#pay attention to his motivation in literally the best most insightful character study of the Doctor ever done? crazy talk

[reachexceedinggrasp]

I've mentioned before I have zero chill about Heaven Sent and do not want to hear anyone's objectively wrong negative opinions about it, but I honestly have to stay in the Whouffaldi bubble even as far as analysis and praise. At least people have to be accepting of the idea or possibility of the ship, not dismissive of it. Not because I need everyone to ship it, but because not realising the love story exists inevitably creates terrible takes on S9 and those people usually shit on Hell Bent and say it ruins the three parter.

The ship is canon and it's woven extremely deeply into the fabric of the story, so much so that if you're oblivious to the romance you will erroneously conclude that the story wasn't coherent. I constantly see people say Hell Bent undoes everything from Face the Raven and Heaven Sent or renders them pointless. And that's because they don't understand what was actually happening. There's still a disturbingly large number of people who say we never found out what the Hybrid was.

It's the single most consistent thing about people being unfair to Hell Bent, even more so than the ones who are just angry it isn't a story about Gallifrey. They're mad because they thought Heaven Sent was about getting over Clara's death and moving on, therefore Hell Bent was a big narrative backtrack. A lot of people say this, totally unwilling to consider that maybe it's not that this one episode radically departs from the thematic impetus of the entire series and is randomly exempt from the heavy, heavy foreshadowing in every other episode, maybe- actually- they missed something.

[maybeformepersonally]

Fic: One golden glance of what should be

Title: One golden glance of what should be Author: maybeformepersonally Rating: G / General Audiences Summary: Hogwarts AU where inter-house friendship blooms, Dan plays Quidditch, Phil cheers for him, and realisations are acted upon. Word Count: 2752   Author’s Note: I wrote this fic for @unhawkeye for the Phanfic Events Spring Fic Exchange. I’d like to thank the kind folks at Phanfic Events for organising this fest and @unhawkeye for submitting this prompt and for the lovely comment they left, I’m glad you enjoyed it!  Warnings: None

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Sometimes, not often but sometimes, Dan regretted talking the Sorting Hat into putting him in Gryffindor. Oh, do not get the wrong idea, he liked his house. For the most part. His housemates may be a loud and boisterous bunch more often than not, but that worked well enough for Dan in group settings, since he could be involved without exhausting himself emotionally; all he had to do was make the occasional comment and laugh when someone said something funny and he was considered part of the group. He was proud of being a Gryffindor. He liked the warm, glowy feeling he got whenever he caught himself being particularly courageous, and there was nothing like seeing hundreds upon hundreds of other students, even from other houses, wearing his house colours and cheering for him when his fingers closed around the ever so elusive golden snitch. He liked earning house points, and he liked being the non-threatening, easy-going upperclassman that first years felt confident asking for help. And if he sometimes felt adrift and trapped in the stifling exuberance of his housemates, if he sometimes needed to get away from the aggressively extroverted energy of his house’s Common Room, well. There's nothing wrong with wanting some time to himself to recharge.

Dan liked his house. He was thankful he had managed to sway the Hat’s first ‘suggestion’. But being in Gryffindor meant he had to share class time with not only Phil Lester, but also Charlie Casey, who was apparently physically incapable of not flirting with Phil for more than 5 continuous minutes.

Here was the thing about Dan: he was a helplessly, desperately, poisonously jealous person by nature. It didn't matter that he had no claim over Phil, except maybe a tenuous one as a situational kind-of-friend who was happy to chat when they were both passing time and no one more interesting was around. It didn't matter that Charlie was getting nowhere with his overt flirting and only slightly more covert near-stalking. It didn't even matter that Phil was clearly not interested, because Phil was also painfully nice, and so as long as Charlie didn't cross a line, he'd put up with his annoying housemate making eyes at him and babbling at him and trying to sit close to him in class and, and, and.

Dan may have been biased, but it still grinded his gears, every single time.

“Any questions? No? Alright then! Split into pairs and start practising the spell. Remember to make that a light swish, we don’t want to have to make any unplanned visits to the Hospital Wing today!”

Dan was distracted enough sneaking looks at Phil and Charlie that the professor’s words caught him a bit off-guard. On the flip side, however, sneaking looks at Phil seemed to have paid off this time, for as soon as the instructions were uttered, Phil had turned to him with one of those bright smiles that always made a nervous wriggly feeling burst inside Dan’s chest. Is he… he is, Dan thinks wildly. Dan had, of course, noticed that Phil’s usual class partner hadn’t been present in either of their shared classes that day, but with Charlie right there he’d figured Phil would just partner with him. Then again, Charlie could be a bit too enthusiastic with his wand movements, so Phil was making the right strategic choice, really.

“Hey,” Phil said once he reached him. He even did that cute little hand gesture he did sometimes when greeting people, that movement that looked like it half wanted to be a wave if only it could gather enough motivation. The wriggly feeling intensified in Dan's chest. “Wanna partner?”

“Yeah,” Dan answered lamely. “Sure.”

The smile he got made him think being awkward was worth it, if it got him that reaction from Phil Lester of all people.

*

Phil walked down the moving staircase excitedly, moving slightly ahead of his mates every couple of minutes before noticing that his longer stride and bubbling enthusiasm were propelling him too far ahead, and forcing himself to slow down. It was 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday, and by all intents and purposes he should have been shuffling his feet and groaning under his breath at being out of bed so early on a weekend. But today was different. Because his efforts were for a cause. A good and just cause. And that cause was Daniel Howell, expertly flying all over the pitch and flaunting his frankly spectacular skills with a broomstick.

Today was the Gryffindor-Slytherin Quidditch match, and the whole school was vibrating with anticipation, with the sheer drama of it, the two rivals clashing in the pitch for their one and only yearly match, fighting to one-up each other at every turn, risking life and limb with gravity-defying moves for the unparalleled glory of coming out the other side victorious. Phil had the passing thought that if he was an animated character, his eyes would be shining. Possibly they’d be shaped like stars.

The overall scores so far were tilted slightly in favour of Slytherin, but the Gryffindors had a more well-rounded team, and the best Seeker in the school (Phil was adamant, despite his own housemates' protests), so the odds were looking pretty good for Gryffindor supporters. Which Phil was, today. He’d always cheered for Gryffindor when his own House wasn’t playing, but his support had become more… ardent since Dan joined the team in their fifth year. Coincidentally, fifth year was the year when Phil… noticed him.

Phil had a habit of spending more time inside his head than in the outside world with all his peers, and so it wasn’t unusual for him not to know the students from the other houses very well. Still, how he managed to overlook Dan Howell for so long was a mystery that evaded him. (Puberty might have had something to do with the ‘revelation’. Maybe. Possibly.)

Dan was just… so nice? Always, even with people who didn’t deserve it. And he was so smart, he always did well in their shared classes, but it wasn’t even that. Anyone who studied would do reasonably good in class, but Dan always asked the most insightful questions, and gave the most thoughtful answers, not like learning by rote would do, but like he had all these thought and ideas about what magic was, how magic worked, how magic affected magical people, about the implied tenets of magical society and what their implications were. Seriously, Phil didn’t know how he’d managed to escape being a Ravenclaw.

And he was beautiful, yeah, that was also a factor, but it wasn’t the only one, Phil had standards.

Dan met all of his standards, and then he went on to create a few new ones just for the sake of it. Like how Phil didn’t use to think about Hogwarts’ expectations that muggleborn children basically cut all ties with the culture they were born in to fully immerse themselves in the magical word, but ever since Dan had brought it up in class, he’d started noticing more and more the completely non-existent efforts purebloods made to learn about their mates’ culture, how most muggle references earned the speaker blank stares at best and a sneer at worst. How there was no muggle history taught at Hogwarts, to the detriment of all students, who would go on to graduate missing the history of the grand majority of humans, much of which is directly relevant to wizardkind. Like how muggle-raised first years have to quietly struggle with learning to write with a quill, since apparently that’s not used by muggles anymore? (Dan had something called a “gel pen” that could write in sparkly pink without any need to dip it into ink at all!)

The point of the matter was, Dan was on Phil’s mind all the time these days, but Phil wasn’t sure where he stood in Dan's. He always acted friendly towards Phil, even happy to talk to him, but he wasn’t normally the one to seek him out. Phil had decided to try talking to him more (it was his number one New Year’s resolution), and so far it was looking promising.

Phil doubted he’d get to talk to Dan the day of a match, let alone the most awaited match of the year for half the school at least, but he didn't really mind. He was going to get to see Dan playing Quidditch today. He was going to get to experience Dan in his element. Phil could have sworn Dan was made to be an athlete, the way he moved on a broom. It was stunning.

He was stunning.

*

Phil had been wrong, as it turned out. Later in the day, once the Gryffindor festivities had died down, Phil ran into Dan on his way to the library. Almost literally.

“Oh, hey, are you okay?” Dan asked, way too concerned and way too close, one hand still on Phil’s shoulder where he’d grabbed him to avoid a full-on collision.

“Oh. Hi. Yeah. Yes, I’m fine. Sorry, I’m bad at keeping tabs on my surroundings. Thanks,” Phil spewed out with no intervention of his brain whatsoever.

Dan gave him one of those sweet, soft smiles with the dimples and squeezed his shoulder lightly before letting go. “It’s fine. Just try to pay better attention next time. We wouldn’t want to have to scrape you off the dungeon floors because you were too distracted to notice the staircase had changed directions.”

Phil threw him an exaggeratedly suspicious look, “What do you know? Whatever they told you, it’s not true and they’re trying to throw off suspicion by telling you made up stories about my early days of being a perfectly balanced first year genius. Don’t let them throw you off the scent, whoever told you that clearly has something to hide.”

Dan’s laugh made his heart do a wild flip in his chest, and all Phil could do was grin really wide.

They ended up going to the library together and sitting down in one of the alcoves to read their respective selection of books, turning to each other every now and then with a comment or a question sparked by their reading. Dan has blushed and ducked his head a little when Phil had congratulated him, and they'd made plans to revise for their Charms exam together later that week.

It had been a really good day, Phil decided as he laid down to sleep that night. A really good day, indeed.

*

They talked a bit more often after that, then started spending more and more time together. Dan was the funniest person he’d ever met, he could always make Phil laugh, even when he was fighting down anxiety or when he’d had a really bad day. Phil felt blessed to get to know him at all.

*

They were brewing Amortentia, Professor Winkledge had said. It made Phil nervous.

He already knew what a correctly brewed Amortentia would smell like to him. Or at least, he knew who it would smell like. Still, when Dan turned to him with a little smile and a questioning look, Phil nodded. He wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to brew with Dan just because he had a little crush. He did take a few deep breaths in the potions ingredients cabinet to release all that nervous energy once he was out of sight, though.

Dan was diligent, and precise. He was really good at potions, and Phil was really good at spacing out watching how gracefully his hands sliced the asphodel roots. They prevailed, however, and ended up with a near-perfect potion by the end of the class that Phil had actually helped make, distractions and all. Phil was a little overwhelmed by the earthly oak scent, tinged with a hint of citrus and something sweet he couldn’t quite identify that was coming from their cauldron once they reached the final stage. But it wasn’t too bad, just a little distracting. It made him want to hug Dan, which made perfect sense, but would also be supremely weird, so he just settled for shifting his weight from one foot to another and putting his hands in the pockets of his robe in that backwards way his body naturally settled into. Some people thought it was weird, but Phil knew Dan wouldn’t mind it or ever tease him about it, except maybe good-naturedly.

Dan didn’t say what the potion smelled like to him, other than muttering “fresh”, and, oddly enough, “alive” when prompted. It had made Phil laugh.

*

The thing to break the mounting tension between them is, surprisingly, Charlie.

Phil was hanging out with Dan out in the grounds, close to the lake, as they sometimes did when the weather was nice, when Dan abruptly cut off his explanation on why he thought muggle technology should be incorporated to the Hogwarts curriculum and how magical folk could benefit from it. It only took Phil a moment to figure out why: Charlie was striding purposefully towards them, stopping right in front of Phil and ignoring Dan completely.

“Phil,” he declared, to Phil’s bewilderment and slight annoyance. He’d been fascinated by Dan’s commentary, and Dan was never annoyed or patronising when Phil asked questions about the muggle world, which meant Phil had already derailed Dan’s explanation half a dozen times, out of a deep curiosity for the subject matter. For all of Dan’s patience with him, he seemed significantly more short-tempered about this interruption.

Charlie cleared his throat and, continuing to ignore Dan standing right there, stared straight into Phil. “Phil, would you like to go to tomorrow’s Hogsmeade visit with me?”

Phil stared, incomprehensive.

“He’s already agreed to go to Hogsmeade with me tomorrow,” Dan jumped in to his rescue.

Charlie frowned, but didn’t turn to look at Dan when he spoke. “A date takes precedence over friends hanging out. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

Well, now that was rude, and uncomfortable. “No,” Phil said without meaning to. Or rather, he did mean it, but he’d rather have said it less bluntly. “I mean, that’s not-Dan and me are going-it’s a date. We’re going as a date. I’m sorry,” Phil blurted out.

“Oh,” Charlie finally turned to look at Dan as he said it. “Oh.” After another two or three long seconds that felt more like an hour to Phil, Charlie said, “Okay,” and promptly left.

Phil waited until he was out of sight, then cast a sound barrier, just in case.

“Um. Sorry, I didn’t-I shouldn’t have dragged you into that without asking first.”

Dan shook his head, dismissing Phil’s worries. But he looked thoughtful, so Phil braced for one of Dan’s sharp, insightful realisations.

“Do you want to go to Hogsmeade with me tomorrow?”

“Yeah?” Phil ventured, confused. “We’d already made plans to...”

“No, I mean…” Dan was blushing, dear Merlin, really blushing, his entire face was a light pink and one of his dimples was showing even though he wasn't even smiling, and it was the cutest thing Phil had ever seen in his life. “I mean, like a date. If you want. A real date, not just... to fool Charlie...” he trailed off.

Phil thought this is what a deer in the headlights must feel, except opposite. Like, the same feeling but with opposite tension. In that deer probably weren't eagerly looking forward to being run over.

“Yes?”

“Is that a question?” Dan was looking straight at him, despite his bright blush, head held high. Brave, a Gryffindor through and through.

“Yes.” Before Dan can ask if he means ‘yes, that was a question’, he barrelled on. “Yes, I’d really like to go on a date with you tomorrow, and also today, if you want. Like tonight. Or right now. Right now is good, we’re already here and this is a good place for a date, I think… Maybe I think any place is a good place for a date with you” Phil ended in a quiet voice, heart pounding with adrenaline and nerves, even as he could see the tension drain out of Dan like a physical presence, and the gorgeous smile he got in response made him smile back instinctively.

“Yeah?” Dan asked breathlessly, but it was rhetorical. When Dan reached out and took one of his hands in his, lacing their fingers and squeezing them lightly, Phil thought this was a whole new kind of magic he had never known before.

[raglanphd]

Man and His Symbols-Carl Jung

Symbols express something unknown to us. They are meaningful in themselves, and not purely representative. They aren’t signs as conscious thought is under the influence of the unconscious, which is always present.

The unconscious presents the thing (object) from sense experience without a word, language being necessary for self-conscious awareness. The unconscious is intentional, the content is repressed with an expenditure of energy for the purpose of being unconscious. Association with the word would remove our ability to think, use language, without bringing up unwanted thoughts.

The unconscious can be brought to conscious awareness by use of symbols. Ordinary discourse can distract from what is motivating our actions by introducing resistance. Free verbal association without resistance from the analyst can bring out what is repressed by concentrating on the meaning behind words, without forcing the meaning into another metaphor.

The unconscious does not afford exact localization in space. We are free to use concepts from natural science as metaphors, but should not reduce the unconscious to the physical metaphors.

The unconscious is not just a repository for archaic ideas from our personal past. The symbols we use in conscious interpersonal discourse get their power from a shared unconscious. Such inherited forms allow us to understand one another at a deeper level in discourse, symbolically, than as signs representing something else in the world.

Dreams are our best way to explore the meaning of symbols, of exploring the unconscious. Dreams occur regularly and their content is the least regulated and restricted from awareness.

Dreams have their own meaning, they must be interpreted as they are. Dreams are fantastical and should not be reduced to the day’s events or taken as literal truth but for their symbolic relation to the unconscious.

“The main task of dreams is to bring back a sort of "recollection” of the prehistoric, as well as the infantile world, right down to the level of the most primitive instincts.“

This is where we begin, with the individual to their personal history and then to deeper instinctual drives in the unconscious.

Jung’s dream: "I dreamed that I was in ‘my home,’ apparently on the first floor, in a cozy, pleasant sitting room furnished in the manner of the eighteenth century. I was astonished that I had never seen this room before, and began to wonder what the ground floor was like. I went downstairs and found the place was rather dark, with paneled walls and heavy furniture from the sixteenth century or even earlier. My surprise and curiosity increased. I wanted to see more of the whole structure of this house. So I went down to the cellar, where I found a door opening onto a flight of stone steps that led to a large vaulted room. The floor consisted of large slabs of stone and the walls seemed very ancient. I examined the mortar and found it was mixed with splinters of brick. Obviously the walls were of Roman origin. I became increasingly excited. In one corner, I saw an iron ring on a stone slab. I pulled up the slab and saw yet another narrow flight of steps leading to a kind of cave, which seemed to be a prehistoric tomb, containing two skulls, some bones, and broken shards of pottery. Then I woke up.”

“The dream is in fact a short summary of my own life, more specifically of the development of my own mind. I grew up in a house 200 years old, our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about 300 years old, and mentally my hitherto greatest spiritual adventure had been to study the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin. Shortly before this, I had been living with the still medieval concepts of my parents, for whom the world and men were still presided over by divine omnipotence and providence. This world had become antiquated and obsolete. My Christian faith had become relative through its encounter with Eastern religions and Greek philosophy. It was for this reason that the ground floor was so still, dark, and obviously uninhabited.

"My intuition consisted of the sudden and most unexpected insight into the fact that my dream drapes the myself, my life and my world, my whole reality against a theoretical structure erected by another, strange kind for reasons and purposes of its own. It was not Freud’s dream, it was mine; and I understood suddenly in a flash what my dream meant.”

Dream analysis is individualistic, there are no ciphers.

“The individual is the only reality. The further we move away from the individual toward abstract ideas about Homo sapiens, the more likely we are to fall in error…but if we are to see things in their right perspective, we need to understand the past of man as well as his present.”

We must understand the patient’s predilection and forget our own prejudices.

“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream”

Dreams have a compensatory role for individuals. The same dream can have different meanings.

Dream analysis is a dialectical technique between persons.

How well an individual functions is partly determined socially, through relationships.

Obsessive and emotional dreams are of a different nature, relating to needs more fundamental than those of conscious origin.

Elements occur in dreams that aren’t individual and not derived from personal experience. Aka archetypes, primordial images.

Motifs are not archetypes, as they are conscious representations. Not inherited.

“The term "archetype” is often misunderstood as meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs. But these are nothing more than conscious representations; it would be absurd to assume that such variable representations could be inherited.“

"The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif-representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern.

Freud hinted at this with archaic remnants: "mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind”. Freud however linked them with the biological drives of sexuality and death, reducing mental life to representing only biological imperatives. Archetypes represent needs beyond love and hunger owing to their inherited innate nature. They are self perpetuating.

Collective symbols are chiefly religious and both human and inhuman in origin, owing to the common descent of the species but also common descent of different peoples.

“If archetypes were representations that originated in our consciousness…we should surely understand them”

Instincts are physiological urges perceived by the senses, having a mental as well as a behavioral aspect. They manifest themselves in fantasy and are revealed in symbols. Their manifestations are archetypes. Without known origin, reproduced across time and place.

“It is even conceivable that the early origins of mans capacity to reflect come from the painful consequences of violent emotional clashes…the shock of a similar emotional experience is often needed to make people wake up and pay attention to what they are doing.”

Our consciousness is an ephemeral adaptation to the needs of the unconscious self.

“The unconscious, however, seems to be guided chiefly by instinctive trends, represented by corresponding thought forms-that is, by the archetypes.”

The unconscious is more descriptive of our mental life and our self than the conscious is.

Dreams can be predictive. It doesn’t ignore like consciousness does. It can be guided by trends, corresponding to known archetypes. Archetypes are dynamic.

“Something that is of a more or less unknown nature has been intuitively grasped by the unconscious and submitted to an archetypal treatment. This suggests that, instead of the process of reasoning that conscious thought would have applied, the archetypal mind has stepped in and taken over the task of prognostication. The archetypes thus have their own intuitive and their own specific energy. These powers enable them both to produce a meaningful interpretation (in their own symbolic style) and to interfere in a given situation with their own impulses and their own thought formations. Complexes compensate for faulty attitudes, myths compensate for the sufferings of mankind in general.”

Complexes are compensations in the personal unconscious, myths are compensations for the collective unconscious.

The self is the totality of our conscious, personal unconscious, and the shared collective unconscious which are made manifest through the ego. The shadow self is what isn’t reconciled into our self and remains in opposition, closest to our irrational and more primitive instincts. In the collective unconscious the self and the shadow are the hero archetype and the villain archetype, protagonist and antagonist.

Individuation reconciles opposites within the psyche. Life is the process of becoming an individual.

Individuation reconciles opposites within the psyche. Life is the process of becoming an individual.

“These four functional types correspond to the obvious means by which consciousness obtains its orientation to experience. Sensation (I.e sense perception) tells you that something exists; thinking tells you what it is; feeling tells you whether it is agreeable or not; and intuition tells you whence it comes and where it is going”

There are also extrovert and introvert personalities. Extroverts are driven toward the outer world, toward others, while introverts have their energy directed inward, toward mind and feeling.

The persona is how our ego presents itself to the external social world which adapts the ego to the outer world instead of reconciling or accepting the deep aspects of the self, what becomes manifested in the shadow self.

Personality relates to the persona, character relates to the self. Personality is our conscious relation to the world, by sensing, thinking, feeling, intuition, extroversion or introversion. A composite type is presented to the world to meet our instinctual needs. The complexes compensate for what is missing in conscious life and remains in the unconscious, personal and collective.

The anima and animus are the respective female and male aspects of ourselves. These feminine and masculine aspects remain in the personal unconscious because of our species’ bisexual constitution, our birth from a mother and a father.

Fundamental to the anima/animus is the passive/active orientation toward the world developed during youth, during the anal stage, which relate to the introvert/extrovert orientation towards the world. We strive for self-mastery as we separate from others early in life and must provide for our needs. We learn to receive as well as to provide. In potty training, when to withhold and contain and when to expel and direct.

The Mother Earth and God the father are manifestations of anima/animus from the collective unconscious relating to the metaphysical division between matter and form, the ovum and the sperm, the passive-receiving (feminine) aspect and the active-providing (masculine) aspect of the world. The demiurge master craftsman forms the earth from preexisting matter.