#me when a thing uses the jungian concept of the collective unconscious or similar as a literal magic demiplane or similar: woah sick pers—

[a-sketchy]

one nice thing about being a persona fan is that persona is just a word, that is used rather often, so you get to think ‘woah sick persona reference’ like every other day

[sometimesrosy]

Do you think we will ever get a bellarke kiss? i know we got plenty of other confirmations, but it would be nice for it to be spelt out for me? i want endgame without a shadow of a doubt, is that too much to ask?

I actually believe that The 100 is around 25% ABOUT Bellarke and I believe the end game of that story is romantic fulfillment, because their relationship is NOT platonic. A platonic soulmate pairing is Sherlock and Joan, not Clarke and Bellamy. They yearn for each other and are jealous when the other is with someone else and long for something more, mutually. They are MUTUALLY PINING, which is an awesome story, imo. 

It can be hard to tell what KIND of story a person is telling, and so our task as the audience, if we want to follow along and be on top of the story instead of just sitting back and enjoying the rollercoaster ride is to figure out what the story is, what genre it is, what tropes they’re using, what archetypes, what themes, what style... what TYPE of story.

A lot of genre stories are very simple and not surprising, a soap offers melodrama and mix and matching relationships, an action show offers big fights and exciting adventures and a victory to reach for, romances offer love and consummation and if a tragedy pain and loss and if a comedy or romantic genre happiness and unification of the couple.. Right? 

So what the hell story are they telling HERE? It IS a post apocalyptic science fiction action adventure survival show, and so we have science fiction tropes like spaceships, AIs, mad scientists, and we have post apoclayptic tropes like quests for redemption, birth and rebirth, scavengers and warriors, mutants, savages, and we have battle scenes and sword fights and gun fights and kidnappings and rescue missions and death.

There is an OBVIOUS Bellarke storyline, and it is OBVIOUSLY (not a delusion) a love story. It IS about their partnership, a soulmate relationship, her head to his heart, their NEED to be together, she is the hero but he is the key, her need to redeem him his need to save her.  Their feelings are not platonic, which precludes romance or sexual desire or longing, thus the jealous watching while one is with someone else romantically or sexually.  BUT the question is, what KIND of romance is it??? We know already it’s a slow burn, but are we getting our established relationship? It’s what I want, but what I want is not relevant to what story they are telling. I suppose I shouldn’t have to tell you that what YOU want isn’t relevant to what story they are telling, either. This kiss and confirmation you want? It doesn’t matter. Us wanting something to happen doesn’t mean that’s the story, doesn’t mean that’s what we’re getting. That’s the kind of interpretation that leads to people deciding Lxa was the hero and Clarke her reward and Bellamy the villain, or Spacekru were the stars with Echo (WTF!? That doesn’t even make any sense,) the new hero and Clarke was the villain. Or ignoring Marper and Mackson because you ship Minty, when Marper and Mackson are also beautiful? And ignoring the actual story and the actual heroes leads to being disappointed when our wants don’t happen the way we want them to. Also, my opinion about what is going to happen isn’t relevant to what is going to happen, either. I am an observer, looking for textual clues for what story is going to happen. Now I’m a GOOD observer, and I spend a lot of time double checking my theories against the text and against logic and literary analysis thought, but I am still only putting the puzzle pieces together trying to make it fit the story they are telling.

I will say that the theory I have found MOST useful in puzzling out the story is Jungian Literary Theory. 

Jung is also an influential force in myth (archetypal) criticism. Psychological critics are generally concerned with his concept of the process of individuation (the process of discovering what makes one different form everyone else). Jung labelled three parts of the self:

Shadow – the darker, unconscious self; rarely surfaces, yet must be faced for totality of SelfPersona – the public personality/mask (particularly masculine)Anima/Animus – a man’s/woman’s “soul image” (the negative that makes a composite whole)

A neurosis occurs when someone fails to assimilate one of these unconscious components into his conscious and projects it on someone else. The persona must be flexible and be able to balance the components of the psyche.

Mythological / Archetypal: A mythological / archetypal approach to literature assumes that there is a collection of symbols, images, characters, and motifs (i.e., archetypes) that evokes a similar response in all people. According to the psychologist Carl Jung, mankind possesses a “collective unconscious” (a cosmic reservoir of human experience) that contains these archetypes and that is common to all of humanity. Myth critics identify these archetypal patterns and discuss how they function in the works. They believe that these archetypes are the source of much of literature’s power. [x]

The Shadow-Persona-Anima/Animus is a particularly good fit for The 100 AND Bellarke. Bellarke ARE the Anima/Animus. In fact, we have seen again and again the dark/light, yin yang symbolism to make us subconsciously connect them as two sides of the same coin, dark and light... and they take turns being the dark and light. If they are the anima/animus, then that means they need to integrate the other (which we saw between seasons 4/5) and it also means they need to be together which we’ve seen in seasons 1-6, and which need has only gotten BIGGER as the seasons have passed.

Oh when I consider this approach more fully, I think that Octavia is the Shadow to Bellamy’s Persona... the girl under the floor, rarely let out, and once free (after losing her animus [lincoln] going out of control and becoming a tyrant that destroys the world until the persona asserts itself and feelings/pain/emotion is balanced once again with purpose/ethics/doing what is right.) You know what? I’m shocked that no one has really delved into the Hades/Persephone/Demeter allegory of Dante/Clarke/Abby. I went with Dante’s Inferno as the allegory I explored... maybe because I didn’t start doing my Jungian analysis until season 3 and they showed us that Blake illustration of Dante’s Inferno, and I took the knock upside the head the show was giving me and went OH YOU MEAN IT’S AN ALLUSION!!!!

I think this show is, well, a mix and match of different influences, and I like that. I like that we get The Divine Comedy and the bible as well as Greek mythology as well as Game of Thrones and Battlestar Gallactica and Tangled and The Beauty and The Beast and Penelope and Odysseus as well as Elizabeth and Darcy. I like that shit. The mythic/archetypal stories can be seen in ALL those references. Bellamy is Han Solo and Clarke is Princess Leia. See I love that shit.

I think in some ways, this show is about healing and becoming whole and making peace with your darkness and choosing to be better and rebirth and redeeming humanity and hopefully in season 7, although it is by no means certain, the healing of the earth itself. It’s about trauma and how we struggle to come back from total destruction, because that’s what post apocalyptic fiction is about and one of the reasons we consume it... because we can see our OWN rebirth in the dramatic, fictional rebirth (and why I hate post apocalyptic fic where the guiding principle is that humanity is doomed and there’s no point.) 

Oh wait. You asked about Bellarke and I went into jungian literary analysis and Dante’s inferno and post apocalyptic fic... Okay so here’s the thing. I can not GUARANTEE you that you’ll get a kiss. Because a KISS isn’t the point. The point is UNITY, together, the head and the heart, becoming WHOLE. This is why they could end every season with Clarke and Bellamy together and victorious, but together in a different way, and still with more story to tell... because...wait... each season there has been a DIFFERENT mythic tale of the anima/animus coming together. If the show had ended at season 4, it would have been the sun/moon, always longing, never together. If it had ended at season 5, it might have been binary stars, aligned and moving in the same direction. Now in season 6, we don’t get the ending of our story. We’re still in the middle of it, but Clarke and Bellamy have actually come TOGETHER, and it is in an intimate, romantic way, with that fairy tale “true loves kiss bringing her back from the dead,” aka mouth to mouth aka “the kiss of life,”... when we know that mouth to mouth was not necessary to CPR, but it WAS necessary to the romantic trope of true love’s kiss.

See, this all brings me back to my ORIGINAL analysis on Bellarke after Hakeldama in season 3, when everyone thought Bellarke was dead and CL was the endgame story, and I went, no wait. They are the head and the heart and they can only do it TOGETHER and the main idea is bringing together the opposites/enemies/yin and yang to create a coherent whole that means that Clarke and Bellamy HAVE to be together that’s how this story works. Bellarke is endgame. I don’t make the rules.

Of course I was not aware that it wasn’t considering ONLY romance to be “together,” and the hands metaphor was used instead of fandom’s desire for a kiss, and there are other archetypal light/dark head/heart/ yin/yang king/queen stories than just the simple romance that shippers want. Not that there’s anything wrong with the simple romance. I think season 1 WAS a simple romance for them. It was enemies to friends to lovers... but without the resolution of the lovers part when they decided to drag it out into a slow burn that COULD, if we got to the end of it, be the most fantastic epic love story on tv. 

I’ve faced so many years of people telling me I was delusional, I have double checked my theories and compared the development of the bellarke relationship to canon, to romantic conventions, to archetypes, to allusions, to other ships on the show. I’ve watched and charted the relationship growth for all six seasons, and the thing is, yeah they sometimes pull back and they always put obstacles between clarke and bellamy and if I saw the direction going ELSEWHERE, that’s what I would go with, because I am more attached to the story than to my WANTING it to give me my ship. But they are NOT portraying Bellarke as platonic, and they are NOT portraying B/E as endgame, but as a romantic obstacle, family, spy/master, and a “right for now” romance, rather than a Ms. Right romance. And Echo’s story is not being portrayed as her being fulfilled by her relationship with Bellamy, but by rediscovering who she is and reclaiming her life from the people who would use her, who stole her identity. Echo’s story seems to be going in a feminist direction about female empowerment and not needing no man, while Clarke and Bellamy’s story has gone in a “yes I can do it without you but I don’t want to and I need you in my life because I love you and I won’t let you go.” Bellarke’s story has only gotten MORE romantic, culminating this season in that true love’s kiss/back from the dead... which leaves us season 7, to ratchet the epic love story up one last notch. 

Which notch? Consummation. So yeah, I think they’ll “kiss,” because the togetherness has steadily gotten more and more romantic every single season and I honestly can’t see what else could come between true love’s kiss and  endgame except a season worth of story about how they get from “I can’t lose you, I need you,” to endgame romantic physical and official “we are married and in love” status. But you know, i’m not one of the writers just an observer with some literary analysis.  My fave is jungian, but i like the others, too. Except maybe the first one, historical/biographical, because I don’t think that works at ALL unless you understand the text for itself outside of historical biographical context which would be a secondary analysis, and I think fandom prefers hist/bio but never bothers to understand the story being told for itself before deciding it means all sorts of things about context. oh my god rowena stop talking and just post. 

[supposedlyawitch]

shadow work

i found a site that explains shadow work and i want to do some work with it and i’m willing to share the details the site has here. I’m putting this also here so i can look back on it. I already know my shadow is probably bigger and deeper than all the oceans combined. it might be interesting to explore, it might not, but it has to be done. This is basically free therapy.

Please note: Shadow Work exercises should not be undertaken if you struggle with low self-esteem. Exploring your demons will likely make you feel a million times worse about yourself and may spiral into self-hatred. Before doing Shadow Work, I strongly and emphatically encourage you to work on Self-Love. Shadow Work should only be undertaken by those who have healthy and stable self-worth, and a friendly relationship with themselves. See this article on how to love yourself for more guidance.

Why Focusing Only on the Light is a Form of Escapism

For most of my life, I’ve grown up firmly believing that the only thing worthy of guiding me was “light” and “love.” Whether through the family environment I was raised in, or the cultural myths I was brought up clinging to, I once believed that all you really needed to do in life to be happy was to focus on everything beautiful, positive and spiritually “righteous.” I’m sure you were raised believing a similar story as well. It’s a sort of “Recipe for Well-Being.”

But a few years ago, after battling ongoing mental health issues, I realized something shocking:

I was wrong.

Not just wrong, but completely and utterly off the mark. Focusing only on “love and light” will not heal your wounds on a deep level. In fact, I’ve learned through a lot of heavy inner work, that not only is focusing solely on “holiness” in life one side of the equation, but it is actually a form of spiritually bypassing your deeper, darker problems that, let me assure you, almost definitely exist.

It is very easy and comfortable to focus only on the light side of life. So many people in today’s world follow this path. And while it might provide some temporary emotional support, it doesn’t reach to the depths of your being: it doesn’t transform you at a core level. Instead, it leaves you superficially hanging onto warm and fuzzy platitudes which sound nice, but don’t enact any real change.

What DOES touch the very depths of your being, however, is exploring your Shadow.

What is the Human Shadow?

In short, the human shadow is our dark side; our lost and forgotten disowned self. Your shadow is the place within you that contains all of your secrets, repressed feelings, primitive impulses, and parts deemed “unacceptable,” shameful, “sinful” or even “evil.” This dark place lurking within your unconscious mind also contains suppressed and rejected emotions such as rage, jealousy, hatred, greed, deceitfulness, and selfishness.

So where did the Shadow Self idea originate? The concept was originally coined and explored by Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Carl Jung. In Jung’s own words:

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”

When the human Shadow is shunned, it tends to undermine and sabotage our lives. Addictions, low self-esteem, mental illness, chronic illnesses, and various neuroses are all attributed to the Shadow Self. When our Shadows are suppressed or repressed in the unconscious long enough, they can even overtake our entire lives and causes psychosis or extreme forms of behavior like cheating on one’s partner or physically harming others. Intoxicants such as alcohol and drugs also have a tendency to unleash the Shadow.

Thankfully, there is a way to explore the Shadow and prevent it from devouring our existence, and that is called Shadow Work.

What is Shadow Work?

Shadow work is the process of exploring your inner darkness or “Shadow Self.” As mentioned previously, your Shadow Self is part of your unconscious mind and contains everything you feel ashamed of thinking and feeling, as well as every impulse, repressed idea, desire, fear and perversion that for one reason or another, you have “locked away” consciously or unconsciously. Often this is done as a way of keeping yourself tame, likable and “civilized” in the eyes of others.

Shadow work is the attempt to uncover everything that we have hidden and every part of us that has been disowned and rejected within our Shadow Selves. Why? Because without revealing to ourselves what we have hidden, we remain burdened with problems such as anger, guilt, shame, disgust, and grief.

All throughout the history of mankind Shadow Work has played a powerful yet mysterious and occult role in helping us discover what is causing us mental illness, physical dis-ease and even insanity resulting in crimes of all kinds.

Traditionally, Shadow Work fell in the realm of the Shamans, or medicine people, as well as the priests and priestesses of the archaic periods of history.  These days, Shadow Work falls more commonly in the realms of psychotherapy, with psychologists, psychiatrists, spiritual guides, and therapists.

Do We All Have a Shadow Self?

Yes, we ALL have a Shadow Self (see our Collective Shadow article for a deeper explanation).

As uncomfortable as it may sound, there is a dark side within every human being. Why is this the case? The reason why all human beings have a shadow is due to the way we were raised as human beings, often referred to as our ‘conditioning.’ (We’ll explore how the Shadow is formed next.)

“But I’m a good person! I don’t have a ‘shadow’ side,” you might be thinking. Well, the reality is that yes, you might be a good person. In fact, you might be the most generous, loving, and selfless person in the entire world. You might feed the hungry, save puppies, and donate half of your salary to the poor. But that doesn’t exclude you from having a Shadow. There are no exceptions here. The nature of being human is to possess both a light and a dark side, and we need to embrace that.

Sometimes, when people hear that they have a Shadow side (or when it is pointed out), there is a lot of denial. We have been taught to perceive ourselves in a very two-dimensional and limited way. We have been taught that only criminals, murderers, and thieves have a Shadow side. This black and white thinking is one of the major causes of our suffering.

If the thought of having a Shadow side disturbs you, take a moment to consider whether you have developed an idealized self. Signs of an idealized self include attitudes such as:

“I’m not like those people, I’m better.”

“I have never strayed.”

“God is proud of me.”

“Criminals and wrongdoers aren’t human.”

“Everyone sees how good I am (even so, I have to remind them).”

“I’m a role model.”

“I should be validated and applauded for my good deeds.”

“I don’t have bad thoughts, so why do others?”

Such perceptions about oneself are unrealistic, unhealthy, and largely delusional. The only way to find inner peace, happiness, authentic love, self-fulfillment, and Illumination is to explore our Shadows.

How is Our Shadow Side Formed?

Your Shadow side is formed in childhood and is both (a) a product of natural ego development, and (b) a product of conditioning or socialization. Socialization is the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society.

When we are born, we are are all full of potential, with the ability to survive and develop in a variety of ways. As time goes on, we learn more and more to become a certain type of person. Slowly, due to our circumstances and preferences, we begin to adopt certain character traits and reject others. For example, if we are born into a family that shows little interpersonal warmth, we will develop personality traits that make us self-sufficient and perhaps standoffish or mind-oriented. If we are born into a family that rewards compliance and shuns rebellion, we will learn that being submissive works, and thus adopt that as part of our ego structure.

As authors and Jungian therapists Steve Price and David Haynes write:

But, as we develop our ego personality, we also do something else at the same time. What has happened to all those parts of our original potential that we didn’t develop? They won’t just cease to exist: they will still be there, as potential or as partly developed, then rejected, personality attributes, and they will live on in the unconscious as an alternative to the waking ego. So, by the very act of creating a specifically delineated ego personality, we have also created its opposite in the unconscious. This is the shadow. Everyone has one.

As we can see, developing the Shadow Self is a natural part of development.

But you also formed an alter ego due to social conditioning, i.e. your parents, family members, teachers, friends, and society at large all contributed to your Shadow.

How?

Well here’s the thing: polite society operates under certain rules. In other words, certain behaviors and characteristics are approved of, while others are shunned. Take anger for example. Anger is an emotion that is commonly punished while growing up. Throwing tantrums, swearing, and destroying things was frowned upon by our parents and teachers. Therefore, many of us learned that expressing anger was not “OK.” Instead of being taught healthy ways to express our anger, we were punished sometimes physically (with smacks or being grounded), and often emotionally (withdrawal of love and affection).

There are countless behaviors, emotions, and beliefs that are rejected in society, and thus, are rejected by ourselves. In order to fit in, be accepted, approved, and loved, we learned to act a certain way. We adopted a role that would ensure our mental, emotional, and physical survival. But at the same time, wearing a mask has consequences. What happened to all the authentic, wild, socially taboo or challenging parts of ourselves? They were trapped in the Shadow.

What happens as we grow up?

Through time, we learn to both enjoy, and despise, our socially-approved egos because, on the one hand, they make us feel good and “lovable,” but on the other hand, they feel phony and inhibited.

Therapist Steve Wolf has a perfect analogy that describes this process:

Each of us is like Dorian Grey. We seek to present a beautiful, innocent face to the world; a kind, courteous demeanour; a youthful, intelligent image. And so, unknowingly but inevitably, we push away those qualities that do not fit the image, that do not enhance our self-esteem and make us stand proud but, instead, bring us shame and make us feel small. We shove into the dark cavern of the unconscious those feelings that make us uneasy — hatred, rage, jealousy, greed, competition, lust, shame — and those behaviours that are deemed wrong by the culture — addiction, laziness, aggression, dependency — thereby creating what could be called shadow content. Like Dorian’s painting, these qualities ultimately take on a life of their own, forming and invisible twin that lives just behind our life, or just beside it …

But while the Shadow Self may be portrayed as our “evil twin,” it is not entirely full of “bad” stuff. There is actually gold to be found within the Shadow.

What is the Golden Shadow?

Jung once states that “the shadow is ninety percent pure gold.” What this means is that there are many beautiful gifts offered to us by our Shadow side if we take the time to look. For example, so much of our creative potential is submerged within our darkness because we were taught when little to reject it.

Not everything within our Shadow is doom and gloom. In fact, the Shadow contains some of our most powerful gifts and talents, such as our artistic, sexual, competitive, innovative, and even intuitive aptitudes.

The ‘Golden Shadow’ also presents us with the opportunity for tremendous psychological and spiritual growth. By doing Shadow Work, we learn that every single emotion and wound that we possess has a gift to share with us. Even the most obnoxious, “ugly,” or shameful parts of ourselves provide a path back to Oneness. Such is the power of the Shadow – it is both a terrifying journey, but is ultimately a path to Enlightenment or Illumination. Every spiritual path needs Shadow Work in order to prevent the issues from happening that we’ll explore next.

What Happens When You Reject Your Shadow?

When shadow-work is neglected, the soul feels dry, brittle, like an empty vessel. — S. Wolf

Rejecting, suppressing, denying, or disowning your Shadow, whether consciously or unconsciously, is a dangerous thing. The thing about the Shadow Self is that it seeks to be known. It yearns to be understood, explored, and integrated. It craves to be held in awareness. The longer the Shadow stays buried and locked in its jail cell deep within the unconscious, the more it will find opportunities to make you aware of its existence.

Both religion and modern spirituality have a tendency to focus on the “love and light” aspects of spiritual growth to their own doom. This over-emphasis on the fluffy, transcendental, and feel-good elements of a spiritual awakening results in shallowness and phobia of whatever is too real, earthy, or dark.

Spiritually bypassing one’s inner darkness results in a whole range of serious issues. Some of the most common and reoccurring Shadow issues that appear in the spiritual/religious community include pedophilia among priests, financial manipulation of followers among gurus, and of course, megalomania, narcissism, and God complexes among spiritual teachers.

Other issues that arise when we reject our Shadow side can include:

Hypocrisy (believing and supporting one thing, but doing the other)

Lies and self-deceit (both towards oneself and others)

Uncontrollable bursts of rage/anger

Emotional and mental manipulation of others

Greed and addictions

Phobias and obsessive compulsions

Racist, sexist, homophobic, and other offensive behavior

Intense anxiety

Chronic psychosomatic illness

Depression (which can turn into suicidal tendencies)

Sexual perversion

Narcissistically inflated ego

Chaotic relationships with others

Self-loathing

Self-absorption

Self-sabotage

… and many others. This is by no means a comprehensive list (and there are likely many other issues out there). As we’ll learn next, one of the greatest ways we reject our Shadows is through psychological projection.

The Shadow and Projection (a Dangerous Mix)

One of the biggest forms of Shadow rejection is something called projection. Projection is a term that refers to seeing things in others that are actually within ourselves.

When we pair projection and the Shadow Self together, we have a dangerous mix.

Why?

Because as psychotherapist Robert A. Johnson writes:

We generally seek to punish that which reminds us most uncomfortable about the part of ourselves that we have not come to terms with, and we often ‘see’ these disowned qualities in the world around us.

There are many different ways we ‘punish’ those who are mirrors of our Shadow qualities. We may criticize, reject, hate, dehumanize, or even in extreme cases, physically or psychologically seek to destroy them (think of countries who go at war with the “enemies”). None of us are innocent in this area. We have ALL projected parts of our rejected self onto others. In fact, Shadow projection is a major cause of relationship dysfunction and break down.

If we are seeking to bring peace, love, and meaning to our lives, we absolutely MUST reclaim these projections. Through Shadow Work, we can explore exactly what we have disowned.

Twelve Benefits of Shadow Work

Firstly, I want to say that I have the highest respect for Shadow Work. It is the single most important path I’ve taken to uncover my core wounds, core beliefs, traumas, and projections. I have also observed how Shadow Work has helped to create profound clarity, understanding, harmony, acceptance, release, and inner peace in the lives of others. It is truly deep work that makes changes on the Soul level targeting the very roots of our issues, not just the superficial symptoms.

There is SO much to be gained from making Shadow Work a part of your life, and daily routine. Here are some of the most commonly experienced benefits:

Deeper love and acceptance of yourself

Better relationships with others, including your partner and children

More confidence to be your authentic self

More mental, emotional, and spiritual clarity

Increased compassion and understanding for others, particularly those you dislike

Enhanced creativity

Discovery of hidden gifts and talents

Deepened understanding of your passions and ultimate life purpose

Improved physical and mental health

More courage to face the unknown and truly live life

Access to your Soul or Higher Self

A feeling of Wholeness

It’s important to remember that there are no quick fixes in Shadow Work, so these life-changing benefits don’t just happen overnight. But with persistence, they will eventually emerge and bless your life.

Seven Tips For Approaching Shadow Work

Before you begin Shadow Work, it’s important for you to assess whether you’re ready to embark on this journey. Not everyone is prepared for this deep work, and that’s fine. We’re all at different stages. So pay attention to the following questions and try to answer them honestly:

Have you practiced self-love yet? If not, Shadow Work will be too overwhelming for you. I have starred this bullet point because it is essential for you to consider. Shadow Work should not be attempted by those who have poor self-worth or struggle with self-loathing. In other words: if you struggle with severely low self-esteem, please do not attempt Shadow Work. I emphatically warn you against doing it. Why? If you struggle with extremely poor self-worth, exploring your Shadows will likely make you feel ten times worse about yourself. Before you walk this path, you absolutely must establish a strong and healthy self-image. No, you don’t have to think you’re God’s gift to the world, but having average self-worth is important. Try taking this self-esteem test to explore whether you’re ready (but first, don’t forget to finish this article!).

Are you prepared to make time? Shadow Work is not a lukewarm practice. You are either all in or all out. Yes, it is important to take a break from it time to time. But Shadow Work requires dedication, self-discipline, and persistence. Are you willing to intentionally carve out time each day to dedicate to it? Even just ten minutes a day is a good start.

Are you looking to be validated or to find the truth? As you probably know by now, Shadow Work isn’t about making you feel special. It isn’t like typical spiritual paths which are focused on the feel-good. No, Shadow Work can be brutal and extremely confronting. This is a path for truth seekers, not those who are seeking to be validated.

Seek to enter a calm and neutral space. It is important to try and relax when doing Shadow Work. Stress and judgmental or critical attitudes will inhibit the process. So please try to incorporate a calming meditation or mindfulness technique into whatever you do.

Understand that you are not your thoughts. It is essential for you to realize that you are not your thoughts for Shadow Work to be healing and liberating. Only from your calm and quiet Center (also known as your Soul) can you truly be aware of your Shadow aspects. By holding them in awareness, you will see them clearly for what they are, and realize that they ultimately don’t define you; they are simply rising and falling mental phenomena.

Practice self-compassion. It is of paramount importance to incorporate compassion and self-acceptance into your Shadow Work practice. Without showing love and understanding to yourself, it is easy for Shadow Work to backfire and make you feel terrible. So focus on generating self-love and compassion, and you will be able to release any shame and embrace your humanity.

Record everything you find. Keep a written journal or personal diary in which you write down, or draw, your discoveries. Recording your dreams, observations, and analysis will help you to learn and grow more effectively. You’ll also be able to keep track of your process and make important connections.

How to Practice Shadow Work

There are many Shadow Work techniques and exercises out there. In this guide, I will provide a few to help you start off. I’ll also share a few examples from my own life:

1. Pay attention to your emotional reactions

In this practice, you’ll learn that what you give power to has power over you. Let me explain:

One Shadow Work practice I enjoy a great deal is paying attention to everything that shocks, disturbs and secretly thrills me. Essentially, this practice is about finding out what I’ve given power to in my life unconsciously, because what we place importance in – whether good or bad – says a lot about us.

The reality is that what we react to, or what makes us angry and distressed, reveals extremely important information to us about ourselves.

For example, by following where my “demons” have taken me – whether in social media, family circles, workspaces and public places – I have discovered two important things about myself. The first one is that I’m a control freak; I hate feeling vulnerable, powerless and weak . . . it quite simply scares the living hell out of me. How did I discover this? Through my intense dislike of witnessing rape scenes in movies and TV shows, my negative reaction to novel experiences (e.g. roller coaster rides, public speaking, etc.), as well as my discomfort surrounding sharing information about my life with others in conversations. Also, by following where my “demons” have guided me I’ve discovered that I’m being burdened by an exasperating guilt complex that I developed through my religious upbringing. A part of me wants to feel unworthy because that is what I’ve developed a habit of feeling since childhood (e.g. “You’re a sinner,” “It’s your fault Jesus was crucified”), and therefore, that is what I secretly feel comfortable with feeling: unworthy. So my mind nit-picks anything I might have done “wrong,” and I’m left with the feeling of being “bad” – which I’m used to, but nevertheless, this is destructive for my well-being.

Thanks to this practice, I have welcomed more compassion, mindfulness, and forgiveness into my life.

Paying attention to your emotional reactions can help you to discover exactly how your core wounds are affecting you on a daily basis.

How to Pay Attention to Your Emotional Reactions

To effectively pay attention to your emotional reactions (I call it “following the trail of your inner demons”), you first need to cultivate:

1. Self-awareness

Without being conscious of what you’re doing, thinking, feeling and saying, you won’t progress very far.

If, however, you are fairly certain that you’re self-aware (or enough to start the process), you will then need to:

2. Adopt an open mindset

You will need to have the courage and willingness to observe EVERYTHING uncomfortable you place importance in, and ask “why?” What do I mean by the phrase “placing importance in”? By this, I mean that, whatever riles, shocks, infuriates, disturbs and terrifies you, you must pay attention to. Closely.

Likely, you will discover patterns constantly emerging in your life. For example, you might be outraged or embarrassed every time sex appears in a TV show or movie you like (possibly revealing sexual repression or mistaken beliefs about sex that you’ve adopted throughout life). Or you might be terrified of seeing death or dead people (possibly revealing your resistance to the nature of life or a childhood trauma). Or you might be disgusted by alternative political, sexual and spiritual lifestyles (possibly revealing your hidden desire to do the same).

There are so many possibilities out there, and I encourage you to go slowly, take your time, and one by one pick through what you place importance in.

“But I DON’T place importance in gross, bad or disturbing things in life, how could I? I don’t care for them!” you might be asking.

Well, think for a moment. If you didn’t place so much importance on what makes you angry, disgusted or upset . . . why would you be reacting to it so much? The moment you emotionally react to something is the moment you have given that thing power over you. Only that which doesn’t stir up emotions in us is not important to us.

See what you respond to and listen to what your Shadow is trying to teach you.

2. Artistically Express Your Shadow Self

Art is the highest form of self-expression and is also a great way to allow your Shadow to manifest itself.  Psychologists often use art therapy as a way to help patients explore their inner selves.

Start by allowing yourself to feel (or drawing on any existing) dark emotions. Choose an art medium that calls to you such as pen and pencil, watercolor, crayon, acrylic paint, scrapbooking, sculpting, etc. and draw what you feel. You don’t need to consider yourself an ‘artist’ to benefit from this activity. You don’t even need to plan what you’ll create. Just let your hands, pen, pencil, or paintbrush do the talking. The more spontaneous, the better. Artistic expression can reveal a lot about your obscure darker half. Psychologist Carl Jung (who conceptualized the Shadow Self idea) was even famous for using mandalas in his therapy sessions.

3. Start a Project

The act of creation can be intensely frustrating and can give birth to some of your darker elements such as impatience, anger, blood-thirsty competitiveness, and self-doubt. At the same time, starting a project also allows you to experience feelings of fulfillment and joy.

If you don’t already have a personal project that you’re undertaking (such as building something, writing a book, composing music, mastering a new skill), find something you would love to start doing. Using self-awareness and self-exploration during the process of creation, you will be able to reap deeper insights into your darkness. Ask yourself constantly, “What am I feeling and why?” Notice the strong emotions that arise during the act of creation, both good and bad. You will likely be surprised by what you find!

For example, as a person who considers myself non-competitive, that assumption has been challenged by the act of writing this blog. Thanks to this project, the Shadow within me of ruthless competitiveness has shown its face, allowing me to understand myself more deeply.

4. Write a Story or Keep a Shadow Journal

Goethe’s story Faust is, in my opinion, one of the best works featuring the meeting of an ego and his Shadow Self.  His story details the life of a Professor who becomes so separated and overwhelmed by his Shadow that he comes to the verge of suicide, only to realize that the redemption of the ego is solely possible if the Shadow is redeemed at the same time.

Write a story where you project your Shadow elements onto the characters – this is a great way to learn more about your inner darkness.  If stories aren’t your thing, keeping a journal or diary every day can shine a light on the darker elements of your nature.  Reading through your dark thoughts and emotions can help you to recover the balance you need in life by accepting both light and dark emotions within you.

5. Explore Your Shadow Archetypes

We have a number of  Shadow varieties, also called Shadow Archetypes. These archetypes are sometimes defined as:

The Sorcerer

The Dictator

The Victim

The Shadow Witch

The Addict

The Idiot

The Trickster

The Destroyer

The Slave

The Shadow Mother

The Hag

The Hermit

However, I have my own Shadow Archetype classification, which I will include below.

13 Shadow Archetypes

Here are my thirteen classifications which are based on my own self-observations and analysis of others:

1.  The Egotistical Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: arrogance, egocentricity, pompousness, inconsiderateness, self-indulgence, narcissism, excessive pride.

2.  The Neurotic Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: paranoia, obsessiveness, suspiciousness, finicky, demanding, compulsive behavior.

3.  The Untrustworthy Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: secretive, impulsive, frivolous, irresponsible, deceitful, unreliable.

4.  The Emotionally Unstable Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: moody, melodramatic, weepy, overemotional, impulsive, changeable.

5.  The Controlling Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: suspicious, jealous, possessive, bossy, obsessive.

6.  The Cynical Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: negative, overcritical, patronizing, resentful, cantankerous.

7.  The Wrathful Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: ruthless, vengeful, bitchy, quick-tempered, quarrelsome.

8.  The Rigid Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: uptight, intolerant, racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, obstinate, uncompromising, inflexible, narrow-minded.

9.  The Glib Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: superficial, cunning, inconsistent, sly, crafty.

10.  The Cold Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: emotionally detached, distant, indifferent, uncaring, unexcited.

11.  The Perverted Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: masochistic, lewd, sadistic, vulgar, libidinous.

12.  The Cowardly Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: weak-willed, passive, timid, fearful.

13.  The Immature Shadow

This Shadow Archetype displays the following characteristics: puerile, childish, illogical, simpleminded, vacuous.

Keep in mind that the above Shadow Archetypes are by no means exhaustive. I’m sure that there are many others out there which I have missed. But you are free to use this breakdown to help you explore your own Shadows. You’re also welcome to add to this list or create your own Shadow Archetypes, which I highly encourage. For example, you might possess a judgmental and dogmatic Shadow who you call “The Nun,” or a sexually deviant Shadow who you call “The Deviant.” Play around with some words and labels, and see what suits your Shadows the best.

6. Have an Inner Conversation

Also known as “Inner Dialogue,” or as Carl Jung phrased it, “Active Imagination,” having a conversation with your Shadow is an easy way to learn from it.

I understand if you might feel a twinge of skepticism towards this practice right now. After all, we are taught that “only crazy people talk to themselves.” But inner dialogue is regularly used in psychotherapy as a way to help people communicate with the various subpersonalities that they have – and we all possess various faces and sides of our ego.

One easy way to practice inner dialogue is to sit in a quiet place, close your eyes, and tune into the present moment. Then, think of a question you would like to ask your Shadow, and silently speak it within your mind. Wait a few moments and see if you ‘hear’ or ‘see’ an answer. Record anything that arises and reflect on it. It is even possible to carry on a conversation with your Shadow using this method. Just ensure that you have an open mindset. In other words, don’t try to control what is being said, just let it flow naturally. You will likely be surprised by the answers you receive!

Visualization is another helpful way of engaging in inner dialogue. I recommend bringing to mind images of dark forests, caves, holes in the ground, or the ocean as these all represent the unconscious mind. Always ensure that you enter and exit your visualization in the same manner, e.g. if you are walking down a path, make sure you walk back up the path. Or if you open a particular door, make sure you open the same door when returning back to normal consciousness. This practice will help to draw you effortlessly in and out of visualizations.

7. Use the Mirror Technique

As we have learned, projection is a technique of the Shadow that helps us to avoid what we have disowned. However, we don’t only project the deeper and darker aspects of ourselves onto others, we also project our light and positive attributes as well. For example, a person may be attracted to another who displays fierce self-assertiveness, not realizing that this quality is what they long to reunite with inside themselves. Another common example (this time negative) is judgmentalism. How many times have you heard someone say “he/she is so judgmental!” Ironically, the very person saying this doesn’t realize that calling another person ‘judgmental’ is actually pronouncing a judgment against them and revealing their own judgmental nature.

The Mirror Technique is the process of uncovering our projections. To practice this technique, we must adopt a mindful and honest approach towards the world: we need to be prepared to own that which we have disowned! Being radically truthful with ourselves can be difficult, so it does require practice. But essentially, we must adopt the mindset that other people are our mirrors. We must understand that those around us serve as the perfect canvas onto which we project all of our unconscious desires and fears.

Start this practice by examining your thoughts and feelings about those you come in contact with. Pay attention to moments when you’re emotionally triggered and ask yourself “am I projecting anything?” Remember: it is also possible to project our own qualities onto another person who really does possess the qualities. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as “projecting onto reality.” For example, we might project our rage onto another person who is, in fact, a rage-filled person. Or we might project our jealousy onto another who genuinely is jealous.

Ask yourself, “What is mine, what is theirs, and what is both of ours?” Not every triggering situation reveals a projection, but they more than often do. Also look for things you love and adore about others, and uncover the hidden projections there.

The Mirror Technique will help you to shed a lot of light onto Shadow qualities that you have rejected, suppressed, repressed, or disowned. On a side note, you might also like to read about a similar practice called mirror work which helps you to come face-to-face with your own denied aspects.

[bodies-without-organs]

Hyperobjects, Tool-Being, and the Tarot

Last couple of days I’ve been dipping my toes into Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects: Ecology and Philosophy After the End of the World. This book has been on my radar for some time, though it always seems to get bumped down the list when something seemingly more pressing takes my attention. Which is a shame, because even fifteen pages in I can tell this is a text of great breadth and beauty, not to mention a much more subtle and lucid explication of Object Oriented Ontology than I’ve encountered so far. Many juicy thoughts have floated by already, but one in particular has tickled me.

The point is one Morton credits to Graham Harman in his reading of Heidegger’s tool-analysis at the beginning of Being and Time. This is simply that when tool-objects (what Heidegger calls ‘equipment’) are functioning they become withdrawn from access. It is only when a tool is broken that it becomes present to consciousness as an object of contemplation. It’s interesting to see the point raised in this context as it is one of the few things that has stuck with me from when I struggled through Being and Time several years ago. The distinction Heidegger makes between being-ready-at-hand and being-present-to-hand always felt to me like a useful insight, though at the time I was unable to situate it in the broader landscape of my own thought.

But the way Morton puts the way Harman puts the way Heidegger puts it has helped me to make the link between this idea and some of the threads I have been following lately in my own practice. One of these threads concerns the way that technology fades into the background (what I have started to think of as the technological unconscious) when it is working, and how disrupting the normal functioning of technologies (via e.g. recontextualising, or engineering malfunction) induces them to intrude into human consciousness, stimulating new modes of encounter with the Machine. I hope that what these encounters provide is direct confrontation with the agency of these machines and technologies. By their ‘agency’ I just mean their capacities to affect and be affected in themselves which is never exhausted by what they are for humans. Chitter was my first attempt at this.

I’ve been asking myself recently why I care so much about this. For many this will seem academic and niche. But in truth I think it is neither abstract nor narrow; I think it is a matter of global and spiritual urgency. 

The concept of the unconscious seems crucial in untangling all this. The practice of foregrounding elements of technological background—disrupting their functioning for humans to reveal them in themselves—directly parallels in my mind the reality-hacking practices of hermeticism, witchcraft, chaos magic, etc, which aim to manifest archetypal unconscious contents in conscious reality through rituals, chanting, psychedelics, sigil crafting, divination, etc etc. I see my practice developing in a line which very much coheres with the spirit of these forms of occultism.

Morton mentions that Freud referred to the decentering of the human in the cosmos by Copernicus and later Darwin as the ‘great humiliation’, adding a snarky comment of Derrida’s that Freud’s own theories only deepened this humiliation. But the person this brings to mind for me is Carl Jung, who’s theory of the archetypes and the collective conscious continues to animate me. Despite some of the more problematic aspects of Jungian theory---Jung’s own empirical sloppiness, the swathes of shallow interpreters--- I can’t help but love it for finding empowerment and re-enchantment in the same decentering in which Freud found humiliation.

The links I want to make between empowerment, technological foregrounding, and the occult have started to become more clear recently. Shaviro’s essays on accelerationism have been a great help in this, particular the distinction he draws been predicting the actual future and extrapolating the potentialities of the present (that wonderful phrase he uses: “the futurity that haunts the present”). 

This resonates utterly with my experiences of tarot reading. Engaging with the tarot almost never feels like a process in which you learn something new. Much more often it feels like something which you already knew but was somehow blocked or obscured from consciousness has been brought into view. It is never a case of reading the future, but of reading the potentialities of the present. It raises into consciousness what is present but unconscious, or semi-conscious. 

The value of this is that once something has been made conscious it can be acted on. This is why these practices are empowering. They make possible new actions by unveiling present potentialities.

The lesson I took from Shaviro was that the positive accelerationist project is one similar in essence to reading the tarot. Except rather than reading a symbolic map of the collective unconscious, the accelerationist is reading the entire cultural landscape of technological capitalism. If I haven’t got the wrong end of the stick about this then my own practice is starting to feel very much situated within this framework.

[ben-trovato]

Archetypes & Individuation process : Jungian Psychology

Individuation process as per Carl Jung is the process of becoming one’s self, gaining individuality, which can mean our own uniqueness which is incomparable and makes me a single, homogeneous being.

The more I realise the self, the more will I be independent and embrace my inner self. My inner self is a combination of diving into my conscious and unconscious mind. So, individuation process is essential for a healthy living personality since it helps in understanding our own psyche.

Psyche is a combination of ‘conscious realm’ & ‘unconscious realm’, where ‘ego’ is a part of former and ‘personal & collective unconscious’ are a part of the latter respectively.

Source : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjgEOLocrus

Personal Unconsciousness consists of ‘the repressed/ suppressed elements from one’s life’, based on individual’s personal experiences of life. The personal conscious includes the individual's spirit as well as his or her spirituality, orientation to the outer world (optimism vs. pessimism, introversion vs. extraversion), beliefs and behaviors. Jung's concept of the personal unconscious includes the thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences, and emotions that are not permitted by the ego are maintained in the unconscious. These may range from experiences to traumatic events or thoughts. For example our dreams, fantasies, or our artistic expressions such as visual art, poetry, or music we create.

Collective Unconscious :  Collective unconscious includes the archetypes and instincts. If I look back at the history of my existence till 16 generations, then there are 65,536 people existed for me to exist today. So, in a way I have inherited collective unconcious from thise 65k people. The fears one inherits from the earliest human ancestors and comes out by default when they encounter a thing or situation similar to that in real life at the moment. The intuition/instincts that something is about to happen are a part of it. For example when we see some wild animals, we are fearful or when we have some kind of intuition or sixth sense of something bad to happen while entering into a situation.

“Archetypes are images and themes which have universal meanings across cultures which may show up in dreams, literature, art or religion.” (Jung, 1947)

Archetypes provide a structure to the parts of our psyche and psyche functions optimally when the parts of psyche are balanced and are not inflated or deflated. Inflated parts are which suffer from over expression. Deflated parts are which under expressed or suppressed. 

Now if look at balancing of the parts of psyche, then there is a need to confront our unconscious to be able to practice individuation process. How do we do so? 

By analysing and recording the dreams of ourselves, we can reach at the level of converting unciouscious into consciousness but that's like a continuous long process. For analysing the dreams, most important is to understand the most important archetypes (as described by Jung). 

The Persona : The persona is like a mask we wear through which we present ourselves to the world. This is the role a person plays, the way he present himself the world which can be different from who we really are. for example : a father, a mother, an actor, an engineer or any tag we carry with us when we are interacting with outside world. Personas are very strong at the following places : Police stations, Hospitals, Court rooms, Schools (Indian context) and even Indian mothers who are sacrificing a lot for their families do carry very strong personas of a mother at times.  

Animus/ Anima :  The “anima/animus” consists of the unconscious feminine side in males and the masculine tendencies in women. Each sex carries the attitudes and behavior of the other by virtue of living together for centuries. The psyche of a woman contains masculine behaviours or tensdencies (the animus archetype), and the psyche of a man contains feminine tendencies (the anima archetype). So it is like a mirror of our opposite biological sex.

The Shadow : Shadow For example : when my father tries to complete his aspirations of becoming an IPS/IAS officer on me as a daughter and asks me to opt for this profession. Or if my mother asks me not to behave in a particular manner, it is their shadow they are imposing on me. So, I can say that Shadow is the part of personality which is suppressed because of the fear of punishment or some other reasons (like fitting in a society). 

The Self : the self is the real me which provides me the sense of uniqueness and unity as an individual. As per Jung, the ultimate goal of every individual is to achieve a state of self-actualisation, which comes with understanding the archetype ‘the self’. 

My Reflections : 

I completely agree with the quote in Carl Jung’s book, ‘Man & his symbols’ : 

“A million zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one.”

I believe we usually forget our own selves in a race to fit in the society. Does that make us lead a happy life at all? I think no. The most important aspect of life should be to understand and embrace ‘the self’ to lead a happy and healthy life. Reading Carl Jung is really an enriching experience. If we study and understand ourselves, we never need to be dependant on other’s validation for living, and this is a way to become a successful leader or for that matter lead a successful life.

[tardisgirlepic]

Ch. 3: “The Doctor Falls” Analysis Doctor Who S10.12: Concepts for Understanding the Complex Symbology of the Characters’ Inner Nature Struggles

<- Read previous chapter

I apologize for getting the rest of these chapters out after several months have gone by.  Life got in the way.  If anyone went to the 12th Doctor panel at the Chicago TARDIS in November, that was me speaking up at the Q&A regarding the subtext.  I never mentioned this set of documents, though, as I feel very self-conscious about advertising my work.  Since I’m writing these documents to help viewers enjoy DW more, I should have mentioned it, and I will at my next opportunity.

Additional Concepts from Analytical Psychology

In the previous chapter, we looked at the characters fighting their inner natures at a superficial level.  However, characters can represent many things at once, which DW loves to do, especially in Season 10.  Bill, for example, as we saw in “The Pilot” analysis, represented all of the nuWho companions. Also, she symbolized a face of the 12th Doctor, which her guitar necklace at the end of the episode symbolized after integrating with him.

While this overloading of symbols attached to certain characters gives us a very rich subtext, it makes it much more difficult to explain.  Therefore, to analyze the characters at a deeper level, we need to look at them through different lenses.  One of these lenses is Carl Jung’s model of the psyche, which requires us to look at additional concepts from Jung’s brand of psychology, analytical psychology. (As we’ve seen, DW is heavily relying on the symbols from analytical psychology for the subtext.)

Even though Jung and Freud are considered founders of psychotherapy, Freud is a household name while the general public does not know Jung nearly as well by name.  This is probably due to the fact that Jung’s model is much more complex than Freud’s, so it’s much harder to wrap one’s head around. 

However, Jung defined many concepts that are very well known and far-reaching.  For example, he defined the concepts of the collective unconscious, introversion and extroversion, archetypes, complexes, the shadow, and much more.  In fact, we’ve seen how important shadows are in DW, although in a different context. However, they take on additional meaning when we use Jung’s definition.  Moffat has a very brilliant but simple example of Bill’s CyberBill Shadow in the finale that perfectly illustrates some aspects of Jung’s model of the psyche.  Therefore, her Shadow represents much more than it seems on the surface.

Also, we’ve seen how DW references fairytales, like Cinderella, and fairytale-like stories, such as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  However, I named my first document of this series Fairytales and Romance in Doctor Who for a reason beyond what we’ve already examined.  Through Jung’s interpretations of fairytales (they really are important), he developed many of his ideas, such as archetypes, for his model of the psyche.

Besides the paradigm that we’ve already used to look at the subtext, we also need to look at Doctor Who episodes through the lens of fairytale interpretation.  This lens will give us new, additional meanings of the characters.  The bottom line is that we need to look at these episodes in multiple ways to get the fullest view of what the multi-symbolic characters really represent.

Before we start looking at the deeper meaning of Bill’s CyberShadow and the other characters, we need to take a look at the main parts of Jung’s model. 

Jung’s Model of the Psyche

According to Journal Psyche:

Among Jung’s most important work was his in-depth analysis of the psyche, which he explained as follows: “By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious,” separating the concept from conventional concept of the mind, which is generally limited to the processes of the conscious brain alone.

Jung believed that the psyche is a self-regulating system, rather like the body, one that seeks to maintain a balance between opposing qualities while constantly striving for growth, a process Jung called “individuation”.

Jung saw the psyche as something that could be divided into component parts with complexes and archetypal contents personified, in a metaphorical sense, and functioning rather like secondary selves that contribute to the whole.

Like Freud, Jung believed the psyche is made up of 3 main parts, albeit they are somewhat different: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious.

The Ego The ego represents everything a person is aware of: thoughts, emotions, and memories.  And Simply Psychology says, “The ego is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity.”

The Personal Unconscious According to Jung, the superficial layer of the unconscious is the personal unconscious, which is basically the same as the Freudian unconscious.

According to Wikipedia:

The personal unconscious includes anything which is not presently conscious, but can be. The personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed. The personal unconscious is like most people's understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. Jung's theory of a personal unconscious is quite similar to Freud’s creation of a region containing a person's repressed, forgotten or ignored experiences. However, Jung considered the personal unconscious to be a "more or less superficial layer of the unconscious." Within the personal unconscious is what he called "feeling-toned complexes." He said that "they constitute the personal and private side of psychic life."

A great example here is the Doctor forgetting Clara.  She became part of his personal unconscious.

A complex, according to Simply Psychology is “a collection of thoughts, feelings, attitudes and memories that focus on a single concept” in the personal unconscious.

The more elements attached to the complex, the greater its influence on the individual. Jung also believed that the personal unconscious was much nearer the surface than Freud suggested and Jungian therapy is less concerned with repressed childhood experiences.

A great example of a complex is the Doctor’s feelings toward the Hybrid.  He ran away from Gallifrey because, as Ashildr said, he was afraid of himself.  Obviously, thoughts of being the Hybrid were extremely distressing and persistent, and they had a great influence on his behavior. Therefore, Jung would say that the Doctor had a complex about believing he was the Hybrid.

The Collective Unconscious The collective unconscious is Jung’s most controversial contribution to his personality theory. BTW, his theory was used to create the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a popular personality test.

According to Simply Psychology:

This is a level of unconscious shared with other members of the human species comprising latent memories from our ancestral and evolutionary past. ‘The form of the world into which [a person] is born is already inborn in him, as a virtual image’ (Jung, 1953, p. 188).

One thing to keep in mind is that Jung believed we shouldn’t take the entire model literally.  It’s metaphorical.  For example, if one takes the idea of a collective unconscious literally at first glance, that can conjure erroneous ideas, at least it did in me before I started studying Jung’s work.  Initially, I didn’t think much of his collective unconscious at a literal level, but as I learned more and about how he came up with the idea of this collective, I could see his points.  Also, once I realized that he never meant it literally, I could see how brilliant this was.  

Jung believed that personality was both a function of the environment and heredity, which, although very controversial at the time, has been borne out, like many parts of his theory, by research, especially on twins.

A great example of how the collective unconscious works is to look at CyberBill.  Instinctively, when CyberBill got angry, she destroyed part of the barn by zapping her energy beam because that was part of her so-called “genetics” of how Cybermen work.  This instinctive behavior is part of the collective unconscious of Cybermen and what Jung called an archetype.

Regarding archetype, according to Ann Hopwood, Jung wrote

‘the term archetype is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of functioning, corresponding  to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas.  In other words, it is a “pattern of behaviour”.  This aspect of the archetype, the purely biological one, is the proper concern of scientific psychology’.  (CW18, para 1228).

Hopwood, herself, goes on to say

The archetypes predispose us to approach life and to experience it in certain ways, according to patterns laid down in the psyche. There are archetypal figures, such as mother, father, child, archetypal events, such as birth, death, separation, and archetypal objects such as water, the sun, the moon, snakes, and so on. These images find expression in the psyche, in behaviour and in myths.

We’ve certainly looked at some of these archetypal figures, such as the sun and the moon, even though I didn’t describe them as archetypes at the time.  They are an extremely important part of storytelling because these patterns come with certain specified characteristics that enrich characters. 

The Self Archetype We’ve examined the concept of the Self before.  It’s the unification of the conscious with the unconscious, which represents the psyche as a whole, making all that is unknown about oneself known.  We saw how Self (capitalized) represented the individuation of a person, in other words self-actualization, integrating one’s personality: the person has achieved their highest potential.  This is a goal of the Great Work, which we’ve seen.

The Self symbol is a circle with a dot in the middle, shown below, which is the same ancient symbol used for sun.  The centered dot is the Ego while the Self is both the whole and the centered dot.

As we saw, the Doctor would not be healed and achieve who he was born to be until he achieved Self, coming to terms with whom he actually was, which meant confronting his dark side and accepting it to move past it.  “Hell Bent” happened the way it did because it had to happen that way for the subtext story.  The Doctor had to confront his dark, psychopathic side of not caring about destroying the universe for someone he loved.

In fact, check out the deleted scenes for Season 10, especially the one from “Knock Knock” at 2:40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bupTCmouOnI  He confirms this.

The Shadow Archetype Finally, we get to the Shadow archetype.  I’ve seen a lot of psychology sites define this in terms of the Jungian model, but none reflect it the way Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung’s protégé, does in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales.  She said Jung would get angry with students who took his concepts too literally and say, “The shadow is simply the whole unconscious.”

In general, it’s everything that isn’t known about oneself, including repressed memories.  The Shadow generally represents the darker side of oneself, things we don’t want to know or think about.  However, there may be good things about oneself that are unknown or repressed, too.

Nevertheless, von Franz said that we have to “bear in mind the personal situation and even specific stage of consciousness and inner awareness of the person in question” when we speak of the Shadow.  It’s contextual and changes as the person becomes enlightened.  And she goes on, “Thus at the beginning stage we can say that the shadow is all that is within you which you do not know about.” 

Missy’s discovery of her good side is a great example of the brighter side of her Shadow.  Did Missy repress her good side?  It sounds like it since she and the Doctor used to be friends. Perhaps it was the Time Lords’ earworm of the drumbeat that changed everything.  It certainly changed a lot and instilled hatred and revenge in the Master toward the Time Lords.

Missy could not become aware of her Shadow without moral effort, just as the Doctor couldn’t become aware of his Shadow without moral effort.

However, as von Franz said, “But this is no achievement, for then comes the much more difficult problem where most people have great trouble: they know what their shadow is, but they cannot express it much or integrate it into their lives.”

Near the end of the finale, Missy does try to integrate the Shadow into her life when she decided to symbolically and literally kill her dark side in favor of doing the right thing – standing with the Doctor to help save the colonists.  Interestingly, the integration of her Shadow does go wrong, though, as her dark side makes a stand too, and decides to kill the good side. It’s a fascinating externalization of the battle of the inner nature one goes through to achieve higher levels of consciousness.  One cannot advance without the conflicts and possible setbacks. 

The Anima and Animus Archetypes We’ve looked at these archetypes before, especially in regards to “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” and the brain room.  We examined how the unconscious of a man is expressed as a feminine inner personality called the anima while the unconscious of a woman is expressed as the masculine inner personality called the animus.

As we saw back in “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” analysis, the Animus was also the character out of the 1st Doctor story “The Web Planet.” Its use and context in the story is a clear indication that Jung’s definition of Animus was intended.  The story, therefore, deals with the unconscious, even though it mostly doesn’t seem that way on the surface.  The unconscious is a very common subtext subject in DW, going all the way back to the beginning of DW.  Therefore, DW is beating us over the head again, especially by naming a character “Animus,” telling us we should use Carl Jung’s model of the psyche to analyze DW.

Jung believed that the Anima and Animus development had 4 distinct levels for each.

According to Wikipedia:

In broad terms, the entire process of anima development in a man is about the male subject opening up to emotionality, and in that way a broader spirituality, by creating a new conscious paradigm that includes intuitive processes, creativity and imagination, and psychic sensitivity towards himself and others where it might not have existed previously.

The 12th Doctor’s character arc beautifully illustrates this process.

The 4 levels of Anima development are

Eve, named after the Genesis account of Adam and Eve.

Helen, an allusion to Helen of Troy in Greek mythology.

Mary, named after the Christian theological understanding of the Virgin Mary

Sophia, named after the Greek word for wisdom.

Of these 4, we’ve seen references to the first 3.  (Helen is connected to the Trojan Horse, which shows up as a toy Trojan Horse in the finale.)  Therefore, it seems very likely that there would be a character or some reference to Sophia or wisdom in the upcoming Christmas Special. 

Wikipedia goes on to say of a woman’s Animus:

Jung focused more on the man's anima and wrote less about the woman's animus. Jung believed that every woman has an analogous animus within her psyche, this being a set of unconscious masculine attributes and potentials. He viewed the animus as being more complex than the anima, postulating that women have a host of animus images whereas the male anima consists only of one dominant image.

The 4 parallel levels of Animus development are

Man of mere physical power

Man of action or romance

Man as a professor, clergyman, orator

Man as a spiritual guide

The really interesting thing here about the levels of Animus development is that they correspond with the 12th Doctor.  He:

Went hell bent through the universe with a terrible destructive power

Went to romance River

Became the professor and was an orator, giving TED Talks-type lectures

Became like Clarence the Angel 2nd Class in It’s a Wonderful Life; the Doctor got his wings by becoming Missy’s spiritual guide and redeeming her

That makes the Doctor the Animus, and we’ll talk about what this means in a bit.

Other Archetypes It’s impossible to list all the archetypes because there are so many variants, and they end up blending. However, Wikipedia does have an interesting, basic list of archetypal events, figures, and motifs, most of which we’ve talked about in some form as they’ve arisen in the subtext:

Jung described archetypal events: birth, death, separation from parents, initiation, marriage, the union of opposites; archetypal figures: great mother, father, child, devil, god, wise old man, wise old woman, the trickster, the hero; and archetypal motifs: the apocalypse, the deluge, the creation. Although the number of archetypes is limitless, there are a few particularly notable, recurring archetypal images, "the chief among them being" (according to Jung) "the shadow, the wise old man, the child, the mother ... and her counterpart, the maiden, and lastly the anima in man and the animus in woman". Alternatively he would speak of "the emergence of certain definite archetypes ... the shadow, the animal, the wise old man, the anima, the animus, the mother, the child".

So as you can see, DW is drawing heavily on Jung’s archetypes to tell the stories.  Since Jung’s work with fairytale interpretations is how he came up with the archetypes, DW is begging us to look at the episodes as fairytales, including how to interpret them – in part. 

There is one archetype that we do need to look at further to help explain the characters in the finale.

The Child Archetype & Some Variants

While I don’t want to get into most of the archetypes in depth other than what we already covered, the Child archetype is one that we haven’t discussed much, especially since there are several variants to look at that are important for the finale.

The Child Archetype

We all have an inner child, which is what the Child archetype refers to.  Jung saw the Child as representing the developing personality.  If we had one word to describe a quality of a child, many of us would say innocence. There is a playfulness and naivety that corresponds to children in general.  However, there is the darker side where, for example, children throw tantrums and hide from responsibility.  They are dependent, but as they grow they should become more responsible.  The healthy Child balances playfulness and the fun side with the increasing responsibilities of the adult.

Carolyn Myss, internationally renowned author and speaker of human consciousness and spirituality, states:

The Child also establishes our perceptions of life, safety, nurture, loyalty, and family. Its many aspects include the Wounded Child, Abandoned or Orphan Child, Dependent, Innocent, Nature, and Divine Child. These energies may emerge in response to different situations in which you find yourself, yet the core issue of all the Child archetypes is dependency vs. responsibility: when to take responsibility, when to have a healthy dependency, when to stand up to the group, and when to embrace communal life. Each of the variants of the Child archetype is characterized by certain tendencies, including shadow tendencies.

When adults tap into the inner Child, these qualities and more come forth.  For example, we saw the 12th Doctor’s playfulness of his Child come out with Clara in Season 9.  However, the 11th Doctor best represents playfulness, impulsiveness, and spontaneity of the Child archetype, as well as hiding from the responsibility of dealing with his PTSD from the Time War.  His anger and power made him a huge threat to the universe, which terrified his enemies.  He was dependent, too, on people to admire him, which was partially what his episode “The God Complex” was about.

In nuWho, the long 10-season arc is about dealing with the damage of the Time War. 

The 9th Doctor was left angry after the Time War and tortured a Dalek in “Dalek”

The 10th Doctor wasn’t giving 2nd chances, no mercy; he said that he had been full of mercy before the war

The 11th Doctor was hiding from responsibility

The 12th had to come face to face with reality and deal with the damage from the Time War to heal

Reacting to situations unconsciously through fear or anger, for example, can stifle the learning and growth of the inner Child.  Since the Doctor had this problem, it was up to the companions to help make him better, healing him throughout nuWho.  Clara even goes back to the Doctor as a child to help heal him, which is symbolic of helping the inner Child.  It’s important for the Doctor to be conscious of his archetypal patterns and how they affect his behaviors in order to move beyond harmful issues.  This is exactly what we’ve been watching with the 12th Doctor.  He, like any soldier, is going through all the pain and torture of reliving memories and nightmares (the Veil is a metaphor for them), as well as tapping into that inner Child to finally heal. 

Therefore, the Child archetype is extremely important, and it’s not surprising at all, in fact, it was expected that children would figure prominently in the finale.  I even named Chapter 18 of my Fairytales document “Rescuing Children & Missy/Master.”  I meant “children” in both the literal and archetypal (metaphorical) sense.

Nardole Nardole has taken on several roles which we’ve examined, but there is one that we haven’t looked at. In “The Husbands of River Song,” it took me awhile to figure out what metaphorical part he was playing.  Once he lost his head and took off flying with Hydroflax, I realized that he represented the Doctor’s inner Child and the cowardly part of the Doctor. 

In fact, Ramone and King Hydroflax also represented the Doctor.  River wasn’t being unfaithful as it appears on the surface.  These 3 faces are all different externalized representations of the Doctor.  That’s why the sheriff’s shield from “Robot of Sherwood” was in King Hydroflax’s ship.  Ramone was the romantic side while we’ll talk more about King Hydroflax in a bit.  River was trying to symbolically kill King Hydroflax to help heal the Doctor of his psychopathic tendencies. 

It’s all part of the rescue.

In the finale, the Doctor’s strength of destruction was symbolized, as we saw in the finale, by his longer hair, which we’ll also examine more in the next chapter with additional symbolism.  As River said in the 11th Doctor story “The Angels Take Manhattan,” she and the Doctor couldn’t be together in the TARDIS for extended periods of time because they were both psychopaths. Therefore, killing Hydroflax (the psychopathic part of the Doctor) and being together on Darillium helped heal them both.

BTW, at the end of THORS, Ramone was the only face we saw in Hydroflax’s body while we only heard Nardole’s voice from inside.  That implied that the Doctor’s cowardly side disappeared when he was with River, while his romantic side took over.  In fact, there is a lovely deleted scene in “Thin Ice” at the link above with him talking with Bill about River, the Ice Fair, and setting a romantic mood for his wife.

Alit Alit was meant to be the physical representation of the Child archetype.  She mirrored the child Doctor in “Listen.”  (She also mirrored Bill, which we’ll get to in the next chapter.) Alit, like the young Doctor, felt different and apart from the other children.  For example, while the other children in “The Doctor Falls” were happy to see Hazran, Alit looked around like it was her first time at the farmhouse. Then, she was lying on her bed while all the other children were playing.  It’s similar to how the young Doctor separated himself and stayed in the barn-like structure.

Also, she had a problem listening to authority just like the Doctor.  For example, Hazran told her to get under the bed and stay there. However, not only did Alit complain, but also she didn’t stay there long.  She alone got up and looked out the window.

We’ll examine her and the other main characters more below because they fit at least one of the variants of the Child archetype.  Please keep in mind there are other variants that I’m not listing below because, while they are used in DW, they are not essential for the finale. 

The Wounded Child

Carolyn Myss states:

The Wounded Child archetype holds the memories of abuse, neglect, and other traumas that we have endured during childhood. This is the Child pattern most people relate to, particularly since it has become the focus of therapy since the 1960s. Many people blame the relationship with their parents that created their Wounded Child, for instance, for all their subsequent dysfunctional relationships. On the positive side, the painful experiences of the Wounded Child often awaken a deep sense of compassion and a desire to help other Wounded Children. From a spiritual perspective, a wounded childhood cracks open the learning path of forgiveness.

The shadow aspect may manifest as an abiding sense of self-pity, a tendency to blame our parents for any current shortcomings and to resist moving on through forgiveness. It may also lead us to seek out parental figures in all difficult situations rather than relying on our own resourcefulness.

A great example of the Wounded Child is the Master.  The Time Lords drove him crazy by installing a drumbeat earworm in his head, and he wanted revenge in “The End of Time.”  He blamed them for the abuse and other traumas for making him the way he was. He is the Shadow aspect of this archetype.

The Doctor fits the Wounded Child archetype too, but at a different stage.  We saw his forgiveness of Bonnie after his war speech in “The Zygon Inversion.”  Then, we saw that his own painful experiences awakened his deep sense of compassion and desire to help others, like Missy.

The Abandoned/Orphan Child

Carolyn Myss states:

From Little Orphan Annie to Cinderella, the Orphan Child in most well known children’s stories reflects the lives of people who feel from birth as if they are not a part of their family, including the family psyche or tribal spirit. But because orphans are not allowed into the family circle, they have to develop independence early on. The absence of family influences, attitudes, and traditions inspires or compels the Orphan Child to construct an inner reality based on personal judgment and experience.

The shadow aspect manifests when Orphans never recover from feelings of abandonment, and the scar tissue from family rejection stifles their maturation, often causing them to seek surrogate family structures to experience tribal union. Therapeutic support groups become shadow tribes or families for an Orphan Child who knows deep down that healing these wounds requires moving on to adulthood. For that reason, establishing mature relationships remains a challenge.

There are several characters that symbolize the Abandoned/Orphan Child archetype: Bill, the Doctor, Nardole, and Alit. 

Bill While Bill was a real orphan, symbolizing this archetype, she also felt abandoned by the Doctor.  Initially, she developed an inner reality of her mother, which helped her gain an independence that saved her from failing victim to the Monks.  Then, she even developed an inner reality as CyberBill.

The Doctor The child Doctor is a great example of not feeling part of a family in the orphanage of sorts.  He separated himself from the rest of the children in a self-imposed manner.  Then, he was only 8 when the Time Lords put him into a life of service, as the Master said happened to Time Lord children.  He had to develop independence in the absence of family.  He saw Missy as the only person who was like himself, so he felt a great sense of aloneness.

Nardole In “The Doctor Falls,” Nardole and Hazran had an interesting conversation:

HAZRAN: I've never met anyone like you. So where are you from? NARDOLE: I don't know. I was sort of found.

Because Nardole didn’t know where he was from being sort of found, these imply that he also was the Abandoned/Orphan Child archetype.  That fits with being a face of the Doctor and the Doctor’s inner Child.

Alit As we’ve seen, Alit very much mirrors the child Doctor, so it’s not surprising that she would be the Abandoned/Orphan Child archetype.

Dependent Child

Carolyn Myss states:

The Needy or Dependent Child carries a heavy feeling inside that nothing is ever enough, and is always seeking to replace something lost in childhood – although exactly what is never clear. As with the Wounded Child, this leads to bouts of depression, only more severe. The Dependent Child tends to be focused on his own needs, often unable to see the needs of others. As with all apparently negative archetypes, you can learn to recognize its emergence and use it as a guide to alert you when you are in danger of falling into needy, self-absorbed attitudes and behavior.

The Master/Missy The Master is a great example of the Needy Child, as he’s always looking to control things and people since he had no control of his childhood, as we saw.

Also, Missy needed the Doctor to be like her, so she hooked him up with Clara to control him.  However, Missy and the Master aren’t the only needy ones. 

The Doctor While we saw above that the 11th Doctor needed admiration, making him dependent, he wasn’t alone.  The 12th Doctor showed his neediness in the first part of the finale when he needed Missy to be good, disregarding Bill’s safety.  He got Bill killed because of it.

Magical/Innocent Child

Carolyn Myss states:

The Magical Child sees the potential for sacred beauty in all things, and embodies qualities of wisdom and courage in the face of difficult circumstances. One example is Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary that in spite of all the horror surrounding her family while hiding from Nazis in an attic, she still believed that humanity was basically good. This archetype is also gifted with the power of imagination and the belief that everything is possible.

The shadow energy of the Magical Child manifests as the absence of the possibility of miracles and of the transformation of evil to good. Attitudes of pessimism and depression, particularly when exploring dreams, often emerge from an injured Magical Child whose dreams were “once upon a time” thought foolish by cynical adults. The shadow may also manifest as a belief that energy and action are not required, allowing one to retreat into fantasy.

We’ve examined this archetype before, although in a different way: as part of the Sacred Marriage of the Great Work back in the Fairytales document Chapter 13: "Clara Has to Come Back: The Love Story and The Ghost."

The Doctor, Merlin, and The Ghost are all part of the Magical Child archetype. Certainly, we’ve seen how the Doctor and Grant as the Ghost thought all things were possible.  After all, it was Grant’s wishes that got him to where he was as an adult.  Therefore, Grant symbolizes the externalization of the Magical Child in a magical type of episode.

In “The Doctor Falls,” the Doctor did do something magical.   When he was running through the forest shooting Cyberman, at one point he lifted his hand to the sky without his sonic, shown below. However, Cybermen were still exploding.  DW shows the Doctor in many magical moments but they are very subtle.

Divine Child

Carolyn Myss states:

The Divine Child is closely related to both the Innocent and Magical Child, but is distinguished from them by its redemptive mission. It is associated with innocence, purity, and redemption, god-like qualities that suggest that the Child enjoys a special union with the Divine itself. Few people are inclined to choose the Divine Child as their dominant Child archetype, however, because they have difficulty acknowledging that they could live continually in divine innocence. And yet, divinity is also a reference point of your inner spirit that you can turn to when you are in a conscious process of choice. You may also assume that anything divine cannot have a shadow aspect, but that’s not realistic.

She goes on to say:

The shadow of this archetype manifests as an inability to defend itself against negative forces. Even the mythic gods and most spiritual masters — including Jesus, who is the template of the Divine Child for the Christian tradition — simultaneously expressed anger and divine strength when confronting those who claimed to represent heaven while manifesting injustice, arrogance, or other negative qualities (think of Jesus’ wrath at the money-changers in the Temple). Assess your involvement with this archetype by asking whether you see life through the eyes of a benevolent, trusting God/Goddess, or whether you tend to respond initially with fear of being hurt or with a desire to hurt others first.

We’ve seen over and over how the Doctor is on a rescue/redemptive mission for himself, Missy, and other children, who represent other Child archetypes.  He certainly has god-like qualities, for example, being able to create the universe by rebooting it and destroying it.  And DW is using religious symbolism to show us, in part, the Divine Child.

The whole idea of going back to the Child archetype and fixing whatever wounds the Doctor had takes him back to a sort of innocence, which is a redemption.

The 13th Doctor will have no need to have the St John Ambulance symbol – which, as we’ve seen, is both a symbol of torture and healing – on the door of the TARDIS.  She can begin anew, unburdened by the events of the Time War that plagued her nuWho predecessors.

The Rocking Horse Metaphor

It’s seems very appropriate that in the finale where the Child archetype loomed large that we also saw 3 rocking horses in the episode.  Rocking horses are symbols of early childhood in addition to DW’s Horse metaphor so part of the rescue. 

There is a large rocking horse (white arrow) in the schoolroom with the Master and Missy. The horse is easier to see in the episode.  The schoolroom, too, is symbolic of childhood, adding to the whole Child archetype.

Also, there are 2 small rocking horses (yellow arrows) in the scene with the Doctor and Alit in the farmhouse.  The interesting thing here is that the Doctor wiped them and the other toys (toy soldiers, Trojan Horse, caboose, etc.) away to symbolize a reboot.  Because he wiped the rocking horses away, they symbolized negative aspects that the Doctor wanted to get rid of, just like the other toys.

Given that we are dealing with the Wounded Child archetype, I believe the rocking horses also are a reference to a classic D.H. Lawrence short story “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” The rocking horse took on multiple negative symbols in the story and led to the death of Paul, a child.  The only meaning that we need to be concerned about, as it pertains to the finale, is that it was a symbol of the fatal obsessions of a Wounded Child. 

Certainly, the 12th Doctor had been fatally obsessed with certain things.  For example, in “Listen” he had to find out what was at the end of the universe, and it nearly killed him.   Clara had to intervene and go back to his childhood, a symbol of saving the inner Child.  He was also obsessed with redeeming Missy, which was fatal to Bill.

Anyway, in the image above, when the Doctor wiped the horses away, he was wiping away the wounds.  His inner Child was symbolically healed.

Before we get to a deeper understanding of the characters using the archetypes, we need to look at the Great Work again.

Reviewing a Few Concepts of the Great Work

I believe it’s worthwhile in a chapter on Jung’s model of the psyche to review a few points of the Great Work, as it defines the process someone goes through to achieve Self.

Transformational Personal and Spiritual Process

In Chapter 9 in the pre-viewing analysis of Doctor Mysterio, I said of this process:

The Great Work can be used to describe the psychological process of personal and spiritual transmutation to achieve individuation, meaning wholeness of Self, by integrating one’s unconscious with one’s conscious. Individuation has the effect of holistic healing, both mentally and physically. This process, if carried out through the 4th stage, brings out the person’s purest nature.

The Great Work Basics

A little later, I explained the basics:

While alchemists of old tried to transmute lead and mercury into gold, gold became a metaphor for the soul being freed from a dead or leaden state of mind (why we’ve seen all the dream-like episodes), as a way to move toward consciousness, an understanding of self, and spiritual enlightenment.

The standard definition involves a four-step process of transmutation:

nigredo (blackening) is the Shadow (negative, fearful aspects of the unconscious)

albedo (whitening) refers to the anima or animus, a reflected light appears in the darkness

citrinitas (yellowing) is the wise old man (or woman) archetype, solar light from within – Sun stage

rubedo (reddening) is the Self archetype, which has achieved wholeness

Each level does several things: it burns off impurities, such as fears and other negative aspects; creates a union (alchemical marriage); and generates a rebirth of one’s sense of self. In order to get to the next level, there has to be a death of that sense of self. A fiery love at each stage opens the heart to greater depths and purifies the alchemist to awaken them to a greater sense of self. Eventually, the person would show their purest nature. However, few people reach the highest level (rubedo – red), for example, becoming Christ-like. In another example, we would talk about Buddha-nature in kung fu and taiji.

Elixir of Life & Philospher’s Stone

The Great Work is the process that creates the philosopher’s stone.  It’s also called the elixir of life, which is interesting because DW uses that term for the substance that the Sisterhood of Karn drank to achieve immortality, one of the real-world goals of the philosopher’s stone, along with rejuvenation.  The Sisterhood also used it to create the War Doctor.  The stone represents the goal of the individuation process, finding a wholeness of Self.

In Christian Terms

In similar Christian terms, this is the process one’s soul takes on the journey home to reconcile with God through Christ's sacrificial suffering and death. Wikipedia says of the philosopher’s stone (lapis philosophorum a.k.a lapis), “Many of the medieval allegories for a Christ were adopted for the lapis, and the Christ and the Stone were indeed taken as identical in a mystical sense.” 

I’m not suggesting we should look at this in a mystical sense.  The Great Work, like religion, is meant to be a transformative, spiritual experience to make one a better person.  Uniting aspects of the conscious and unconscious brings enlightenment, which can seem mystical in the similar sense as undergoing religious revelations.

As for the Doctor, he symbolically achieved his pure nature at the end of the finale, which his kindness speech signified.  He got redemption after he sacrificed his life for the good of others and sent Heather to Bill.  His 2 angel wings represented not only his ascension to Heaven, but also his completion of the 4th stage of the Great Work.  Through this sacrifice, he became Christ-like, Buddha-like. 

Same Characters Can Represent Different Stages of the Great Work

While we’ve looked at the standard, 4-step Great Work process, which was highlighted through the 4 representative colors (black, white, gold, and red) in “The Return of Doctor Mysterio,” we’ve also seen how the 12th Doctor represents the 12-step Great Work with the Fish metaphor.  For our purposes in this chapter, we’re going to stick with the 4-step process.

Missy and the Master are great examples of the same character at different stages.  Missy was much more enlightened at the beginning of “World Enough and Time” than the Master.  She was doing the moral work of making her Shadow part of her conscious. However, the Master represented the nigredo or black stage, the first stage of the Great Work, while Missy was a later stage.  Just before the end of her life, she made the choice to become fully enlightened by actualizing the goodness within as part of her character. 

In fact, the image, shown below, of her lying dead on the ground tells us a lot.  The photo is harder to see than the actual episode, so I’ve marked her 2 arms (white arrows), which are held out in a crucified position. The subtext is telling us she achieved the Christ-like, final stage of the Great Work (for a woman that would be the Mother of God, a.k.a Virgin Mary, symbol) and was crucified for it.  It is significant that she rebuffed the Master’s sexual advances, which supports the Mother of God symbol.

Fairytales, Spirituality & the Shadow

Doing fairytale interpretations using Jung’s model adds a whole new spiritual dimension to fairytales, including DW as a whole.  After all, Jung believed that spirituality was a huge part of actualizing Self to become whole through the process of the Great Work.  This is exactly what, as we’ve seen, the Doctor has been going through, borne out by all the spiritual symbolism in the finale and elsewhere.

Furthermore, it’s not lost on me that the 2017 Christmas Special is titled “Twice Upon a Time.” The reference to fairytales is unmistakable.  River even said they were all fairytales. 

Therefore, DW is beating us over the head with the idea of fairytales, and we need to take notice in more than just a superficial way. 

Just like our other lenses, the fairytale lens is like viewing an onion.  I’ll pull back a few layers to give you an idea of how this works and what the characters represent, but by no means will this character analysis be complete.  It could never be.  Each time we revisit an episode, we could do additional interpretations with possibly deeper meaning, especially after watching other episodes.  Also, as our knowledge of Classic Who episodes grows, they help refine our understanding of nuWho symbolism.

Spirituality & the Ship’s Arabian Nights (One Thousand and One Nights)

While in Western culture, we don’t typically associate spirituality with fairytales, many don’t make much sense unless we do.  Or they can take on a more important spiritual meaning than a traditional surface reading affords.  We can look at Grimm’s fairytales, as an example, since the Doctor mentioned the Grimm brothers.  But the finale makes reference to another set of fairytales, which I want to point out.

The clock on the ship had a differential of 1001 years on the day counter at one point, shown below. My daughter reminded me that 1001 was a reference to Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights, better known in English as Arabian Nights.  According to Wikipedia, they are “a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age.”

The frame story is that Scheherazade agreed to marry the king, who killed his previous wives, believing that all women were unfaithful, like his first.  Scheherazade didn’t want to suffer the same fate, so she cunningly used stories.  Wikipedia says

On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king, curious about how the story ends, is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) a new one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion of this tale, postpones her execution once again. So it goes on for 1,001 nights.

These fairytales are not merely stories.  They are meant to be used for spiritual enlightenment.  Reading the spiritual symbolism, they show the trials the soul has to go through to reach full enlightenment.

They have a connection to our DW characters, as well.  Interestingly, Missy was the one whom the Doctor was supposed to execute.  Then, he was supposed to watch over her dead-ish body in the Vault for at least 1000 years.  Being on the ship for over 1000 years, as far as the ship’s differential was concerned, he fulfilled his obligation of watching over her. 

At the same time, the implication is that Missy’s execution was delayed by more than 1001 years, so in a way they mirrored the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights. 

DW, itself, is reminiscent of Christian parables or passages from the Dao De Jing where just as one’s spiritual development grows, so does one’s understanding of the profoundness of the parables and passages.  As we peel away layers of the onion, the beautiful spiritual treasure inside is revealed.

Characters Can Represent Aspects of Each Other’s Psyche

While using other characters to represent some aspect of a main character is a classic storytelling technique designed to make stories much more engaging, characters can represent aspects of each other.  In this way, the story can add to the main characters’ characterizations without bogging them down in the text.  This technique also adds a lot of dimension and extends what can be done.  It’s much more interesting in a show like DW to watch different characters deal with problems than to have to trudge over a mountain of problems for one character.

Above, we saw how the Doctor ended up mirroring the stages of the Animus development, which may seem quite odd because he becomes the unconscious of a woman, expressed as the masculine inner personality: the animus.  Therefore, the implication is that in addition to how we already view the Doctor, we should, in one sense, consider him an externalization of a woman’s inner personality for the fairytale interpretation.  It sounds strange, but is it really?

The Doctor and Missy The Doctor and Missy are like 2 sides of the same coin.  We saw him become like her in “Hell Bent,” where he didn’t care if he destroyed the universe to save Clara.  The psychopath in him came forth.  He had to confront the Hybrid in his Shadow, as part of his healing. He couldn’t move past it until he accepted that side of himself to move beyond it.

Of course, Season 10 dealt with Missy’s psychopathic side.  Once the Doctor became enlightened, he could then help Missy do the same.  In the end, she mirrored his goodness.

Coming back to something I mentioned in a previous chapter and delayed the explanation until now is the dialogue between the Doctor and Missy on the rooftop where Missy talks about being in 2 minds.  First, the Doctor said

DOCTOR: Knock yourself out. (Missy pirouettes and KO's the Master with her parasol.) MISSY: Your wish is my command. (She unties the Doctor.) MISSY: I was secretly on your side all along, you silly sausage. DOCTOR: Is that true? MISSY: Don't spoil the moment. DOCTOR: Seriously, I need to know. Is that true? (He holds Missy's hand.) MISSY: It's hard to say. I, I'm in two minds. Fortunately, the other one's unconscious.

How can she be in 2 minds unless there is a telepathic link, for example?  OR is she an externalization of, for one thing, the Master’s psyche?  The answer is that both are possible.

“Last Christmas” beats us over the head with the concept that characters can be externalizations of an aspect of the psyche. Also, the episode made it quite clear that the characters were connected in a shared mental state, a multi-consciousnness gestalt that formed telepathically.  As we know, things aren’t really happening the way they seem, as we are viewing constructs from the unconscious, supporting the whole fairytale theme.  Santa is a great example:

SANTA: Hey. You want to take the reins, Doctor? DOCTOR: You're a dream construct, currently representing either my recovering or expiring mind.

Missy is no different, functioning like the Santa dream construct.  How else could she survive in the locked Vault (a metaphor for the unconscious) without any food for 6 months, since no one came to visit her while the Doctor was on the prison ship?  Since we know that Clara is Missy’s familiar from the title “The Witch’s Familiar,” Clara is Missy’s proxy.  And we know that Clara was in the Doctor’s personal unconscious.  By extension of the proxy relationship, Missy was in the Doctor’s mind. 

This makes sense, too, as the Doctor and Missy are 2 sides of the same coin and Shadows of each other. This brings to mind the image from “Tooth and Claw” where the 10th Doctor’s and the werewolf’s faces are pressed against the wall on opposite sides of it, shown below.  The subtext unmistakably shows us that the Doctor had a dark side.  He and the wolf were 2 sides of the same coin.

Season 10 showed us many times that Missy was mimicking the Doctor, as she was becoming like him.  Therefore, through this lens, Missy’s struggle for redemption represents the Doctor’s inner fight of his nature.  And he, hers.  Missy’s struggle allows us to see how he had to come to terms internally with killing a lot of people.  While he represents her Animus, she represents his Anima.

Another interesting point to note is that gender roles are vital to the Anima and Animus. Therefore, as far as the subtext story is concerned, the Doctor had to be male externally until he reconciled his feminine inner personality with his outer masculine personality, shown by the reconciliation of Missy and the Doctor. 

Since the 12th Doctor achieved that, it was inevitable that the Doctor would be able to become a woman externally.  It’s clear to me from the subtext all the way back into Classic Who with the 7th Doctor that DW was marching down the road toward reconciling the Doctor’s male/female split problem: the female personality was always internal and always hiding.  In fact, the 10th Doctor’s Time Lord consciousness in the watch, when he turned himself human, had a female voice among the men’s, as we saw many analyses ago.  She said she was hiding among men.

I don’t want to suggest that this reconciliation wasn’t there from the start.  It’s obvious that Classic Who is using Carl Jung’s symbolism of integrating opposites (male/female) from the very 1st Doctor.  However, the 7th Doctor’s stories really show where the Doctor’s arc was heading, at least in a broad sense.

The Doctor and the Master By extension of Missy being a Shadow of the Doctor, the Master, too, is a Shadow of the Doctor, so they are 2 sides of the same coin.  The Master mirrors King Hydroflax in cruelty, destruction, and death.  In the finale, the Doctor said to the Master:

DOCTOR: Well, let's see how I do. Your Tardis got stuck. You killed a lot of people, took over the city, lived like a king until they rebelled against your cruelty. And ever since then you've been hiding out, probably in disguise, because everybody knows your stupid round face.

The Doctor even says the Master lived like a king, a reference to King Hydroflax.  Also, the Master mirrors the Monks in many ways, some of which we looked at in “The Lie of the Land” analysis.  In fact, the Monks were in disguise, just like the Master.  Also, we saw in that analysis that the Master was possessing the Doctor, which explains the maniacal laughter and other oddities.  Therefore, the Master was in disguise there, too, so Razor’s mask in the first part of the finale is a clever externalization of the other disguises.

Since the Doctor and Master are 2 sides of the same coin, the Master represents the Doctor’s psychopathic side.  This actually gels with the notion that the Master is the War Doctor, which we looked at in Chapter 19: “The Rescue Plan.” 

Because DW wouldn’t want to show us that the Doctor stabbed the Master, Missy took on that role. However, she symbolized not just trying to kill her past, but also the Doctor trying to kill it.

In the Next Chapter

Next, we’ll continue our examination of the characters and what they tell us about the Doctor.

Read next chapter ->

[drthomasmaples-blog]

Introduction

          Purpose. In this theoretical work, I explore whether a developmental sequence of archetypes occurs during the lifelong individuation process. Human development is a key concept for the theory underlying psychology and its practice; however, the lack of a developmental perspective based on the theoretical tenets of analytical psychology shows that need exists to elaborate upon this often-ignored subject matter.

Carl Jung wrote extensively about individuation. For Jung, individuation represented a goal that all human beings endeavor towards during their lifelong maturation process. While Jung wrote extensively on individuation and the archetypes that form the foundation of the collective unconscious, he did not create a theoretic perspective concerning how these pivotal psychological components drive human development towards an individuated state. The purpose of this theoretical work was to explore the lifelong developmental sequences that underlie the individuation process.

          Rationale. During his career, Carl Jung wrote extensively on individuation and self-realization as being synonymous representations of the psyche’s ability to transcend its own nature. Both individuation and self-realization involve an individual’s ability to understand the Self as a separate construct from the ego and other archetypes that lie within the collective unconscious of the individual psyche. Self-realized and individuated forms of consciousness are holistic (Jung, 1939/1969; 1950/1969; 1951/1969g) and drive the psyche to realize its inherent nature. For the purpose of this theoretical work, I utilized the term individuation as being inclusive of self-realization. A person that individuates realizes the true nature of the Self, as it exists separate from the split nature of a consciousness that develops evolving layers of complexity as an individual matures. Individuated consciousness allows a person to understand the minute interconnectedness that exists between the often-opposing themes common to the archetypes that form the foundation of the psyche. Concerning self-realization and the unification of consciously opposing themes, Jung (1951/1969f) stated:

In the psychology of the individual there is always, at such moments, an agonizing situation of conflict from which there seems to be no way out—at least for the conscious mind… But out of this collision of opposites the unconscious psyche always creates a third thing of an irrational nature, which the conscious mind neither expects nor understands… For the conscious mind knows nothing beyond the opposites and, as a result, has no knowledge of the thing that unites them. Since, however, the solution of the conflict through the union of opposites is of vital importance, and is moreover the very thing that the conscious mind is longing for, some inkling of the creative act, and of the significance of it, nevertheless gets through… The new configuration is a nascent whole; it is on the way to wholeness, at least in so far as it excels in “wholeness” the conscious mind when torn by opposites and surpasses it in completeness… Out of this situation the “child” emerges as a symbolic content… this new birth, although it is the most precious fruit of Mother Nature herself, the most pregnant with the future, [signifies] a higher stage of self-realization. (p. 168)

Inherent duality exists within consciousness from which an integrative third entity arises; this integrative entity mediates between the often-opposing themes apparent within the psyche; the process of mediating between the opposing themes of consciousness prompts individuation to occur. Therefore, an individuated state of being represents a psychologically holistic state that transcends the polarized nature of a consciousness divided by paradoxical awareness.

The idea of an individuated consciousness is a central theoretical component of many developmental theories of psychology. This is most evident in the use of the term self-actualization proposed by humanistic psychologists (Maslow, 1943; Rogers, 2008) and Erikson’s (1963) belief that the ego can reach a state of integrity during old age. Although Jung wrote extensively on how archetypes affect individuation, he and subsequent analytical psychologists have not developed a developmental theory (Withers, 2003).  

The central focus of this theoretical work is to develop an understanding of the archetypal phenomena that occur while entering new phases of development during the individuation process. The results of research that underlies this theoretical work will show that an emergent model of archetypal development is discernible through the themes present in Hermann Hesse’s (2002) story, Siddhartha.

In Siddhartha, Hesse (2002) wrote about a young man’s journey to find his true nature. This research underlying this theoretical work utilized Hesse’s book as a case study from which to develop an archetypal theory of individuated development. I analyzed the protagonist, Siddhartha, as an exemplar case of Self-development. The hope was that by conducting this study, an understanding of the archetypes that drove Siddhartha to realize his Self image would emerge. My choice of the story, Siddhartha, over other novels that focus on developmental sequences, was due, in part to the influence Carl Jung had on the production of Hesse’s story, and the mastery of metaphorical language Hesse used to explain a process of soul work that encompassed the lifespan of the Buddha. 

The Buddha was an extraordinary individual that achieved Nirvana. In part, he realized an apex form of consciousness that few will ever realize during their lifespan. Because of this, I read the story metaphorically rather than literally. I do not propose ultimate truths in this research; instead, I expand upon the two truths proposed by Buddhist doctrine: “Conventional worldly truths and truths that are ultimate” (Dalai Lama, 1975, p. 31). While most individuals will consciously adhere to “conventional worldly truths” (Dalai Lama, 1975, p. 31), by transcending the polarized nature of consciousness, an individuated being begins to understand ultimate truths as they occur within emptiness and existence (Dalai Lama, 1975). Even though this study examined the life sequence of an individual that attained the ultimate capacity psyche has to realize its nature, I did not seek to provide a doctrine of ultimate truth regarding the means by which an individual can achieve an individuated sense of consciousness. The Buddha achieved Nirvana: a state, which represents something greater than the ability the Self has to understand its inherent nature as an individuated construct reliant on the life of an individual.

I began to believe, to hope, I began to imagine, & dream about the possibilities open to me.

Let us Help You Advance Confidently in the Direction of Your Dreams. (Dr. Thomas Maples)

Hesse was an ordinary individual that wrote extraordinary stories during his lifetime. Siddhartha was a story written about an extraordinary individual that found peace of mind by living in each moment, as it objectively occurred. In his quest to understand his emerging Self, Hesse explored the archetypal content of the psyche that prompts the search for an individual’s personal ontology. While biographical material is also rich in archetypal motifs, stories written in a manner similar to fairy-tales allow an individual to directly access the emotional polarities common to each archetype. Tales written in a metaphorical manner are an invaluable tool that prepares the psyche for the developmental tasks that lay ahead, and also form the foundation from which analytical psychology has sought to explain the means by which the unconscious manifests within the daily life of an individual.

Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form (von Franz, 1996, p. 1)

Hesse’s (2002) story is a historically fictionalized biography of the Buddha’s life. The literary prose that Hesse created presents a narrative account of the life of the Buddha. The Buddha was a person who provided a path toward an enlightened state of consciousness that exists outside the nature of suffering. His teachings continue to have a following some 2500 years after his death. This theoretical work illuminates the themes present in the story, Siddhartha, from an archetypal perspective, providing an outline of a Jungian theory of development.

References

Dalai Lama (1975). The Buddhism of Tibet: Translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins. Ithica, NY: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Norton.

Hesse, H. (2002). Siddhartha: A new translation with an introduction by Paul W. Morris. (C. S. Kohn, Trans.) Boston, MA: Shambhala. (Original work published 1922)

Jung, C. G. (1969). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vols. 9-1, pp. 275-289). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1939)

Jung, C. G. (1969). A study in the process of individuation. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vols. 9-1, pp. 290-354). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1950)

Jung, C. G. (1969). The psychology of the child archetype. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vols. 9-1, pp. 151-181). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1969). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vol. 9-2). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review , 50, 370-396.

Rogers, C. (2008). The actualizing tendency in relation to ‘motives’ and to consciousness. In B. E. Levitt, B. E. Levitt (Eds.) , Reflections on human potential: Bridging the person-centered approach and positive psychology (pp. 17-32). Ross-on-Wye England: PCCS Books.

von Franz, M. L. (1996). The interpretation of fairy tales (Revised ed.). Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Chapter 1

Introduction           Purpose. In this theoretical work, I explore whether a developmental sequence of archetypes occurs during the lifelong individuation process.

Chapter 1 Introduction           Purpose. In this theoretical work, I explore whether a developmental sequence of archetypes occurs during the lifelong individuation process.

[drthomasmaples]

Introduction

          Purpose. In this theoretical work, I explore whether a developmental sequence of archetypes occurs during the lifelong individuation process. Human development is a key concept for the theory underlying psychology and its practice; however, the lack of a developmental perspective based on the theoretical tenets of analytical psychology shows that need exists to elaborate upon this often-ignored subject matter.

Carl Jung wrote extensively about individuation. For Jung, individuation represented a goal that all human beings endeavor towards during their lifelong maturation process. While Jung wrote extensively on individuation and the archetypes that form the foundation of the collective unconscious, he did not create a theoretic perspective concerning how these pivotal psychological components drive human development towards an individuated state. The purpose of this theoretical work was to explore the lifelong developmental sequences that underlie the individuation process.

          Rationale. During his career, Carl Jung wrote extensively on individuation and self-realization as being synonymous representations of the psyche’s ability to transcend its own nature. Both individuation and self-realization involve an individual’s ability to understand the Self as a separate construct from the ego and other archetypes that lie within the collective unconscious of the individual psyche. Self-realized and individuated forms of consciousness are holistic (Jung, 1939/1969; 1950/1969; 1951/1969g) and drive the psyche to realize its inherent nature. For the purpose of this theoretical work, I utilized the term individuation as being inclusive of self-realization. A person that individuates realizes the true nature of the Self, as it exists separate from the split nature of a consciousness that develops evolving layers of complexity as an individual matures. Individuated consciousness allows a person to understand the minute interconnectedness that exists between the often-opposing themes common to the archetypes that form the foundation of the psyche. Concerning self-realization and the unification of consciously opposing themes, Jung (1951/1969f) stated:

In the psychology of the individual there is always, at such moments, an agonizing situation of conflict from which there seems to be no way out—at least for the conscious mind… But out of this collision of opposites the unconscious psyche always creates a third thing of an irrational nature, which the conscious mind neither expects nor understands… For the conscious mind knows nothing beyond the opposites and, as a result, has no knowledge of the thing that unites them. Since, however, the solution of the conflict through the union of opposites is of vital importance, and is moreover the very thing that the conscious mind is longing for, some inkling of the creative act, and of the significance of it, nevertheless gets through… The new configuration is a nascent whole; it is on the way to wholeness, at least in so far as it excels in “wholeness” the conscious mind when torn by opposites and surpasses it in completeness… Out of this situation the “child” emerges as a symbolic content… this new birth, although it is the most precious fruit of Mother Nature herself, the most pregnant with the future, [signifies] a higher stage of self-realization. (p. 168)

Inherent duality exists within consciousness from which an integrative third entity arises; this integrative entity mediates between the often-opposing themes apparent within the psyche; the process of mediating between the opposing themes of consciousness prompts individuation to occur. Therefore, an individuated state of being represents a psychologically holistic state that transcends the polarized nature of a consciousness divided by paradoxical awareness.

The idea of an individuated consciousness is a central theoretical component of many developmental theories of psychology. This is most evident in the use of the term self-actualization proposed by humanistic psychologists (Maslow, 1943; Rogers, 2008) and Erikson’s (1963) belief that the ego can reach a state of integrity during old age. Although Jung wrote extensively on how archetypes affect individuation, he and subsequent analytical psychologists have not developed a developmental theory (Withers, 2003).  

The central focus of this theoretical work is to develop an understanding of the archetypal phenomena that occur while entering new phases of development during the individuation process. The results of research that underlies this theoretical work will show that an emergent model of archetypal development is discernible through the themes present in Hermann Hesse’s (2002) story, Siddhartha.

In Siddhartha, Hesse (2002) wrote about a young man’s journey to find his true nature. This research underlying this theoretical work utilized Hesse’s book as a case study from which to develop an archetypal theory of individuated development. I analyzed the protagonist, Siddhartha, as an exemplar case of Self-development. The hope was that by conducting this study, an understanding of the archetypes that drove Siddhartha to realize his Self image would emerge. My choice of the story, Siddhartha, over other novels that focus on developmental sequences, was due, in part to the influence Carl Jung had on the production of Hesse’s story, and the mastery of metaphorical language Hesse used to explain a process of soul work that encompassed the lifespan of the Buddha. 

The Buddha was an extraordinary individual that achieved Nirvana. In part, he realized an apex form of consciousness that few will ever realize during their lifespan. Because of this, I read the story metaphorically rather than literally. I do not propose ultimate truths in this research; instead, I expand upon the two truths proposed by Buddhist doctrine: “Conventional worldly truths and truths that are ultimate” (Dalai Lama, 1975, p. 31). While most individuals will consciously adhere to “conventional worldly truths” (Dalai Lama, 1975, p. 31), by transcending the polarized nature of consciousness, an individuated being begins to understand ultimate truths as they occur within emptiness and existence (Dalai Lama, 1975). Even though this study examined the life sequence of an individual that attained the ultimate capacity psyche has to realize its nature, I did not seek to provide a doctrine of ultimate truth regarding the means by which an individual can achieve an individuated sense of consciousness. The Buddha achieved Nirvana: a state, which represents something greater than the ability the Self has to understand its inherent nature as an individuated construct reliant on the life of an individual.

I began to believe, to hope, I began to imagine, & dream about the possibilities open to me.

Let us Help You Advance Confidently in the Direction of Your Dreams. (Dr. Thomas Maples)

Hesse was an ordinary individual that wrote extraordinary stories during his lifetime. Siddhartha was a story written about an extraordinary individual that found peace of mind by living in each moment, as it objectively occurred. In his quest to understand his emerging Self, Hesse explored the archetypal content of the psyche that prompts the search for an individual’s personal ontology. While biographical material is also rich in archetypal motifs, stories written in a manner similar to fairy-tales allow an individual to directly access the emotional polarities common to each archetype. Tales written in a metaphorical manner are an invaluable tool that prepares the psyche for the developmental tasks that lay ahead, and also form the foundation from which analytical psychology has sought to explain the means by which the unconscious manifests within the daily life of an individual.

Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form (von Franz, 1996, p. 1)

Hesse’s (2002) story is a historically fictionalized biography of the Buddha’s life. The literary prose that Hesse created presents a narrative account of the life of the Buddha. The Buddha was a person who provided a path toward an enlightened state of consciousness that exists outside the nature of suffering. His teachings continue to have a following some 2500 years after his death. This theoretical work illuminates the themes present in the story, Siddhartha, from an archetypal perspective, providing an outline of a Jungian theory of development.

References

Dalai Lama (1975). The Buddhism of Tibet: Translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins. Ithica, NY: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Norton.

Hesse, H. (2002). Siddhartha: A new translation with an introduction by Paul W. Morris. (C. S. Kohn, Trans.) Boston, MA: Shambhala. (Original work published 1922)

Jung, C. G. (1969). Conscious, unconscious, and individuation. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The Collected Works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vols. 9-1, pp. 275-289). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1939)

Jung, C. G. (1969). A study in the process of individuation. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vols. 9-1, pp. 290-354). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1950)

Jung, C. G. (1969). The psychology of the child archetype. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vols. 9-1, pp. 151-181). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Jung, C. G. (1969). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self. In H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, & W. McGuire (Eds.), The collected works of C. G. Jung (R. F. Hull, Trans., Vol. 9-2). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1951)

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review , 50, 370-396.

Rogers, C. (2008). The actualizing tendency in relation to ‘motives’ and to consciousness. In B. E. Levitt, B. E. Levitt (Eds.) , Reflections on human potential: Bridging the person-centered approach and positive psychology (pp. 17-32). Ross-on-Wye England: PCCS Books.

von Franz, M. L. (1996). The interpretation of fairy tales (Revised ed.). Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Chapter 1 Introduction           Purpose. In this theoretical work, I explore whether a developmental sequence of archetypes occurs during the lifelong individuation process.

[collectiveunconciousofficial]

The Millennial Gothic

My cousin and I used to play video games together every summer for hours on end. Him being four years older than me, he had every advantage to win, from superior dexterity and better stats on his avatars, right down to his hands being bigger and better suited to hold the Xbox controller. We’d go head to head in virtual basketball, wrestling, and, my personal favorite, car racing. For a long time, our gaming sessions always went the same way. I would try whole heartedly to win, until I realized my skills just weren’t developed enough. No matter what I did, at the end of every match, my cousin would get the winner screen and I would just get upset. It seemed I had just as little chance at beating him while trying my hardest as I did if I just pulled donuts with my car instead, so one day that’s just what I did. It filled me with a strange pleasure and pride to see my cousin grow frustrated at blatantly rejecting proper participation. He would call me a sore loser when I started driving the wrong way on the race track, eventually giving me the silent treatment when I escalated to aiming for head-on collisions with his car. Remembering my younger self spitefully driving the wrong way on the track it’s no wonder I grew up to be the archetypal cousin dressed in all black, sweating it out in the summer sun at the family picnic. I may have retired from playing racing games, but in this sense, I’m still driving the wrong way on the race track.

Thinking back on times spent ruining circuit races, I asked myself: isn’t that the main principle at the heart of the gothic tradition? Purposefully driving the wrong way on the race track? Taking action to become as dramatically inconvenient as possible? Keeping these questions in mind, I researched how recent popular media deals with this trademark gothic theme of individual resisting oppressive conventionality. First, how they continue the tradition and then how the formula has been changed with the millennial zeitgeist. Also, I must stipulate that what I will call millennial media is not necessarily media created by millennials, but any facet of popular culture that mainly target and successfully draw large millennial audiences. I will look in depth at a piece that meets this criteria particularly well is the third season of FX’s anthology, American Horror Story: Coven. In both narrative, the protagonists’ struggle with against the coercive influence of society, and by extension, the conditioning of the collective unconscious. Through examining this series as well as other media that relays similar tropes, it will become clear how not only do these franchises feature encrypted evocations of social conditioning in keeping with classic gothic literature, they add a 21st century spin; a millennial irreverence for these forces. We will see how the millennial gothic tradition not only expresses values conditioned by the collective unconscious and but also grapples with the very idea of a collective unconscious.

Before getting to American Horror Story and popular culture, it is important to understand how studies of storytelling and the collective unconscious have gone hand in hand since the early development stages of psychoanalysis. Most notably, in Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex, taking its name from a mythical story and the Jungian analysts’ conventional of use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in illustrating the concepts of the Ego and Shadow (Stevens, 1990, p. 205). Similarly, as we’ve seen in the writings of Joseph Campbell, myths across cultures replicate certain archetypal characters, situations, and themes. In his study on myth and created stories, Campbell begins by discussing psychoanalysis, stating, “the modern science of reading dreams, has taught us to heed these unsubstantial images.” (Campbell, 2004, p. 5). This is significant in that it linking of dream imagery and fiction writing by highlighting the allegorical nature of any and all story elements. Though Jung’s ideas are largely still considered valid and an apt place to begin when studying group psychology and the unconscious (unlike many Freudian assertions), many dream and story analysts prefer a more refined take on Jung’s collective unconscious. This post-Jungian approach, as it is called, rejects the idea of self-creating archetypes that Jung seems to posit. As is implied in his tendency to describe archetypes as something being inborn, inherent, or inherited from ancestors; Stevens observes that Jung saw the unconscious as “the most remarkable achievement of the cosmos” (29) signaling a certain universal, quasi-mystical edge to what Jung identified as the origin of the unconscious. Post-Jungians instead argue for a less global application of the concept of the collective unconscious. Along with this notion is the implication that archetypes are not universal by pure virtue of some innate, cosmically predetermined human nature, but are widespread due to the ideas they perpetuate and the purposes those ideas serve for certain societies (Adriano, 1993, p.3). This would certainly explain why not every single society/culture has exactly the same stories. Despite obvious similarities between myths, differentiations in the details do exist. These differentiations might stem from factors such as the geography or historical context of a particular society. With post-Jungian developments in mind, it is still crucial to understand that post-Jungians do not dispute that there are certain ancient horrors that subside in all of our subconsciouses; it’s just that Jung might argue these ancient horrors are passed on as if they were carried in genes, while post-Jungians would make the distinction that their fears are not automatically inherited, but persist because they remain relevant. I am inclined to agree with post-Jungian logic as through examining iterations of gothic tropes over the decades, the archetypes while consistently present are not perfect replications of past embodiments. The same archetypes and symbols meanings transform based on contemporaneous factors that affect how audiences might regard them.  

As I’ve already briefly touched on, popular literature and literary criticism often are used as tools in understanding Jung’s ideas, particularly in dealing with the Ego (conscious self), Shadow, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. The personal unconscious, in Jung’s view, are the beliefs and biases conditioned in us by our upbringings (Stevens, 1990, 205). Even as an individual matures and rejects these biases, they always remain in the personal unconscious as they are held by the collective unconscious which is the same throughout a society (Lewin, 2009, p.99). Though relating to the Shadow, the shadow is different from the personal unconscious in that it houses qualities the ego actively detests and denies in itself. Jung believed the rejection of unconscious and the shadow was the cause of all internal disharmony, unhappiness and even evil; that we must acknowledge, confront, or if, necessary, assimilate these unwanted parts of our personality (Stevens, 1990, 205). Though this may seem counterintuitive, in essence, all Jung claimed is that suppressing the desires and fears that lurk in the personal unconscious will not get rid of them. The conscious self must be aware of that which exists in the unconscious, because it does influence our thoughts and actions though we may think it doesn’t. The only way for the problem to get worse is if the unconscious is left unchecked. The idea is Foucauldian at its core: the less you speak about something, the more power you give it. No genre or subculture deals with this theme better than the gothic tradition and its fascination with all things gloomy.

As I write this paper, I can hear my inner gothic tradition and punk subculture purist voice in my head railing against everything I’m saying. That voice (which sounds suspiciously like my middle aged uncle who spent many nights in the nineties wearing black eyeliner onstage with his experimental industrial rock band) claims that going around labelling styles goth dilutes its ideals. If they don’t meet the Ann Rice canon of gothicism or at the very least, some Stephanie Meyer caliber imitation, it’s simply not goth. However, this argument fell apart quickly when I recalled simple historical facts I’ve learned over and over in various art history classes about the origin of the architectural aesthetic term that that the genre takes root in. Initially, the word “gothic” itself was only applied to describe French architecture that rejected the Renaissance method. In the classical mind, the new French style was inefficient with its non-weight bearing walls and other haphazard innovations. Essentially, the science of Renaissance architecture already provided a comprehensive guide on how to build good buildings, why were gothic architects insisting on driving the wrong way on the track? The term “goth” was simply chosen as it referred to the so-called barbarians blamed for the fall of the Roman Empire. There is more meaning in the connotation of the name than the name itself. In its inception, Gothic simply meant not subscribing to Renaissance ideology. It means nothing more than not conforming to and even challenging dominant aesthetic canons. Now, going beyond architecture, gothic fiction can be traced to exactly 1764, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, billed with the subtitle: A Gothic Story. In the story, the only son of a wealthy family is killed before his wedding, prompting the patriarch to divorce his own wife and attempt to forcibly marry his would-be daughter-in-law because he wants to make a male heir to take on his legacy. Walpole’s novella rejects and subverts the idea of admirable pragmatism, villainizing the social norm to establish legacy; the pursuit of some mythical sense of permanence. It is no coincidence that Walpole chose a gothic castle for his setting as it directly references Medieval times, demonstrating how the gothic literary tradition is more closely related to Medieval traditions centered on feeling and intuition, which is at odds with the ideals of classical thought movements such as the Renaissance, The Enlightenment and modern industrial revolutions which present a more scientific, quantifiable worldview (Lachman, 2015, p. 20). Understanding this narrative element is crucial when analyzing the principles at the heart of the death-obsessed gothic tradition we all know and love today and how it has transformed a bit. Additionally, this favoring of feeling over rationalizing explains how the gothic genre lends itself well to horror and science fiction, wherein the protagonists are typically resisting dehumanization and the increasing oppressive systematization of society in one form or another.

As I begin to move out of classical roots of gothic tradition and into contemporary works, I’d like to explain the three reasons I’m choosing to focus on the Coven season of the American Horror Story anthology. First, out of all the seasons, it is one of two that take place primarily in contemporary times with almost all main characters from the present, not ghosts or immortal entities who are costumed to imitate another period. Second, Coven has heavy focus on teen to college aged characters, how they relate to and compete with one another mainly over which one of them will claim the title of Supreme, or leader, of their witch coven. Finally, Coven, despite many critics’ issues with the muddled storylines, was exceptionally more popular than its predecessors Murder House and Asylum, and is still regarded among many fans as the most entertaining season. Furthermore, this distinction between critical merit and entertainment quality is at the heart of why I decided to focus mostly on how gothic principles manifest in television programs rather than films. TV, along with video games, comics, and pop music, tends to fall into the category of lower art forms when compared against cinema or literature. The criticism stems from the fact that TV and so called lower art forms, sacrifice complexity in order to be more appealing to more audiences (Gaut and Lopes, 2013, p. 479). Our feelings on the formal artistic merit of popular media aside, for the purposes of analyzing the zeitgeist of an era, the mass appeal of shows alone is proof of its value as a tool to gage the ideals of a given demographic; in this case, the coveted 18-49 audiences that seem drawn in droves to American Horror Story.    

                       Cordelia: Any last words?

                       Myrtle Snow: Only one…Balenciaga!

(Gif created from episode of American Horror Story: Coven)

Now, we can look to how the millennial gothic tradition communicates its ideals through fashion. As this video encapsulates, though gothic subculture is typically associated with black Victorian era dress or Morticia Addams’ style, the fashion crosses into territories such as punk rock and cyber punk. The bright colors of pin-up and pastel goth in particular seem to go against what most would usually categorize as gothic aesthetics. Not included in the video, is the recent street goth style, sported by the likes of Kanye West and A$AP Rocky and of course, the bastard offspring of street goth, subject of much ridicule, the health goth style movements. Attached here is the store of the founders of health goth. Though not everyone who subscribes to the health goth style wears their actual merchandise, but by looking at their clothes you can get a sense of the aesthetic.

Health goth is particularly interesting as the founders of the movement have roots in the normcore fashion movement (Davis, 2014). As normcore’s name would suggest its aesthetic champions this idea of being hardcore normal. Aggressively common. It is decidedly reminiscent of many mainstream fashion trends of the nineties marked by acid wash denim, tucked in button-downs, and sneakers as streetwear; style elements that are decidedly unglamorous and by no coincidence reminiscent of clothes the cast of Seinfeld might wear during their absurd exploits. It comes as no surprise that health goth should be linked to this trend as it seems to also provide a commentary on the oversaturation of the fashion industry. Amidst rhetoric championing individuality, there is a certain dignity in rejecting the rat race and embracing, to the point of satirizing the fact that try as we might, we cannot escape trends. Succumbing to the mass production of clothes as a mirror of the mass production of human life and experiences in modern capitalist society. Essentially, health goth blends values of two aesthetics that are superficially at odds; the goth aesthetic, centered on meditations on death and impermanence, and sporty aesthetics, associated with adoration of and perfecting one’s own corporeality (Davis, 2014). Some might argue, as Eugene Thacker does in a podcast about his own book on cosmic pessimism, against giving any weight to something as frivolous, and commercially driven as fashion; that types of clothing rise to popularity because of choices made by fashion executives or costume designers (Abumrad, 2014). However, as scholars on that same show argue, one must consider the factors that led to those aesthetic decisions and what the artists might be trying to communicate visually. I would go even further to include the collective unconscious in this argument. Fashion executives do not guide the fashion zeitgeist, as Thacker’s argument implies, but they gage, tap into, and depend on it. Their artistic productions are not well-received based on some pure aesthetic merit (I would even argue this notion of objectivity in judging aesthetics is itself a myth), but because their aesthetics communicate ideas their target audience is ready to receive. The ideological qualities of fashion in mind, one might be more open to receiving the message that arises out of the synthesis of goth and sporty styles: Fleeting, human life from beginning to end is arbitrated by society’s gaze. In this industrialized, material-minded society, worth is judged by physical appearance and capability, which is all the more reason to look good before you die. Though fairly popular, health goth is still more of a subculture than the fashion trend of the majority, however, its central message is still found in mainstream fashion we see in most popular media, despite seeming unconnected because it manifests slightly differently. The characters of American Horror Story: Coven are beautifully costumed by Lou Eyrich and her team. She hand picks and designs outfits for the characters on all seasons that tend towards the higher end of fashion. Though superficially different from the aesthetics of health goth and normcore, the characters of Coven all conform to mainstream fashion trends, often dressing notably alike to each other one can plainly observe in the season’s promotional video below.

At both end of this fashion spectrum we can see echoes of the central gothic principle of resisting institution, but with characteristic millennial flair for irony that borders on internal inconsistency. Normcore, health goth, and the fashion of Coven revel in being derivative and embrace being trendy as a simple means of decorating corporeality until inevitable death.      

One of the major charges against popular music these days is its homogeny and triviality. Well encapsulated in this skit from the show Portlandia which routinely satirizes middle-class liberal youth subcultures associated with the Pacific Northwest. 

The most important take away from this skit is no matter how the millennials try to challenge oppressive systems, the song always turns into a party anthem with clichéd lyrics playing over the same three or four chords. The creators/stars of the series, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein’s criticism of millennial culture is not at all subtle: this generation just can’t seem to pull themselves together long enough to intelligently improve their situation. This point is illustrated in how they mindlessly regurgitate the same musical formulas over and over again producing songs that sound exactly alike, failing to progress. This is a typical denigration coming from older generations as a whole, but especially predictable considering Brownstein’s music career, born from the riot grrl punk scene of the nineties. This criticism coming from her only highlights the metamorphosis of counterculture in music from striving to pursue some mythical wholly original sound to a more retrospective approach. We see this throughout all the American Horror Story seasons (it is also of course a centerpiece of Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s other major project, Glee) with their utilization of song covers and in Coven, this scene showing one of the character’s overzealous infatuation with Stevie Nicks. This idea of communicating supposedly uniquely personal feelings through pop music, songs produced for mass appeal, is decidedly in keeping with previously touched upon principles of the millennial gothic also expressed through fashion trends. Moreover, the act indirectly references the notion of the collective unconscious; painting it as a societal implantation that directs our desires, feelings, and how we can express them. While this principle of millennial gothic aesthetic is consciously evoked in Coven and satirized for laughs, it manifests seemingly involuntarily in shows such as MTV’s Scream, the CW’s The Vampire Diaries and ABC Family’s Pretty Little Liars. These shows (all notably on youth aimed networks) are filled with histrionic dialogues of teenaged love confessions or passionate quarrels. As the climax of any such scene approaches, like clockwork, the slow, minor key pop song that’s been playing quietly in the background will swell and usually our emotions along with it. It’s become something of a protocol, but upon reflection, overlaying pop music designed to be vague enough to be massively appealing ought to undercut the visual communication of intimacy. Yet, in instances ranging from appropriately tense to eye roll inducing melodrama, fan-favorite scenes routinely follow this outline. This is the cultural phenomena that the Coven scene seems to be satirizing, millennials allowing their most personal aspects of identity to be defined by media industries. This all goes back to the same ideals I discussed when examining normcore, millennials have embraced the industrialized mass-production of human experience. Though, as the scene from Coven exemplifies, youth culture also enjoys mocking that act itself.  

Many might read my argument as an excuse for the “lazy” behaviors often associated with “idiot” millennials, exemplified here in a simple Google search. The top result, “millennials are killing” is a meme that calls attention to the trend of articles geared towards older generations that accuse millennials of “killing” certain industries or practices that were previously thriving. With this meme in mind, let’s consider Jack Halberstam’s discussion of their book The Queer Art of Failure. She outlines a notion identified by anthropologist Jack Scott as “weapons of the weak”. These weapons are any tactics used against societal powers and are typically regarded as undignified or improper means by hegemonies as means of discouraging this type of disruptive behavior. With this in mind, charges of apathy or laziness against the millennial generation prove to be based in hegemonic constructs of what productive behavior and success is. This is demonstrated in way millennials choosing not to engage in previously dominant consumer or interpersonal practices is severely criticized in a way that paints the millennial as somehow incompetent or morally bankrupt for not operated within the system in the prescribed way. Of course, these condemnations do little to faze lazy millennials as they would sooner make internet jokes about the charges against them than change their ways, an indication of the millennial gothic tradition’s tendency to embrace this failure or loser of society archetype. I will further examine this way of absorbing conventions both of and detested by the system; turning them against that very system is also evident in how millennial gothic uses archetypes.  

The way American Horror Story: Coven employs archetypes and narrative conventions. Continuing our look at how millennial gothic tradition moves away from Brownstein’s punk ideal of actively, emphatically protesting against the system, we should observe this moment from American Horror Story: Coven that made the Madison Montgomery character an internet icon.

This scene opens with Fiona Goode, the Supreme of the witch coven, balding and vomiting into a toilet. In a prior scene, she had killed Madison Montgomery in hopes that by stopping the rise of a new Supreme she could delay her own demise, but instead finds the younger witch alive and well while she only grows sicker. The tension of the scene is built up with unfocused frames that give the effect of obscured vision to highlight Fiona’s vulnerability and canted angles of Madison’s form presenting her as insidious. As Fiona comes down the hallway to discover her would-be successor, all these qualities indicate to the audience to expect some sort of grandiose explanation of how Madison resurrected herself or some manifesto about her imminent rise to power, anything archetypically villainous. However, Fiona only receives curt answers to her questions about Madison’s escape from death as Madison seems more concerned with pondering the square footage of her new room. Of course the legendary “Surprise, bitch” line, immortalized in many a meme across the internet, is integral in fully appreciating Madison’s irreverence. While Fiona’s alarm in this moment is sophisticated and practical, likely concerning the powers that be and the state of her own future, Madison trivializes her anxieties. 

As the season continues, Madison Montgomery proves to stick in the mind of most fans as the feature character of Coven, the heart of its troubled, fashionable teenage aesthetic. In examining Montgomery’s various interactions with authority and conduct in grave situations, a defining difference arises between the nineties era Carrie Brownstein school of troubled youth/young adult and the 2010s Madison Montgomery troubled youth/young adult. The Brownstein school of rebellion would have us scream at the man, while Madison Montgomery snubs the man, finding happiness in frivolous, decadent pleasures while shrugging at the values deemed enviable or venerable by institutions. Though this is a materialistic position, one that would seemingly be welcomed in capitalist doctrine, millennial gothic as Madison Montgomery demonstrates, picks and chooses what it wants from hegemonies and leaves whatever doesn’t suit current goals (in this case, Madison has little respect for the title of Supreme until later when she is in the running to become Supreme). In keeping with the tradition’s appreciation for inconsistency, insincerity, conceit, and most importantly, inconsistency. This notion gains added depth when we see the characters of Coven who hate Madison for these qualities blatantly acting just like as she would in this scene. This encapsulates the millennial gothic tradition’s celebration of inconsistency and dishonesty in storytelling and protagonists who are as flawed if not more so than their antagonists. We can see this across television medium in shows often regarded as highlights of what many hail as our current Golden Age of Television. Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and many others in this category center around protagonists that fit neatly into the antihero or Byronic hero archetype. This archetype is prevalent in the offshoots of gothic fiction, science fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction.  

One could argue that apocalyptic fiction is one of the oldest traditions. Mankind envisioned the end of the world millennia before gothic fiction in myths such as the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Biblical Flood and Book of Revelations. And what, in spite of centuries of history, links ancient conceptions of divine retribution and modern post-apocalyptic fiction? In his essay, Junot Diaz quotes David Brooke’s statement, “wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities,” then, adding his own point, “…equally important, they allow us insight into the conditions that led to the catastrophe,” (Diaz, 2011). Post-apocalyptic fiction requires the self to become conscious of the systems of power whose influence on our lives we either actively push out of our minds or remain only unconsciously aware of. Where ancient myths of apocalypse often have an external force (a divine deity) putting an end to mankind’s sinfulness, modern apocalyptic fiction synthesizes what is ending with what caused the end; the failings of our seemingly all powerful social constructs brought about its own end. In Coven, we do not see a traditional end-of-the-world type of apocalypse, but rather the end of a way of life in the form of topple of Fiona Goode’s reign over the Coven and her final scene in her personal hell. Sentenced to spend eternity, it is decidedly ironic that a woman who sought immortality and permanence should be tortured to live the same day over and over again; doomed to stagnation, her captor tells her “nobody sent you here but you, baby”. This evokes an integral principle of the millennial gothic tradition. The mythical norms we’ve been conditioned to desire will somehow bring about our downfall. We see this same idea manifest throughout contemporary zombie narratives. While the zombie originated in Caribbean culture as a corpse reanimated by supernatural forces (Peaty, 2011, p. 103), the contemporary American zombie is almost exclusively mythologized as a rogue product of bioengineering. Additionally, often it is not some failure to adhere to the scientific method that causes and sustains the zombification of the population, but instead unfettered pragmatism. From the Umbrella Corporation of Resident Evil films who intend for the release of a zombie virus to solve the earth’s overpopulation problem, to the gory survival tactics of The Walking Dead that usually end in leaving or purposefully feeding fellow humans to zombies to suit one’s own goals, millennials are collectively aware and receptive to this notion of a self-destructive edge to practicality. In a sense, the shadow that comes naturally with American culture, as Hoglund puts it in his book The American Imperial Gothic, which is “[focused] on Enlightenment principles” (22). Obviously, in order for Enlightenment as well as Renaissance thinking to define itself as purely logical, it must reject the presence of irrationality in its doctrine. However, as Jungians would argue, exiling unwanted qualities to the shadow (in rationalism’s case, how it can lead to horrible violence and cruelty) does not solve anything and, as gothic fiction often demonstrate, can escalate into callus utilitarianism that eventually contribute to the self-termination of a system. The millennial method of utilizing gothic apocalypses reveals the usually unaddressed inadequacies of modern industrialized society.    

 Briefly, my aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for Its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the power it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function. (Foucault, 1978, p. 8)

This quote was taken from the first chapter of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, aptly titled “We ‘Other Victorians’”. Foucault points to the Victorians when identifying where societal repression of inefficient desires and behaviors for the sake of endorsing more productive lifestyle models originated. It seems interesting then that Victorians, progenitors of social repression, should also be known as the era that dawned the gothic genre, defined by its demonization of any and all forms of authority. Turn of the century Victorian literature expressed an unease held in the Victorian collective unconscious at the trajectory of society brought on by the Industrial Revolution and an increasingly commercially focused society; acknowledging also that their own ideologies are what charted this course. In essence, Victorians were unconsciously wary of the industrialized world they were creating and these insecurities which is the very world millennials have been steeped in since birth. Inheriting generations of history from parents who have also lived and worked within the rules of the same system as their before them did and inevitably meet a similar end. With inheriting the factors of this moment in history, their preoccupation is not simply with anti-authoritarianism and mortality, but has evolved into embrace the triviality of human existence which manifests as irreverence for conventions that attempt to rationalize or prettify human existence. As the Victorians’ collective unconscious housed an acute awareness of the harmfulness of industrializing society, millennials are collectively unconsciously aware that they live the reality the Victorians feared: materialism usurping ethics, homogenized lifestyles, and the commodification of human experience. However, when met with these harsh realities, rather than despair, millennials revel in the absurdity that comes with trying to enjoy yourself before cosmically scheduled doom. The way capitalist ideals are simultaneously express and lampooned in the gothic asethetics American Horror Story: Coven and other current pop culture elements and popular television points to how millenials see through the ruse of modern society. They are critical of the values conditioned by the collective unconscious but, unlike the Victorians, they recognize and accept that, much like fate, they can’t escape it so they might as well embody it; indulge in impractical yet entertaining exploits such as obsessing over fashion, regurgitating the same old catchy tunes, write protagonists that never learn from their mistakes, or drive your video game car the wrong way on the race track. Their entertainment quality is not based in any conventional notion of virtue, but rather, the only virtue is entertainment quality.

 References

Abumrad, J. “In the Dust of this Planet”. Radiolab. 2014, September 8. [Audio podcast]

Andriano, J. (1993). Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Daemonology in Male Gothic fiction. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 

Campbell, J. (2004). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Davis, A.P. (2014 October 22). “Introducing Health Goth, A New Lifestyle Fashion Trend”. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/10/faq-do-you-know-what-health-goth-means.html. 

Diaz, J. (2011, May 1). “Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal”. Retrieved from http://bostonreview.net/junot-diaz-apocalypse-haiti-earthquake.

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books.

Gaut, B., & Lopes, D. (Eds.). (2013). Routledge Philosophy Companions : The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (3). Florence, GB: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.ebrary.com

Halberstam, J. (2011). RADAR Productions Book Club Presents: Judith Halberstam. Retrieved from https://vimeo.com/35588538.

Hoglund, J. (2014). The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence. Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Lachman, G. (2015). The secret teachers of the western world. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher-Penguin.

Lewin, N.A. (2009). Jung on War, Politics, and Nazi Germany: Exploring the Theory of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. London: Karnac Books Ltd.

Peaty, G. “Infected With Life: Neo-supernaturalism and the Gothic Zombie”. In Alder, E. and Wasson, S. (E.d.). Gothic Science Fiction: 1980 - 2010 (pp. 102-115). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Stevens, A. (1990). On Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Filmography

Armisen, F., Brownstein, C. Krisel, J., and Oakley, B. (Writer). Krisel, J. (Director). (2013). Winter in Portlandia [Television series episode]. In F. Armisen, C. Brownstein, J. Krisel (Producers), Portlandia. Portland, OR: Broadway Video Entertainment.  

Corson, H. (Writer). Scott, O. (Director). (2016) Dawn of the Dead [Televsion series episode]. In A. Blair and A. Fink (Producers), Louisiana: MTV Physical Production.  

Fivaesh, C & Stoteraux, J. (Writers). Stover, G. (Director). (2014). The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get [Television series episode]. In K. Williamson et.al (Producers) Covington, Georgia: CBS Television Studios.     

Petrie, D. (Writer), & Gomez-Rejon, A. (Director). (2013). The Seven Wonders [Television series episode]. In Falchuk, B. and Murphy, R. (Producers), American Horror Story: Coven, New Orleans, LA: FX Network.   

Murphy, R. (Writer), & Gomez-Rejon, A. (Director). (2013). The Sacred Taking [Television series episode]. In Falchuk, B. and Murphy, R. (Producers), American Horror Story: Coven, New Orleans, LA: FX Network. 

[akhenaten-037]

1988

I was a child, It was spring I suppose because I remember the breeze blowing through my brother’s window, which was always welcoming when coming in from playing outside and sweating all over; my family kept our only TV in his room, my parents weren’t really big on TV so they didn’t want us nagging them to have it on during dinner (as it was viewable from the dinner table if they would have kept it in the living room). I believe I was watching cartoons at the time when my oldest brother walked in around four thirty  from high school, if I’d be watching any of the Starwars films he’d let it finish because he liked having them on ( for a time, I’d say about three weeks, he or I would have Return of the Jedi playing every day after school, it was mostly just the second half of the movie, and for a time, I knew the entire script to the final scenes where the Emperor and Darth Vader are taunting Luke to give in to his animal instincts, to give in to his desires, to shift the scales of his duality and harness the power of the darkside, for he was on the verge of realizing the light, for only when he had unleashed the rage of the darkness within him, only when he had completely succumbed to darkness, was he able to defeat his father. It was necessary for Luke to taste to addictive qualities that the prospect of immense power had to offer, and only then at that moment when he resisted the temptation is when he became a Jedi. This was his initiation, his rite of passage, to prove to himself that he could be a master, a master of his duality. There is only the duality, there is only the binary, be not deceived. At the time all this was unbeknownst to me, I simply loved the lightsaber battle, but there was always something more about that scene that intrigued me.  Please allow me to go off into a tangent; the scene where Luke harnesses his darkside is accompanied by a beautiful pipe organ and choir, the type of beautiful voices you would hear at a church choir, such a splendid scene.) but if i was watching anything else he’d just physically overpower me for the remote control; basic insignificant sibling infighting, something I miss so dearly.  He walked in excited saying his friend let his borrow a movie about war and that “there were was lots of action and lots of bad words”;  “Full Metal Jacket” I read as he handed me the VHS tape, on the cover, a green U.S Vietnam-era Marine’s helmet with “BORN TO KILL” written in black maker, I nodded in approval; for the next 2 hours I was exposed to reality, realities that I as a child would never ever want to find myself in, and yet, a short nine years later I found myself in at least in one of the realities of that movie, I was in U.S Marine Corps boot camp, training in all sorts of ways to kill people.  I believe I was affected subconsciously as a child by the sheer fright Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman instilled in me in the first few scenes, it was partially because of this fear, that I chose the Marine Corps when I decided to enlist in the military, I wanted to meet Drill Instructor Hartman for myself, I wanted to feel the fear, I wanted to grow.

 The following is taken from the website:  http://www.visual-memory.co.uk

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0093.html

The Jungian Thing: Duality in Full Metal Jacket

A Discussion

Ichorwhip: The Jungian thing is the distinction between the personal unconscious and the Collective Unconscious. The personal unconscious is composed of an individual's repressed thoughts or feelings. The Collective Unconscious is composed of primordial images found in all of humanity: Jung labelled them archetypes. A cornerstone of his therapeutic approach to psychology was the recognition of the way an individual's personal unconscious integrates, or conflicts with the Collective Unconscious.

In this light, how does Joker's sick joke pan out? If he writes "Born to Kill" on his helmet , it would seem to be a manifestation of the Collective Unconscious, for as Kubrick points out again and again in his films, we have a primordial urge to kill each other. Joker's peace button on his body armor is a symbol of his personal unconscious. "Where'd you get it?" "I don't remember sir." Has Joker repressed the origin of the peace symbol?

T.D. Juede: I believe Private Joker was making a statement about how he acknowledges his fate... or that there is no such thing as a mistake.

David Kirkpatrick: Private Joker fancies himself an individual... a writer's conceit. Pun on "private joke". But as a journalist for Stars and Stripes he must recite the party line.

Gordon Dahlquist: To push the duality stuff a little farther, it should very much be remembered that when Joker actually speaks this little gem:

1) he's talking to a shit-for-brains pogue colonel who knows fuck-all about combat and real life in country.

2) Joker himself is a wise-ass reporter who - when we really get down to it - also knows fuck-all about combat and real life in country.

3) Joker's WHOLE EXISTENCE, from the beginning of the film to the point where he kills the sniper, is all about denying, abstracting, ironizing, distancing the duality within him.

Mark Ervin: I think this is a crucial point. Jungian duality is merely another phrase where Joker can demonstrate his aloof superiority: unaware of how his own personality exemplifies the concept. His beating Pyle harder with the soap than anyone else, and then holding his ears to stifle the screams, is a perfect example.

Ichorwhip: Joker seems to have an acute sense of the conflict within himself: "I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them.... I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill." Joker reconciles conflicting components of his unconscious experience and achieves a sort of individuation and wholeness of self, albeit in a rather bizarre and ironic manner.

Gordon Dahlquist: when he's mouthing off about being "the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill" he's not really embracing anything other than a posture that he hopes will protect him from any deeper risk and investment. Which is to say, his strategy for saving himself is consistently to deny that he exists.

I don't think Joker is accepting of his own duality at all, until the end. It's the killing of the sniper that finally allows him to embrace it, and that embrace is certainly also a gesture of self-destruction. While the comment about the Jungian thing is certainly funny and does reference a central theme of the film, it's also very much spoken within context, and by an unreliable narrator, which are part of the film's own duality of presentation: of the supposedly objective, with the desperately performed.

Mark Ervin: That's well put. What makes Full Metal Jacket a devastating experience for me, is the gravity of the self-realization when Joker kills the sniper. His drive to revenge Cowboy and at the same time his delivery of cruel mercy to a female child sniper rips his self-denial to shreds. It's clear that Joker recognizes himself in the pathetic duality of the sniper, and that the agony of firing that shot is because it's an act of suicide as well as aggression (as with Pyle's last act).

Gordon Dahlquist: The gun happens to be aiming in a different direction, which is perhaps an all-important political reading of the film, but a trivial psychological reading.

Boaz: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Remember that famous quote from the Viet Nam War?

Gordon Dahlquist: this is a complicated point Mark, but as you say, crucial: the connection of Joker's big tranformative gesture with Pyle's is what makes sense of the film as a whole. We pay attention to Joker for a reason, despite his wilfully shallow behavior he is consistently perceptive, improvisational and smart.

Mark Ervin: And he has a certain courage to be truthful to a fault. On several occasions his admissions get him into trouble, but while he can be truthful about himself to others, he can't be true to himself--until the killing of the sniper....

Gordon Dahlquist: A perfect example of this is where Joker's courage in standing up to Hartman (re: the Virgin Mary) is rewarded with the responsibility for getting Pyle into shape, that he can't ultimately live up to, because it would amount to a personal investment. We see that it's Joker's own guilt in failing Pyle that leads him to beat him all the harder. This also brings us back to the duality moment with the colonel. Almost all of what the antagonist figures to Joker (Hartman, Lockhart, Animal Mother, etc.) say about him in their criticisms is true.

Ichorwhip: The whole film reeks of duality, especially during the boot camp sequence.

"Sound off like you've got a pair!"

"Only steers and queers come from Texas..."

"One for the commandant. One for the Corps."

"This is my rifle. This is my gun."

And then there is the duality of "Left Right Left Right Left Right" ad infinitum. It's clear Pyle doesn't know his left from his right. Joker shows him how to lace his boots, "right one over the left, left one over the right..." Also Pyle has to be shown, one leg at a time, how to get over the obstacle. This is a crucial symbolic event in the film. It looks like Pyle might make it after all. He may achieve individuation similar to his doppelganger Animal Mother. "Congratulations Leonard, you did it." If only he hadn't succumbed to the allure of a jelly donut.

Peter Tonguette: One of the more interesting theories about "Full Metal Jacket's" unconventional narrative structure was proposed by critic Bill Krohn, who wrote, "...the little world of the training camp is portrayed as a brain made up of human cells thinking and feeling as one, until its functioning is wrecked from within, when a single cell, Pyle, begins ruthlessly carrying out the directives of the death instinct that programs the organ as a whole." In many ways, Pyle is on his way to becoming an ideal Marine - a strong rifleman with a hard heart - But he self-destructs when confronted with Joker's humanity.

Mark Ervin: I would argue it is Pyle's humanity at odds with the platoon not the death instinct. His humanity makes a final return in the scene in the bathroom, the conflict causing the murder of Hartman and his suicide. Joker thinks his intellect; his cynicism; his satirical attitude alone is enough to keep Hartman's training at arm's length. Joker rides herd on his shadow side, while Pyle flips like a light switch. After Pyle gets revenge on Hartman, he points the gun at Joker, who begs for mercy. Pyle grants it, then kills himself. If Joker could have helped him through that episode without Hartman finding out, one might assume that Pyle would have become a marine, very much like Animal Mother.

I see a deliberately chosen resemblance between Pyle and Animal Mother: black hair, large stature, constantly half-open eyes, and the same false grin. The main difference is Pyle's juvenile baby fat. I don't know which actor Kubrick chose first, but the similarities are striking.

Peter Tonguette: After Pyle's suicide, the film shifts to Viet Nam and abandons many of the threads begun in the first act. Animal Mother emerges as the Marine Pyle might have turned into, although significantly he lacks Pyle's humanity, having evidently overcome whatever weaknesses he may have faced in basic training ("You did it, Leonard.") Animal Mother has literally "become death," ("I AM BECOME DEATH") the full realization of the Marine undoubtedly Hartman was trying to mold out of Pyle.

Mark Ervin: I had never thought of the quote just that way, but I think you may be right that this is part of the reason Kubrick put this phrase on his helmet. This makes the resemblance between Animal Mother and Pyle all the more poignant.

Sask696: What is the relevance of Joker killing the sniper? Is it that he finally acts upon the "Born to Kill" capacity in him?

Ichorwhip: I've always taken it that Animal Mother had at first mistaken Joker when he says, "we can't just leave her here," as if he thinks Joker wants to take her with them. When the sniper starts begging them to shoot her, Animal Mother picks up on what Joker is getting at, he says: "If you want to waste her, go on, waste her." Joker does so, his moment of truth is consummated. I view Joker's wasting of the sniper to be humane. It's his crucial moment, and the reconciliation of his duality's is at stake, also vengeance for Cowboy's death is fresh in the wind. But the moment at hand is a moral one, to put the mortally wounded sniper to death so that she will not suffer.

Gordon Dahlquist: And it's telling that the actions of this "best and brightest" representative are to degrade himself, to talk the talk, to hide for as long as he possibly can. And when Joker gets to the - essentially - same point that Pyle does, it matters that much more to him to avoid it. Quite simply, the point resonates with Joker because he is in fact thoughtful, whereas the transition for someone like Animal Mother was probably a little ... uh ... easier. It's this connection that allows us to really read the ending, and the hands off quality with which Kubrick presents it. There's no question that Joker is free, that he has reconciled himself with his situation, that actually killing himself is just a truthful, sensible gesture, given the situation. I think the film succeeds where many similar films don't, because it presents this truthfulness without judgement or condescension, or an externally imposed morality that a movie like "Platoon" feels compelled to fall back on.

Also interesting to consider that a filmed-but-cut scene showed Joker shooting two ARVN soldiers in a helicopter: in that version of the film, we would have seen Joker kill by the time we get to the final scene with the sniper. Obviously removing the earlier killings, places the final one into higher contrast.

Mark Ervin: The crux of the film, and why I see it as a masterpiece, is that in the act of killing the sniper, Joker, who is largely a pretence, finally finds himself and ties together his experiences: his attempt to laugh things off; his somewhat forced and excessive friendship with Cowboy; his shepherding and protecting of Pyle and Rafterman; his pretence of being a killer and a Jungian-- are all ultimately a war face which he loses when he kills the sniper.

David Culpepper: And the sniper is a woman! Throughout the film, women are objects of pleasure - and nothing else, in the finest traditions of the male hero cult projection. Joker plays this out in the aforementioned facades, he attempts to make the traditional John Wayne myth role his own, through his maverick sarcasm. It's quite a jolt to our intrepid Marine, when he is confronted by a culture where young women become skilled "marksman," killers in a desperate grasp for self- determination. That wasn't in the movies!

Another angle is that of the Archetypal. Joker (not unlike Dr. Bill in Eyes Wide Shut), lives in the Persona; behind a mask. Jung decried this Western narcissism repeatedly, because to him it illustrated the shallow banality of the ego. The Shadow is quite active throughout the film, Joker keeps this darker reality of humanity at bay with the mask of his Persona. But the Shadow finds its song in the beating of Pyle; Pyle's suicide; the attack on the base in the Tet Offensive; the lime-covered bodies in the pit; the death of Cowboy; and finally in the confrontation with the young woman. The feminine principle, embodied by the sniper, interplay with the Shadow. Joker has no real experience of women, his only ones are those of subjugation, "female" being reduced to a mere "sign" not only socially but psychologically. The climactic encounter can be read as a conflict between the ego and the anima, the ego (Joker) has no choice but to kill the anima (the sniper). His psyche is caught in a dilemma with no resolution. The question is, where will he go from here?

Peter Tonguette: The larger point here hits at the core of how I view the film, and why I consider it to be the finest exploration of war ever put on film. Kurt Vonnegut has often written that, had he been born in Germany as opposed to Indiana, he probably would have become a Nazi. This is a pretty radical statement, it hints at the darkness within all human beings. And yet I think it's true. To overcome the darkness within all of us we must first recognise that darkness. I feel this is the point Joker has reached at the end of the film.

David Culpepper: I get a rather fatalistic feel from the end of Full Metal Jacket. I don't see how the darkness can ever be entirely overcome.

Sask696: Another thing that's puzzled me is the reference to the Mickey Mouse song at the end. The placement of Mickey and Minnie dolls on the window sill behind Joker in the news barracks, perhaps foreshadows the end of the film? Does this somehow fit into the Jungian thing?

Ichorwhip: I'd felt that the cheap and phoney connotation of Mickey Mouse served the film well. We think of things that are Mickey Mouse as being lousy and crummy.

Rick Nelson: I always figured that the Mickey Mouse theme song was the troops' expression of their triumphant Americanism. Having survived their part of the Tet Offensive, they release all their pent-up adrenaline by proclaiming their status as Jolly Green Giants, walking the earth singing the most American thing they could think of, the Mickey Mouse song. Nicely surreal that.

Tom Haynes: I don't take away a sense of the soldiers swaggering with US power at the end of Full Metal Jacket. Just the opposite. Mickey Mouse is referenced at least three times in the film, each time ironically. The first is when Hartman goes into the head to see what Pyle is screaming about: "What is this Mickey Mouse shit?" The second is in the Stars and Stripes office, where a Mickey Mouse doll is visible. The entire sequence is devoted to showing that the Stars and Stripes paper is a joke, and that everyone in the room understands that it is. Hence the banner, "first to go, last to know".

The singing of the Mickey Mouse song seems to me a kind of realization, by Joker at least, of what is important in his life. For all his earlier bluster and jokes, he knows now that the war isn't what's important. He's grown up.

Gordon Dahlquist: I would disagree. Yes, he has a clarity about what is important, yes one could say he's grown up, but I would say that this clarity and growth has everything to do with the war. That in fact, the war has become everything. I don't think the Mickey Mouse song is particularly ironic. One of the ironies is the exact lack of irony in which it's sung. In the audience, we smile stiffly at the distance between Hue city and Annette Funicello (it's a joke but not a very good one) ... but perhaps we smile even more stiffly, because the men singing it have managed to find a clarity, where no distance between Hue city and Annette Funicello exists at all. There's an element to the final scene that's wide open in a way the rest of the film isn't, and much of this relates to Joker's statement about being unafraid: for the first time in the film, I would suggest.

Mark Ervin: One has the sense that Joker has started the singing of the song himself; Mickey Mouse is identified with him throughout. It is his ability to embrace incongruity that separates him, by degrees at least, from the fates of Pyle and Animal Mother. The final image of hell suggests that, even for Joker, it no resolution, and no easier an endpoint.

Ichorwhip: It seems like the denouement of Full Metal Jacket is foreshadowed by Hartman: "If your killer instincts are not clean and strong, you will hesitate at the moment of truth. You will not kill. You will become dead marines. And then you will be in a world of shit.

T.D. Juede: The United States has the most sophisticated and powerful military forces in the world, not to mention the biggest entertainment icons. What America does best is entertainment and armed forces.

David Kirkpatrick: While John Wayne made some World War II films mythologizing the American war hero, Disney also made propaganda cartoons demonizing Germans and Japanese. And these figures stand against the context of John Wayne's association with Westerns and Disney's association with its Main Street USA theme park.

Gordon Dahlquist: You start thinking about a larger socio-economic picture; about how the military functions..... Full Metal Jacket is an inordinately layered piece of work.

Mark Ervin: I think so, and it's sad that so many people see this film as inferior to his earlier films.

Gordon Dahlquist: I believe Geoffrey Alexander used to say it was his favorite, and I can see why. It's sort of impossible for me to choose between Kubrick's Films, but I do reject that Full Metal Jacket is a lesser film in any way. It's one of those films that takes the measure of its audience, not the other way around.

[che-ck-your-self]

5.0 out of 5 stars A landmark of 20th century literature.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book with a capital "B." First of all, I feel inadequate and unworthy to review this book, but since Amazon has given me the chance, all I can say is that this is one of the greatest Books (with a capital "B") of my experience. I suspect that it shall be recognised as one of the single greatest products to come out of 20th century American letters. No, I'm not setting Campbell up as a prophet or anything like that, indeed, I suspect that this book's greatness lies in the eternal truths that transcend Campbell's individual personality. He just managed to tap into them- thank God. The entire book deals with the hero's journey. This is the Monomyth shared by all cultures- and indeed seems to be a direct inspiration from the cosmos itself by way of the collective unconscious. Here we have the eternal cycle of 1) the call to adventure; 2) the crossing of the threshold; 3) the tests, trials, and helpers; 4) the sacred marriage, apotheosis (becoming one with god), or elixir theft; 5)the flight 6) recrossing/ressurection; and 7) the return to society with hard won gifts. He examines all of these elements in depth with a wealth of cross-cultural examples. The first half of the book deals with this cycle on a more individual and personal level (the microcosm), while the second half deals with the greater cosmogonic importance (the macrocosm.) Now, the really amazing part of all this is that virtually all of it comes across as meaningful, interesting, and totally nonacademic. That's why academic types hate Campbell, and his mentor Jung,- they know that Campbell's and Jung's works will endure and be read a thousand years from now, while their own monographs will be justly forgotten. There are a lot of mediocre Ph.Read more › Go to Amazon

4.0 out of 5 stars A New Hope... Joseph Campbell is a "love him or hate him" type of guy. The other reviews of his works that I have found on Amazon bear this out. The criticisms seem to be that his examples do not bear out his theories, that he relies on Freudian and Jungian psychology as "proof", and that people do not agree with his world-view. My response is this: we must bear in mind that Joseph Campbell was, above all things, a pioneer. A pioneer need not get everything right the first time out - he is setting up a new paradigm with which to view the world. Freud did not get everything right when he fathered modern psychoanalysis, but he created a new framework and steered it in the direction it needed to go.The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a comparative study of the religions and myths of the world. Its central theme is that all of their stories are essentially the same. They follow certain archetypal paths that are different in particular circumstances, but in general, follow the same overall arch. Now, this is not 100% true as even he admits - stories get changed around a bit and different things happen, but to the extent that he makes his point, the similarities are astonishing. His conclusion - or ONE possible interpretation - is that this reflects certain archetypal themes that are in every society's collective subconscious (Jung) and that these myths represent eternal truths about life...how to look at it and how to live it.Now, as to the criticism that his examples don't bear out his theories, Campbell states that he is just choosing an example or two to illustrate his point. The purpose of this book is not to be a comprehensive collection of the world's myths - that book is The Golden Bough. Campbell selects myths that the average reader may not be familiar with.Read more › Go to Amazon

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound, World Shakingly Influential & Changing. All may roads may lead to Rome, but for me, this year, all books seemed to lead to Joseph Campbell's Hero With 1000 Faces.I have discovered that this book is probably one of the most influential, widely read books of the 20th century. It's no wonder the author, Joseph Campbell, was featured in a Bill Moyers special on The Power of Myth (with an accompanying book, as usual for Bill Moyer's specials.)I was reading books on writing-- on story structure-- Particularly, Christopher Vogler's excellent Writer's Journey, and it was based on this book. Ironically, I was already reading another of Campbell's series of books on myth. But then I started looking deeper into this realm-- the idea of the Hero's journey, -- the call to adventure, refusing the call, finding a mentor, encountering threshold guardians, crossing the threshold, facing the worst evil, winning the elixir--- and I discovered that dozens of books have been written about the concepts Joseph Campbell first broached.It's such a powerful idea, and so useful in conceptualizing life's changes. I used it as an element in a presentation I just gave this past weekend on how the art and science of story can be applied to healing and helping people grow. 80% of the people attending the lecture were familiar with the concept.This is such powerful material, you might consider essential for helping you understand the way movies are made, and how the contemporary world has been affected by advertising and the loss of sacred rituals in everyday life.One way I gauge a book is by how many marks I make in the margins, to indicate wise ideas or quotable material ( I collect quotes, and quotation books big-time, owning over 400 quotation books) and this book's margins are just packed.Read more › Go to Amazon