{"id":9531,"date":"2017-02-08T01:05:19","date_gmt":"2017-02-07T14:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.anneskyvington.com\/?p=9531"},"modified":"2024-03-09T09:41:16","modified_gmt":"2024-03-08T22:41:16","slug":"shadows-bullies-synchronicities-literature-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anneskyvington.com.au\/shadows-bullies-synchronicities-literature-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"Shadows and Synchronicities"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung<\/a> (1875-1961) created many of the enduring terms for the mind and for the unconscious that have enriched literature and humanity during the twentieth century. Certainly he was firstly a follower of Freud and the psychoanalytic method that Freud instigated. But terms such as “projection”, “archetypes”, “complexes”, “the shadow”, “the collective unconscious”and “the anima\/animus” all owe their enduring resonance to him and to those who built on his legacy, some of which is still being uncovered today.<\/p>\n The Red Book<\/em>, with its beautiful mandalas and paintings by the author, has only in recent years been open to public scrutiny. Jung also wrote about polarities and the importance of wholeness, that is, the need to synthesise disparate entities, in order to find what he called “the self”. When I first read Jung, during my own adolescent crises, it was as if he was talking directly to me. He understood what I’d been going through, and what I was to go through later on. And I would come to see, eventually, how my individual experiences and search for wholeness were a reflection of societal structures: the microcosm in the macrocosm, and vice versa.<\/p>\n When asked once what he saw as the most important and ubiquitous aspect of the human mind, Jung replied without hesitation: “Projection<\/a>“.<\/p>\n Could it be that many of the problems facing the world at this time can be seen in terms of projection? Is this why the new President of the United States has taken to demonising Muslims? In differentiating between “them” and “us”, the others (Muslims) become the demons or, in Jungian terms, “the shadow”. If ignored, the shadow side of us becomes relegated to the unconscious. Jung stated that: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is… Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading for a headache.” (Jung: CW: Psychology and Religion<\/em>).<\/p>\n