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Coming out of a prolonged period of social interactions, and now experiencing the exact opposite: semi-solitude in the Swiss mountains, I find it difficult to remember the person I was just a few weeks ago. One is talkative, opinionated, friendly while the other is quiet, melancholic, anxious. And though both personalities sprout forth from the same foundation, I cannot help but wonder whether there is such a thing as an I if I cannot even keep up a coherent self over the span of a few days. How can I be one thing whilst around people, and another thing whilst alone?
In literature we call stories involving a victim and a persecutor a drama. In life similar dramas take place, but more often than not, both the victim and the persecutor are located within the same person — the self. In 1912, in his dissertation entitled On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena, Carl Jung described a medium who claimed he was able to interact with spirits through seances. From this Jung hypothesized that the aforementioned “spirits” are parts of our many splinter personalities which lay dormant in our unconscious mind. While the medium thought the “splinter personalities” were spirits from some kind of outward realm, Jung believed they manifested themselves from within.
He postulated that our psyche, or our entire personality, is composed of a conscious and unconscious realm. Within the unconscious realm we are split between our personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The former is largely composed of our repressed, private desires, while the collective unconscious is made up of instincts and archetypes. Archetypes grant structure to the various part of our psyche and influence our emotional states, our thoughts and our behavior, and function best when in harmony. Unfortunately few people function as a coherent whole. Most, like myself, suffer from imbalances wherein some parts of our personality are inflated, depending on our environment, while others are repressed.
“Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as ‘self-realization.’” (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Volume 7, Carl Jung)
Striving towards completeness, or individuation, was of such dire importance to Jung that he dedicated a large part of his career to the task. Many of us get stuck at various stages of the individuation process as the integration of our unconscious into everyday consciousness is not only difficult, but scary. Our psyche, however, is not a mere by-product of our neural networks, but an irreducible fact of nature that should be considered as real as physical reality.
Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, Jung postulated that the best, most impartial way to accelerate individuation is to record and analyze our dreams over a long period of time. Unlike Freud, however, Jung did not believe that our dream hide meaning from us. Rather they are undisguised and spontaneous symbolic representations of the unconscious, “they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.” (Collected Works of C.G. Jung Volume 10, Carl Jung)
Largely because of its mysterious nature, our nocturnal imagination is more vibrant than our day to day imagination. We tend to have a hard time deciphering our dream world as it is a realm made up of highly symbolic structures. Could our true personalities lie within these deep realms of our unconscious? That somewhere in the depths of our slumber, we transform into our true being? Iris Murdoch explores a similar theme in her novel The Sea, The Sea, a story about a talented but smug playwright who is overcome by a fatal flaw: because of his obsessive self-reflection, his narcissism ultimately overshadows his creativity. His creativity, that part of us that extends out of the mortal realm and into a similar dreamlike trance as found in deep sleep, granting us “an occasion for unselfing” (Murdoch).
Perhaps this coherent self, the one I cannot seem to find when I indulge in introspection, is precisely hidden from me because it is not meant to be found forcefully. Perhaps the self can only be found at the very top and bottom of our personalities. Everything in the middle is an act, with the conscious world as our stage. Murdoch understood perfectly that we remain perennially half-opaque to ourselves. We feign coherency, while all the while we are uncertain creatures, acting ourselves into being.
The division I feel and felt between the person I portray socially, and the person I am whilst alone is natural. Unselfing, Murdoch warns, cannot come into being through the straining of our will. Rather, it comes forth as a relaxing of the spirit, and the seeping into the many pulses of existence. I am neither this nor that, but the thing which arises as I sleep, meditate, find myself in the flow of writing or painting…
The Incoherent Self
The Vanishing Mediator. Any number multiplied by Numero Uno equals itself. Personally I bear witness to 10000 dead pie who awaken, every morning, with a querulous defiance. Absurd is the word !
If we are defined by the top and bottom of the top and the bottom of our personalities and everything else--the stuff in the middle-- is an act. . .it makes me wonder about both myself and how I am weaving in and out of the middle act ALL the time. I think I am consistent but maybe not. I think I am dependable but maybe not. Is the bassoon player the same as the author? Is the dancer the same as the professor mentoring students? Can it really be that clean cut? Or am I just an actor! Oh my. Good stuff Shifra. x