jueves, 19 de mayo de 2011

Animus


Animus is the archetype of reason and spririt in women. This is the male aspect of the female psyche, as the anima is the female aspect of male psyche.
This archetype is projected in various male images and characters like great artists, heroes, warriors, sportsmen, philosopher, and so forth. When identified with the animus (animus-inflated), women develop an excessive rational drive which may end up in excessive criticism and stubbornness.
In animus-inflated women with strong interest in intellectual matters we find the need to impose and maintain a rigurosus and schematic list of values judged the most important. There's no reflection as regard the tenues of these values, nor any aim at discussing about them. Only the urge to impose them to others.
But how should women deal with the animus archetype inside them? There is a very important study on the animus written by Jung's wife Ema. She wrote: "What we women have to overcome in our relation to the animus is not pride but lack of self-confidence and the resistance of inertia. For us, it is not as though we had to demean ourselves, but as if we had to lift ourselves" (Animus and Anima, Spring Publications, Dallas, Texas, 1978).
Jung about Animus (quotes)Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit. (From The Syzygy: Anima and Animus, Collected Works, 9ii, par. 28f.)
The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man - and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call... the spermatic word. (From Anima and Animus , Collected Works 7, par. 336.)
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© Carl Jung Resources, 2008

What Is a Shadow?by Susan Reynolds


Your shadow is that part of your psyche that contains unconscious, unexpressed aspects of your personality that you either strongly dislike (negative shadow) or don't know you possess (positive shadow). Shadows grow in intensity inversely proportional to your knowledge of it — the less you know the denser it becomes. If you have a weak or ineffective ego, the shadow may muscle its way into prominence. People often project their shadow material onto someone else — viewing your husband as controlling when in fact you are the controlling partner; or viewing your husband as brilliant when in fact you are brilliant but almost completely unaware of it. A large part of unveiling your essence, or true self, involves claiming your negative and your positive shadow and all of its projections. You have to first claim your shadow to change it. Oddly enough, particularly if you came from a dysfunctional, destructive family, you may have greater difficulty owning your positive shadow.
How does projection work?
Projection occurs when rather than acknowledge or accept negative traits or positive virtues, your ego projects these traits onto other people. Falling in love occurs when you project your hidden, positive qualities onto another person. And when you vehemently dislike someone, whatever it is that drives you crazy about another person is likely to be a quality you possess. Projection offers you opportunities to recognize messages from your unconscious about who you really are.
Shadows are generally seen as the dark side of your personality that your ego goes to great lengths to keep under control and safely hidden. The positive shadow harbors qualities of your idealized, or self-actualized, self that you have yet to discover and that you usually project onto loved objects. One must face the negative shadow and reclaim the positive shadow to find a healthy balance based on consciousness rather than repression. Repressing your negative shadow often leads to neurosis or psychosis, while failing to acknowledge your positive shadow dilutes full expression of your true self. Claiming and learning to live with your shadow is both empowering and crucial to progression toward the self. When you are in the grips of a shadow trait or behavior, you may say, “I am not feeling like myself,” or “It was so unlike me to do such and such.”

The Elements of Personalityby Susan Reynolds


Psyche is a Greek word meaning “soul,” and psychology is basically a theory or method of understanding the science of the soul — what comprises your soul, how your soul functions, and what changes your soul. Carl Jung was a disciple of Sigmund Freud who then branched off and formulated his own theories. According to Jung, your psyche, or self, encompasses everything that is you — your genetic heritage including sensory, intuitive, cognitive, or emotional proclivities or tendencies; your physical or emotional components; your primary and secondary environments, that is, your family and your culture; and your dreams. Within your psyche, your unique qualities of, ego, shadow, persona, and complexes formulate a distinctive personality that arises out of all these various elements.

What Is My Self?

The basic concept is that self is your whole personality, including the conscious and unconscious aspects of a psyche. Jung believed that you were born with a true self, or essence, and that your unique ego, or personality, emerged as a result of your heredity traits and your early childhood development — your need to function in your primary environment and your culture — working in tandem with your hereditary, genetic, or unique inborn qualities. He believed the self's one true purpose was to transcend — rise above or resolve — all of the opposites contained within your personality and create a balanced, whole psyche that is far closer to your true self, or essence. Because your ego arises out of the self, you cannot have a healthy ego without a healthy self. Jung defined the self as transcendent and transpersonal and regarded it as the most important aspect of the psyche.
According to Enneagram theory, you can liberate your true self by weakening and dissolving the rigid patterns that keep your ego state (personality) fixated to known perceptions, beliefs, or behaviors within the parameters of your Enneatype. When you gradually free yourself from these rigid patterns, you are finally capable of being fully present to the moment and responsive to the demands of the present in accordance with your essence or true self. Your Enneagram style is actually a distortion of your true personality and is only a small portion of your true self. The more fully actualized you are, the less obvious and influential your Enneagram style becomes.

What Is My Ego?

Jung believed that your ego is the center of consciousness that creates your identity. The ego's primary purpose is to help you function in society by organizing and balancing the conscious and unconscious aspects of your psyche to form an integrated, stable personality. A balanced, healthy ego achieves equilibrium between the conscious and unconscious aspects of a person's psyche that integrates all the various qualities of self and results in a fully self-actualized personality. An inflated, or exaggerated, ego creates an imbalance that often results in a narrowly defined, rigid, and intolerant personality. At the far end of the spectrum, an overly inflated, deluded ego results in a psyche that feels godlike and can become increasingly dangerous to the self and to others (because a person with an overly inflated ego will project his or her negative unconscious onto others, such as Hitler, Osama bin Laden, and other radical fundamentalists). Jung defined the ego as the mediator and protector of the self whose purpose is to observe, receive, and interpret information about the self and others.
Like most crises, a midlife crisis results from an inflexible, entrenched ego or system of beliefs that has excluded large portions of a person's psyche. In a midlife crisis, people often make an abrupt turn, behave like a child, or simply change their beliefs and personality in an unconscious attempt to rebalance their ego. This crisis resolves itself when you break free of rigidity and redefine who and what you are and how you behave.
In regard to the Enneagram of Personality, your ego is a grouping of conscious and unconscious behaviors, opinions, truths, and thoughts that developed as a way for you to comprehend and live within your childhood environment. Your ego becomes a pattern of beliefs, habits, and behavior that you have, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to present to the world; it's the personality you use to navigate life's challenges. Generally, a healthy ego not only functions well in society but allows for a relatively uncomplicated unveiling and blossoming of your essence. An unhealthy ego creates self-designed roadblocks or impediments that hinder your ability to grow or even begin to function anywhere near your peak potential within society.
Your Enneagram ego, or personality, is the way you have learned to express yourself in the world and the way you communicate who you are to others. These personality traits become your most enduring way of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the world and your place in it. A healthy person develops and sustains a flexible ego. An ego-driven personality functions, but it is often too reliant on reactionary impulses or behaviors or too restrictive to express your true self. An unhealthy ego may become pathological — rigid, inflated, or deflated — and definitely does not serve its owner well.

What Is My Essence?

Your essence is you, stripped of your ego. It's your authentic, fully integrated true self. Moving toward your essence doesn't eliminate your personality or ego, it merely frees you to make choices rather than succumb to fixated behavior. It expands your vision of yourself.
When you regress, you move farther away from your true essence; when you progress, you move closer to your true essence. Your essence is more than the sum of everything in your psyche, of which your core personality is only a part. It's the point at which the restrictions imposed upon your core personality are truly liberated, allowing the other elements of your unencumbered true self to emerge. In other words, your core personality or Enneatype contains methods of coping or adaptive responses that allow you to function in the world. Your ego boundaries within your core personality determine the degree of compulsion or rote response that define your life. These behaviors are the fixations that shape your core personality. As you integrate, you free yourself from the fixations that have shaped your life and increasingly learn to live from your essence.

Father Hunger: Jung’s Dreams of His Father by Susan Olson


In his book Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men (1994), Jungian analyst and author James Hollis defines eight “great secrets” that “bedevil the male soul.” The seventh of these is “father hunger,” a man’s “deep longing for his father and for his tribal fathers.” The eighth has to do with healing this hunger, which requires men to “activate within what they did not receive from without.” These words, written to address “the collective experience of men,” might well have been written about Jung’s relationship with his father, a Swiss reform pastor. Jung’s “father hunger” began in child- hood and was not filled until he found within himself the spiri- tual wisdom that his father could not provide. The spiritual food came in the form of dreams that occurred after Paul Jung’s death, in which he finally became his son’s spiritual teacher, mentor, and guide.
C. G. Jung had the misfortune (or perhaps the good fortune) to be born to parents who were often at odds about religious matters. His father espoused a traditional form of Christianity that did not satisfy the spiritual curiosity of his intuitive, imagi- native son. Jung’s mother, with her dark “No. 2 personality,” came from a family that regarded “paranormal” experiences such as séances and communication with the dead as a natural part of life. Jung was keenly aware of the conflict between his parents and tried as a young man to reconcile it within himself. He looked to his father to help him interpret his own profound spiritual experiences, especially his dreams, but Paul Jung could provide only trite, conventional responses. In his autobi- ography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung describes his many frustrating attempts to engage his father in conversa- tion about theological issues. At last he realized that his father “suffered from religious doubts” himself and could offer “nothing but the same old lifeless theological answers” to his questions. (MDR, p. 112) When Paul Jung died in 1896, his 21- year-old son was left without a strong father to guide him into psychological and spiritual maturity. The spiritual wisdom that Jung did not receive from his father would have to come from within.
The first hint of inspiration came six weeks after Paul Jung’s death, when he came to his son in a dream and told him that he had recovered from his final illness and was on his way home. Two days later the dream came again, leaving Jung feeling ashamed for thinking that his father was dead. “What does it mean,” he asked himself, “that my father
returns in dreams and that he seems so real?” (MDR, p. 117) Although his outer father had died, the image of a healthy father was already being activated from within and was coming “home” to live in his inner world.
In 1907 Jung met Sigmund Freud, who became his surrogate father for the next five years. Jung must have told Freud the dream of his father, for it appears in a paper, “Formulations Regarding Two Principles in Mental Functioning,” given by Freud in 1911. As we might expect, Freud interpreted the dream as a wish-fulfillment with an Oedipal twist. Assuming that Jung had wanted his father to die and then blamed himself for harboring such thoughts, Freud viewed the dream as a compensation for Jung’s repressed Oedipal guilt. But this is not how Jung understood his dream. To him it was “an unforgetta- ble experience” that “forced [him] for the first time to think about life after death.” (MDR, p. 117) Already his dream father was becoming an inner guide and inviting him to explore a spiritual question that fascinated him for the rest of his life.
Twenty-six years later, at the age of 47, Jung was married with five children, well established in his career, and past the break with Freud that had created a crisis in his life from 1912- 1918. Then, late in 1922, Paul Jung made another dream ap- pearance. In this dream Jung wants to show his father around his house, introduce his wife and children, and tell him about the book he has just written on psychological types. But before he can do so, his father says that he wants to consult him on the subject of marital psychology. At this point Jung awoke, feeling perplexed and asking himself why his father should be inter- ested in that particular topic. It was not until his mother’s sud- den death four months later that he wondered if the dream might have been a warning or a premonition. Perhaps, he thought, his father knew that his wife was about to join him in the afterlife and was worried that their marriage, which had been “full of trials and difficulties and tests of patience,” was about to resume. (MDR, p. 347) Jung was not able to answer his father’s questions in the dream, but in 1925 he wrote “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” in which he began to explore the psychological underpinnings of marriage. Once again a dream “activated from within what he did not receive from without” in the figure of a father who respected his son’s pro- fession, sought his advice, and inspired him to explore a new area of study.
By the early 1940’s, Jung was in his mid-sixties and at the height of his career as an analyst, writer, and teacher. Now his father appeared again in two important dreams and invited him to venture into uncharted psychological waters. In the first dream, Jung is exploring a large wing of his house that he has never seen before. He finds a laboratory with shelves full of bottles containing “every imaginable sort of fish” and realizes that it is his father’s workroom. (MDR, p. 240f.) Next door is his mother’s room, in which she has set up beds for “ghostly
Susan Olson is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Atlanta and is on the faculty of the Memphis Jungian Seminar, affiliated with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts. Her article on The Phantom of the Opera appears in Spring Journal 73 (2005), and her book on the function of dreams in the mourning process will be published by Spring in 2009.
© 2008 C.G. Jung Society of Atlantamarried couples” to sleep. In his comments on the dream, Jung interpreted the fish as a Christ symbol and the beds as a “somewhat farcical” symbol of the coniunctio, the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine principles. Although his parents were not seen in the dream, he felt their presence strongly and understood the dream to mean that “something had remained unfinished and was still with my parents; that is to say, it was still latent in the unconscious and hence reserved for the future.” Again Jung’s father (and in this case his mother) appeared “from within” as guiding figures who led him to his work on Christian symbolism in Aion (1951) and his study of alchemy and the sacred marriage in Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955).
In the next dream, Jung’s father is living in a large house in the country and working as the custodian of the tombs of several famous people. To his son’s great surprise, he is now a distinguished Biblical scholar. In his study he opens a large Bible bound in shiny fishskin and begins a learned exege- sis of an Old Testament passage. Then he leads Jung up a narrow staircase to a mandala-shaped room and points to an- other flight of stairs and a small door leading to the chamber of “the highest presence.” (MDR, p. 245f.) As his father kneels and touches his forehead to the ground in a gesture of rever- ence, Jung imitates him but confesses that he “could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor—there was perhaps a millimeter to spare.” At the end of the dream he realizes that the room at the top of the stairs is the chamber of Uriah, whom King David had betrayed to the enemy in order to marry his wife Bathsheba.
Jung interpreted this dream as another indication of “the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious.” The fish- skin, the Biblical passage, and the Old Testament figures indi- cated the work yet to be done on the Christ symbol, the Book of
Job, and the coniunctio. Now that his dream father had become a scholar in his own right, he could finally address his son’s theological questions. But when they bowed before the highest presence, the father touched his forehead all the way to the ground while the son did not. This meant to Jung that he needed to preserve a measure of “mental reservation” for his work, but I wonder if the dream might also have been hinting that his father’s spiritual development had now surpassed his own. In any case, his dream father had finally become the spiritual
guide that he was not able to be in his lifetime. Perhaps his own father hunger—his unsatisfied longing for a genuine relation- ship with God the Father—made it impossible for him to under- stand his son’s unorthodox religious experience. But what he did not provide in life he provided in death, by taking the form of a vivid dream figure and becoming Carl Jung’s psychopomp, or guide of souls. For all we know, satisfying his son’s father hunger may have also have done much to satisfy his own.
In my analytic practice and my own experience, I am aware every day of the ways in which the deep connection between parent and child shapes our consciousness and determines our outlook on life. Our parents become “inner objects” whose influence (for better and for worse) remains powerful long after we have left the nest, and our relationship with our children (with whom we try, and often fail, to be better parents) contin- ues to evolve long after they have flown. Jung’s dreams of his father offer the hope that even after death it is possible for unsettled conflicts to be resolved and open wounds to heal. In the realm of dreams, which Jung honored all his life and taught us to honor, the images of the dead appear and offer us the gift of a lively and ongoing connection with them. If we accept this gift, our own deep hunger for what we did not and cannot receive from without can be filled by what is given to us from within ¦
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© 2008 C.G. Jung Society of Atlanta