Glossary of Jungian Terms
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Glossary of Jungian Terms Active Imagination: A technique of concentrating on dream or fantasy images by lowering the level of conscious activity. This allows the images to develop according to their own logic and furnishes a means of exposing unconscious contents. Affect: Emotion. A primary force exercised by the unconscious over which the individual has little control. Amplification: A process of interpretation, important in the analysis of dreams, it depends upon finding the appropriate context for images by searching for parallels in other dreams or in myths. Images in films can be amplified by cross-reference to other images whether in the same film or in comparable sources. Androgyne: (Also hermaphrodite.) An imago having the sexual characteris tics of both male and female in equal measure. In its perfected form it represents the linkage of anima and animus in a syzygy that reflects the balancing of opposite elements in the differentiated self. Anima and Animus: The contrasexual archetypes. The first, experienced by men, represents the hidden feminine aspects of their personalities; and the second (present in the dreams of women) symbolises the concealed masculine in them. They mediate between the ego and the unconscious, and thus are opposites to the persona. See also syzygy. Apperception: A process whereby a new psychic content is recognised so that it becomes clear. Directed apperceptive processes, like thinking, depend on rational, conscious activity; undirected apperception, such as dreaming and fantasising, is irrational. Archetypal Images: The images which clothe the archetypes and enable the conscious mind to know unconscious contents. Often recognisable by their numinosity or magical charge. See also symbol. Archetypes: The contents of the collective unconscious. They are not inherited ideas, but inherited modes of psychic functioning. Until activated, they are forms without content; when activated they control patterns of behaviour. The centres of energy around which ideas, images, affects and myths cohere. 253 254 Glossary Association: The spontaneous linkage of. ideas, perceptions, images, fantasies according to certain personal and psychological themes, motifs, similarities, oppositions or causalities.,r Child: Archetypal image usually signalling a beneficial change of personality before it occurs, it represents to the adult instincts experienced in childhood and subsequently split-off. Collective Unconscious: The deeper layer of the unconscious whose contents are more or less the same in all individuals. See archetypal images, archetypes, personal unconscious. Consciousness: Described by Jung as the relation of psychic contents to the ego, insofar as this relation is perceived by the ego. For our purposes it generally suffices to think of consciousness as awareness. Demon: An extreme form of the shadow. Duality: See Enantiodromia. Ego-Complex: The centre of consciousness, in so far as psychic contents which the ego perceives are conscious. Although we have knowledge of it, ,. the ego is inferior to the self which is the ordering principle of the human 1personality. Emblems: Also called by Jung allegories or signs, they are distinct from symbols in being paraphrases of contents that are already conscious. Unlike symbols they do not signify meanings for which no other expression yet exists. Enantiodromia: The tendency of every psychological extreme to contain its own opposite and to run towards it. This principle is the key to the essential duality of Jungian analyses of myth, since the more extreme a position is, the more readily it can be expected to convert into its opposite. God-Image (Imago Dei): See Self. Great Mother: (Also Earth Mother.) The collective maternal imago, both a figure of benign fertility and nurture, and the devourer who pulls her children down to the abyss. For Jung the profound ambivalence of the imago signified the need for the young to break away from their mother's embraces in order to enter adulthood. Thus the hero's return to the world from the cave of the Earth Mother marks an early step on the way to individuation. Glossary 255 Hermaphrodite: See Androgyne. Hero(ine): A human or quasi-human figure, symbol of the libido and 'the ideas, forms, and forces which grip and mould the soul:2 He or she 'represents the will and capacity to undergo repeated transformations in pursuit of wholeness or meaning', and at times appears to be ego, at times the self.3 Hieros Gamos: Sacred copulation, consummation of the sacred marriage. Often a seasonal ritual ensuring the fertility of a people or their land. In analytical psychology, the union of hero and anima (often the mother) represents a preliminary stage of transformation towards individuation. Imago: Refers to an image generated subjedively and therefore often having archetypal qualities because it is shaped by the internal state of the subjed.4 Incest: See hieros gamos. Union of the hero(ine) with the parent of the opposite sex represents the regressive entry into the unconscious, a step which must be followed by rejedion of the parent imago if he or she is to progress towards discovery of the self. Individuation: The process of discovery by which the individual approaches knowledge of the self. It entails not only an enhancement of consciousness but also the more complete fulfilment of the colledive qualities of the human being. Integration: Either the recognition, or the process of bringing about the interadion of conscious and unconscious. Lapis Philosophorum: The philosophers' stone, believed by alchemists to have the power to convert matter to gold, and interpreted by Jung as an image of the self. Libido: Psychic energy. Desire and appetite in their natural state, unchecked by any kind of authority. Mana Personalities: (See also Hero(ine») Imagoes of personalities such as priests or magicians, radiating extraordinary energy and having divine or magical powers, which appear when the ego is consciously confronted with the sele Mandala: An image having numinous powers, and often combining redilinear (representing conscious) and circular (unconscious) components. 256 Glossary Jung interpreted his patients' mandalas as intuitively produced and detailed maps of their psyches. Myths: Revelatory narratives which Jung argued were not so much invented as experienced. He thought they resembled a projection of the collective unconscious of each nation and thus provided a means to study it. Numinosum: Transcendent energy (mediated by the archetypes) wholly outside the control of the individual's will. It can transport the subject into a state of rapture and transform the consciousness. Jung thought that experience of the numinous was an important factor in the religious life of the individual, and produced a personal faith in what is beyond the power of the psyche to know. Persona: The public face or mask of the individual. It is the means by which the ego confronts the world. Its countertype is the anima or animus. Personal Unconscious: That layer of the unconscious that owes its existence to personal experience and stores forgotten and repressed contents. Pneuma: Literally air, wind, breath or spirit. Pneuma and 'spirit' refer to the immaterial aspect of humanity, 'in their archetypal character [they] are dynamic and half-substantial agencies; you are moved by them as by a wind .. : 6 Psychic manifestations of the spirit are autonomous complexes (like the wise old man) which may lead to enhanced intuitive self-knowledge. Projection: Occurs when individuaIs find either good or problematic aspects of their own personality transferred on to other people or objects. It gives subjects who are aware of this function the opportunity to identify some of the contents of the unconscious. Psyche: The total activity and contents of the mind, both conscious and unconscious. Also used to mean soul. Psychopomp: In myth, a figure that leads souls down to the underworld; in analytical psychology a symbol of interchange between consciousness and unconsciousness. Psychosis: 'A perso~ality state in which an unknown 'something' takes possession of the psYche to a greater or lesser degree and asserts its existence undeterred by logic, persuasion or will:7 Quaternity: Division into four parts, frequently seen in mandalas. Represents the wholeness of psychic life through the conjunction of opposites in the self. Glossary 257 Regression: The turning back of the libido to the depths of the unconscious (often symbolised by the Great Mother) caused either when an individual recoils before a daunting task or by neurosis. Self: Like the imago Dei, the central archetype in the human psyche; the image of totality; and both the source and goal of our psychic life. Shadow: The archetype that represents the 'dark side' of human nature, that is those elements of the personality which the individual does not recognise in him or herself. Often appears as a dark figure. Soul: Sometimes used by Jung interchangeably with psyche; sometimes employed to refer to deep level activity in the psyche.s Spirit: See pneuma. Symbol: Expression of an intuitive idea that cannot yet be formulated in any other way. See archetypal images. Synchronicity: An 'acausal connecting principle' by which events that have no causal relationship in space or time are nonetheless experienced as meaningfully linked. Covers such parapsychological phenomena as telepathy and clairvoyance. Syzygy: The linking of opposites in a pair. Sometimes found as interlinked symbols such the Yin and Yang but usually as