich's description of the spirits as "one-sided" is exactly right, for they are the autonomous complexes that upset the total equilibrium of the personality by compelling one-sidedness. One among other easily recognizable symptoms is the way in which the thoughts and deeds of the possessed person tend to circle, in incredible monomania, around the one complex-theme, to the damage of the whole personality.

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Autonomous complexes behave in exactly the same way; they can warp or destroy the whole personality. Viruses, we know, are "dead" matter; it is only in a living creature that they acquire a "quasi-life." The same is true of autonomous complexes. They take all the life out of a person; when they have "eaten him up" they become entangled with life in the surrounding environment.

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Spirits are "either pathological fantasies or new but as yet unknown ideas." As we have seen, this is true of the archetypes in general. Jung emphasized that the demonic works with negative effect mainly at that moment when "an unconscious content of seemingly overwhelming power appears on the threshold of consciousness"; then it will lay hold of the personality in the form of a possession." Before such a content is integrated into consciousness it will always appear'physically, because it 'forces the subject into its own form."18 The negative aspect can be avoided if the man or the woman holds his or her ground against the thrust of the unconscious content and tries to be-come conscious of its meaning through reflection. The de-monic, therefore, would be the creative in statu nascendi, not yet realized, or "made real," by the ego.

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Nothing in the human psyche is more destructive than unrealized, unconscious creative impulses.

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Many demons are not such radically distorted creatures but rather "mixed" figures that do not occur in nature—centaurs, mermaids, Pegasus, the bird Garuda, and the like. Images of this kind express something supernatural and hence spiritual or mental. They embody essentially creative fantasies, which are morally neutral but in general tend to be benevolently disposed to human beings.

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The distinction made in late antiquity between gods, who are remote from all earthly suffering, and demons, who a subject to all the human passions and feelings, seems to be very important. The demons are, so to speak, closer human beings, more subjective-psychological than the gods, Cicero even describes them as mentes or animi, that is, as "souls."36 Others call them potestates, "powers."37 The de-scription of demons as "souls" may be found in many earlier authors but especially in later ones, in the Stoa, Poseidonium, Philo, Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria, and others.38 Front the standpoint of Jungian psychology the distinction in an¬tiquity between gods and demons means the following: The gods represent more the archetypal ground-structure of the psyche, which is far removed from consciousness, while the demons are visualizations of the same archetypes, it is true, but in a form nearer to consciousness, which comes closer to the subjective inner experience of humans. It is as if a partial aspect of the archetype were beginning to move closer to the individual, to cling to him and to become a sort of "grown-on soul."

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According to Justin Martyr, the celestial bodies and God's angels possessed a providence over things beneath heaven.43 (The angels are identical with the "gods" of Plato)" But the cause of everything evil was the fall of cer¬tain angels and their intercourse with human females. They try to usurp divine power and they pander especially to sexual passion.45 Their sin lies not so much in hostility to¬ward God as in disobedience and in deceiving and deluding (apoplanan) humanity."

These views went back to the Book of Enoch (around 100 ii.c.), in which the story, as we know, is told of certain angels who fell in love with human women and descended from heaven to be with them. Together they gave birth to a de-structive race of giants who laid the whole earth to waste

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According to Theophilus of Antioch, is not the power-drive but jealousy and bloodthirstiness tho are the chief attributes of the evil spirits.59 After the fall from paradise these spirits usurped divine names and employed magic signs and images of terror in their efforts to seduce mankind. The heathen gods do the same thing, according to Justin Martyr.6° This view was a continuation, modified, of a pagan tradition. In their day Plutarch and Xenocrates had interpreted a number of heathen cult practices as serving the evil demons, in order to relieve the highest gods of the bur¬den. Justin Martyr expressly places the guilt for the crucifix¬ion of Christ not on the Jews but on the evil demons.6' It was precisely for this reason that the cross became the power that overcomes demons.62 If the demons occasionally succeed in achieving miraculous healing, this is merely, according to Ta¬tian, in order to attract public honors;63 the same holds true for mantic proceedings, when for once they speak the truth.

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Dr. Ernst holds the patient categorically responsible for his behavior. But in my opinion, the patient's responsibil- ity is only conditional. In this connection the explanation given in an old text on exorcism from Stans (1729)66 seems worthy of note. This text emphasizes that a man can be possessed by "devils" when he has surrendered to sinful feelings such as wrath, envy, hatred, lechery, and fainthearteness.67 seems to me to be a closer approximation to the true stateThio or affairs: The ego is responsible only to a certain extent for the effect a person has on his environment—namely, for what Jung called the personal shadow of the individual, but not for archetypal psychic factors. Ignoring one's own shadow, though, is often very much like opening a door through which these powers can break in. The question of moral responsibility is therefore extremely subtle and requires different judgments from case to case.

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Jung performed an important service, however, by showing that it is possible to relate to these contents, instead of repressing them, thus neutralizing their negative effects quite considerably. This can be done through the technique of meditation that is called active imagination. In this method the conscious ego permits the unconscious contents to come into the field of consciousness as fantasy-images, as objectively as possible, and then enters into dialogue with them as with an autonomous vis-a-vis. Through this conscious and voluntary attention the demons, if it be a question of demons, receive the respect or "ritual worship" that they demand and that serves to placate them. If the objectives of the ego are at cross-purposes with those of the "daimons," it may be that a compromise which takes th needs of both parties into account can be found.

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Psyche and Eros in Apuleius

Among primitive peoples and also in the cultures of late an-tiquity, as we have seen, not all demons were regarded as evil; whether they exerted a good or a malign influence on human beings depended largely, if not entirely, on the behavior and attitude of humans themselves. [...]

what Jung called the shadow: all those animal and otherwise inferior aspects of the conscious personality that tend to condense into an image of an enemy and that are unashamedly projected onto persons in the environment. This personal inimical image can be recognized, however, without too much difficulty, granted a little self-criticism; if one takes the trouble one can catch oneself in flagranti, in the very act of doing or saying just that thing one most dislikes in the other person. The shadow consists largely of laziness, greed, envy, jealousy, the desire for pres¬tige, aggressions, and similar "tormenting spirits."

Among the daimons of antiquity, though, Plato also men-tioned some that are the "great daimons," like the god Eros and the goddess Psyche. Psychologically interpreted, these "great daimons" are those contents of the unconscious that Jung called the anima and animus and that he described as the real projection-creating factors of the psyche.' He used the word anima, as we know, to indicate the feminine aspect of a man's psyche that is first embodied in the mother-imago and rejuvenated in the image of the beloved or the wife. She is par excellence the fate-spinning core of the unconscious psyche in a man, which is why in the East she is called Maya—the world-spinner, or the dancer who creates the illusion of the real world. Those projections woven not by the shadow but by this factor are much more difficult to recognize; without a close and living relationship with a countersexual partner one almost never picks up the trail. It is actually the power that stands behind all love entanglements and behind most marital conflicts. The anima appears as an irrational sort of temperament [...]

While Lucius is swamped in moods of lust, egotism, fear, and stress and by ineradicable cynicism, the unconscious presents, in the form of this story, the secret, underlying weaning of his situation: the fate of his anima who suffers from her proximity to and separation from the god Eros. It is as if the unconscious were saying to him: "Behind your ap-1 parently meaningless and unhappy fate a deeper drama is being performed, a divine play of the daimons whose mean-I mg is the redemption of the anima by the spirit of love." The story itself was not invented by Apuleius but belongs to a class of fairy tales that even today one finds all over the world;6 the names Psyche and Eros (as well as those of most of the other characters), however, were invented by him. He has obviously projected his own conception of the daimons into these fairy-tale figures and has implied, with subtle psychological intuition, that the tale really concerns the fate of his own feeling-side, his daimon-anima, a spirit who mediates the experience of the divine. According to Jung, the anima is the projection-creating factor par excellence: she weaves the hidden pattern of a man's fate but she also builds a bridge to an experience of God within his own psyche.

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Eros behaves like a moody youngster; it is only in the nocturnal light-scene that he appears as the great and numinous god he really is. His "boyishness" (it is the equivalent, of the immaturity of the Homunculus and of Euphorion in Goethe's Faust) indicates that the possibility of a realization of the Self is not yet present. The daimon is not yet integrable; he comes and goes, and the man who encounters him cannot understand the meaning of his appearance. But who, even today, can really grasp the meaning of a deep experience of love? A prayer to Eros from late antiquity comes close, perhaps, to expressing this incomprehensible experience:

"I call to thee, the source of everything living, whose wings are outspread over the whole world, the unnameable and im¬measurable, who breathes life-giving thoughts into every soul, who with his power has welded everything together. First-born, all-creator, golden-winged, dark mysterious one, who conceals discreet and crafty thoughts and inspires dark and ominous passion, thou hidden one who lives in stealth in every soul; thou kindlest the invisible fire in all that is ani¬mate by thy touch, tirelessly tormenting, with lust, through anguished rapture, since time began. . . . Thou youngest one, lawless, heartless, inexorable, invisible, bodiless, bringer passion, archer, torch-bearer, thou master of every mover of the spirit, of all things hidden, giver of forgetfulness, fail of silence, through whom and to whom the light shines lot tender infant when you are born in the heart, ancient of days when you are quite completed. I call to thee, the inexorable using thy great name. Thou hast been the first to appear, nocturnal visitor, joyful by night, maker of night, thou who hears and answers . . . thou in the depths . . . thou hidden in the sea, thou eldest!"

Seen from the point of view of woman's psychology, Eros in Apuleius' fairy tale is also a pre-form of the god Osiris; in a woman he is the "spirit who shows the way," in the original meaning of the word (psychopompos), that is, her positive animus. One can study his destructive aspect in the very impressive medieval reports of possession by the devil, but here he is the positive animus-daimon in the role of mediator to the Self, which for a woman could be seen in the goddess Isis; Isis was also officially invoked as "Isis of women" in Egyp¬tian religious texts.

The Masculine Companion in Woman's Psyche

Just as the anima derives from a man's mother-imago, so the animus is a rejuvenated form of the father-image.20 As "father" he represents a traditional spirit which expresses it-self in "sacred convictions" that the woman herself has never really thought through. The animus as divine puer aeternus, on the other hand, appears as a creative spirit who can inspire a woman to undertake her own spiritual achievements. This spirit is a spirit of love, that is, of her own living inner mys-tery, which comes into realization in the Eros between man and woman. In the tale by Apuleius, therefore, Psyche can be understood, as Neumann understands her, as a model of the woman who frees herself from a hollow, exclusively female matriarchal way of life and attains a higher, individual femininity through much suffering and an experience of the masculine world. That Psyche in the story ends up on Olympus means that even here this way of individuation for a woman hast not yet been reached in human reality. It appears to be in the nature of the animus to lure the woman away from reality now and again. Whereas the anima usually appears in the form of a fascination, an allurement that draws the man into life, the animus often appears as a spirit of death;21 indeed there are even fairy tales in which a woman marries a handsome, unknown stranger who is revealed later on as death (personified, a revelation that brings about the death of the woman herself. This is tied to the fact that, as a projection-making factor, a man's anima produces mainly passive, that is, empathetic, projections that bind the man to objects; the animus, on the other hand, produces more active, that is, more judgmental, projections that tend to cut the woman off from the world of objects. In both cases anima and animus effect an alienation from reality, because the empathetic pro-jections of the anima are of an illusory nature and the judgments of the animus are very often simply beside the point.

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All that we can say is that it is part of a process of fl reciprocal individuation, of becoming conscious and whole in the encounter. [...]

If we compare the projections that issue from the shadow complex with those proceeding from the anima-animus complex, we may say that insight into one's own shadow pro-jections means first of all a moral humiliation, intensive suffering. Insight into projections originating in the anima or the animus, on the other hand, demands not so much humility as level-headedness and commonsense self-observation and reflection, which demand a certain wisdom and humaneness, because these figures always want to seduce us away from reality into rapture or pull us down into an inner world of fantasy. Whoever cannot surrender to this experience has never lived; whoever founders in it has understood nothing.

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We should be skeptical about attempts to relate some of these "souls" or "daimons" to the Jungian concepts of shadow, anima, animus, and Self. It would be a great mistake, as Jung himself often emphasized, to suppose that the shadow, the anima (or animus), and the Self appear separately in a person's unconscious, neatly timed and in definable or¬der. In the reality of everyday practice it is much more likely that a person in depth psychological analysis will first meet with something psychically "absolutely other" in himself, a dark, chaotic something, appearing to him in complicated dream images in which, little by little, he begins to discover his alter ego. Some orientation begins to emerge from this chaos as certain inferior traits in this "other" begin to separate out, traits that are relatively easy to recognize as belonging to the particular person. As this process continues, the contrasexual aspects in this massa confusa gradually begin to be dis-tinguishable. It is only after these, too, have drawn nearer to consciousness that it later becomes evident that a part of the great power and the divinity of these figures does not come from the person himself but originates in a still deeper and more embracing psychic center, the Self.

[...]

If we look for personifications of the Self among the daimons of antiquity, we see that certain daimons are more like a mixture of shadow and Self, or of animus-anima and Self, and that is, in fact, what they are. In other words, they represent the still undifferentiated "other," unconscious personality of the individual.

[...]

As to the attitude of consciousness needed to gain insight into this projection, the situation is differently modulated than that of the integration of the shadow and the animus or anima. In the case of the shadow it is largely a question of humility; in the case of the other two figures it is one of an at least partial insight into their individual qualities and simul-taneously of a wise "live-and-let-live" attitude toward their overwhelming nature.

[...]

The fact that the Self appears as that aspect of the personality which puts an end to all projections' is often expressed in the symbolical products of the unconscious by no longer appearing in personified form.

[...]

Jung says repeatedly throughout his work that common sense, reflection, and self-knowledge are the only means of clearing away the clouds of projections of unconscious con-tents.

[...]

If one is caught in a projection that disturbs one's adaptation, whether it be an attraction full of fascination or hatred or obstinacy in clinging to a theory or an idea, at first one is carried along by a current of powerful affect as well as of desire or inner demand (to "devour" the beloved object, to "annihilate" the enemy, to force the idea onto other people). This leads to behavior that is constantly at odds with the outer world, and conflicts and disappointments result. Pride and defiance then seduce one into a further struggle to push ahead in the same direction. If the affect turns inward, it can lead to suicide fantasies. When the suffering has lasted long enough, so long that the ego and its strength are worn down and one begins to feel oneself to be "small and ugly," then at last comes that merciful moment when reflection is possible, when there is a reversal of the stream of energy,
which now flows away from the object or the idea and toward and oneself or, better still, toward the Self. One becomes quiet, still, or rather "something in one becomes still." Insight into the projection itself is then usually a very simple matter; it is no longer a question of "yes, but .. ." even though injured pride may still go on grumbling a bit. The most painful part of this process is the recognition that through the previ¬ous wrong attitude or behavior one has lost valuable time or has even, through one's sacred convictions, been guilty of very serious misdeeds.

[...]

With the aid of ins, however, one can estimate roughly at least when the has come; but even then the ego is free to accept the required change, the "return," to reflect or to persist in the old attitude.

[...]

Whenever one understands a dream or some other spontaneous product of the unconscious "one's eyes are open —hence the eye motif. Many authors of an earlier day have described how, after seeking this kind of self-knowledge in meditation for a long time, many lights or eyes gradually grow together into one great inner light or eye that is image of God or of the light "which faith gives us." I myself understand the words of Paul—"For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood' (I Corinthians 13:12)—in this sense.

[...]

The divine eye, which, so to speak, looks at us from within and in whose seeing lies the only nonsubjectively colored source of self-knowledge, is a very widely distributed ar-chetypal motif. 12 It is described as an inner, noncorporeal eye, surrounded by light, which itself is also light." Plato and many Christian mystics call it the eye of the soul, others the eye of knowledge, of faith, of intuition. Jacob Bohme even says: "The soul is an Eye in the Eternal Abyss, a similitude of Eternity." Or: "The Soul is like a ball of fire or a fiery Eye?'" Only through this eye can a human being really see himself and partake of the nature of God, who is himself all eye. Synesius even calls upon God as "Eye of thy self."

[...]

The shadow or the animus and anima can instill a person with curiously distorted thoughts about hints but only that reflection which proceeds from the Self, the inner center, could be correctly described as genuine too
reflection.

[...]

The possibility of integrating projected contents instead of apotropaically casting them out into extrapsychic space does arise until symbols of the Self begin to appear. From this center impulses proceed to a contemplative, thoughtful recollection of the personality. The contents now seen to have en projected are at the same time recognized as belonging to one's own psychic wholeness. Consequently the psychic energy belonging to these contents now flows toward one's own inner center, strengthening it and heightening its intensity.

Another depiction of the same process that appears spontaneously among the products of the unconscious is the image, or mythologem, of a "re-collection" of scattered units or sparks of light into an ordered, centered unity. This demands of the conscious side of the personality an attempt to form as objective an image of one's own nature as possible. "It is an act of self-recollection, a gathering together of what is scattered, of all the things in us that have never been properly related . . . with a view to achieving full consciousness." The demand that we act thus comes from the Self. 27 The pre¬viously split-off contents of one's own psyche are made con¬scious and integrated. "Self-recollection," writes Jung, "is a gathering together of the self."

[...]

I am thou, and thou art I, and wherever thou art, there am I, and I am scattered in all things, and from wherever thou wilt thou canst gather me, but in gathering me thou gatherest thyself."

[...]

These Stoic and Gnostic texts reveal two trains of thought to the attentive reader. First, the individual human contains in itself various kinds of sparks, the sparks of collective representations, and must gather them into a unity (in variations it must even gather light sparks in the outer world). Second, the spiritual souls of men or of certain chosen men are themselves sparks that are gathered up by a god-man and redeemer fig¬ure and brought back into unity with God or with the divine world. Translated into psychological language, the first pro¬cess depicts how a human being "gathers" or "collects" him¬self through meditation and, for example, with the aid of his dreams becomes conscious of his complexes and projections and in this way develops into a spiritually and morally more integrated and more whole personality.39 As is well known, Jung named this the individuation process. The Self stands, says Jung, in a creative relation to the ego and at the same time the individual human being is the form in which the Self becomes manifest. The re-collecting, or gathering together, of the divine light-substance in the Gnosis and in Manichae¬ism corresponds psychologically to the integration of the Self through bringing split-off contents into consciousness.4°

The mythologems cited above also, however, depict a pro-cess of re-collecting that proceeds from the god-man or the light-man or some similar Anthropos-Redeemer figure and that unites the many single human souls into a unity, that is, into a genuine community. Therefore not only does the indi-vidual become a whole in himself but a community comes into being that also represents a whole. In antiquity this whole was called the Anthropos. Psychologically it means that an organically united community becomes visible. A group of human beings of this kind is not organized by laws or by the instruments of power; to the extent that each indi-itlual relates to the Self in himself he will quite naturally mistime his rightful place in a social order of a psychological tint. In the Middle Ages this thought was expressed by the irlief that the ecclesia spiritualis was the body of Christ, the Anthropos. Hence Jung writes: "By appealing to the eternal perights of man, faith binds itself inalienably to a higher order, not only on account of the historical fact that Christ has proved to be an ordering factor for many hundreds of years, but also because the self effectively compensates chaotic condi¬tions no matter by what name it is known: for the self is the Anthropos above and beyond this world, and in him is con¬tained the freedom and dignity of the individual man."41 The unification or integration of the individual and his integration into the higher unity of the many appears thus to be a simulH mucous process, as it is so beautifully expressed in "The Gospel of Eve" when the great god-man says to the seeress: "And from wherever thou wilt thou canst gather me, but in gather- ' ing me thou gatherest thyself."

This dual motif of the process of gathering is found also in the Christian era. Once again it is Origen in particular who has been impressively explicit about this. In his Commen¬tary on First Samuel, fourth homily, he says, "There was one man. We, who are still sinners, cannot obtain this title of praise, for each of us is not one but many. . . . See how he who thinks himself one is not one, but seems to have as many personalities as he has moods, as also the Scripture says: A fool is changed as the moon." And regarding Ezekiel 9:1, he , puts it strongly: "Where there are sins, there is multitude .. . but where virtue is, there is singleness, there is union." In his sermon on Leviticus 5:2, he says: "Understand that thou hast within thyself herds of cattle . . . flocks of sheep and flocks of goats. . . . Understand that the fowls of the air are also within thee . . . understand that thou thyself art another world in lit-tle, and hast within thee the sun and the moon, and also the stars."42 The individual human being must, through Mil effort, bring this multiplicity together into one personality_ to the many individual souls in all humanity, these will e in its turn be gathered into a unit in Christ, alterna united in his corpus mysticum, the Church.43

The first stage shows the process of the inner unification the personality in the individuation process. The sei i stage, however, has reference to a special process that al w accompanies individuation in the single person: namely, flit development of relatedness to certain fellow human bein 4 and to mankind as a whole, a relatedness that proceeds n from the ego but from a transcendental inner center, the Self.

Individuation and Relatedness

It happens again and again in psychological practice that when a person has been caught in blinding projections relating to his human environment and they are then withdrawn, in many cases this in no way annuls or sets aside the relationship. On the contrary, a genuine, "deeper" relation emerges, no longer rooted in egoistic moods, struggles, or illusions but rather in the feeling of being connected to one another via an absolute, objective principle. This is well expressed in the Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad: "Verily a husband is not dear, that you may love the husband, but that you may love the Self, therefore a husband is dear. Verily a wife is not dear, that you may love the wife, but that you may love the Self; there¬fore a wife is dear. . . . Verily the Self is to be seen, to be heard, to be recognized, to be marked. . . . Where the Self has been seen . . . then all is known."

[...]

Each person gathers around him his own "soul family", a group of people not created by accident or by mere motivation but rather through a deeper, more essential spiritual interest or concern: reciprocal individuation. Whereas relations based merely on projection are characterized by fascination and magical dependence, this kind of relationship, by way of the Self, has something strictly objective, strangely transpersonal about it. It gives rise to a feeling or immediate, timeless "being together." The usual bond of feeling, says Jung elsewhere, always contains projections that have to be withdrawn if one is to attain to oneself and to objectivity. "Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the cen¬tral secret."47 In this world created by the Self we meet all those many to whom we belong, whose hearts we touch; here "there is no distance, but immediate presence."

There exists no individuation process in any one individual that does not at the same time produce this relatedness to one's fellowmen."

Along with the mythologem of the re-collecting of light sparks, there is another motif of archetypal images that refers to the coming together of certain people through the agency of the Self. It is the motif of the "Round Table" around which the individual persons are seated. The inner unification of the personality is often represented by this image in dreams, as is also the attachment to friends who are fellow members and finally to all of mankind. Arthur's Round Table, as it appears in the Grail legends, is the most famous.

[...]

But on the surface, on the threshold area between consciousness and the unconscious, dream images appear spontaneously, not only seeming to give us information about the depths but also mirroring our conscious personality, although not in identical form, but rather in a more or less altered form. The mirroring is always by way of the symbolic image that has a place in both worlds.

[...]

What we see in the mirror held up to us by the Self is hence the only source of genuine self-knowledge; everything else is only narcissistic rumination of the ego about itself.

Not only is the ego of the empirical human being mirrored in the act of self-knowledge, but also the Self is then first brought from its state of potentiality into realization by vir-tue of the fact that it is mirrored in the ego, that is, it is recog¬nized. It is only from the standpoint of the Self that the ego can be seen as object and, vice versa, that the ego can obtain in every dream, for example, a clearer notion of the nature and existence of what it is looking at. Therefore when the ego follows the signals given in dreams, it is helping the Self attain realization in time and space. It is then "mirroring" the Self by lifting it out of its unconscious, merely potential existence into the clarity of ego-consciousness. So, in a certain sense, we can say that even the Self can become aware of itself only with the help of the ego, only in ego-consciousness, which is the mirror.

[...]

If we want to grasp the differences between projection and synchronistic events more precisely, we shall have to look more closely at a point as yet mentioned only peripherally, namely, the flow of psychic energy. Jung pointed out that the aforementioned disturbance of adaptation that justifies our labeling subjective images as projections occurs only when the psychic energy begins to regress, the energy that before had flown toward the object and activated the psychic idea of it we had made for ourselves. The energy flows back to the subject, either because it is repelled by the object (unrequited love or an enemy unobligingly offering no opportunity for a quarrel) or because it simply flows back spontaneously, with out any cause that we can discover. The inner self-regulation
of the psyche sometimes causes this in order to "charge" another object or to raise the inner potential. In synchronistic events the situation is different. In this case an archetype in the unconscious is "explosively" constellated, which is often the case, as Jung emphasizes, when consciousness sees no way out of some life situation or when it sees no solution to a problem. In projection, therefore, the undisturbed flow of energy inward from ego to Self, that is, re-flexio (reflection), is blocked, whereas in the synchronistic ev

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Marie-Louise von Franz said:

In Zen Buddhist meditation the master tries to teach his pupil how he can forever keep the inner mirror free of dust. I o the extent that he lives in complete accord with the rhythm of psychic energy and with its regulator, the Self, he has no projections anymore; he looks at reality without illu-sion and more or less continuously reads the meaning of all the synchronistic events happening around him. He lives in the creative current or stream of the Self and has himself, indeed, become a part of this stream.

If he remains, so to speak, always in contact with the suc-ceeding currents of psychic energy that are regulated by the Self, he no longer experiences disturbances of adaptation, no longer projects, in the stricter sense of the word, but remains at the center of the fourfold mirror relation. Obviously, only a person with the most highly reflected concentration can achieve this. We average human beings, by contrast, will hardly be able to avoid the necessity, for the rest of our lives, of again and again recognizing projections for what they are, or at least as mistaken judgments. It seems to me, therefore, to be extremely important to bear constantly in mind, at the very least, the possibility of projection. This would lead to much greater modesty on the part of our ego-consciousness and to a readiness to test our views and feelings thoughtfully and not to waste our psychic energy in pursuing illusionary goals.

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Ana said:

So I would say this material is definitely worth reading, even if our lesson profile may be
specific and individual the process that leads us to learn them is definitely a common goal, that of the Self.

Thanks for sharing Psyche. :)

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Psyche said:

Whether this is rare or not, I decided to share it in any case as I know for a fact that it is something that can be quite tormenting when it gets out of control. Perhaps that is the key to see if it's a problem or not in yourself. At least I know that my father has a similar issue (much more "manifested"), only that he doesn't consider it a problem at all, on the contrary. So I was thinking that perhaps it had a genetic predispostion or one is typically introspective. Or perhaps one tends to misuse the sexual center through the intellectual center.

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luke wilson said:

I need help!

I am sorry to ask this, I know this is dumb, but what is this whole passage about? Just a brief, rather easy to understand summary is all am after...
...........
The little bit that I think I understand is to do with things coming from the unconscious mind and taking over us. Uhmm, ok, if stuff can come from deep within the unconscious up to the level of consciousness, then how is one meant to control this? I dont understand how such forces can be brought under control given that they are 'automous' to a degree. What was the aim of the passage? Just to say such things happen and maybe try and explain some of the mechanics? Or was there another reason to it?

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luke wilson said:

I need help!

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Windmill knight said:

In short, wow. I think I might have to get a copy of that book.

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Windmill Knight said:

It is also very thought provoking about the nature of the unconscious. I mean, if a 'demon' coming from an archetype is so powerful, and the archetype does relate to every human being with a soul (i.e. with a rich inner life), it does suggest that at some point our unconscious minds merge into a 'psychic ocean'. We are one Group Soul. Or we were and are now fragmented. Or perhaps the experiences of thousands of human generations are encoded into genes, and they get activated for a number of reasons in us, thus forcing us to repeat the same old tales again and again, until we come up with new solutions. And perhaps the fact that synchronicites speak to our own little psychic dramas (I witness this on a daily basis) is also related to an overwhelming psychic force that emanates from, or is composed by, all human souls.

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EmeraldHope said:

Here is an excellent paper on Cupid/Psyche from the Carl Jung Dallas site. As an addition to Psyche's information above, it was very rewarding to read.

http://www.jungdallas.org/CUPIDANDPSYCHE-ed.pdf

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Gertrudes said:

I would be grateful for some help in clarifying a few thoughts on Psyche's post though: am I understanding correctly in inferring that archetypes become demons (or daimons) when their universal energy is not acknowledged within us (by lack of knowledge, trauma, and so on), and we misuse its energy by projecting it outside of us, repressing it, or embodying that archetype in full identification?

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http://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/labelledamesansmerci.html

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering;
The sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery's song.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew;
And sure in language strange she said,
I love thee true.

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gaz'd and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kiss'd to sleep.

And there we slumber'd on the moss,
And there I dream'd, ah woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cry'd--"La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke, and found me here
On the cold hill side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

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