Trapsing further into the flow of images, archetypes in psychic rivers...the poetic mind

 One of the most complex notions in attempting to describe the complex world of human beings, including our encounters with other equally complex, nuanced, dynamic and turbulent human beings, is that, while these keys are painting letters and words in the early morning of December 11, 2022, and there is a kind of focus on their sequence and their meaning, not only is the message they are attempting to convey coming from an incomplete scribe, with a partial view of himself and the world, the letters and the scribe are in a state of constant movement. Nothing that we say, think, perceive, write and even believe, while we hold tight to its purpose and intent in the moment, is or can be captured in a bottle.

And, while it may seem ‘encased’ in the bottle of the letters and words and derived meaning of each reader, (as well as the intended meaning and purpose of the writer), it is also a mere particle of the universe’s sense of itself, at a moment in time. Time, as a construct of our attempt to ‘order’ our lives and our world, is ephemeral, essentially a metaphor of linearity, structure, deadlines, planning guidelines and something of a measure of ‘how long we have’ in this life. And while we grow up in a ‘time-named’ world, there is a different world of how ‘images’ (of which group we are part), float in and through and out of our conscious and unconscious minds, rooms, courts, classrooms, offices, homes, sanctuaries, emergency rooms, forests, mountains and rivers.

The indigenous relationship to the natural world, including the rivers, has helped many to envision a ‘flow’ of external events, which metaphor has relevance, resonance and application to our inner lives which are also in flux, with or without our acknowledgement of that flow. This ‘flow’ is not the ‘flow’ of the intensity of an athlete who is ‘in the zone’; rather this ‘flow’ is the image of moving water in all of its various conditions, speeds, environments including banks, beds, skies, animal and bird ethos, and something inescapably ethereal and atmospheric. Just as the river itself is a living and changing and awesome example of the dynamic of movement and permanence, so are we. It is cogent and coherent to think of our human entity, identity, complexity, including our attitudes, beliefs, actions, motivations as well as our bodies and our minds, through the lens of the flowing river. And that flow has implications not only for the ageing of our bodies, but also the transitions and transformations of what we conceive of as the operative archetypes in our psyche.

While the puer-senex oscillation is an example of how some (think Jung first) have imagined the dynamic of how the youth-age oscillation is both perceived and enacted, we are not and cannot be encased in such a river of images that posits puer literally and exclusively in youth and senex literally and exclusively in our dotage. Any discussion, observation or even any further cognitive/imaginative speculation, reflection and application of these ‘images’ or archetypes, cannot be seen in the light of a rigid or even an oscillating kind of ‘magnetic force’. Even positive and negative energy, as envisioned by the physicists, does not capture, but merely hints at, the dynamic between and among the archetypes. And those archetypes, themselves, are not alone in our psyche. They inhabit an imagination again itself not a terrain, or a piece of intellectual real estate, but another ‘energy’ or capacity, or image itself resonating with a magnetic, artistic, executive, cognitive, physical, burst of energy that we can sometimes glimpse, both coming from ourselves, and/or being projected onto us or even from us onto others.

We use images from physics, or medicine, based on something we have come to denote as ‘empirical’ and measureable, and limited by our definitions, as a way of attempting to communicate meaning and purpose. And yet, in each case, even in those cases in which we are ‘dealing with the facts’ (truth, empirically verifiable, demonstrably affirmed and confirmed by others) we are exploring and exposing various ‘perceptions’ or ‘takes’ on those truths. And while we have codified, defined, inculcated and proselytized this universe, and conduct our business, medical, legal, educational, social, political, environmental, scientific, and even our religious affairs, including our individual lives, amid the language of these spheres, as if the empirical was the only universe extant, our psyche is another realm of which we continue to explore.

And, of course, we are both indebted to and dependent on the same words used in our daily lives to discuss various perspectives, theories and models of how our psyche is and operates. Capturing some concept that is abstract in a cluster of letters that appear concrete, and tend to paint a picture of something ‘we can experience with our senses,’ is something of a mug’s game. This conundrum confronts all our attempts to ‘dig’ into anything relating to god, goddesses, myth, archetype, fantasy, dream, and image. Even the words, themselves, conjure up images that tend to identify classes of images as empirically valid, and thereby eligible for academic disciplines to investigate, or ‘ethereal, spiritual, ephemeral and abstract’ and thereby excluded from rigorous academic disciplines to explore.

Such a division, however, belies and precludes the full application of many of the brightest and most insightful minds, and leaves those ‘artsy’ types outside the formal, structures of academia. We love our art galleries and the images on their walls, and we do have some ‘schools’ in which the basic principles of how to capture and portray images are taught, practiced, adjudicated, valued, displayed and sold. And we do have our cathedrals, synagogues and mosques, in which prayers, hymns, homilies and physical gestures, adornments, images and liturgies (all of them images of one kind or another) are enacted, displayed, and even sanctified and blessed.

What we continue to struggle with, still, along with the sheer depth and complexity of the multiple galaxies and universes to be discovered, and the complexities of how oceanic “life” continues and changes, and the applications, for example, of I-131 to the treatment of pancreatic cancer, is the dynamic of the human psyche. Defined as the human soul, spirit, or mind, coming from the Greek, psyche which

means, ‘the soul, mind, spirit, or invisible animating entity which occupies the physical body. Not your actual brain, but whatever it is that generates all of your thoughts and emotions, the immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life.” (vocabulary.com)

Again, here, the concept of a ‘box’ definition, frozen in time, or even in a single idea, is a kind of reduction that denies the dynamic of the river of ideas (images, archetypes, that, rather than lying ‘frozen’ on the canvas of our psyche, actually ‘have us’ in their hands (another metaphor) and another way of both seeing and thereby thinking about how the psyche pulses. And these ideas, these images, themselves never isolated from other ideas and images, and never exclusively in charge of how we think or see ourselves,  essentially, as James Hillman writes in Revisioning Psychology:

 (P)sychologizing, as it converts alien ideas into psychological ones, subsumes all other actions. Through psychologizing I change the idea of any literal action at all   --political, scientific, personal—into a metaphorical enactment. I see the act and scene and stance I am in, and not only the action I am into. I recognize that through my ideas I apprehend and am apprehended by my inmost subjectivity, entering all actions in the role of an idea.

Archetypal psychology envisions the fundamental ideas of the psyche to be expressions of persons—Hero, Nymph, Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, Puer, and many other specific prototypes bearing the names and stories of the Gods. These are the root metaphors. They provide the patterns of our thinking as well as of our feeling and doing. They give all our psychic functions-whether thinking, feeling, perceiving or remembering—0their imaginal life, their internal coherence, their force, their necessity and their ultimate intelligibility. These persons keep our persons in order, holding to significant patterns the3 segments and fragments of behavior we call emotions, memories, attitudes, and motives. When we lose sight of these archetypal figures we become, in a sense, psychologically insane: that is, by not ‘keeping in mind’ the metaphorical roots we go ‘out of our minds’—outside where ideas have become literalized into history, society, clinical psychopathology, or metaphysical truths. Then we attempt to understand what goes on inside by observing the outside, turning inside out, losing both the significant interiority in all events and our own interiority as well. The weaker and dimmer our notions of the archetypal premises or our ideas, the more likely our actions area to become stuck fast in roles. We become caught in typical problems, missing the archetypal fantasy we are enacting. Even with the best moral intentions, political goals, and philosophical methods, we will exhibit a psychological naivete. Even that precious instrument, reason, loses its freedom of insight when it forgets the divine persons who govern its perspectives. ( Hillman, op, cit.,p.127-128)

And a little later, Hillman, in the same work, writes this:

A semantic definition of metaphor is ‘deviant discourse’ and its corresponding opposite term is ‘literal.’ The dictionary says that metaphors transfer meaning. If psyhchologizing proceeds by seeing through the plainly literal, then the psychologizing activity will continually enliven, by transferring meaning into and out of direct discourse. Psychology then refers less to a body of knowledge than to a perspective parallel to other bodies of knowledge, a running commentary to the direct and literal discourse. Psychology will not be straight and well0-structured. IT will be scattered, not direct, not a Hero on his course, but a Knight Errant picking up insights by the way. (Hillman op. cit, p. 159)

While engaged in the teaching profession, I and many of my colleagues were or became acquainted with the work of both Freud and Jung, in a limited way at best. We learned names of the Ego, Id and Libido from the Freud lexicon, and animus and anima from the Jungian lexicon. The concept of the Shadow, (from Jung) also started to appear as the dark side, that ‘bag of traumas, tragedies we had experienced, which, at the time of their occurrence, we buried in our unconscious, so the pattern went, in order to be brought out later, in later life, for mining for the respective ‘gold’ of the lessons about what we had by then learned, and how we might approach a similar rough patch now. Consistently, throughout those decades, eccentric and especially extreme actions, thoughts, attitudes, were considered ‘abnormal’. And these social and political and even professional ‘judgements’ were being made by doctors, teachers, clergy, social workers and even by executives engaged in the business of classifying and then hiring or rejecting candidates for employment.

Eruptions of behaviour, then termed, ‘situational maladjustment syndromes’ were considered abnormal, and were often prescribed pharmaceuticals, in order to moderate both feelings and actions. Judgements by those in positions of authority, often veered in the direction of ‘assignment’ to some kind of psychiatric care facility for individuals whom they considered ‘abnormal’. And the perception of the abnormal was, itself, partly informed by, for example, the kind of religiosity, morality and sense of professional obligation to rid such individuals from public interference and potential insecurity.

Several decades hence, through the thoughts, imagination and writing of people like Hillman, we can see validity in a way of seeing (soul) that embraces the metaphor of images, archetypes, that, rather than pigeon-hole our character and our person into something like a tumor, or a broken femur, or a genetic hole in the heart, and then prescribe some ‘medical’ treatment, we all more able and thereby likely to take a more ‘flowing’ and process and idea-energized interpretation of those eccentricities and not automatically deem them either criminal or requiring medical treatment.

It is that timeline, that this scribe is attempting to discern from both experience and reflection, in these pieces.

                                     ---more to come----