Persistent Dilemmas

[Guest guest]

Alice, all,So, I'm reflecting on how the email list Jung-Fire has changed over the years, gone back-and-forth, undergone attrition and replacement of participants, and done so among those who stepped up to the plate, and, those who never hollered from the edge of the bleachers.

The " list " travels expressive cycles too--maybe call 'em psychles!--much of it revolving around an interest in 'Jung' and the Analytic Psychology. At the same time, obviously there is here being enjoined the individual psychologies of each active participant.

Given this it always strikes me as mildly contradictory that there is need to deliver an advisory about how we might better protect the discussion in the abstract from the discussion in the concrete.Why do I suggest as much? Well, you point it out in drawing the distinction between head and heart. This dovetails with my previous all too aggressive response to , in which I suggested that to understand the concept of the collective consciousness we might be (or should be,) compelled to deal with the lonesome proposition, " only the center point dwelling in the unconscious " knows. " Actually, what Dr. Jung asserted was that there are as many archetypes as their are situations. The leap from this, given this, is that the advisory is itself inflected by its unconscious ground. This is the reason why I previously wrote the suggestive, " the brighter the light... " So it is, as we agree to circumscribe the dialog (etc.) we per force agree to enlighten on one hand, and, darken on the other.

In other words, there is an unconscious factor necessarily drawn along with the wish to, in effect, bring the dialog back to Jung. This is, broadly, a kind of " situation. " Earlier you also wrote, " I think we need to move on from the stalking and get back to Jung and those wonderful quotes about the collective unconscious. " This is tantamount, as I see it, to wanting to move from the Heart of the Matter, back to the Head of the Mission. Do you see this?***Take the quotes and their underlying a specific conception--that of Dr. Jung--termed the Collective Unconscious. As you know, or should know, the Collective Unconscious is at the same time and at once, Dr. Jung's most essential conceptual contribution, and, his most controversial.

Very interestingly, it's not an arcane conception at all. But, it also is accompanied by a stock rejoinder to any criticism: no matter what may be the grounds for skepticism, any and all such grounds are infected by the fact of the unknown archetypes and primordial constituents of this same Collective Unconscious.

From the positive perspective, the same is true. So, when the concept is ramified in innovative ways, such as supposing a metaphoric (?) Nazi resides in every individual psyche, this too is merely a description of a situation, underneath which lay the primordial archetypal fundamentals--that are unique to this description. Crucially the factor(s) of the Collective Unconscious are also unique to the individual making this description.

Why is this so? Because all anybody can do is shine a light via their introspective and intrapsychic experience on their own flux betwixt consciousness--what is apparently known in this light--and, what is not known, what is in the primordial dark and what is in the personal dark.

When we deploy an archetyally-imbued description, or any description, it is, per the Analytic Psychology, always subjective. This isn't to say such deployments when deployed to describe a couple, or family, or community, or country, or cosmos, aren't " true, " it's to say that the primordial factors are never fully revealed, and, what remains in the dark is the unknown factor in each and every such description. (The Collective Unconscious is objective completely in the terms given by its being " Just So. "

This would be one reason to understand the element of projection placed in every attribution. Thank you, Gene.It follows from this, obviously, that there is no hope for having an absolutely veracious discussion, or, having a discussion walled off from the individualized factors and ongoing experience. So it is: the advice rings for me in the context of its impossibility. Yes, subject (!) matters may be set to the side, yet there the heart of the matter will, as it were, wait, for the head to tire.

From this it seems to me stalking arrived just in the nick of time!regards, in Clepheland