Can/would the church embrace archetypal psychology's perspective?

 Wrestling mentally and emotionally, intellectually and culturally with some of the principles of Hillman’s archetypal psychology is a path to a quite different ‘perspective’ than the one we have been taught to honour. Symptoms, seen as problems to be ‘fixed’ in our psychological lives, as they are in medicine and the legal system, renders both ‘symptom-bearer’ and ‘fixer’ engaged both implicitly and explicitly in a transactional relationship. One has a ‘need,’ the other a ‘solution.’ And the matter of the price, cost, reward and context of the engagement is the primary issue in the consideration of that dynamic. The name and the implications of the symptom are conditioned by the nature of the ‘transaction’. Is the ‘fixer’ able to detect, diagnose and comprehend the symptom-bearer in a manner comparable to the orthopod who mends a broken femur? Is the symptom-bearer able to ‘see’ and ‘grasp’ and disclose the full nature of the ‘issue’? Indeed, is the “intervention to fix” model itself as relevant, appropriate and benign as we have to come consider it?

Further complicating that ‘arrangement’ is the obvious question of “outcome”….was the encounter ‘successful’ or not. And then, the next question is what does one mean by ‘success’? Was the symptom removed like a wart to which a chemical compound was added to see it evaporate? Was the ‘symptom’ changed and replaced by some other, that enabled the ‘patient/client’ to change the pattern of his/her life? Was there a different interpretation/perspective available to both client and therapist that, essentially, offered a path to growth, change and both autonomy and authenticity previously unavailable? In an empirical, extrinsic and driven culture, the issue of ‘goals’ and measurable outcomes, in so many of our endeavours, has been elevated to a level that contradicts and contravenes our capacity to deliver.

An internal medicine professional of my acquaintance, once prescribed a ‘non-curative’ pill for a medical condition, only to have to discontinue the prescription and refer a patient to a different internal medicine specialist who had a licence to prescribe radioactive iodine, that had a much more impactful result than the ‘non-curative’. And indeed, many of the legitimate interventions of the medical profession, while partial, and often with considerable ‘side-effects’, demonstrates the full capacity of the profession to provide ‘care’ while also illustrating the  partial and often complicating implications of that care.

The field of psychology/psychiatry, in all of its many valiant attempts to meet and address both the expressed needs/symptoms and the ‘back story’ of those needs/symptoms, similar to the multiple galaxies we are learning about, continues to attract and to warrant revision. Pushing back against literalism, and offering a more fluid, imaginative and imaginal perspective, especially of those moments, memories, acts, and dynamics that beset our okayness (for lack of a better term), archetypal psychology attempts to see those ‘problems’ in and through the face and the story and the dynamic of images borrowed from the legacies of the gods, goddesses, and their mythical stories first. Without ascribing as a starting place in that perspective, whether or not the ‘issue’ is moral, right or wrong, or even abnormal, the image of the god/goddess/myth links the human species in a common psychic heritage. Soul-making, rather than ‘fixing’ a problem is considered the appropriate and universal purpose. Beyond genetics, or at least outside of genetics and biology, and based on one’s fulsome biography, this perspective, way of seeing, lens, (soul) embraces both story and the intimate and inescapable connection of each story to its own death. Rejecting the reductions of both morality and the empiricism/literalism/nominalism of both medicine and law, and the heroic model of ‘fixing’ every problem, along with the demands and expectations that approach lays on professionals first, and patients/clients second, archetypal psychology’s approach offers a “mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with de-literalizing-that psychological attitude which suspiciously disallows the naïve and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul. So the question of soil-making is ’what does this event, this thing, this movement move in my soul? What does it mean to my death. The question of death enters because it is in regard to death that the perspective of soul is distinguished most starkly from the perspective of natural life.” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, p.27)

We are not, as humans, akin to, analogous to, or in any way similar to a machine, especially in our psychological life. Even with all of the worthy and honourable research in neuroscience, and the discovery of the various pathways and  relationships in the circuitry of our brain, we have not ‘mastered,’ and for the foreseeable future will not, completely master the totality of either our identity or our various attempts to approach our psychology. Chemistry, physiology, electricity, even if and when measured and calculated, analysed and interpreted, taken together, are insufficient to capture the fullness of our psychology, in spite of our heroic and partial attempts to address the ramifications of the intersection of multiple factors and forces that converge in our lives.

And while our various scholars and theorists have given some clues for further study, and that process is likely to continue, the division between science and the poetic mind, as a dividing line in our academic pursuits, nevertheless, leaves a vacuum and an opportunity for some different perspectives.

Archetypal psychology, less a clinical, scientific and objective approach, and more of a “lens” through which to perceive some of the behaviours, attitudes, and even beliefs that, in a former universe, were categorized as ‘abnormal’ takes a different starting point. Pop culture throws around the word ‘normal’ in describing an individual while implying that others, different perhaps for each person, are labelled ‘abnormal’. In a culture, too, that obsesses with belonging, fitting in, compliance to the norm, such categories tend to create models of behaviour, and the judgements of ‘difference’ that generate both walls and exclusions of those who do not ‘fit’ the prevailing conventional model. And the exclusions, isolations, scornings and alienations of those who do not ‘fit’ is, itself, a cultural issue which, while seeming to support some kind of ‘order’ and expectations, also limits and potentially even precludes creative ideas from a wide swath of people.

Highways, by definition and in order to offer some degree of safety, need lanes, and lane markings, along with the speed limits and cautions that provide a degree of safety for their use. Similarly, public institutions, depending on their purpose and design, need some defining lanes, protocols, and the requisite supporting methods to achieve those goals and purposes. It is the question of the ‘goals and purposes’ of a human life, that, after centuries of pondering, reflecting, writing and even educating about the best theories, and interventions, remains open for further  imaginative considerations.

Considering the ‘previously unknown galaxies’ of our psyche including what is normal and/or abnormal, however, through the methods and approaches of historic disciplines such as law a medicine, is likely to generate theories and perspective, methods and approaches that replicate, imitate, and even duplicate those that have already attempted to establish a footing in our collective consciousness, as well as our collective unconscious.

The material deemed critical for the kinds of theories and approaches to human psychology, by both medicine and law, will also be constricted by the limitations of the lanes of epistemology, theory, demonstrated and documented evidence of the centuries of their respective ‘lanes’ of both cognition and precedent. And the definitions, diagnoses, treatments and outcomes will continue in patterns that are acceptable, justified and predictable. Indeed, the risk to all of us is that because of the narrowness of the lanes of both theory and methodology, the size of the abnormal lane embracing a relatively high number of human individuals, will expand, as professionals operating in their established field seek to enhance their playing field and the opportunities for further growth. Sickness, so defined, will continue to inflate in numbers, requiring additional interventions, as will abnormal behaviour continue to demand more laws and more restriction.

Adopting as lens, the way of seeing human psychology, as a concerto of the images of the various gods, goddesses, archetypes and narratives that have ‘peopled’ the stories of cultures around the globe, from native and indigenous, tribal and nation, ethnicity and religion, language and myth, warfare and peace, gender and sexuality, is in a word, radical. Embracing easily and openly those multiple images that we all have dancing, arguing, stabbing, hugging, selling, defending, seeking revenge, seeking love, striving (and the list of active verbs continues endlessly) through the biography, seen in the rear-view mirror, makes so much sense, that one wonders why it has not come to our awareness before the last quarter of the twentieth century.

And rather than reduce our psychological life to the enactment of a single diagnosis, or even a single image, (example, Peter Pan, or Lade MacBeth), and also rather than presume that we are fully in charge and control of whatever is going on in our lives including the images playing in our psyche, and that viewed from a primarily moral perspective, as right or wrong, archetypal psychology offers a far more nuanced, complex and perhaps even relevant and applicable “lens”  of images, including fantasies, dreams, nightmares, and the whole range of human experiences, both conscious and not, to consider when taking the whole “picture” through biography, into account. The notion, for example, that the image “has” us, rather than ‘us’ being in control of those images, is first, far more realistic based on the reality that we all know ‘stories’ with images are playing in our ‘heads’ all the time. It is as if, through the perspective of archetypal psychology, we acknowledge that our ‘head-screen’ is alive with images, many of which we simply pass by, considering that they are little more than ‘child’s play’. We permit our children, and ourselves as young children, to explore an imaginative world, through literature, film, fantasy and dream. And then, for adults, we turn the tables on those legitimate “visions” and make them pragmatic, in order to be vetted by a ‘responsible parent or guardian’ and turn them into a vocation, a profession and a way to ‘make a living’.

Essentially, archetypal psychology is confronting the deeply embedded concepts of the human will and ego as being in control of our lives, including especially rationality, logic and empiricism. And without denigrating any of those concepts, indeed offering them each a more legitimate and fruitful and free expression of their insights, archetypal psychology opens the door to a vision of a fully accessible and fully acknowledged and fully tolerated complexity of all. The perspective is not a way out of having to confront the most malicious and injurious and contemptible and nefarious of behaviours, and excuse them, or rationalise them.  Rather it is a different way of ‘seeing’ each human being ‘psychologically’ in a process Hillman dubs ‘soul-making’. And as a process of psychologizing, it does not infer or imply a ‘morality’ as its first consideration. Rather, whether moral or not, each human being carries the stories not so much of conscious imitation, but rather of evocation of those voices that populate the mythologies from around the world.

And, in evoking those voices, on reflection, after the fact, possibly long after the fact, we can glean a montage or collage of the images that were energizing our lives, with or without our awareness at the time. Patterns, envisioned in and through the faces/voices/images of gods and goddesses, rather than ‘incident reports of crisis’ uses a wide-angle lens, looking through the telescope into the galaxies of images that have played out in and through our stories. Similarly, through the lens of the archetypes, of the gods and goddesses, we open our lens wide to include those voices that were not so comfortable, so heroic, so altruistic, and so empathetic as our public mask, persona, was wont to display and to deliver throughout our lives. And in opening to those ‘shadow’ figures, voices, perspectives themselves identified with and identifying those gods and goddesses, we naturally see ourselves very differently, from the ways in which ‘others’ saw and considered us in their direct experience of our presence. The archetypes significant to those ‘others’ (from this perspective) are and were also contributing to their psychological lives, in a manner that reflects those imaginal voices, themes, conflicts, reconciliations, assassinations, recoveries, fantasies and dreams that have populated not only our shared literatures and cultures, but also our families, communities and our churches.

And here is the significant rub: where archetypal psychology greets and separates from religion and faith.

In Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, James Hillman, writes a section entitled, Polytheistic Psychology and Religion. He writes;

The polytheistic moves of archetypal psychology occur in four inter-related modes.

1)    The most accurate model of human existence will be able to account for its innate diversity, both among individuals and within each individual. Yet this same model must also provide fundamental structures and values for this diversity. For both Freud and Jung, multiplicity is basic to human nature, and their models of man rely on a polycentric fantasy. Freud’s notion of the child as sexually polymorphous originates the libido in a polymorphic, polyvalent and polycentric field of erogenous zones. Jung’s model of personality is essentially multiple, and Jung correlates the plurality of its archetypal structure with the polytheistic stage of culture. Hence, the soul’s inherent multiplicity demands a theological fantasy of equal differentiation.

2)    The tradition of thought, (Greek, Renaissance, Romantic) to which archetypal psychology claims it is an heir is set in polytheistic attitudes. The imaginative products of these historical periods cannot contribute further to psychology unless the consciousness that would receive from them is able to transpose itself into a similar polytheistic framework. The high achievements of Western culture from which contemporary culture may find sources for its survival remain closed to modern consciousness unless it gains a perspective mimetic to what it is examining. Hence, polytheistic psychology is necessary for the continuity of culture.

3)    The social, political and psychiatric critique implied throughout archetypal psychology mainly concerns the monotheistic hero-myth (now called ego psychology) of secular humanism. i.e., the single-centered, self-identified notion of subjective consciousness of humanism (from Protagoras to Sartre). It is this myth which has dominated the soul and which leads to both unreflected action and self-blindness (Oedipus). It is responsible also for the repression of a psychological diversity that then appears as psychopathology. Hence, a polytheistic psychology is necessary for re-awakening reflective consciousness and bringing a new reflection to psychopathology.

4)    The perspectivalism of archetypal psychology requires a deepening of subjectivity beyond mere Nietzschean perspective or existential stances. Perspectives are forms of vision, rhetoric, values, epistemology, and lived styles that perdure independently of empirical individuality. For archetypal psychology, pluralism and multiplicity and relativism are not enough: these are merely philosophical generalities. Psychology needs to specify and differentiate each event, which it can do against the variegated background of archetypal configurations, of what polytheism called Gods, in order to make multiplicity both authentic and precise. Thus the question it asks of an event is not why or how, but rather what specifically is being presented and ultimately who, which divine figure, is speaking in this style of consciousness, this form of presentation. Hence a polytheistic psychology is necessary for the authorization of a ‘pluralistic universe’ for consistencies within it, and for precision of its differentiation.

The polytheistic analogy is both religious and not religious. The Gods are taken essentially, as foundations, so that psychology points beyond soul and  can never be merely agnostic. The sacred and sacrificial dimension--the religious instinct as Jung calls it—is given a place of main value; and in truth, it is precisely because of the appeal to the Gods that value enters the psychological field, creating claims on each human life and giving personal acts more than personal significance. The Gods and therefore the Gods of religion and not mere nomina,(mere names) categories, devices ex machina*. They are respected as powers and persons and creators of value….The Gods of psychology are not believed in, not taken literally, not imagined theologically. ‘Religion approaches Gods with ritual, prayer, sacrifice, worship, creed…In archetypal psychology, Gods are imagined. They are approached through psychological methods of personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing. They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of existence and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates.’ Mainly the modes of this participation is reflection: the Gods are discovered in recognizing the stance of one’s perspective, one’s psychological sensitivity to the configurations that dominate one’s styles of thought and life. God’s for psychology do not have to be experienced in direct mystical encounter or in effigies, whether as concrete figures or as theological definitions.(Hillman, op.cit, pps 32, 33, 34, 35)

*Deus ex machina (from britannica.com) Latin: ‘god from machine’ a person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly  and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty…A  god appears is Sophocles’ Philoctetes and in most of the plays of Euripides to solve a crisis by divine intervention.

What are the implications, repercussions, supports and enhancements of the religious dimension, if viewed through the ‘lens’ and approach of archetypal psychology?

For many years, this scribe has struggled with the relationship between one’s religious life and one’s secular life, partially as a function of an over-active curiosity, and partly as a function of an also over-active scepticism. Of course, many theologians have posited that there is and can be no authentic separation between what one believes and how one interacts in the secular world. Indeed, for many, the secular world is fraught with impurities, sins and horrific people and situations, while the religious, the spiritual, and the matter of one’s relationship with God demands/needs to be sanctified, or at least trending and portending to a degree of sanctification, righteousness, imitation of and emulation of God. In the New Testament, Hebrews 11:1 posits these words: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Paul Tillich writes in Dynamics of Faith, 1957, “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned: the dynamics of faith are the dynamics of man’s ultimate concern.” Vincent Williams, in curatingtheology.org, writes about Tillich, “Faith, for Tillich, is indeed the only thing capable of unifying human life among its disparate elements and concerns. But more so, that unifying result is also its definition; faith is simply that state of ultimate concern.”

One of the obvious questions, whether applied to human psychology or faith is the issue of how and whether one can indeed capture a polytheistic and complex reality through a monotheistic lens. And, how does one go about such a pursuit.

Hillman, writing in Revisioning Psychology (p. 167), says this:

By speaking of Gods….it seems as if we have lost the distinction between religion and psychology. Because the movement of our archetypal psychologizing is always towards myths and Gods, our psychologizing may seem actually a theologizing, and this book is as much a work of theology as of psychology. In a way this is so, and must be so, since the merging of psychology and religion is less the confluence of two different streams than the result of their single source—the soul. The psyche itself keeps psychology and religion bound to each other. Therefore our talk of Gods is not merely the use of personified hyperbole for heightening the values of archetypes, which as psychic functions and structures could as well be described more conceptually, or with analogies to physiological organs, physical forces, of philosophical categories. No—we speak of Gods because we are working toward a nonagnostic psychology, a psychology which does not have to operate in the hollow left from the separation of Sunday and weekday, church and interior state of mind…..The difference between psychology and religion boils down to the same as between psychology and science: literalism, Theology takes Gods literally and we do not…..Another way of putting it would be that the difference between religion and psychology lies not in our description of the Gods but in our action regarding them. Religion and psychology have care for the same ultimates, but religion approaches Gods with ritual prayer sacrifice, worship, creed. Gods are believed in and approached with religious methods. In archetypal psychology Gods are imagined…..They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates…Psychologically, the Gods are never dead; and archetypal psychology’s concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the survival of soul. ( Hillman op. cit. p, 165-169-170)

And here lies one of the primary tensions not only between psychology and religion, but also in the tensions that religion faces, in attempting to link, bridge, connect, relate and implement, apply, incarnate religion and personal life. The argument that they by definition are inseparable makes theoretical sense, and yet, in practice, within the domain of the church, there is both a conscious and an unconscious ‘elevation’ and purification and sanctification and righteousness and even a pretentiousness about the various acts. Ironically and paradoxically, this sanctimoniousness is also devoid of any sensibility of or to metaphor. The rules of liturgy, and the performance of the clergy, not only while ‘on duty’ but in all hours of their life, are deemed to be above reproach.

And all the while, the church is praying that ‘we are all sinners’ seeking and needing the saving grace of forgiveness. Naturally, the charge of hypocrisy seems both obvious and warranted. And yet, that is only ‘literal’ and legalistic, moralistic and exclusionary. More importantly, the question of ‘why’ the church deems such ‘superiority’ and righteousness and purity and perfection as essential, and required by and before God, seems in its core and its entirety to be self-sabotage. The pretense and the arrogance to believe and to impose such a belief and practice of the appearance of holiness and sanctimony on its officials, as if it has been ordained by God, undermines the very dynamic of the religious, spiritual and soul-making and salvation processes.

Such a premise can and does and will only lead to an ecclesial genuflection and almost a military and dogmatic insistence on secrecy and a frozen public face while opening the institution to the truth of its own denial and avoidance of the deeper truth that such a proposition and presumption is both unnatural and unsustainable.

‘Walking on eggs’ and sequestering all wildness, savagery, spontaneity, deception,  the sinister and the dark sides of our person as well as the dark side of the church itself, in order to please God (any God of any faith) seems, at its core, to be an act of the most ungodly, deceitful and nefarious premise. Not only is it hypocritical, but it ‘encases’ God in a man-conceived box and then authorizes and permits and sustains a practice of moral, ethical, social and psychological colonialism and domination. To presume that ‘God’ ordains and sanctifies and has already vetted such a twisting of individual humans, and organizational identities, and then to slide openly and willingly and conspicuously into the corporate business model as the path to respectability and credibility (bigger and richer numbers of people and dollars are the signs of God working), is only adding to the theological Achilles heel. At the core of the Christian faith lies the exhortation to humility; at the core of its identity is hubris. And the two are incompatible.

It is the reduction of the spiritual life to the narrow confines of conventional morality, sustained by the achievement of corporate ‘fiscal stability’ that demonstrates the domination of the ‘spirit’ as compared with the proximity to God of soul.

And it is, so proposed here, from the difference between spirit and soul, from the perspective of archetypal psychology, that the church has much to learn, to  integrate, and to begin to ‘see’. Hillman writes:

At times the spirit position with its rhetoric of order, number, knowledge, permanency and self-defensive logic has been discussed as ‘senex’ and Saturnian; at other times, because of its rhetoric of clarity and detached observation, it has been discussed as Apollonic; on other occasions, because of the rhetoric of unity, ultimacy, identity, it has been termed ‘monotheistic’; and in other contexts, ‘heroic’ also ‘puer’. While recognizing that the spirit perspective must place itself above (as the soul places itself as inferior) and speak in transcendent, ultimate and pure terms, archetypal psychology conceives its task to be one of imagining the spirit language of ‘truth’ faith law and the like as a rhetoric of spirit, even if spirit is obliged by the same rhetoric to take its stance truthfully and faithfully, i.e. literally. (Archetypal Psychology, A Brief Account, p.25)

Archetypal psychology does or ought to replace religion or faith; rather it is here intimated and even envisioned that perhaps through the archetypal psychology approach of the poetic mind, the complexity of human beings, first approached from a mythical relevance to gods and goddesses, that the path to faith and faith community can be enriched, enhanced and enlivened.

The literary imagination has given us models of world views that include the ironic, the tragic, the comic and the historic. It has also given us, through each lens, images of God as king, healer, teacher, prophet (i.e Hopewell’s work, Congregation) and modes of worship that, based far too heavily on ‘marketing’ and  ‘growth’ in a corporate model. The literary imagination has also given us models of the hero within, including the innocent, the orphan, the victim, the warrior and the magician, as exemplified in and through movies and novels of development. Freud and Jung have both excavated the human unconscious as integral to our complexity. Hillman opens us to the perspective of the poetic mind and the imaginal in and through the lens of archetypal psychology. And while none of these kernels of theory or ideas or propositions can or will be ultimate or final or absolute, it is the negation of the absolute and the courage to begin to envision the hypothetical, the ambiguity and the numinous through archetypal psychology that has the potential to open doors and windows for theology that have been sealed shut for eons.

The church’s theological ‘pillars’ of thought, tradition, scholarship, and the belief systems that have emerged from those wells, have, at least from a liberal perspective, have embraced the discoveries of science, without throwing the baby our with the bath water. That is the case in the creation/evolution debate, and in the freedom of choice/right to life debate. However, it is in the dualities, and the literal dimensions of our debates, imposing a strict ‘either-or’ quality of certitude that both the secular and the sacred have fallen of the sword of reductionism.

Restoring a perspective of ambiguity, numinosity, multiplicity, while at the same time unleashing the concept of the psychological ‘normal’ from the confines of politically correct, socially tolerable conventionality, and squeezing the notion of the abnormal without abandoning the psychopathic or the sociopathic or the sexual offender….these are all noble and worthy ideals. Archetypal psychology also ‘grounds’ all of its precepts in the question ‘what does this mean to my death’ another revisionary notion that attempts to take the blinders of denial and avoidance off our shared conventional repression of the truth and reality of our mortality. That in itself is a gift for both psychology and religion.

Trapsing further into the flow of images, archetypes in psychic rivers...the poetic mind

 One of the most complex notions in attempting to describe the complex world of human beings, including our encounters with other equally complex, nuanced, dynamic and turbulent human beings, is that, while these keys are painting letters and words in the early morning of December 11, 2022, and there is a kind of focus on their sequence and their meaning, not only is the message they are attempting to convey coming from an incomplete scribe, with a partial view of himself and the world, the letters and the scribe are in a state of constant movement. Nothing that we say, think, perceive, write and even believe, while we hold tight to its purpose and intent in the moment, is or can be captured in a bottle.

And, while it may seem ‘encased’ in the bottle of the letters and words and derived meaning of each reader, (as well as the intended meaning and purpose of the writer), it is also a mere particle of the universe’s sense of itself, at a moment in time. Time, as a construct of our attempt to ‘order’ our lives and our world, is ephemeral, essentially a metaphor of linearity, structure, deadlines, planning guidelines and something of a measure of ‘how long we have’ in this life. And while we grow up in a ‘time-named’ world, there is a different world of how ‘images’ (of which group we are part), float in and through and out of our conscious and unconscious minds, rooms, courts, classrooms, offices, homes, sanctuaries, emergency rooms, forests, mountains and rivers.

The indigenous relationship to the natural world, including the rivers, has helped many to envision a ‘flow’ of external events, which metaphor has relevance, resonance and application to our inner lives which are also in flux, with or without our acknowledgement of that flow. This ‘flow’ is not the ‘flow’ of the intensity of an athlete who is ‘in the zone’; rather this ‘flow’ is the image of moving water in all of its various conditions, speeds, environments including banks, beds, skies, animal and bird ethos, and something inescapably ethereal and atmospheric. Just as the river itself is a living and changing and awesome example of the dynamic of movement and permanence, so are we. It is cogent and coherent to think of our human entity, identity, complexity, including our attitudes, beliefs, actions, motivations as well as our bodies and our minds, through the lens of the flowing river. And that flow has implications not only for the ageing of our bodies, but also the transitions and transformations of what we conceive of as the operative archetypes in our psyche.

While the puer-senex oscillation is an example of how some (think Jung first) have imagined the dynamic of how the youth-age oscillation is both perceived and enacted, we are not and cannot be encased in such a river of images that posits puer literally and exclusively in youth and senex literally and exclusively in our dotage. Any discussion, observation or even any further cognitive/imaginative speculation, reflection and application of these ‘images’ or archetypes, cannot be seen in the light of a rigid or even an oscillating kind of ‘magnetic force’. Even positive and negative energy, as envisioned by the physicists, does not capture, but merely hints at, the dynamic between and among the archetypes. And those archetypes, themselves, are not alone in our psyche. They inhabit an imagination again itself not a terrain, or a piece of intellectual real estate, but another ‘energy’ or capacity, or image itself resonating with a magnetic, artistic, executive, cognitive, physical, burst of energy that we can sometimes glimpse, both coming from ourselves, and/or being projected onto us or even from us onto others.

We use images from physics, or medicine, based on something we have come to denote as ‘empirical’ and measureable, and limited by our definitions, as a way of attempting to communicate meaning and purpose. And yet, in each case, even in those cases in which we are ‘dealing with the facts’ (truth, empirically verifiable, demonstrably affirmed and confirmed by others) we are exploring and exposing various ‘perceptions’ or ‘takes’ on those truths. And while we have codified, defined, inculcated and proselytized this universe, and conduct our business, medical, legal, educational, social, political, environmental, scientific, and even our religious affairs, including our individual lives, amid the language of these spheres, as if the empirical was the only universe extant, our psyche is another realm of which we continue to explore.

And, of course, we are both indebted to and dependent on the same words used in our daily lives to discuss various perspectives, theories and models of how our psyche is and operates. Capturing some concept that is abstract in a cluster of letters that appear concrete, and tend to paint a picture of something ‘we can experience with our senses,’ is something of a mug’s game. This conundrum confronts all our attempts to ‘dig’ into anything relating to god, goddesses, myth, archetype, fantasy, dream, and image. Even the words, themselves, conjure up images that tend to identify classes of images as empirically valid, and thereby eligible for academic disciplines to investigate, or ‘ethereal, spiritual, ephemeral and abstract’ and thereby excluded from rigorous academic disciplines to explore.

Such a division, however, belies and precludes the full application of many of the brightest and most insightful minds, and leaves those ‘artsy’ types outside the formal, structures of academia. We love our art galleries and the images on their walls, and we do have some ‘schools’ in which the basic principles of how to capture and portray images are taught, practiced, adjudicated, valued, displayed and sold. And we do have our cathedrals, synagogues and mosques, in which prayers, hymns, homilies and physical gestures, adornments, images and liturgies (all of them images of one kind or another) are enacted, displayed, and even sanctified and blessed.

What we continue to struggle with, still, along with the sheer depth and complexity of the multiple galaxies and universes to be discovered, and the complexities of how oceanic “life” continues and changes, and the applications, for example, of I-131 to the treatment of pancreatic cancer, is the dynamic of the human psyche. Defined as the human soul, spirit, or mind, coming from the Greek, psyche which

means, ‘the soul, mind, spirit, or invisible animating entity which occupies the physical body. Not your actual brain, but whatever it is that generates all of your thoughts and emotions, the immaterial part of a person; the actuating cause of an individual life.” (vocabulary.com)

Again, here, the concept of a ‘box’ definition, frozen in time, or even in a single idea, is a kind of reduction that denies the dynamic of the river of ideas (images, archetypes, that, rather than lying ‘frozen’ on the canvas of our psyche, actually ‘have us’ in their hands (another metaphor) and another way of both seeing and thereby thinking about how the psyche pulses. And these ideas, these images, themselves never isolated from other ideas and images, and never exclusively in charge of how we think or see ourselves,  essentially, as James Hillman writes in Revisioning Psychology:

 (P)sychologizing, as it converts alien ideas into psychological ones, subsumes all other actions. Through psychologizing I change the idea of any literal action at all   --political, scientific, personal—into a metaphorical enactment. I see the act and scene and stance I am in, and not only the action I am into. I recognize that through my ideas I apprehend and am apprehended by my inmost subjectivity, entering all actions in the role of an idea.

Archetypal psychology envisions the fundamental ideas of the psyche to be expressions of persons—Hero, Nymph, Mother, Senex, Child, Trickster, Amazon, Puer, and many other specific prototypes bearing the names and stories of the Gods. These are the root metaphors. They provide the patterns of our thinking as well as of our feeling and doing. They give all our psychic functions-whether thinking, feeling, perceiving or remembering—0their imaginal life, their internal coherence, their force, their necessity and their ultimate intelligibility. These persons keep our persons in order, holding to significant patterns the3 segments and fragments of behavior we call emotions, memories, attitudes, and motives. When we lose sight of these archetypal figures we become, in a sense, psychologically insane: that is, by not ‘keeping in mind’ the metaphorical roots we go ‘out of our minds’—outside where ideas have become literalized into history, society, clinical psychopathology, or metaphysical truths. Then we attempt to understand what goes on inside by observing the outside, turning inside out, losing both the significant interiority in all events and our own interiority as well. The weaker and dimmer our notions of the archetypal premises or our ideas, the more likely our actions area to become stuck fast in roles. We become caught in typical problems, missing the archetypal fantasy we are enacting. Even with the best moral intentions, political goals, and philosophical methods, we will exhibit a psychological naivete. Even that precious instrument, reason, loses its freedom of insight when it forgets the divine persons who govern its perspectives. ( Hillman, op, cit.,p.127-128)

And a little later, Hillman, in the same work, writes this:

A semantic definition of metaphor is ‘deviant discourse’ and its corresponding opposite term is ‘literal.’ The dictionary says that metaphors transfer meaning. If psyhchologizing proceeds by seeing through the plainly literal, then the psychologizing activity will continually enliven, by transferring meaning into and out of direct discourse. Psychology then refers less to a body of knowledge than to a perspective parallel to other bodies of knowledge, a running commentary to the direct and literal discourse. Psychology will not be straight and well0-structured. IT will be scattered, not direct, not a Hero on his course, but a Knight Errant picking up insights by the way. (Hillman op. cit, p. 159)

While engaged in the teaching profession, I and many of my colleagues were or became acquainted with the work of both Freud and Jung, in a limited way at best. We learned names of the Ego, Id and Libido from the Freud lexicon, and animus and anima from the Jungian lexicon. The concept of the Shadow, (from Jung) also started to appear as the dark side, that ‘bag of traumas, tragedies we had experienced, which, at the time of their occurrence, we buried in our unconscious, so the pattern went, in order to be brought out later, in later life, for mining for the respective ‘gold’ of the lessons about what we had by then learned, and how we might approach a similar rough patch now. Consistently, throughout those decades, eccentric and especially extreme actions, thoughts, attitudes, were considered ‘abnormal’. And these social and political and even professional ‘judgements’ were being made by doctors, teachers, clergy, social workers and even by executives engaged in the business of classifying and then hiring or rejecting candidates for employment.

Eruptions of behaviour, then termed, ‘situational maladjustment syndromes’ were considered abnormal, and were often prescribed pharmaceuticals, in order to moderate both feelings and actions. Judgements by those in positions of authority, often veered in the direction of ‘assignment’ to some kind of psychiatric care facility for individuals whom they considered ‘abnormal’. And the perception of the abnormal was, itself, partly informed by, for example, the kind of religiosity, morality and sense of professional obligation to rid such individuals from public interference and potential insecurity.

Several decades hence, through the thoughts, imagination and writing of people like Hillman, we can see validity in a way of seeing (soul) that embraces the metaphor of images, archetypes, that, rather than pigeon-hole our character and our person into something like a tumor, or a broken femur, or a genetic hole in the heart, and then prescribe some ‘medical’ treatment, we all more able and thereby likely to take a more ‘flowing’ and process and idea-energized interpretation of those eccentricities and not automatically deem them either criminal or requiring medical treatment.

It is that timeline, that this scribe is attempting to discern from both experience and reflection, in these pieces.

                                     ---more to come----

Secrets kept, illusions eroding even today....

 Keeping family secrets, while the pattern is familiar to everyone, and privacy is required in order to cope with one’s situation, and the line between sharing and concealing shifts depending on a myriad of influences, has several side-effects.

One of the more complex spin-offs of keeping secrets is its corollary, deception. Shakespeare borrowed from Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field when he penned the famous line:

Oh what a tangled web we weave

When first we practice to deceive

The perils of lying, however, seem to have been buried under the over-weening will to power, that, ironically, comes with a fear of being “found-out”. The Jesuit, John Powell, in a tiny book, “Why I don’t tell you who I am,” answers the question simply, “I do not tell you who I am because that is all I have, and you might reject me.” On the website pubmed.gov, Melody Carter writes, July 2016, in a piece entitled, “Deceit and dishonesty as practice: the comfort of lying:

Lying and deceit are instruments of power, used by social actors in the pursuit of their practices as they seek to maintain social order. All social actors, nurses included, have deceit and dishonesty within their repertoire of practice. Much of this is benign, well intentioned and a function of being sociable and necessary in the pursuit of social order in the healthcare environment. Lying and deceit from a sociological point of view, is a reflections of the different modes of dominating that exist within a social space. French philosopher Pierre Bourdieu theorized about the way that symbolic power works within social order. The social structures and the agency of individual actors moving within it are interrelated and interdependent….lying or acting dishonestly is a powerful act that is intent on retaining stability and social order and could be seen to be a justification of lying and deceit. However, we need to consider, in whose interests are we striving to create social order? Is it in the end about the comfort of patients or for the comfort of professionals?

Dr. George Simon, in a post entitled, “Deceit Can Take Many Forms,” on his website, drgeorgesimon.com, writes this:

Deceit is the hallmark trait of manipulative characters…Deceit and manipulation are…close partners. Covertly aggressive individuals know that to successfully advance their hidden, nefarious agendas, they now only have to conceal their true intentions but also cast themselves in a way that seems benign.

Then adolescent struggle, which in some ways continues, is one that ‘writes’ and then ‘plays out’ conversations in my imagination about the several incidents over the years in which the questions of---

disclosure/discretion

                               safety/exposure

                                                   fear/courage/

                                                                 recrimination/endorsement

                                                                                                 retribution/openness

have oscillated, both consciously and unconsciously as a recurring theme.

At the heart of this intellectual vacillation lies an emotional weed, perhaps toxic virus would be more appropriate:

shame, guilt/acceptance, forgiveness.

And as that latter continuum vibrated, the question of by whom

(self/some other, parent, teacher, principal, clergy, and even deity?)

was the note in play. The indelible imprint of childhood, for many including this scribe, is shame and abandonment at not being “enough” in the eyes, mind and heart of a single parent. (No this is not a pity party, just the facts ma’am!)

Proving oneself as adequate, however, is analogous to a dog chasing his tail:

the motion continues, the tail is never caught. Spinning wheels, as in a snow drift, only digs the hole deeper, while the heat of the tires turns the snow into ice that is even more slippery, deepening the problem, while proving the futility of the rubber siren.

The public life, performance, wardrobe, words, facial gestures, ambition to take on various roles, while on the surface justified (internally and socially) as this version of the ‘Walter Mitty’ fantasy*. Untrained and untried, I sought roles as the co-co-ordinator of the campus formal at university, class president (by acclamation), fraternity vice-president, and then, while teaching in a boarding school, again untrained and untried, eagerly accepted coaching roles in football and basketball, and later, variety show co-ordinator, year-book advisor, and as a part-time worker in men’s clothing sales. When a colleague announced he was going on sabbatical, I casually mentioned that I would appreciate his tossing my name into the hat for his replacement as a free-lance television reporter.

Another of the ‘water-mitty’ fantasies, I had for some time been a spectator of news, public affairs, and the people in provincial and national leadership, from the perspective of a small-town kid whose interest in the wider world exceeded any interest in the issues of the small town itself. In grade thirteen, I recall one moment in history class, when I asked a question about the United Nations, only to be rebutted by the female instructor, with these words: “We do not have time for that question; we have to prepare for a final examination!” “Finals” were the provincial tradition for all Ontario students graduating from high school, and intending to go on to university and the reputations of the teachers were, in part, judged by the performance of their students in those examinations. As a student, however, my  I was unaware of such ‘other’ issues, and focussed only on the topic of geo-politics.

That moment, in retrospect, while glossed over in a heart-beat, seems to have been glued to consciousness. The “no” of the instructor was considered then, and continues today, to have been a form of pedagogical negligence. And yet, it was a seed for other questions for myself, and for others, depending on the situation’s need for questions. Naturally, the Socratic method# of conducting the classrooms and provided decades of opportunity to formulate questions, to imagine and to insert questions spontaneously, as a normal and integrative method of establishing rapport with students. The formal training at OCE Ontario College of Education was enhanced, developed and enriched by decades of practice for many of those who entered the teaching profession when the demand for teachers far exceeded the supply. (Otherwise, I might not have even found work in the field, given my dismal undergraduate background.)

From my perspective, the opportunity to report on local city hall news, on a repeater television station, for $10/report, and $5/interview, seemed like the ideal ‘fit’ for my curiosity, and my need to escape the tedium of sixteen-year-olds. Monday nights, for a dozen years, were given over to attending council meetings, interviewing various political and civil servant actors, writing and recording a three-minute report, on average. While there were moments of anxious timing, the experience was one of the most gratifying, as well as most enriching and disciplining of my life. There was a thermometer of language choice operating in each moment of those reports, as well as in each video-interview. How to express what happened, obviously from a single perspective, and yet retain a level of integrity for the moment being reported as well as for those actors who, undoubtedly, would refuse to continue to provide information and opinion, should the words ‘cross their line,’ was a question that lingered over each report. A single caveat, from a summer job while in university, from a trainer at Canada Packers, a man by the name of Harry Semple, has served me well: “Remember that, when there is a customer compliant, for example with a product that does not meet our standard, you must be fair both to the customer and to Canada Packers. Veering too far in either direction will not bode well for your and our business.”

A teacher colleague, entering the cloak-room area of the staffroom, on a Tuesday morning following my Monday night report commented, “There is nothing of your personality coming across on television.” Whether or not the comment was intended as a compliment or sarcastic tweek, I took it as a positive, given that my personality was not the issue nor was the ‘reporting’ about me. If I were somehow making it possible for viewers to imagine a debate over an issue like restoring the hard services to the Main Street, something no council had attempted for a century, for example, and help them to become engaged in that discussion, then I considered my job done.

On reflection, however, whether or not my reports and interviews were ‘good’ or less so, seems to pale in the light of the ‘walter-mitty’ aspect of the unconscious importance of living out a fantasy or dream.  Call it idealism, optimism, or sheer “puer” archetype. “The Latin phrase, puer aeternus (eternal boy) in mythology is a child-god, who is forever young. In Jung’s conception, the puer typically leads a ‘provisional life’ due to fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He..covets independence and freedom, opposes boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable.” The ‘positive’ side of puer appears as the Divine Child who symbolizes newness, potential for growth, hope for the future. He also foreshadows the hero that he sometimes becomes. The ‘negative’ side is the child-man who refuses to grow up and meet the challenges of life face on, waiting instead for his ship to come in and solve all his problems…The phrase puer aeternus comes from Metamorphoses, an epic work by the Roman Poet Ovid, dealing with Greek and Roman myths. In the poem, Ovid addresses the child-god Iacchus as ‘puer aeternus’ and praises him for his role in the Eleusinian mysteries. Iacchus is later identified with the gods Dionysus and Eros. The ‘puer’ is a god of vegetation and resurrection; the god of divine youth such as Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis. The shadow of the puer is the senex, (Latin for old man), associated with  the god Cronus-disciplined, controlled, responsible rational ordered. Conversely, the shadow of the senex is the puer, related to Hermes or Dionysus—unbounded instinct, disorder intoxication, whimsy.” (wikipedia.org)

How can one read, write and reflect on this combined archetype, without having that ‘hitler-chamberlain’ phrase from my father ringing in my head. His phrase referred to how he perceived I was being raised, by two parents, one he labelled the Fuhrer, the other Chamberlain (he saw himself as the latter). The phrase, the ‘acorn doesn’t fall from the tree,’ seems to have some resonance in this story. And the tension between the puer and senex has been the archetypal energy, unconscious, undiscovered, unmonitored and unmetered, for all these decades.

In the classroom, I was considered by some critical peers as “far too close to the students” and thereby less than professional, while from the students’ perspective, I was humbled by their ‘friendship’ and their dedication to their respective tasks and their own growth. Rarely, did I neither envision nor articulate a vision of limits for their lives. Indeed, with one specific student, a male dyslexic, who had extreme difficulty in reading and writing, and yet whose intellect soared in each of his in-class reposts, passed in my grade eleven class, only to be told, by his grade twelve English teacher, “You need to go back to Atkins’ class where there are no standards; you will fail in my class!” Similarly, when the grade thirteen math teacher, teaching in a classroom immediately adjacent to mine, told me, while we were monitoring class movements between classes, “Pam cheated on her last math test!” I instantly remarked, “Pam did not cheat on her math test!” This retort provoked the “too-close to the students” rejoinder. When I determined to seek out “Pam” as soon as I could, and report the ‘charge’ to her, who confirmed my assessment and thanked me for the information, I knew there would be repercussions. She brought her two parents to the parent-teacher meeting that very evening, to confront the math teacher who never mentioned the incident again in my presence.

Attempting to discern whether a person, statement, situation, is authentic on a scale running from high to low, is a lens and an attitude, and a discipline fraught with peril. A similar gordion knot applies to the situation in which one tries to live-out one’s own authenticity, including the well-known and infamous capacity we all have for self-delusion. And the energy, tension and reverberations of that continuum seem to be central to at least this scribe’s attempt to confront whatever reality/appearance that cropped up in my path.

                                                ---more to come---

*In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an employee of Life magazine spends monotonous days developing photos for publication. To escape and to overcome the tedium, he ‘moves into’ a world of exciting daydreams permitting him to play the hero.

# a form of collaborative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on the process of asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thought and elicit new ideas and assumptions. 

Detouring, from biography, into Archetypal Psychology in pursuit of soul-making for all genders

 Navigating the swirling waters of gender politics, including definitions and vocabulary, human rights, support groups and  public opinion, not to mention various organizational, cultural, ethnic and national aspects, requires more than an advanced swimming skill, a ready helmet, a fully developed muscularity, as well as basic senses, acuity, a full possession of one’s own basis for even considering the questions and a processing method that does no harm, while helping to elucidate new insights. In the midst of these turbulent waters, one encounters words, perspectives and attitudes that bring one up short.

This piece, while deterring from the biographical briefly, is an attempt to find a path between some of the more recent data-word-image sign posts that have emerged while on this path of discoveMeeting a male individual who echoes the distaste and discomfort with Carl Jung’s work for the reason that “Jung has an interest in something called a divinity”, is just one of these ‘litmus tests’ that many universities in North America have failed. Both a divinity and an unconscious, as part of the metaphysic of this profound and generous and complex thinker, and the concomitant ethereal perspective that literally and imaginatively escapes the rational, empirical, experimental, scientific model of formal academic research, however, is not sufficient reason for his studies to be marginalized. History has perpetually, inevitably and immutably cast aside all thought, theory and perspectives, as well as the attitudes and the methods inherent in the ‘untenable’ and the “politically incorrect” and the “intellectually challenging”. From the beginning of recorded history, humans (mostly) male writers and thinkers have ascribed to the gods and goddesses those aspects of the universe over which they had no control, no full comprehension, and not a full appreciation. The whole notion of the history of mythology linked intimately to the cultural imagination, defying one specific academic discipline, for example, is more of an indictment of the traditions of the academic perfectionists than it is of the scholarship implicit in its study, and also in the application of such theories to the study of psychology, as a formal academic discipline.

Falling into the trap of the empiricists, the number crunchers, the diagnosticians and the prescriptive model of medicine, and then galloped at break-neck speed to justify itself with its own DSM and the pharmaceuticals of remediation, along  with interventions of various kinds and theories, to “make people  whole” and psychologically healthy, begs both scepticism and empirical review as to the ‘success’ the current psychological model has attained. Not incidentally, too, the open and free study of Jung, Freud, Perls, Rogers, Adler, Maslow et al, opens the potential for rigorous and critical evaluation both of the strengths of each and the vulnerabilities of each, both in isolation and in comparison. Put James Hillman in that list as well, one who studied and practiced as a Jungian depth therapist, and then evolved into what he terms ‘archetypal psychology’, the ‘making of soul’ as Hillman puts it.

Embracing not merely the full exploration of the biography of individuals, not in search for abnormal and strict adherence to those definitions that assign abnormalities to one of two buckets: medical (because the individual is sick) or legal (because the individual is criminal), it seems to this untutored pilgrim that archetypal psychology portends a different way of coming face to face with human eccentricities, without first ascribing and assigning either the medical or legal templates.

The human imagination, in the form of images that continue to run in and through our conscious and unconscious, flooding each and every minute and situation, as a dynamic in which we all involuntarily and yet inescapably swim, opens the pathway to both an internal and intrinsic perception of one’s soul, from the perspective of the imagination. It also offers the potential of multiple links to those same gods and goddesses, myths and archetypes that have populated our lives forever, it would seem. Medical and legal definitions, by their very nature, are confining to a single or a series of symptoms, and then a class of those symptoms that beg and demand comparison with the appearance of similar symptoms from other individuals in other times. They reduce the universe that we consider from our ‘senses’ to only those symptoms and features that we feel comfortable in acknowledging, with some professional care-or counsel-giver. And, while there are instances in human existence, both individually and collectively, when such fine-tuned attention (psychopaths, sociopaths, sex offender, for instance) seems not merely necessary but serving the interests and safety and security of the community.

It is in the area of eccentricities, those ‘unfamiliar’ instincts that drive each of us, that archetypal psychology could (and we postulate, do,) provide different and useful and far more supportive and inspiring clues to what is, has been, and will be going on in our psyche. Looking at individual lives after their close in death, for example, discloses patterns that are instructive in terms of getting to know who such people were for the purpose of providing a way of seeing for our own lives, looked at backwards. Speculative, curious, indeterminate, somewhat inconclusive and certainly drawing in and evoking more exploration, regardless of which images we might discern, just the ambiguity itself is attractive not only to the imagination but to the culture obsessed with absolutes, correctness, perfection and the sterility of the dominance of those pursuits. Portending naturally towards androgyny, archetypal psychology is both a liberating potential for both men and women. Constricting our models of masculinity and femininity to those positive  “ideals” or ‘heroes,’ or “kings” or “queens” in a cardboard reduction of each of those images, defies the fulsome range of those images that are scampering in and through our psyches throughout our lives.

We are more complex that those self-imposed simplistic, reductionistic magnetic role models; we each can ‘see’ (imagine) ourselves, for example, as not merely taking issue with another, but having a full-fledged duel, or a devious, deceitful sabotage of an enemy, in our imaginations, just as our ancestors themselves engaged in, in their imaginative lives. Often, too, without our fully grasping how, such fantasies birth into our active conscious lives, having slipped the bonds of dreams and fantasies.

 It is those very dreams and fantasies that archetypal psychology seeks to mine, to explore and to supplement our emotional and cognitive and imaginative comprehension of our whole person. As one who grew instincts that, like radar, “smelled” the atmosphere in our home, with a view to determining the relative safety, calmness, kindness, and acceptance, like the knight errant in literature, I tend to deploy that perspective, attitude and absorption of the details in my surroundings instinctively, rather than merely cognitively, or merely emotionally, and certainly not only through the senses. Intuition, without my taking classes in it, or being formally coached in its capacities and risks, or even being conscious that it was intuition that I was using to protect myself, has been my ‘lens’. Also like the knight errant, impelled by curiosity, drive to explore, I have been something of a vagabond, without a permanent home for many of my mid-life years.

With this perspective/lens/soul, I also find absolutes restrictive, confining and deadening. Interested in ‘going inside’ to foreclose on a compulsive and driven effort to ‘prove myself,’ I withdrew from the corporate, public and ‘such models of North American culture. Looking from inside, I could reconnect with fantasies of the writer, the explorer, the adventurer and the shit-disturber, without actually having to engage in the many real risks and dangers if one were to enter into those various vocations physically. Some will undoubtedly consider the archetypal perspective to be ephemeral, fatuous even, and certainly impractical. It does not ‘solve’ any crisis; in fact, in the process of pursuing its requisite questions, often one is led into even more uncertainty, ambiguity and more fanciful dreams and images. Of course, the literary, imaginative and the ideational lens, is not proposed as a full solution; it serves rather as a way of seeing differently from the dominant, (some would say, colonial) model of treating both the self and the other.

And while discussions of various archetypes, images, fantasies and dreams is also enriching for those fortunate enough to find collaborative perspectives in others, no suggestion, or diagnosis or prescription of any kind is either expected or implied in the process from one to another. The imaginative universe, by definition, escapes the “pinning-to-the-board” of the symptoms, as if they were an anaesthetized insect, for the purpose of dissection. Rather, it takes a position, even on such common subjects and vocabularies as “emotions” that is slightly more detached, curious, exploring and suggestive. Seeing emotions as momentary, perhaps inflammatory, phosphorescent, and thereby not conclusive of any specific symptom, but rather a brief and useful expression of something that comes naturally, and passes as quickly as it arrives. It is the residue that lingers, and the patterns of those residues helps in the imaginative ‘dig’ for the images that are ‘in charge.

There is a relevant and potent vulnerability, from the archetypal psychology perspective. Through its lens, we are unable to dominant either our description and definition of an experience, or a final mapping of our lives. There is a shadowy, ethereal, and mercurial aspect to the images dancing in our imaginations, and they are all linked, if we are to taste this approach, with our own death.

And as such, there is an inescapable resistance to all forms of denial, of death, certainly, and also of many other ways by and in which we succumb to the demands of a public culture that ‘sees’ us as things, to be manipulated, deployed, and also dismissed when no longer effective or useful.

The pursuit and the discovery of ‘soul’ rather than the driving and cool ‘spirit’ (to borrow from Hillman) is also a more resonant, more complex and more realistic, even though paradoxical, coming as it does attempt to do, from the imaginative, the images and the eccentricities and the instincts.

“Something” inside told Ella Fitzgerald, appearing at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in a talent contest as a dancer, to change her mind and tell her audience she was about to sing. Something inside Yehudi Menhuin, at four, after attending a symphony concert, that he wanted ‘one of those’ violins, and when his parents gave him an aluminium instrument, he stamped on it, demanding a ‘real violin. These somethings inside, these voices, Hillman terms the daimon, the angel that resides somehow, somewhere in our psyche, that, while not determining our specific vocation or professional career, nevertheless, serves as an influential factor in ‘how’ we go about living our lives.

And both men and women, regardless of where they might find themselves on the continuum of ‘radical’ or modest gender advocates, for their own gender, can explore their own lives, through the mirror of memory, fantasy, dream and images none of which are exclusively masculine or feminine, nor can or do they deny the androgyny of each of us.

Talk of “winning” as some of the more prominent mens’ support groups do, seems more than a trifle restrictive, based on clearly defined goals and the accomplishment of those goals. This model is embedded in the cultural imagination and the political ethos of North America, and, from the perspective of this desk, it is, has been and will continue to ‘erode’ much of the energy, imagination and hope from millions, as an exclusive model for all genders.

A 'biographical' lens peering into mysogyny and misandry...

Cruelty is a modest word, that can morph into ideology of the victim (ideological feminism) on the one end of the spectrum and into the triumph of the alpha male on the other end of the spectrum. Regardless of which polarity is speaking, writing or acting, men and women are being hurt, some of them irreparably.

Debates over the virtues/sins of men and women have raged for centuries. Whether the female goddess image, worshipped by both men and women, or the heroic king, also worshipped by both genders, have witnessed and enhanced the swinging of the pendulum in a cultural oscillation, without end.

Various writers over the last two or three decades have attempted to document, some of their work as revisionist history, a theory of masculine dominance that, like a criminal sentence has to be removed from the culture, while others point to the under-coverage, under-noted, and under-valued victimization of men. And  while the theories and the vocabulary of the extreme polarities reads like two deaf people talking past each other, and while debates about the merits and demerits of each side, even those calls for further discussion seem impaled in a universe dominated by a zero-sum, Manichean dichotomy, with temporary victors and losers depending on the skill and the artistry of the protagonists.

A man living in the twenty-first century who refuses to acknowledge not only the rights but more importantly the inherent strength, endurance, creativity, capacity for affiliation and community, leadership, mentorship and outright “value” of women is, metaphorically living in his own dark cave of denial. Similarly, a woman of the twenty-first century who refuses to acknowledge the capacity of men to experience deep and profound emotions, tender care for vulnerable babies, parents, and the elderly, as well as the strength, endurance and creativity, adventurousness and risk-taking of men is clinging to reductionistic archetypes of brute force.

Misandry, the contempt for and hatred of men, has been well documented in the evidence from the popular culture that needs men as buffoons, jerks, idiots, and the butt of such perverted humour. Similarly, although far more deeply embedded in the social consciousness, misogyny, the contempt for and hatred of women, is the subject of multiple court cases perpetrated by men against women, mostly of their own intimate association. While the legal system is one theatre for attempting to balance competing forces, interests and ideologies, the public square is the place where attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and even thoughts are tested, revised, and potentially transformed. Let others debate whether or not both misandry and misogyny warrant definition as legally actionable under human rights legislation. In our view, this is a no-brainer; both attitudes and the actions each provokes are reprehensible. However, having plucked those keys into this space will do little to accomplish that legislative development. Indeed, while ‘definition of rights’ is and can be a path to social and cultural change, much of the ink and the narrative of enhancing human rights serves as only one arrow in the quiver in the over-all movement toward equality and equity*.

Indeed, it is not only reasonable, but often overlooked, to argue that the campaign for human rights, while an effective consciousness-raising instrument dependent on the courage of oppressed and victimized individuals to take legal recourse in response to their victimizers, has another impact. This headline and narrative of this worthy initiative tends to pit victims against aggressors, and can leave an imprint that the ‘war of the genders’ like the Middle East, is not only interminable but intractable. Throwing up arms, however, is to relinquish hope, without which  nothing can or will move.

Having been reared in a home in which the dominant female (mother) exhibited  ultimate power and control, while the passive-aggressive (father) exhibited a compliant appeaser role, this scribe has been consciously and unconsciously wrestling with the issue of equality and equity in such a “nest” for eight decades. And while anger and disappointment to and for each has oscillated back and forth, often triggered by an incident, a comment, a piece of prose or poetry, any attempt to reconcile each parent the other, obviously hypothetically and posthumously and imaginatively and ideally, is and can be at best only subjective and tentative.

Personal narrative, as opposed to formal research required for doctoral study and public recognition, pales as just another personal story. And as such can easily, glibly and dismissively be trashed as just another person’s opinion. And in this case, when the overt abuse was imposed by the female, while the male provided the quiet, supportive, care-giving archetype, the story contravenes the demographic and statistical evidence. As a consequence, many would read any such account as reducible to the (male) victim, who is self-indulging in a pity-party. Respectfully, I ask you, dear reader, to suspend that specific judgement, at least for the moment.

Each parent’s strength, while evident and appreciated by two siblings, was largely un-recognized and definitely undervalued by the other. A kind of unwritten arrangement provided employment and income from both, a modest house, a bountiful larder and table, a verdant and energetic garden of fruits, vegetables and flowers. In retrospect, it was the hidden darkness of each parent, their unconscious that erupted in dramatic conflict, without triggers that were perceived or available to spectators. Indeed, the many conflicts were also keep as deep, dark secrets from the outside world, camouflaged by a religiosity and a public performance of upstanding citizenship.

Having been raised in what amounted to a ‘gender war’ long before the rise of feminism, and the interjection of the word misandry, I can still hear references to the former Ottawa mayor, Charlotte Whitton’s pungent and cogent epithet that “in order to be considered equal to a man, women had to be twice as good; fortunately, men have made that quite easy.” Power, in the service of busy hands to accomplish determined goals, primarily for the apparent purpose of public acclaim, seemed to be the operative principle, authored and enforced by the maternal actor. And “actor” while somewhat reductionistic, nevertheless attempts to capture the energy, the drive and the intolerance of ambiguity, uncertainty, challenge to authority and dominance of this woman. A partially ‘trained’ soprano voice that neither knew nor respected the context in which it vibrated, embarrassed this pre-teen sitting in the back pew on Sunday mornings. Beside her, a totally unmusical, tuneless and muted sound was creeping from father’s larynx. That scene and its sounds is metaphor for the drama of the family of origin.

Adding to the ‘sound’ metaphor, back home, were a somewhat shrill argumentative ‘forte’ voice counterpointed by a gentle, soft male ‘piano’ speech impediment, offering a manuscript of disharmony and dysfunction. Rin the 1950’s radio stations CKEY and CHUM from Toronto, along with WKBW, Buffalo and WOWO Fort Wayne were constant ‘companions’ offering a popular music version of harmonies and rhythms to ears weary of cacophony.

Navigating between these two sounds, attitudes, perspectives, personalities and Shadows, as a teen, in a neighbourhood populated by quiet, alpha-fathers and submissive, compliant mothers was another of the differences between life inside and life outside the house. And it is those imaginative guard rails, models of masculinity and femininity, the former warm and loving the latter cold, calculating and austere that have shaped this somewhat helter-skelter path.

Male teachers, both friendly and supportive, along with occasional female teachers whose need for control exceeded their good judgement, seemed to be a second act of the home-scene, or a reiteration of the only kind of drama I knew. From the perspective of 2022, in the 1950’s men in the classroom did not have to be concerned about their authority while women were the exception, and were paving a path for generations of women to follow. Strict, austere, detached and over-bearing are descriptors of at least two female teachers, while others were matronly, compassionate and friendly. Among peers, the boys hunted with their fathers, played hockey and drove and worked on cars when they reached driving age. The girls, scholars, and more compliant and rigorous in following instructions, were interested in choirs, dances, movies and guys.

Stereotypes among peers, however, differed from what happened at home. We never considered those adolescent stereotypes of masculinity or femininity to be a curtailment of either our attitudes or our potential. They were all that we ‘knew’. The question of our orientation to authority, however, is central to the development of adolescent psychology.

Rarely, did an incident occur about which I was familiar, that demanded an authoritative response. A single occurrence of a strapping, in grade four, an occasional bullying in the school yard, the occasional missed homework assignment, and the occasional inebriated male on the main street on Saturday evening in summer in this tourist town were about the only dramatic incidents of my experience, outside the house. Tranquillity in the community, during adolescence, was the norm. Neighbours, too, were polite, friendly and generally soft-spoken without red-flag opinions even if they harboured them. A modest, moderate, although never really questioned ‘brand’ of authority was the template to which most people were accustomed. A main street fire in the middle of the night, in the summer between first and second-year of undergraduate years, continues as the most ‘inflamed’ imprint in memory, with the exception of a litany of suicides of adult male members of the community, all of whom I knew at least superficially. And those suicides, in varying degrees, left a ‘scar’ on memory. One especially of the father of a classmate, continues to ‘pain’ my memory and conscience.

Both son and father, of that family, the latter a Christie’s Breadman, were among the most implacable, unflappable, composed and friendly males of my experience, then and since. I have since learned that the son, at fifty, died of a cardiac arrest. Something about family secrets, within my own family, and obviously in that family, struck a note, a minor and reverberating note, in my psyche, especially given my own experience at having to remove the .22 from my father as a pre-teen.

In a Bach Fugue, themes are detailed in then repeated in a different voice and pitch, in relatively the same rhythm, sufficiently similar to be unmistakable as an echo. Somehow, in a manner of composing, different, for example, from the effervescence of Beethoven, Bach’s strict discipline, and formal mathematical intellect was able to imitate in a creative and imaginative way, something very deep and profound about human existence: that we are part of the themes and characters of our ancestors, and our off-spring will be part of those same themes.

And family secrets, for reasons of pride, shame, fear and even convention have been a theme of humans for centuries. Literature is replete with appearance/reality tensions and our lives are no different in that way. Very early, we know and respect some deeply hidden notion that there are certain things we do not tell our parents. What they are likely change as we grow. We also become aware that certain ‘stories’ are for family telling and re-telling only. Among the ‘secrets’ for example, are personal answers to how we each envision, consider and worship God. Some are openly and earnestly willing to enter into such conversations, for their own reasons. Others, not so much. Our family was among the latter.

So, one of the earliest operational scales on which the notion of authority was applied, was the question of belief. What one believed, for instance, was a subject that could and would only provoke intense emotional reactions. In order to engage in public life, one avoided that topic. Similarly, sex was another subject verboten, among the public discourse, secret, and both metaphorically and literally sacralized/demonized, at the same time. Conventionally, however, the demonized aspects of sex far outstripped the sacralized in public morality. And morality, for adolescents in this tiny very conservative town reigned supreme.

Authority, then, was seeded in morality, and keeping family secrets was high among the list of acceptable standards.

                                          -----to be continued---

 *Equality means that everyone is treated the same exact way, regardless of need or any other difference. Equity means everyone is provided with varying levels of support depending on what they need to achieve greater fairness of outcomes. An example of equality occurs when a government subsidizes gasoline or food. The subsidy is available to all people, rich and poor alike. An example of equity occurs, for example, in affirmative action policies such a quotas for marginalized sections of society, and/or decisions by companies to consciously look for a female director of a board composed of all men. 

Wading into the turbulent waters of misogyny and misandry

 One of the most prominent ‘hot-button’ social issues, over the last decade in North America, along with the emergence of the LGBTQ+ community, is the issue of misogyny. Defined as contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women, the word and the publicly documented instances of its cruelty abound in shameful headlines, in court rooms, and sadly in homes and workplaces around the continent.

 Hopefully, the anthropologists with be among the number of researchers who examine critically the relationships between men and women in various cultures. Historically, traditionally, often liturgically and also religiously cultures  have perceptions of both genders, and the appropriate (and inappropriate) models of relationship. Functionality and need have been central to the ‘assigned’ roles of men and women in the communities. 

Rebecca L. Upton, in a piece entitled, Gender, November 19, 2019 (from oxfordbibliographies.com) writes an introduction to the anthropological lens on ‘gender.

Gender is a key concept in the discipline of anthropology. Sex and gender are defined differently in anthropology, the former as grounded in perceived biological differences and the latter as the cultural constructions observed, performed, and understood in any given society. Often based on those perceived biological differences…..Many early monographs in anthropology were grounded in perspectives determined by the interests of largely male ethnographers. Despite early female pioneers in the field, it was not until the1970’s and 1980’s and the real rise of feminist anthropology that gender as a distinct area of theoretical and methodological interest took hold within the discipline. Women were no longer sees as a category of culture and society outside of the realm of the everyday….The study of women, men and the intersections of gender across cultures has become a key aspect of any holistic study or methodological approach in anthropology today.

Meanwhile, while the scholars are conducting their research, and theorizing about their observations and conclusions. The Canadian Women’s Foundation, on their website, report:

More than 4 in 10 women have experienced some form of intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. In 2018, 44% of women reported experiencing some form of psychological, physical, or sexual violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes (Statistics Canada, 2021)…Approximately every six days, a women in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. The proportion of women killed by a spouse or intimate partner is over eight times greater than the proportions of men. In 2020, 160 women and girls were killed by violence. In 2021, 173 women and girls were killed by violence. In 2020, one in five women killed in Canada was First Nation, Metis of Inuit….Indigenous women and girls are 12 times more likely to be murdered or missing than any other women in Canada, and 16 times more likely than white women. Women are more likely than men (39% to 35%) to report experiencing violent crime at some point since age 15. Women are five times more likely than men to experience sexual assault. Approximately4.7 million women, 30% of all women  5 years of age and older, report that they have experienced sexual assault least once since the age of 15. This is compared to 8% men.

On September 12, 2020, The Calgary Journal’s Bill Atwood writes, in a piece entitled, “Male victims are being left out of the domestic violence conversation:

(A)ccording to a Statistics Canada report), Family Violence in Canada: a Statistical Profile, men self-reported to have been abused by their partners at a higher rate than women—with 4.2 percent of men and 3.5 percent of women being victims….Experts explain that because these self-reported stats are often overlooked this can lead to male victims being left our of the conversation, and without proper support. They also explain that there has been an overuse of the police-reported statistics by both academics and the media. This has led to situations where male victims have not been believed by police, and in some cases even face accusations of being the perpetrator….The bulk of crimes within the family are never known to the police….The Canadians in the victimization survey were asked if their victimization was ever reported to the police, and 70 percent of them said no.

In our contemporary culture in which the “protection of women and children” is one of the most powerful motivators of both policy and perception, the public consciousness of the tensions and conflicts between men and women and the manner by which each gender is perceived, processed and supported reflect a playing field tilted in favour of women. And while all supports for female victims

continued support, both in financial and in policy and practice terms, a significant shift to a more balanced attitude, based on both a shift in perceptions about the various and complex varieties of conflict between the genders.

How we behave when we encounter a conflicting situation, will result in the convergence of a plethora of both external and internal forces. And some of those forces, for each of us, may well be beyond our conscious awareness. A study at the University of Florida, evinced data that tended to point to a high percentage of both men and women who inflicted cruelty on the opposite gender having experienced physical abuse, or had witnessed abuse between their parents. That is one of many contributing factors to our myriad of options including and between the ‘fight-flight’ classical response. Our experience of betrayal, abandonment, bullying, gossip, and our capacity to recover from those experiences, will impact however we perceive and act when confronted with cruelty subsequently.

Given that the vast majority of public information and public attitudes tend to shine light on, and thereby to tend to favour, the plight of women as a social and a political issue, the equality of the genders, a stated goal of both feminists and advocates for androgyny, remains a distant mirage. Remaining silent, for example, when enduring emotional, psychological or even sexual abuse by a female partner is a pattern explained by a number of militating factors:

·        men are proud and by sharing such a story, they expose themselves as being “less than a real man” especially to other men;

·        men are also insecure, and any form of abuse is undoubtedly going to trigger feelings and even a belief that one’s neurosis is not only real but perhaps even crippling, given the abuse that is taking place;

·        men, at least many men, resist getting in touch with their emotional energy, including ascribing names to complex feelings, listening to the messages of those feelings, reflecting on the patterns of the recurrence of those feelings, and envisioning the potential options that might be available to both share and deal with those feelings….most likely not with another man, especially a stranger, a therapist, or even a coach or mentor;

·        men are raised and imprinted with the psychic/emotional/social/familial archetype of strength, force, physical fitness, physical skill, endurance, athletic prowess, competitive obsession with winning/success, especially of the kind that brings physical rewards, trophies, medals, coloured ribbons, and cash.

·        men are inversely imprinted with the obsessive avoidance, resistance, denial of the opposite of strength, including emotions, physical pain, evidence of crying, withdrawal from a fight, ‘wimping out’ in whatever form and situation he faces

·        men are taught, both formally and informally, that physical structures, bridges, equipment, transportation devices, hockey sticks and equipment, golf clubs, memberships in clubs, teams, and a shared pursuit of a common goal (of winning) is a sign of maturity, inter-dependence, leadership training and social acceptance.

·        men are enculturated to train, to earn a living, to climb up various competitive ladders, for themselves, their families of origin and eventually their adult families…all of this a matter of action, leaving reflection as a mere after-thought if at all entertained.

Without attending to the inherent nuances of different perceptions, attitudes, training and enculturation of women, specifically, it seems fair and reasonable to attest that each gender has what might be termed an empty bucket of both experience and knowledge, cognitive and emotional, of the other primary gender. Both genders frequently attend the same schools, in both elementary and secondary levels, where the primary gender stereotypes are discovered, reinforced and imprinted. Through the literature, the history texts, and even the sociological texts and classes, (although this dynamic is shifting fairly rapidly), adolescent males and females enter at the beach of gender relationships, with the biology of each gender is in a hormonal tornado.

Enmity, cruelty, power imbalances are all included in both the formal and the informal maturational processes of both genders. The models of relational behaviour adolescents witness from the adult world, doubtless, are not as inspiring and uplifting as one might hope, especially as the dominance of male models surrounds all of us in North America. Even with the evolution of various academic and corporate and ecclesial and social organizations now experiencing a dramatic shift in female leadership, compared with only a few decades ago, it is only in the last decade or so that women have felt comfortable in leadership, not having to mimic the alpha male archetype.

In our employment and workplace protocols, men and women, in order to be truly considered as equals, we will have to abandon the stereotypical prohibition of workplace romances, based as they have been on the assumption that the male (power figure) had to be taking advantage of the female subordinate, and vice versa. In our transformation of our cultural archetypes we have to shift from a male dominance presupposition, to a perception and the concomitant attitudes that each man and woman is capable of making his/her own independent, ethical, moral and authentic decision. Our “template of abuse” based on masculinity’s perversity has to give way to a much more objective, empirically centred, gender-equal premise that resists the political rhetoric of instant assumptions of guilt, by men, and innocence and victimhood by women. Locked in stereotypes, again originated by a male dominated culture, in which men were attempting to “over-protect” and thereby to patronize women, perhaps in a manner that men themselves considered ethical, we have to confront such psychic and cultural snares of reductionism.

Shifting to a more complex, nuanced, and effective model of the perception of equality of intellect, of imagination, of resourcefulness, of ambition, of skills of endurance (even if defined differently and not exclusively physical) of both male and female, we have the prospect of potentially reducing the incidence of both misogyny and misandry, that word that is so rarely heard and so absent from our cultural vernacular.

In a 2014 piece in the Vancouver Sun, by Douglass Todd, entitled, “She’s fighting to bridge the gulf between women and men,” we read:

Katharine Young isn’t in the habit of picking fights. But the (then) 70 year-old Hinduism specialist didn’t like what she witnessed in the 1990’s when a hard-edged stream of feminist scholarship started gaining traction as conventional thinking in higher education and popular culture (And I might add within the mainline churches!)…While Young remains leery of the spotlight, she and McGill University colleague Paul Nathanson have found themselves in the past 15 years at the incendiary forefront of exposing a trend in North America—the sexist counterpart of misogyny, which they call ‘misandry’….Titled Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History, (the book) explains how technological advances have harmed men and boys, reducing the value of physicality….With ideological feminists, the only males who are granted approval are those Young terms ‘honorary women,’ which includes all males who agree all females are oppressed, as well as gays and visible minorities. (A) second book by Young and Nathanson is titled Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systematic Discrimination Against Men..explores ways males are discriminated against in the legal system in regards to sexual abuse, violence against women, workplace harassment, child custody, and prostitution. Legalizing Misandry ‘exposes how ideologies based on an assumed superiority..have no place in the quest for social justice and equality, (Edward) Kruk writes in  New Male Studies. Judges and legislators are basing decisions ‘ on the assumption that women constitute a ‘victim class (and are thereby devalued as inherently weak.)’

Clearly, it is not only ideological feminists who, alone perpetrated this misandry. They had, and in some cases continue to enjoy, the full support of those ‘honorary women’ many of whom, as self-emasculated men, served as leaders in organizations and churches that imposed their imbalance and inequality and injustice and unfairness in their desperate decisions.