*(Jody Gray) (Jody Gray) this Blog Post is part of my personal research -Origins -understanding how what exists today came to exist; and, Why are you my enemy? This topic, relates to human behavior as a result of Collective unconsciousness, which Jung argues had profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meanding through their experiences...
Keywords: "primordial images" "archetypes" - the collective unconscious -inherited presuppositions -The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. -aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind'. -consensus reality -generally agreed to be reality -fashionable ideologies of the age -
Concept. Mass society as an ideology can be seen as dominated by a small number of interconnected elites who control the conditions of life of the many, often by means of persuasion and manipulation. -advocates of various kinds of cultural elite who should be privileged and promoted over the masses, claiming for themselves both exemption from and leadership of the misguided masses… mass media are necessary instruments for achieving and maintaining mass societies.
Organized religion, Dogma, is an official system of principles or tenets of a church… that which one thinks is true -applied to some strong belief that the ones adhering to it are not willing to rationally discuss… assent to a proposition about a non-evident matter.
Application to politics and society. Groups of people can become especially receptive to specific symbols due to the historical situation they find themselves in. -makes people ripe for political manipulation…
...all humans, regardless of racial and geographic differences, share the same collective pool of instincts and images, though these manifest differently due to the moulding influence of culture.
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Synchronicity: an acausal principle as a basis for the apparently random simultaneous occurrence of phenomena.
Archetype: a concept “borrowed” from anthropology to denote supposedly universal and recurring mental images or themes.
Archetypal images: supposedly universal symbols that can mediate opposites in the psyche, often found in religious art, mythology and fairy tales across cultures.
Complex: the repressed organisation of images and experiences that governs perception and behavior.
Collective unconsciousness: [https://en.wikipedia.] a term coined by Carl Jung, refers to structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among beings of the same species. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts and by archetypes -universal symbols such as the Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, the Tree of Life, and many more.
Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He argued that the collective unconscious had profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences.
Basic explanation. The “collective” unconscious encompassing the soul of humanity at large. In “The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology” (Nov. 1929), Jung wrote:
And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.
The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.
“The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” (Oct. 19, 1936) Jung:
My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.
Jung linked the collective unconscious to 'what Freud called "archaic remnants" – mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind'. He credited Freud for developing his "primal horde" theory in Totem and Taboo and continued further with the idea of an archaic ancestor maintaining its influence in the minds of present-day humans. Every human being, he wrote, "however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche."
As modern humans go through their process of individuation, moving out of the collective unconscious into mature selves, they establish a persona—which can be understood simply as that small portion of the collective psyche which they embody, perform, and identify with.
The collective unconscious exerts overwhelming influence on the minds of individuals. These effects of course vary widely, since they involve virtually every emotion and situation. At times, the collective unconscious can terrify, but it can also heal.
Distinction from related concepts. ...Psychotherapy patients.. Often described fantasies and dream which repeated elements from ancient mythology. These elements appeared even in patients who were probably not exposed to the original story. For example, mythology offers many examples of the “dual mother” narrative, according to which a child has a biological mother and a divine mother. Therefore, argues Jung, Freudian psychoanalysis would neglect important sources for unconscious ideas, in the case of a patient with neurosis around a dual-mother image.
...collective consciousness (meaning something along the lines of consensus reality -generally agreed to be reality, based on consensus view) offered only generalizations, simplistic ideas, and the fashionable ideologies of the age. This tension between collective unconscious and collective consciousness corresponds roughly to the "everlasting cosmic tug of war between good and evil" and has worsened in the time of the mass man [https://en.wikipedia.] (mass society, any society of the modern era that possesses a mass culture and large-scale, impersonal, social institutions -aka a “society in which prosperity and bureaucracy have weakened traditional social ties”... took form in the 19th century, referring to the leveling tendencies in the period of the Industrial Revolution that undermined traditional and aristocratic values. Concept. Mass society as an ideology can be seen as dominated by a small number of interconnected elites who control the conditions of life of the many, often by means of persuasion and manipulation. This indicates the politics of mass society theorists- they are advocates of various kinds of cultural elite who should be privileged and promoted over the masses, claiming for themselves both exemption from and leadership of the misguided masses.”As technological innovation allowed government to expand, the centralized state grew in size and importance.” “Since then, government has assumed responsibility for more and more areas of social life: schooling, regulating wages and working conditions, establishing standards for products of all sorts, and providing assistance to the elderly, the ill, and the unemployed.” “In a mass society, power resides in large bureaucracies, leaving people in local communities with little control over their lives… Although such regulations may protect and enhance social equality, they also force us to deal more and more with nameless officials in distant and often unresponsive bureaucracies, and they undermine the autonomy of families and local communities.” Mass society theory has been active in a wide range of media studies, where it tends to produce ideal visions of what the mass media such as television and cinema are doing to the masses. Therefore, the mass media are necessary instruments for achieving and maintaining mass societies. “The mass media give rise to national culture that washes over the traditional differences that used to set off one region from another.” “Mass-society theorists fear that the transformation of people of various backgrounds into a generic mass may end up dehumanizing everyone.”
Organized religion, exemplified by the Catholic Church, lies more with the collective consciousness; but, through its all-encompassing dogma it channels and molds the images which inevitably pass from the collective unconscious into the minds of people. (Conversely, religious critics including Martin Buber accused Jung of wrongly placing psychology above transcendental factors in explaining human experience.) (Dogma, is an official system of principles or tenets of a church… or a philosophy such as Stoicism… derived from the Greek ‘dogma’ meaning literally “that which one thinks is true” and ‘dokein’ “to seem good”... in a pejorative sense referring to enforced decisions, such as those of aggressive interests or authorities. More generally it is applied to some strong belief that the ones adhering to it are not willing to rationally discuss… assent to a proposition about a non-evident matter.)
(Stoicism, the path to happiness for humans is found in accepting that which we have been given in life, by not allowing ourselves to be controlled by our desire for pleasure or our fear of pain, by using our minds to understand the world around us and to do our part in nature’s plan, and by working together and treating others in a fair and just manner. It was founded in Athens in the early 3rd century BC.)
Instincts. Jung's exposition of the collective unconscious builds on the classic issue in psychology and biology regarding nature versus nurture. If we accept that nature, or heredity, has some influence on the individual psyche, we must examine the question of how this influence takes hold in the real world.
Humans experience five main types of instinct, wrote Jung: hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection, and creativity. These instincts, listed in order of increasing abstraction, elicit and constrain human behavior, but also leave room for freedom in their implementation and especially in their interplay. Even a simple hungry feeling can lead to many different responses, including metaphorical sublimation. These instincts could be compared to the "drives" discussed in psychoanalysis and other domains of psychology. Several readers of Jung have observed that in his treatment of the collective unconscious, Jung suggests an unusual mixture of primordial, "lower" forces, and spiritual, "higher" forces.
Archetypes. Jung writes: "Archetypes are typical modes of apprehension, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with an archetype, no matter whether its mythological character is recognized or not."
Note: there is a partial list of well-studied archetypes, listed in pairs of opposites… e.g. Great Mother vs. Terrible Mother. Old Wise Man vs. Trickster. Order vs. Chaos. Time vs. Eternity. Sacred vs. Profane. Light vs. Darkness. (those who are familiar with Tarot will recognize archetype themes).
(other terms) “representations collectives” “mythological motifs” “categories of imagination” “primordial thoughts” “dominants”-because of their profound influence on mental life.
Evidence. In his clinical psychiatry practice, Jung identified mythological elements which seemed to recur in the minds of his patients—above and beyond the usual complexes which could be explained in terms of their personal lives. The most obvious patterns applied to the patient's parents: "Nobody knows better than the psychotherapist that the mythologizing of the parents is often pursued far into adulthood and is given up only with the greatest resistance."
Jung cited recurring themes as evidence of the existence of psychic elements shared among all humans. For example: "The snake-motif was certainly not an individual acquisition of the dreamer, for snake-dreams are very common even among city-dwellers who have probably never seen a real snake.” Still better evidence, he felt, came when patients described complex images and narratives with obscure mythological parallels. Jung's leading example of this phenomenon was a paranoid-schizophrenic patient who could see the sun's dangling phallus, whose motion caused wind to blow on earth. Jung found a direct analogue of this idea in the "Mithras Liturgy", from the Greek Magical Papyri of Ancient Egypt—only just translated into German—which also discussed a phallic tube, hanging from the sun, and causing wind to blow on earth. He concluded that the patient's vision and the ancient Liturgy arose from the same source in the collective unconscious.
Going beyond the individual mind, Jung believed that "the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious". Therefore, psychologists could learn about the collective unconscious by studying religions and spiritual practices of all cultures, as well as belief systems like astrology.
Application to politics and society. Elements from the collective unconscious can manifest among groups of people, who by definition all share a connection to these elements. Groups of people can become especially receptive to specific symbols due to the historical situation they find themselves in. The common importance of the collective unconscious makes people ripe for political manipulation, especially in the era of mass politics. Jung compared mass movements to mass psychoses, comparable to demonic possession in which people uncritically channel unconscious symbolism through the social dynamic of the mob and the leader.
Although civilization leads people to disavow their links with the mythological world of uncivilized societies, Jung argued that aspects of the primitive unconscious would nevertheless reassert themselves in the form of superstitions, everyday practices, and unquestioned traditions such as the Christmas tree.
Based on empirical inquiry, Jung felt that all humans, regardless of racial and geographic differences, share the same collective pool of instincts and images, though these manifest differently due to the moulding influence of culture. However, above and in addition to the primordial collective unconscious, people within a certain culture may share additional bodies of primal collective ideas.
Jung called the UFO phenomenon a "living myth", a legend in the process of consolidation. Belief in a messianic encounter with UFOs demonstrated the point, Jung argued, that even if a rationalistic modern ideology repressed the images of the collective unconscious, its fundamental aspects would inevitably resurface. The circular shape of the flying saucer confirms its symbolic connection to repressed but psychically necessary ideas of divinity.
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Monopsychism [https://en.wikipedia.] is the belief that all humans share the same eternal consciousness, soul, mind and intellect. It is also a recurring feature in many mystical traditions.
Monopsychism is a doctrine of Sabianism, Jewish Kabbalah, and Averroism, and also forms a part of the Rastafarian belief system.
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Pantheism [https://en.wikipedia.] is the belief that all reality is identical with divinity, or that everything composes an all-encompassing, immanent god (the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world -the spiritual world permeates the mundane). Pantheists thus do not believe in a distinct personal or anthropomorphic god.
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*Anthropomorphism [https://en.wikipedia.] is the attribution of human traits, emotions, and intentions to non-human entities and is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology.
Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions and natural forces like seasons and the weather.
Both have ancient roots as storytelling and artistic devices (art), and most cultures have traditional fables with anthropomorphized animals as characters. People have also routinely attributed human emotions and behavioural traits to wild as well as domestic animals.
Name. Anthropomorphism derives from its verb form anthropomorphize, itself derived from the Greek ánthrōpos (ἄνθρωπος, lit. "human") and morphē (μορφή, "form"). It is first attested in 1753, originally in reference to the heresy of applying a human form to the Christian God.
In religion and mythology. In religion and mythology, anthropomorphism refers to the perception of a divine being or beings in human form, or the recognition of human qualities in these beings.
Ancient mythologies frequently represented the divine as deities with human forms and qualities. They resemble human beings not only in appearance and personality; they exhibited many human behaviors that were used to explain natural phenomena, creation, and historical events. The deities fell in love, married, had children, fought battles, wielded weapons, and rode horses and chariots. They feasted on special foods, and sometimes required sacrifices of food, beverage, and sacred objects to be made by human beings. Some anthropomorphic deities represented specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. Anthropomorphic deities exhibited human qualities such as beauty, wisdom, and power, and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed, hatred, jealousy, and uncontrollable anger. Greek deities such as Zeus and Apollo often were depicted in human form exhibiting both commendable and despicable human traits.
...Anthropomorphism has cropped up as a Christian heresy, particularly prominently with the Audians in third century Syria, but also in fourth century Egypt and tenth century Italy. This often was based on a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:27: "So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them".
...Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black… Thracians that they are pale and red-haired.
...Hindus do not reject the concept of a deity in the abstract unmanifested, but note practical problems. Lord Krishna said in the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 12, Verse 5, that it is much more difficult for people to focus on a deity as the unmanifested than one with form, using anthropomorphic icons (murtis), because people need to perceive with their senses.
In Faces in the Clouds, anthropologist Stewart Guthrie proposes that all religions are anthropomorphisms that originate in the brain's tendency to detect the presence or vestiges of other humans in natural phenomena.
In literature.
Religious texts. There are various examples of personification as a literary device in both Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament and also in the texts of some other religions.
Fables. Anthropomorphism, also referred to as personification, is a well established literary device from ancient times… employ anthropomorphized animals to illustrated principles of life. Many of the stereotypes of animals that are recognized today, such as the wily fox and the proud lion, can be found in these collections… Apollonius of Tyana: And there is another charm about him, namely, that he puts animals in a pleasing light and makes them interesting to mankind. For after being brought up from childhood with these stories, and after being as it were nursed by them from babyhood, we acquire certain opinions of the several animals and think of some of them as royal animals, of others as silly, of others as witty, and others as innocent.
Apollonius noted that the fable was created to teach wisdom through fictions that are meant to be taken as fictions, contrasting them favorably with the poets' stories of the deities that are sometimes taken literally. Aesop, "by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events". The same consciousness of the fable as fiction is to be found in other examples across the world, one example being a traditional Ashanti way of beginning tales of the anthropomorphic trickster-spider Anansi: "We do not really mean, we do not really mean that what we are about to say is true. A story, a story; let it come, let it go."
Modern literature. Building on the popularity of fables and fairy tales, specifically children's literature began to emerge in the nineteenth century with works such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) by Carlo Collodi and The Jungle Book (1894) by Rudyard Kipling, all employing anthropomorphic elements. This continued in the twentieth century with many of the most popular titles having anthropomorphic characters…
The fantasy genre developed from mythological, fairy tale, and Romance motifs and characters, sometimes with anthropomorphic animals… Tolkien saw this anthropomorphism as closely linked to the emergence of human language and myth: "...The first men to talk of 'trees and stars' saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings... To them the whole of creation was "myth-woven and elf-patterned".
In science. In science, the use of anthropomorphic language that suggests animals have intentions and emotions has traditionally been deprecated as indicating a lack of objectivity. Biologists have been warned to avoid assumptions that animals share any of the same mental, social, and emotional capacities of humans, and to rely instead on strictly observable evidence…
De Waal has written: "To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.” Alongside this has come increasing awareness of the linguistic abilities of the great apes and the recognition that they are tool-makers and have individuality and culture.
Writing of cats in 1992, veterinarian Bruce Fogle points to the fact that "both humans and cats have identical neurochemicals and regions in the brain responsible for emotion" as proof that "it is not anthropomorphic to credit cats with emotions such as jealousy".
Developmental perspective. Children appear to anthropomorphize and use egocentric reasoning from an early age and use it more frequently than adults. Examples of this are describing a storm cloud as "angry" or drawing flowers with faces. This penchant for anthropomorphism is likely because children have acquired vast amounts of socialization, but not as much experience with specific non-human entities, so thus they have less developed alternative schemas for their environment. In contrast, autistic children tend to describe anthropomorphized objects in purely mechanical terms because they have difficulties with theory of mind.
In mental health. In people with depression, social anxiety, or other mental illnesses, emotional support animals are a useful component of treatment partially because anthropomorphism of these animals can satisfy the patient's’' need for social connection.
In marketing. Anthropomorphism of inanimate objects can affect product buying behavior. When products seem to resemble a human schema, such as the front of a car resembling a face, potential buyers evaluate that product more positively than if they don't anthropomorphize the object.
People also tend to trust robots to do more complex tasks such as driving a car or childcare if the robot resembles humans in ways such as having a face, voice, and name; mimicking human motions; expressing emotion; and displaying some variability in behavior.
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Related:
BP: Cosmic Consciousness, a bridge between spiritual and material reality. http://historicalandmisc. *
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