Jungian Theory for Storytellers

A Toolkit

Helena Bassil-Morozow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351128520
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Jungian Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jungian Theory for Storytellers is a toolkit for anyone using Jungian archetypes to create stories in fiction, TV, film, video games, documentaries, poetry, and many other media. It contains a detailed classification of the archetypes, with relevant examples, and explains how they work in different types of narratives. Importantly, Bassil-Morozow explores archetypes and their significance in characterization, individuation, plot and story-building.

Bassil-Morozow also presents an overview of Jung's thoughts on creativity and other Jungian concepts, including the unconscious, ego, persona and self and the individuation process, and shows how they are linked to conflict. The book provides an explanation of relevant Jungian terms for a non-Jungian audience and introduces the idea of the hero's journey, with examples included throughout.

Accessibly written yet academic, both practical and engaging, and written with a non-Jungian audience in mind, Jungian Theory for Storytellers is an ideal source for writers and screenwriters of all backgrounds, including academics and teachers, who want to use Jungian theory in their work or are seeking to understand relevant Jungian ideas.

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1 The unconscious

The birthplace of creativity

According to Jung, the creative process is born in the unconscious. In terms of narratives, the unconscious is also the moving force behind our characters’ motivation, sense of direction, impulses, and both positive and negative emotions. The Jungian unconscious is, however, complex, and these motivations can come from one of two chambers: the collective, in which contents shared by all humankind, past and present, reside; or the personal, which is home to our unique issues and experiences.

The presence of the common psychological base – the collective unconscious – is important as it emphasizes the structural similarities of human narratives instead of concentrating on the cultural and personal differences. The collective unconscious consists of archetypes (discussed in detail in Chapter 2), whereas the personal unconscious is home to individual contents such as memories, fantasies and complexes (examined later in this chapter).

The collective unconscious

Jung defines the collective unconscious as a system that exists independently from the individual, has nothing to do with personal experience, and contains universal characters and behaviour patterns we all know and recognize (parental figures, romantic partner; growing up, falling in love, dealing with midlife crises, etc.). The collective unconscious is inherited, Jung argues (CW 9/I: para. 90).

It is thus an objective system, unknowable in its vastness. It is so much larger than individual consciousness that it is important to know yourself well in order to avoid being engulfed by it. Its influence, the effect of ‘a merging of minds’ and ‘being at one with the world’, is exciting and addictive. Human consciousness, Jung keeps reminding his readers, is but a tiny island in the ocean that is the collective unconscious:

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the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system; it is sheer objectivity, as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject, in complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness, where I am always the subject that has an object. There I am utterly one with the world; so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am. ‘Lost in oneself’ is a good way of describing this state. But this self is the world, if only a consciousness could see it. That is why we must know who we are.

(CW 9/I: 46)

Naturally, Jung realizes that a giant, objective (as he calls it) superstructure that has a ‘mind’ of its own and that is invisible to the human eye is a difficult and complex concept. Not all of his readers would be convinced. Some will start asking questions similar to the ones atheists ask believers: ‘How do you know it exists if you cannot see it?’ Jung attempts to forestall accusations of being unscientific by trying to give his concept a ‘biological’ base. The unconscious, he says, is not a mystical concept; far from it:

The hypothesis of the collective unconscious is, therefore, no more daring than to assume there are instincts. One admits readily that human activity is influenced to a high degree by instincts, quite apart from the rational motivations of the conscious mind. So if the assertion is made that that our imagination, perception, and thinking are likewise influenced by inborn and universally present formal elements, it seems to me that a normally functioning intelligence can discover in this idea as much or as little mysticism as in the theory of instincts.

(CW 9/I: para. 92)

Jung also gives his readers what he calls ‘empirical’ (verifiable by observation) proofs of the existence of the collective unconscious. There are several such proofs. The first is dreams, in which archetypes appear to us involuntarily, which proves that they are products of nature (CW 9/I: para. 100).

Then there is ‘active imagination’: ‘a sequence of fantasies produced by deliberate concentration’ (CW 9/I: para. 101). Active imagination is a good way of making otherwise hidden and repressed fantasies conscious. Imagine that you saw a flock of brightly coloured hot air balloons high up in the sky. Suddenly you imagine yourself riding in one of these balloons, breathing in fresh air, feeling simultaneously excited and scared, looking at the little dots that are people, the moving dots that are cars, at the incredible puffed-up clouds above and the green and yellow patchwork of forests and farm fields below. Why are you having this fantasy? Is it because you are afraid of heights? Or perhaps you feel trapped in your job or relationship, and dream of escaping? Maybe you find everyday existence dull, and look to the skies for salvation from reality? Do you secretly dream of being ‘above it all’? In any case, stay with it, and let images and sensations flow out freely. Observe them, take note of them. Don’t force them out or stifle them in. Stay in the moment and enjoy the rare meeting of the unconscious with consciousness.

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Active imagination is spontaneous creativity, but it can be managed and directed to produce a creative product. In several of his articles concerning the role of the collective unconscious in the creative process, Jung criticizes Freud and his disciples for looking for the artist’s personal problems (and particularly sexual issues) in the work of art. He believes that a novel or a painting is not simply a dump heap of its creator’s unsolved, ‘dirty’ problems such as a secret desire for the mother or the wish that the rival sibling might fall off the balcony, but a true expression of the force that is bigger than any personal problem: the collective unconscious. Its contents, archetypes, ‘appear . . . in the shaped material of art as the regulative principles that shape it; that is to say, only by inferences drawn from the finished work can we reconstruct the age-old original of the primordial image’ (CW 15: para. 94). The magical process of the birth of works of art out of raw creativity will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5.

Finally, there are more problematic ‘proofs’ of the existence of the collective unconscious, such as psychotic delusions, ‘fantasies observed in trance-like states’ and ‘dreams of early childhood, from the third to the fifth year’ (CW 9/I: para. 50). Yet, Jung takes these types of evidence very seriously because the information contained in them is not meaningless. They contain a grain of truth and therefore deserve to be treated with respect. In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he writes about a schizophrenic female patient who was convinced that she heard God’s voice in her body. Instead of dismissing this claim as nonsensical, Jung decided to listen to the voice and even discovered that it made ‘some very sensible remarks’ (Jung, 1962: 148).

Earlier in the book, he also recalls the case of a young woman who became mentally ill as a result of sexual abuse in the hands of her schoolmate as well as her brother. The traumatized patient was convinced that she lived on the moon, and that her heroic task was to kill a vampire who kidnapped women and children. After stalking her prey for several nights, she finally came face to face with the vampire:

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Suddenly he stood before her. He had several pairs of wings. His face and entire figure were covered by them, so that she could see nothing but his feathers. Wonder-struck, she was seized by curiosity to find out what he really looked like. She approached, hand on the knife. Suddenly the wings opened and a man of unearthly beauty stood before her. He enclosed her in his winged arms with an iron grip, so that she could no longer wield the knife. In any case she was so spellbound by the vampire’s look that she would not have been capable of striking. He raised her from the platform and flew off with her.

(1962: 151)

Even though the young woman was severely mentally ill, there is nothing unusual in this fantasy given the girl’s previous experiences with predatory males. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century when Romanticism made vampires into symbols of predatory behaviour, they have been associated with seduction and sexual aggression. One interpretation of the fantasy could be that the victim was trying to make sense of her terrifying experiences, and perhaps attempting to restore her trust in men. The dream could also be interpreted as a revenge fantasy in which the roles of the victim and the aggressor are reversed.

After she was discharged and took a job as a nurse in a sanatorium, she shot and lightly wounded an assistant doctor who, Jung writes euphemistically, ‘made a somewhat rash approach to her’ (1962: 152). Jung was also shocked to learn that she was carrying the gun with her at all times in case she had to defend herself against sexual advances. The young woman’s perception of men as potentially dangerous was confirmed once more by the incident with the assistant doctor. In this light, the image of the vampire created by her unconscious to make sense of the situation, in metaphorical terms, is a lucid and understandable response of a victimized female to a shameful, scary and confusing situation.

The vampire fantasy goes beyond the experiences of the individual female in hostile circumstances (the personal unconscious), and potentially throws light on the position of women in patriarchal societies in general, or the role of women in social structures. Jung argues that psychosis contains ‘the old human conflicts’, and whereas patients may appear to be apathetic or irrational, ‘there is more going on in their minds, and more that is meaningful, than there seems to be’ (1962: 149).

Thus, the collective unconscious finds its expression in dreams, active imagination and psychotic fantasies, and exists independently from the individual. It creates a universal picture of psychic life and reflects common experiences shared by all humankind. It needs to be treated with respect, despite our habit of dismissing things that look irrational to us, or things that we cannot control.

The personal unconscious

Whereas the collective unconscious contains general and universal patterns, and is shared by everyone, its personal counterpart reflects the issues of particular individuals. It rests below the threshold of consciousness, and is fairly superficial. Each of us has our own version of the personal unconscious as a direct response to our unique life. Jung explains its existence by the fact that human consciousness cannot hold many things at once, and some inevitably end up being repressed, forgotten or subliminally perceived (CW 7: para. 205). Instead of forever disappearing, this content, which cannot be kept in the congested consciousness because of the lack of space, ends up in this depository of human experiences – the personal unconscious.

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If the collective unconscious is home to the archetypes, which are shared by everyone, the personal unconscious contains personal issues such as memories or complexes, which are unique (Jacobi, 1942: 37). A complex is a constellation of sensitive issues in an individual, ‘a centre of functional disturbance, which becomes virulent in certain external and internal situations, when it may totally upset the psychic balance and dominate the whole personality’ (Jacobi, 1942: 36). Complexes vary from individual to individual: one person may viciously compete with their father; another is obsessed with submissive women he can control; someone else may feel like a superhero or a saviour; a fourth thinks she is Mother Teresa. Popular culture seems to like the narrative potential of complexes. Any of Marvel’s characters (for instance, Spider-Man, Iron Man or Hulk) may be described as possessing (and being possessed by) a complex which prevents them from feeling normal: anger complex, invincibility complex, etc.

Our personal unconscious makes itself known when, for instance, we have a dream about our boss whom we hate; when we suddenly feel an urge to call our elderly parents just to make sure they are fine; or when we catch a peripheral glimpse of an attractive person on the underground, and surreptitiously look again. Although transparent and fairly superficial, these impulses nevertheless are not fully digested and accepted by consciousness.

In all three cases, we may not even realize what we are doing, or why we are doing it. The information accompanying these events may not be fully available to consciousness. This is because we are trying to protect ourselves from unpleasant thoughts or emotional disasters; or perhaps this particular impulse or feeling is on its way to reach the threshold of consciousness, but is not yet there. In contrast with Freud’s famous view of subliminal contents as being caused by unpleasant and therefore repressed childhood experiences, Jung emphasizes that the hidden thoughts are not necessarily repressed thoughts – they may simply be not developed or ripe enough for us to understand, and are ‘waiting’ for the right moment to become visible:

In Freud’s view, as most people know, the contents of the unconscious are reducible to infantile tendencies which are repressed because of their incompatible character. Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment and continues throughout life. By means of analysis the repression is removed and the repressed wishes made conscious.

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According to this theory, the unconscious contains only those parts of the personality which could just as well be conscious, and have been suppressed only through the process of education. Although from one point of view the infantile tendencies of the unconscious are the most conspicuous, it would nonetheless be a mistake to define or evaluate the unconscious entirely in those terms. The unconscious has still another side to it: it includes not only repressed contents, but all psychic material that lies below the threshold of consciousness. It is impossible to explain the subliminal nature of all this material on the principle of repression.

(CW 7: para. 202–3)

Instead, Jung argues, some materials, such as an uncomfortable hunch or a pleasant sensation about a particular situation, ‘have not yet reached the threshold of consciousness’ (CW 7: para. 204). In this way, Jung adds a holistic dimension to the relationship between consciousness and the personal unconscious. They are simply engaging in dynamics, in a conversation; they are constantly managing and exchanging ideas, thoughts, feelings, premonitions, sensations, memories and intuitions.

In this way, we may dislike our boss but cannot express this hostility openly for fear of confrontation and possible damage. We may even lie to ourselves that she is likeable and has a range of positive qualities which offset the negative ones. Alternatively, we may not be aware of our feelings, and once this information reaches consciousness, we may take action – raise a complaint, confront the boss, or even resign.

We also love our parents and are afraid that they may die suddenly from a heart attack; perhaps we even feel guilty for not visiting them as often as we should. Or maybe the fear has nothing to do with repressed guilt, and is simply a realistic assessment of the situation by our personal unconscious. After all, we have to be prepared for all eventualities.

Finally, flirting with strangers on public transport is never a good idea as they are not likely to respond to our advances. On the other hand, we may simply not be aware of the impulse. Contents do not have to be repressed in order to be unconscious. They may just be waiting for the right moment to engage in a conversation with consciousness.

Jung’s Romantic vision of the psyche

Jung’s vision of the unconscious can be seen as ecological as well as in tune with nineteenth-century Romanticism, a movement that warned the Western world of the dangers of modernity and lamented the demise of nature and the ruination of beautiful rural landscapes caused by the Industrial Revolution. The Jungian philosopher Susan Rowland writes that ‘Jung takes a Romantic sensibility into anxieties about modernity and popular culture’ (Rowland, 2005: 12).

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Very much like the Romantics, Jung warns his readers about the dangers of modernity and urges them not to place too much confidence in the power of civilization and rationality. Consciousness, Jung maintains throughout his writings, is too self-assured. It tends to overestimate its own ability to handle instincts, feelings, emotions and projections. This overconfidence leads to inability to handle unconscious contents (dreams, fears, visions) when they arrive. Very often, these contents are simply repressed instead of being made conscious because ‘it suits our hypertrophied and hubristic modern consciousness not to be mindful of the dangerous autonomy of the unconscious and to treat it negatively as an absence of consciousness’ (CW 11: para. 141). Here, once more, Jung identifies consciousness as the driver of modernity and warns against the possible consequences of over-reliance on the rational approach to internal and external worlds.

Yet, Jung does not just criticize consciousness for being too arrogant and modernity for being disrespectful towards mother nature. We need both, consciousness and the unconscious, to maintain the psychic balance. Without consciousness, ‘things go less well’ (CW 8: 695). Consciousness also makes us aware of the dangers of identification with other human beings – of mass projections when whole nations are swept by an ideology, or when ‘the other’ is made into a scapegoat and blamed for a particular nation’s failures. Consciousness makes it possible to analyse our feelings and emotions, and to disentangle them from those expressed by the people in our immediate environment or in mass media. It protects us from becoming ‘part of the herd, from submersion into a common unconsciousness’ (CW 10: para. 150). Every step i...