cell913blog.com #79

In another life, I encountered the Jungian term, enantiodromia, in reference to the persona (mask) fusing with the ego, replacing whatever individual identity was inherent and innate in the individual. An example would be a role taking over the identity of a person, in a process that seems both imperceptible to that individual, and to which that individual might actually succumb. This is not a foreign notion, once we become aware of it and it’s potential. Marriages often suffer from the enantiodromia within one of the partners, and the ‘performance’ of the persona unconsciously overtakes the individual’s life and quite likely, the marriage itself. As one who, on reflection, may well have fallen into the trap of my own enantiodromia, in mid-life, and then discovered the dynamic in the lives of others, I was brought up face-to-face once again with these words:

In 1996, while being interviewed by Wes Nisker,* (James) Hillman said, We are in a time which Jung referred to as the ‘enantiodromia,’ a term from Heraclitus, when things change into their opposites and virtues become vices. That’s what happens at the end of a great period of history. People will cling to the old virtues, but they’ve now turned into vices and have to be abandoned. But if you abandon the old virtues, you are lost and don’t know what to believe in.

The 2000 years that preceded this was the great expansion of the West, and the age of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet these three salvational prophecies with their tremendous aesthetic accomplishments and enormous civilizing effects have turned into monsters in their self-absorption with their righteousness and orthodoxies. They lack insight: all three claim to be ‘the one’.

In a talk given at Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2000, Hillman argued: ‘The better the intentions, the shorter the road to hell. At a time of enantiodromia, the Devil and Christ change places…Whatever constructive vision we aspire to must be accompanied all along by deconstruction of our own motives, our own subjectivity, our biblical righteousness. For we are each and all, willy-nilly, like it or not, children of the Biblical God…If the Bible is fundamental to our kind of consciousness, then we must read it, learn it, know it and see through it. (Dick Russell, The Life and Ideas of James Hillman, Vol. III, Soul in the World, New York, 2023 p, 637)  

*Wes Nisker (from wesnisker.com) was an award-winning broadcast journalist and commentator, a respected Buddhist meditations teacher, a best-selling author and a standup Dharma comic who has been described as ‘masterful at using humor to lighten the enlightenment journey.

In the West, we have been fed a diet of Christian stories, central to which are the birth and death stories of Jesus. Casting death in the pall of the Judgement Day, at which moment we will all be judged according to our embodiment of the ‘Christian ethic’ of having emptied, or turned over our human will to the will of God. And through the grace of God, and the Crucifixion/Resurrection of Jesus the Christ, our sins will be (are) forgiven. Believing in the ‘truth’ of this Crucifixion/Resurrection story, similar to the immaculate conception/birth of Jesus, half-man, half-God, we have been, hypothetically through prosletyzing and ‘conversion,’ introduced and welcomed into the state of mind, heart and spirit of discipleship, as ‘converted’ Christian disciples.

The mystery in between both the ‘narrative’ of the literal events and their numinous, ephemeral, ethereal mystical, incomprehensible qualities, however, becomes ‘flattened’ in that the dogma and the discipline of embracing and absorbing the supremacy of the conviction of the literal obliterates the mystical.

Hillman puts it this way:

In the kingdom (or is it the mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life. The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void. The gods have withdrawn, said the poets Holderlin and Rilke; it takes a leap of faith, said Soren Kierkegaard. Not even that will do, for God is dead, said Nietzsche. Any bridge must be made of superhuman proportions. Well, that kind of bridge our culture has ready to hand: the greatest bridge, some say, even constructed between visible and invisible: the figure of Jesus Christ.

Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among, so that all our accumulated ‘goods’ have become mere ‘stuff,’ the deaf and dumb consumables, Christ becomes the only image left in the Kingdom for bringing back to our culture the fundamental invisibility upon which cultures have always rested. Fundamentalism attempts, literally and dogmatically, to recover the invisible foundations of culture. Its strength lies in what it seeks; its menace in how it proceeds.

Christ as bridge (and isn’t the pope, vicar of Christ, still called the pontiff from pons, bridge) because the Incarnation means the presence of the invisible in the common matter of walking-around human life. A god-man: visible and invisible become one. (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, p. 110)….

And then:

When the invisible forsakes the actual world-as it deserts Job, leaving him plagued with every sort of physical disaster—then the visible world no longer sustains life because life is no longer invisibly backed. Then the world tears you apart. Isn’t that the simple lesson taught by the withering and collapse of tribal cultures once they are robbed of their spirits in exchange for goods? (Hillman, TSC, p. 111)

For a long time, this scribe, and others, have divided/separated/‘Balkanized’ the invisibles from the empirical, as if they were two distinct universes, playing on, interacting with, influencing each other in ways that generally escaped both consciousness and cognition. (Isn’t cognition totally dependent on consciousness, I thought?) If some perceived such a perspective to be ‘self-righteous’ or ‘pretentious,’ or ‘presumptuous,’ that  perception and interpretation seems understandable, given that the perspective defies 'logic,' and 'cognition,' and 'empiricism,' and renders the perceiver ‘quixotic’ even delusional from a social, political and conventional view. Certainly, the Christian model, Jesus, the man-God, was out of reach, out of touch with the limited, minimal, even imaginative and cognitive belief system of many, including this scribe. Posited and evangelized as ‘the incarnation of the holy and the sacred,’ Jesus was the ‘ideal’ to be emulated, worshipped, and ‘followed’ depending on the various interpretations of discipleship, and the intentions of the prosletyzer. And in that ‘light,’ the archetype of the Crucifixion/Resurrection was central to a deep and seemingly indelible self-identity, as sinner, as rogue, as forsaken, as deeply damned and desperately in need of ‘forgiveness,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘redemption, and ‘salvation.’ And the ‘permission structure’ for that process, metaphorically, mythically, and religiously was first the depths of depression, guilt, shame and despondency echoed in the Biblical utterance of Jesus, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?’ My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27: 45-47 and Mark 15: 33-34) Also, Good Friday had to be followed, according to the archetype, by Easter Sunday, the Resurrection and the hope and promise of forgiveness.

In Biblical ‘time’ it seems like a process of some 48 hours duration; in mythic or archetypal terms, it could take a lifetime. What has lingered, remained, as the archetypal image of ‘rising’ from desperation, (irrespective of how each individual experiences desperation, depression, and ‘intense darkness) is a rather ‘instant’ form of ‘recovery’ into ‘healing,’ ‘new awareness,’ ‘new insight,’ a profound psychic ‘aha,’ a profound ‘relief.’ From a societal perspective, this ‘transformation’ is perceived, conceived and valued as healing. And, as depression has become the substitute for Crucifixion, therapy has become the ‘symbol’ of ‘Resurrection. Some might say ‘science has replaced faith.’ (This perspective is borrowed from Hillman’s work.)

The ’instant gratification’ of how North America has interpreted and applied the “CR” archetype, however, is an unqualified reduction of many realities. Let’s list at least a few:

·      That depression is a kind of ‘sentence’ from which one must be freed

·      That depression has nothing to illustrate, explicate, inform, challenge or even to ‘gift’ the person suffering in its depths

·      That the lifting of depression, for example, is a credible sign of ‘conversion’ to discipleship of Jesus the Christ

·      That the relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son is also the model on which Christian lives are intended to emulate, follow, and worship.

·      That depression is a symptom, from a medical perspective, of illness, of ‘psychological abnormality’ that requires ‘treatment’

·      That depression, having taken over the individual human’s mind, body and spirit, requires ‘intervention’ in the form of medication, therapeutic intervention, or religious conversion, as its ‘dragon-slayer’

·      That depression, once lifted, is and will be able to be thwarted in a similar manner if and when it returns.

·      That God does not wish his ‘children’ to suffer depression for an extended time, in keeping with the ‘sunrise’ of Easter Sunday morning

What if, for example, between the ‘darkness of Good Friday, and the Sunrise of Easter Sunday,’ from a psychic perspective, there are innumerable, incalculable, unknown, indecipherable, ephemeral, insights, over which this ‘slick’ and ‘effective’ and ‘efficient’ cleansing passes without recognition, expectation, anticipation and encounter? Indeed, the darkest depths are our darkest and deepest mysteries, including the darkest mystery of all, death.

And what if, rather than jumping from darkness to light, through whatever metaphoric/healing/freeing and relieving archetype (religious, medical, legal, clinical psychological), we began to imagine a different psychic landscape?

In an essay entitled, The Power of the Mythic Image,  Norland Tellez, writing on the website of the Joseph Campbell Foundation,  September 24, 2024, writes:

Images are not outside of language, not even outside verbal communication; For hich caststhere is a direct relation between images (of depression, for example) and their meaning; they belong together as integrated wholes in the symbolic order. When e hear a foreign language, for example, we may have the jarring experience of hearing sounds without meaningful images attached to them. Without the resonance of images in our soul, we could not hear the song of the meaning in the vibrations of human thought. As Martin Heidegger put it, ‘Language itself is poetry in the essential sense (Poetry, Language, Thought pg. 72) that is, in the sense that language can reveal the essence of things. Hence he explains, ‘Language is not poetry because it is primal poesy; rather poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry.’ (p.72)

Rather than external opposites, mythological images are internal to words, as mythos to logos and logos to mythos, in the full concept of mythology. We know that ‘non-verbal’ images have the power to speak louder than words. As structures of signification, archetypal images are core channels of meaning and imagination; they constitute the world wide web of our symbolic life as a species.

Archetypal images retrace the order of the collective unconscious; they express the cultural forms of a collective consciousness which casts its shadow on the reality of the social field where it generally becomes unconscious. The collective consciousness and the collective unconscious are one and the same. Mythic images both hide and reveal the subterranean movement of the universal in the order of conscious thought, a movement that unleashes the power of the creative imagination. Combining the literal with the metaphorical into a single force, it is in the nature of the mythic to become historic.

Whatever constructive vision we aspire to must be accompanied all along by deconstruction of our own motives out own subjectivity, our biblical righteousness…as Hillman reminded us above.

Any thinking, perception, action, attitude

·      that is ‘extracted’ or ‘removed’ or disengaged from our motives, irrespective of how ‘nefarious’ they may be, or

·      disengaged from our own subjectivity (including our minimal assessment and identification of who we believe ourselves to be), and especially

·      detached from our ‘biblical righteousness’ (as exampled in the strict, literal, judgmental definition and depiction of salvation (from sin, guilt, shame)…

requires our uninhibited, unconstrained, and unambiguous dive into those normally hidden ‘undercurrents’. It is those undercurrents that, if we are honest with ourselves, (as Tellez reminds us) are not and cannot be separated from our consciousness, either as individuals or as part of the collective.

This is not only an ethical mandate; it is a psychological exhortation/pedagogy/insight to which the anima mundi in the United States, and elsewhere, can and would do well to embrace.

Pontificating as another image of ‘the one’ (to the not merely rhetorical, political and ethical inferential dismissal of the other) merely underscores an already failed posture of the three Abrahamic, Biblical faiths.

Even Kamala Harris, perhaps especially Ms Harris, has an historic and epic opportunity to ‘acknowledge’ the unconscious in her party’s vision of both the Oval Office and the future of the nation.