Monday 27 January 2003

Pic of the day: The girl becomes as tall as a building and intercepts two cruiser missiles ... all in the boy's imagination. Scene from the anime Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu.

Inflated ego

There are lots of people around with an unrealistic sense of self-worth and self-importance. Most of these are just plain dumb, and they are not who I am writing about here. Perhaps they were raised that way, or perhaps they just could never face the truth about how small and unimportant each of us is. It could scare anyone, I admit. It is natural to think of oneself as very important: As a child, you are by default concentrating on your own survival and growth, and this pretty much takes all your time. This is as it must be. For some people this lasts throughout life: They never grow up in that way.

Most of us realize, in our head and to some extent our heart, that other people are important too. We concentrate on ourselves and the few people we love, because we have limited resources. But we silently assume that others feel the same way, and we respect this and expect them to show us the same respect. When some people suddenly think they are qualitatively better than us, we are not happy about it. Yet sometimes it is hard not to think so, and I will write about one such situation today.

***

It all started with my current fad, a Japanese cartoon (anime) called Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu. I don't understand Japanese myself, but I am told that the title is a pun, possibly even a multiple pun. It could mean "the jungle is nice / fine / sunny except for some Guu" but since the main character is a boy called Hale it could also be "the jungle was all about Hale until Guu came". My Japanese readers please feel free to correct me, as I have only heard this from others.

As mentioned in my yellow Friday entry, this Guu character seems to be based on the experience of Anima, the female archetype as experienced by men. C. G. Jung consider her the first of the archetypes in the collective subconscious. Before we get that far, there's the personal subconscious and its archetype, the shadow. The shadow is the parts of our personal life that we don't like to think about, the things we've suppressed and tried to forget. This was about as far as poor Freud came, and it was certainly a big step from ignoring the subconscious completely, like western culture had done most of the time. (And so we had all the demonic possessions and witch burnings and what not. Similar processes continue today wherever and whenever people are unwilling to look at their own shadow.)

Anima is not simply a repressed part of ourselves. Well, you could say she is, if you assume that we are born gender-neutral and just choose away half of ourselves, but this seems far-fetched at best. There are real biological reasons why we grow into one gender and not the other, even though some of the gender roles are assigned somewhat randomly (such as "pink for girls, blue for boys").

The female archetype then is somewhat alien, and therefore mysterious. We don't really understand, and so we are uncertain of its limits. But it is certainly powerful. Men kill and die for the ideal woman, even if she usually only exist in their heads. This is the image we project onto women when we fall in love. (Except a few of us don't.)

***

It is not a physical thing, but rather it borders on the religious. Anima is a small goddess. And so we get all those insane love songs that you don't know for sure whether they are love songs or hymns to the Goddess. I can't live without you but I'm drowning in your love, you're taking me to paradise and it's with you that I'll be forever more. Yadda yadda. There ain't no cure for love, or so they say.

They are so wrong. The solution is to eat your goddess. Uhm, and I mean that in a totally non-ecchi way. When you look at your inner life and you meet this character, you realize that it was a part of yourself the whole time. You absorb its functions into yourself, and you grow as a person as more of your subconscious becomes conscious. This is bound to be a good thing, right?

Except that Anima was never quite meant to be part of a man. Yes, she was in our subconscious but she's part of the collective subconscious. She's more general than our individual self, our ego. She is part of the greater self which cannot be contained within the ego. Things only get worse as we continue inward and absorb more of the characters we meet there. We become larger than life, godlike, superhuman. As we transcend our humanity, we start to lose it. This can be cool, but it can certainly also be irritating to common people. It is not conductive to a normal family life either, that's for sure.

***

Jung wrote about how more and more people seemed to feel a need to absorb from the subconscious. As the collective subconscious evolved, it seemed to develop a craving for consciousness. Myths started to break into life. If the mind was unable to handle this influx, the result was madness. But if the mind (perhaps with some help) learned from the subconscious, then the consciousness grew. This process did he call individuation, a word I think he just made up because it was difficult to think about a thing a lot and not give it a name.

The problem is that when the consciousness grows, some people let their ego grow correspondingly. They see all the fascinating stuff bubble up from the subconscious and they watch it and they begin to understand it, and they think "this is me". But it is not quite that simple. Some of this stuff comes from the collective subconscious. Jung thought it was like instincts, but more likely it is part of our culture, just not explicit. It could be shaped by such subtle clues as the structure of our language, for instance. Anyway, these things are shared. I cannot say "this is me" as if I somehow had gotten the copyright on it or could change it at a whim. I may adjust my own life, but whatever I do about my anima will have very little effect on my neighbor's anima. What we choose to think is certainly not without effect, but neither are we in control of the shared structures.

Let me use a comparison. You can be a linguist and study your language for many years. You will then know and understand many things about your language, which most people just take for granted. But you cannot randomly change a part of it. Well, you can, but if you do too much of that people will not understand you, and they will think you are weird. I make small changes like "overstatement" instead of "exaggeration" and people will still understand me. Perhaps some of them even think it is a better word. But if I suddenly start to grizg too many lurrgs, people will retreat and it will have no effect at all.

In the same way, we can only learn from the collective subconscious and have a kind of dialog with it. But we cannot master it. Like the Christian story about Jesus says, you can only become a God by accepting God and obeying him, not by fighting him. By bringing God into the world of man, Jesus came across as being God. In the same way, we can express the greater Self and give it individual form (individuation) but we cannot impose our control on it. If we overreach and try to let our ego swallow the greater self, then we become inflated and nothing good comes from it. We lose the dialog with the subconscious and thereby with all those who are connected through it.

(Notice that I don't state that this connection is telepathic or paranormal in any way. Perhaps that happens too, but as far as I know it happens through communication. Like here, now. We synchronize through our words and actions. Well, actions always overrule words, I guess.)