Telling fact from fancy

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This is from The Symbolic Quest, by Edward C. Whitmont, Princeton University Press, 1969, p.161:

"Projection {of our own shadow material} invariably blurs our own view of the other person. Even when the projected qualities happen to be real qualities of the other person…

Imagine an automobile driver who wears spectacles of red glass. He would find it difficult to tell the difference between red, yellow or green traffic lights and he would be in constant danger of an accident. It is of no help to him that some or for that matter even most of the lights he perceives as red really happen to be red. The danger comes from the inability to differentiate and separate which his "red projection" imposes upon him.

Where a shadow projection occurs we are not able to differentiate between the actuality of the other person and our own complexes. We cannot tell fact from fancy. We cannot see where we begin and he ends. We cannot see him; neither can we see ourselves."

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"Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race." –Carl Jung

Attack and avoidance

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My husband is a contractor, so he gets to deal with people who want something from him 'yesterday' on a daily basis. The other day David got a snippy, snooty email message — not a call, not a drop-in visit at the building site, but an email, of course — from one of his clients, telling him to please "focus" and get his job finished immediately.

Now, bear in mind that this same client changed the entire "focus" of the job himself by adding a bathroom to the project. In other words, by more than doubling the amount of work he originally contracted with David to do, after he contracted with David to do it. "Oh! Let's put a bathroom in down there, too!"

But the client couldn't see his own part in creating a problem. All he could see was his own impatience with the result. And all he could think of to do about that impatience was speak to David — via electronic device, of course — as if David were a complete idiot who'd been wasting his time.

Is life in the US becoming one long warlike video game? And are there really only two ways to play the game now, only two strategies for winning: 1) attack or  2) avoidance?

it is hard to gain experience in polite discussion. In parlay and trade-off. We don't have to talk to others very often anymore, especially if we disagree with them. We are so well entertained now — hunkered down in the privacy of our own homes — that we spend most of our free time alone. Hell, we spend most of our work time alone. A computer monitor is not another person. How many jobs these days require the development of diplomacy and/or tact in interpersonal relationships? Versus how many jobs require simply getting one-up on the competition no matter what it takes…?

So maybe it's no surprise that the same thing is happening in personal communication as has already happened when we get behind the wheels of our cars: you can be as selfish as you want, you can project as much blame as you want, you can attack, you can bend the rules, and you do not have to reach a compromise, because you are not really in contact with other people. They can't hit back right away. They are sealed off in their little spaceships of plastic and steel, and you are sealed off in yours.

Similarly, we have developed ways of "speaking" to others or about others, without being anywhere near others. That's what I'm doing right now, with this blog piece, by the way…  I am sealed off, by myself, here in my office, talking to my computer screen about someone else's behavior.

Dangerous.

Dangerous to be developing so many ways of attacking, so many ways of avoiding, while not developing very many ways of arriving at mannerly agreements.

 

“Slut shaming”? It should be “shame on those doing the posting.”

Posted on by kay

If you were listening to NPR a couple of nights ago while making dinner or driving home from work, you might have heard a segment about "slut shaming." Which is what some young people do to other young people via facebook and simliar social media platforms.

And you might have thought you were living in Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, when adulterous women were branded with scarlet A's while adulterous men went scot free.

And you might have gotten scared out of your wits.

Because we are still living in Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, psychologically. Just with far deadlier tools.

What's new and scary is not how awfully and abominably some people treat other people. That's as old as evolution, and presumably not any worse today than it was in ancient times.

What so new and so scary about the times we live in are the devastatingly disasterous ways we've developed for treating one another awfully and abominably.

The bell curve of human intelligence hasn't changed. What's different is our access to one another, our ability to do everlasting harm to others in brief thoughtless minutes.

These days, the meanest, stupidest person in the US probably has several credit cards and an arsenal of guns. Not to mention the ability to say anything about anybody in wildly public ways with no fear of retribution.

Our technology is outrunning our consciousness — by leaps and bounds and laps and laps.

 

 

Everybody’s crazy here

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Carl Jung once said, "Neurosis is the price we pay for civilization." And even a cursory look within or without proves how accurate that statement is.

Thus, going around trying to prove that you're not crazy — usually by pointing out how crazy other people are — misses the point entirely.

The point is to go and ahead and freely admit how crazy you are, so you can start to do something about it.

 

We need to get serious, folks

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"The task of confronting the brutal, destructive elements of the shadow has become the inescapable destiny of our species: if we fail, we cannot hope to survive." –Anthony Stevens, PhD., Analytical Psychologist

 

It's time to get serious, folks.

It's time to connect the dots while we still have some dots left to connect.

How many Native American children were killed when Europeans took over this continent?

How many children were killed at Dresden and Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

How many children have died when we interferred in other countries to protect American corporate interests? (Pick just about any country in Central America or the Middle East and start counting. See Overthrow, by Stephen Kinzer.)

How many children — that we will never even hear about — are being killed by our silent, deadly drones today?

How many of our own children are going stark raving mad now and killing other children before they turn the incredibly deadly weapons which are readily available on themselves? (Most mass murderers are white males between the ages of 25 and 35.)

"Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race." — Carl Jung

 

 

Watch out for that family stuff during the holidays…

Posted on by kay

I'm just gonna let James Hollis cover the holiday/family/shadow issue. There's no one one better qualified, or more truthful, for the job. And this stuff is big. It's old, it's mostly unconscious, and it's BIG.

The following excerpt is from Hollis' book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:

 

"We all know that the normative power, the ingrained authority, and the stability of all great institutions — the church, the government, and the family — have undergone substantive, progressive enervation over the past two centuries, and are today most commonly attended by nostalgia, cynicism, habit and rootlessness. The first, nostalgia, is epitomized by the now banal songs that assault one beginning in November, such as "I'll Be Home for Christmas." Most of my clients have unhappy memories of the holidays. Or they have inordinate hopes for what can be repaired in their families and are always disappointed, or they are re-exposed at holiday time to those familiar dynamics lingering with them as pathologies, or they miss those who have died or from whom they have been estranged. Not the pretty picture one would expect based on the commercialized versions one sees on television! As with the fantasy of romantic love, perhaps the idealized family fails because we ask too much of it.

This very afternoon I sat with a man in his late forites, just back from a holiday visit to his extended family of origin. His scattered tribe had gathered from distant places and brought all their familiar madness with them. This tiime, Father was dead. Mother was now, finally, benign, half-senile, half the viper she once was. One brother was drifting through an alcoholic haze, another addicted to video games. One sister was having affairs with two different married men. Only one sister was willing to talk with my client about his life. I told him that he was a survivor, and that he was entitled to echo the words of Job, "I only have alone escaped to tell thee." He asked me, "How many of my family can I save?" And I said, "One. And I'm talking to him." Battered as he had been by their substance abuse, their continual denigration, and their mis-use of fundamentalistic guilt, he had in turn found intimacy with others so risky that, lonely as he was, he had never managed to commit himself to another. So much for over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house we go.

What then, in this current era, with its mobility, its transience, and its anonymity, might family be, and what is reasonable to ask of it? How is family to serve the task of soul building? While the family as institution was historically necessary for survival, the protection of children, and the transmission of cultural values, I am not always ready today to venerate the idea of family naively, for I have seen where family can also be a vehicle of tyranny, a sanctioned mode of constriction, and the inhibitor of developmental needs to the individual.

…we are obliged to ask tough questions of family in order to see if the institution in each particular instance serves the soul. We have to ask, "Does each person receive affirmation and support in being different, or is the price of being in the family conformity, the subversion of the agenda for individual growth that each of us brings into this world?" Just as each marriage has the right to ask fidelity, loyalty to the task of the marriage, and the willingness to work at resolution of discord, so every family has the right to ask the full participation of each member in the life of the family. Yet all marriage and family therapists know that family interactions are typically arrayed around its most damaged member. Except in the case of a catastrophic illness of a child, that damaged member is inevitably one of the parents, or sometimes both of them in their pas de deux. When I hear someone waxing sentimentally about family, I often detect nostalgia for what family is supposed to mean, rather than what they experienced.

Don't suppose that I am negative toward, or cynical in approaching, the idea of family. Yes, it's true that as a therapist I am almost daily in the thick of trying to repair some of the hurt that family has brought to the life of the person sitting before me. But in my own family I have also experienced, and been immeasurably enriched by, being loved beyond my merit, having others sacrifice on my behalf, and knowing there were those who worried for me as I made my bumbling way through the world. My point is rather that I believe nothing can escape the realistic scrutiny of consciousness. Of every family we must ask, "How well did the soul flourish here? How much life was lost through the failure of modeling a larger life, granting permission to follow one's own course, or was constricted by the glass ceiling of familial fears and limitations?" 

—Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, How to Finally, Really Grow Up, James Hollis, PhD, pgs. 129-131

"Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." –opening lines of Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

How do you spell relief? Obama.

Posted on by kay

I had no idea how stressed out I was by the looming Presidential election until after it was over. (Mainly because I swore to myself after the Bush/Gore debacle that I would never get that upset over politics again. Which didn't really work, as you can see. Apparently I was just as upset about this election, but repressing it.)

Wow — what a difference! A whole new lightness, brain and body, head to toe, inside and out.

Because this election was a fulcrum, a turning point. And even though I was trying to be cool about it, I knew it in my bones.

Had the majority of voters in America been backwards enough to believe what the Republican Right is saying and doing these days, it would have been a very bad sign indeed. Adding 4 years of Romney-rule to the 8 years of Bush-rule that we are still trying to recover from might have made recovery really, truly impossible.

And who knows? Maybe it is impossible. Maybe, like every other democracy so far in history, we will turn — have turned? —  into an oligarchy run by the rich and powerful who dominate the masses by spending money, putting on circuses and making small concessions.

But also maybe, just maybe, we could become a democracy that lasts.

One where people work together to govern themselves.

At least we have a shot at that now. At least we have a President who understands that lying, blaming, smearing and finger pointing are the shadow of human interaction, not the substance.

 

This Election is Projection

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Projection happens all the time. It starts with denial, and ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don’t like —or are ashamed of, or don’t want to think about, or can’t bring ourselves to deal with— and then we project it out onto another person, where we can see it.

Imagine a movie projector. You would be the projector whirring in that little room at the back, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re creating the image, the image is coming from inside of you, but the other person is the only place where you can actually see that image. Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality we’re projecting, while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. {“I don’t have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? You have a terrible temper!”}

I'm sure you've heard that Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. Well, Projection and Blame ain't just small towns in Texas. We are not talking about a quaint practice only carried out by a few remote primitives somewhere on the other side of the planet. This cycle —denial-projection-blame— is a basic psychological mechanism. It’s a description of what went on at your dinner table last night. It’s a description of what we each do all day long unless we’re making a sincere effort not to do so, and probably a good 78.87% of the time even then. There’s no getting around the fact that human beings are now using their intelligence to project whatever they don’t like about themselves onto other people, rather than using their intelligence to correct whatever it is about themselves they don’t like.

Shoot—we’re taught to project whatever we don’t like about ourselves onto other people. Children hear their parents and teachers and leaders do it every day. Hang out in any schoolyard, anywhere in the world, for one whole recess period, and count how many times one kid blames another kid for what he or she just did. Where do they learn that?

Start looking around for the human shadow. It will not take you long to find it. In history, in current politics, in the news, in the paper, on the web, on television, in your own home, and in your own heart. Nor will it take you long to come to the conclusion that this is not some harmless procedure easily overlooked among friends. This is one of humanity’s biggest problems.

As Robert Bly put it, "Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world."

And as Carl Jung wrote, "Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race."

Whoa. What? Extinction of the human race? What in hell is he talking about? Why’d he say that? Because we not only project blame individually, we also project blame collectively. Or: Whole Cultures Cast Shadows. A hat that looks really cool in a bar in Wyoming may not look cool at all on Fifth Avenue in New York. There are substantial cultural differences between the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South. Between being German and being Sudanese. Between Chinese and Chilean. We’re not just stuck in ego roles and family roles; we’re also stuck in social-historical-mythological eras and areas. And then, in practice, we refine our differences even further by only hanging out with people inside our era and area who are the most like us. Red State, Blue State.

As history has shown over and over again, if enough people deny and project the same qualities something really nasty occurs: like Inquisitions, or exterminations of native populations, or slavery, or the Third Reich, or Israelis and Palestinians, or Shiites and Sunnis, or genocide, or Corporate America—Where the Rich Get Richer! while the poor get laid off. Massive acts of evil simply could not be perpetrated without massive amounts of denial, projection, and blame.

The human shadow comes in layers, as does the unconscious: there’s a personal layer as well as a collective layer. Thus we each have a personal shadow that can get out of hand —for example, we might make fun of how others look if we feel insecure about our own attractiveness. And then we each participate in a collective shadow that can get out of hand —for example, we might accuse another group of evil if we can’t bear to look at the evil our own group has done.

An excellent example of the latter occurred in US history at the end of WWII. After the saturation bombing of German cities by British and US forces which culminated in a firestorm at Dresden so fierce it literally melted 100,000 people, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on a country that was trying to surrender to the Allied forces. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki 150,000 people were killed instantly, and tens of thousands later died slowly and hideously from radiation poisoning. We’re talking more than 300,000 dead people here, and not soldiers, either—completely innocent civilians who were going about their business in big cities. Gruesome. Way beyond gruesome.

Yet soon after these events, unable and unwilling to comprehend that such colossal evil could be perpetrated by their own country, citizens all over the USA (spurred on by their leaders), began to obsess about how dangerous Russia was, and to build bomb shelters in their backyards. I grew up with one of those bomb shelters in my backyard. {No lie: my Dad had an actual bomb shelter built on our property in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s. At first it was all clean and full of water and canned goods, later it got dirty and full of spider webs and snakes, and then finally, after many years of neglect, my Aunt Eddie planted iris all over it, so it eventually became a little hill of flowers with a hollow core.} I also grew up hearing stories about how brutal the Japanese were in WWII. No one ever mentioned Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden in my family.

In other words, there is a ‘me against you’ aspect to the personal shadow, and there is an ‘us against them’ aspect to the collective shadow. And projected out onto others, both types of shadow material harm—do actual damage to—the targets of their projections. Not just psychic mumbo-jumbo, real harm. “Bombs in the baby carriages,” as Paul Simon said in "Graceland."

Welcome to a Presidential election year! Where all the problems one party hasn't been able to address or fix will be blamed on the other party, while the problems themselves will remain unaddressed.

The Shadow in Warfare

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Oregon Friends of CG Jung managed to convince Karl Marlantes to come talk here in Portland two weeks ago, and I'm still not over it. Marlantes is the author of Matterhorn, a novel based on his own experiences as a Marine during the Vietnam War, and the non-fiction What It Is Like To Go To War. You need both books. Buy them. Read them. Recommend them to others. This man has been there, done that — and then spent the next 40 years dealing with it.

The following quotes are from What It Is Like To Go To War:

"Part of us loves to destroy…  this feeling is just the other face of creativity, in Jungian terms, the shadow side of creativity…  What's scary is that it is far easier to take the path of transcendence through destruction than to take the path of transcendence through creation. And the destructive path gets easier as technology improves, while positive creating, whether spiritual, artistic, or commercial, is just as hard as it ever was." p. 63

Isn't that what Yoda said? The dark side isn't stronger. Just easier. Faster. More seductive.

"You can't be a good person until you observe how bad you are. It is only when the evil is conscious that it can be countered." p. 64

"The transcendent realm one reaches through violence is one that society says it condemns but in fact celebrates everywhere, on film, on television, and in the news. It is because of this split that these feelings are so very dangerous. This split is like the wicked fairy who isn't invited to the wedding but who will get her due. It is the darkness that haunts the lynch mob that in the daytime is dispersed as lawyers, doctors, and church aldermen." p. 66-67

"We are legion, says the Bible. We have a shadow, says Jung." p. 68

"Once we recognize our shadow's existence we must resist the enticing step of going with its flow. This is the way of Charles Manson and terrorist cells. This is also the way of filmakers who suddenly get into its dark power and splatter it all over the screen in slow motion. This is the wrong way to relate to it." p. 69

"The critical psychological issue about weapons technology is the ability to distance the user from the effects. A constant martial fantasy is the 'clean kill'… This clean-kill fantasy avoids the darkness. It allows the hero trip without any cost… Even the language is getting neat and tidy, as in 'surgical strike'… Numbness and hypocrisy aren't learned in boot camp. When it comes to inurement to violence, boot camp is just a finishing school… Getting used to the extremes of violence in combat is just another level up from our everyday training. The circuitry is all in place, having been wired long years before. All that's happening is an increase in voltage. The problem is, however, that the voltage has been steadily and rapidly increasing in all of the entertainment fields… our psychic wiring is getting sized upward for higher and higher voltages." p. 71-73

"If you don't recognize your shadow sides, you'll be likely to cause a lot of damage trying to do your heroic deeds." p. 85

"Then we started seeing some hard-to-stomach reality on television. [during the Vietnam War] Rather than accept that this terrible reality was the result of our inflated ideas of being the good-guy soldiers we thought we were, and accept that we'd buried deeply our own despised Nazis and Tojos, it was easier to throw that darkness onto the people we asked to do the fighting. So the Vietnam veterans came home catching everyone's shadow, portrayed as dope-shooting,coke-snuffing, baby-killing mercenaries. They were far from that." p. 86-87

Well, this is ridiculous. I'll end up quoting the whole damn book.

Go buy Marlantes' books yourself:  Matterhorn and What It Is Like To Go To War.

Then read them.

We owe the people who fight our wars for us. Big time.