8. Jung And The Self Concept

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Jung's concept of the dual mother

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[...] (Speaking of Freud) Layard continues: "He understands to some extent the meaning of the phallic snake, which will be investigated also in the following analysis, but the meaning of what is here symbolisés by the dragon of the feminine principle remained in the background and not understood. This we know as he tells us with such candor in Totem and Taboo that he is at a loss to understand the meaning of the great maternal deities (Freud: Totem and Taboo, London, Kegan Paul, p. 247).

This is where Jung comes into the picture with his concept of the Dual Mother (see Symbols of Transformation, Chap. VII).

Here duality is regarded not as an unfortunate or pathological ambivalence, as it is basically in the Freudian Outlook, but as a fundamental characteristic of all human nature.

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The Incest Taboo allows Self-consciousness

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This (the duality of human nature) gives it not boundness but freedom, based on the incest taboo, which as Jung emphasizes "created the self-conscious individual" (Ibis, pour. 271). This theme is further elaborated in his later work The Psychology of the Transference in which he quoted passages from my The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype. Both these works show the kinship aspect of this phenomena leads also to à psychic one and to the formation of the Self, the core of human existence. This is itself dual, containing in itself the opposites of instinct and of instinct potentially transformed as the primary material of psychic life.

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The Ego serving the Self

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By this is meant the distillation of basic instinctual emotions in the crucible of consciousness; no longer only ego consciousness, but ego consciousness joined to what we may now see is meant by psychic consciousness. This means ego's consciousness of it's instinct, which thus ceases to be an unconscious drive compelling a person to do all sorts of acts and have feelings which may either overwhelm him of have to be repressed. The individual can then be at one with them. because he understands them symbolically as well as actually. Ego can thus attain to a position in which it is neither "driven" not "drives", but is a willing channel for the expression of the Self. It agrees with the Self and this can serve it, as some hope they may serve God, or as an Easterner envisages some ultimate purpose, which he may only dimly understand but believed in and lives by.

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Experience of Desolation is Indispensable Pre-dispositon

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One of the Indispensable predisposing conditions for the achievement of anything like the psychic balance or inner security that such learning brings, is it's own opposite: the previous experience of Desolation, which alone can teach that ego is not all. Ego can be all only if it allied itself to the greater "all", that psychic consciousness which understands duality. Otherwise it is a one-sided waif, wandering in unknown paths, uprooted and alone, without a guiding principle, disagreeing with it's fate and thoroughly disgruntled. Ego then becomes a kind of "foreign body" in society; it becomes antisocial and hostile against itself. If psychic consciousness is denied expression, it will revenge itself by producing every kind of psychic or psycho-somatic disorder. Such disorders are always symbolic and, if closely observed with the eye of faith that recognized that psychic consciousness knows what it is doing, will teach us if we are teachable. If we are not, we shall succumb.

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How Mary Learned of Psychic Consciousness

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This book is an attempt to show at least one way of learning that worked. Mary found that a force quite unknown to her one-sided and torn ego consciousness took hold of her while she was painting. It had a symbolism of its own quite foreign to anything that she might think or even imagine in what she thought of as her "normal" moods - which were in fact highly abnormal. By giving herself up to this force while it gripped her, which, as she put it, "used her hands only to hold the brush and mix the paints" at it's dictates, she gradually learned to give free play to the forms that came to her - that strange world of symbolic imagery whose own will was so different from her conscious one.

She would often start off with a blank sheet and "let the pictures come". To begin with, the three Central motifs of the dragon, tree and snake, (in that order) came to her simply as isolated and more or less unconnected fantasies.

But as she gradually became more aware of what they symbolized and that they were expressions of her varying and (at first) chaotic emotions, then grew up in her a whole personal mythology based on archetypal experience. By means of this she could begin to sort her reactions out to the extent that we could eventually refer to some given mood as a "dragon mood", "snake mood" or a "tree mood". This have us a vocabulary of symbols (there were others too) which were invaluable guides to discussion long before any formal psychology vocabulary could be used. They were of course more dynamic for us to use.