When Sharon Blackie talks about the state of embodied enchantment and its components, she says this of the fourth: “Enchantment is an emanation of the mythic imagination, and is founded on an acknowledgment of myth and story as living principles in the world.”
Those same living principles, in a state of genesis or reflection within the human psyche, are called archetypes. Junginan analyst and cantadora Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminds us that every character of a given myth or story has its dynamic analogue within the psyche of every human being; we each contain them all. This is why myth and story are so inherently resonant and powerful.
But here we can make a critical mistake: the mythic was not made for concretizing. The symbolic, by nature, is not the literal.
I have often wondered: beyond the pathology — the abusive and regressive experimentation of sexologists, the fetishistic interests of research donors, the unaddressed trauma and mental illness and porn-fueled dopamine addiction of cross-sex ideators, and the endless grooming opportunities afforded by social media — beyond all of that, is there some break in mythic function?
We have cross-sex dreams — this is normal. We contain cross-sex archetypes — also normal. We have internal experiences of the deep psyche that transcend sex, blend sex, examine it from myriad angles and possibilities — all normal. This is our innermost collective consciousness at play.
But in material life, in waking relations, we can no more change sex than we can fly, or morph into a different species, or disintegrate into sensate dust. All of this shapeshifting is completely natural to the deep psyche, but very much at odds with material reality.
So along with the pathology and play-acting, does cross-sex ideation confuse the dream with the waking? Has it forgotten the fundamental rules that delineate the imaginal from the real?
It is a mistake, a huge and fundamental mistake, to attempt to literalize the mythic. There are boundaries between the numinous and hypnagogic, and the liminal and material, and they exist for important reasons. When these states are confused through injury or illness, we call it insanity. Postmodern critical theory, for instance, likes to challenge binaries, but when (say) the binary of perception and cognition is unraveled, we call it schizophrenia.
A man may say he “feels” like a woman. This might reflect an experience of archetypal potency within the deep psyche, but it cannot break the surface to become literal — that’s not its function. At the level of material reality, it becomes a nonsensical claim. This man may empathize with women in certain situations. He may have misconstrued this “feeling” as an affinity for female cultural gender roles, fetishistic behaviors, porn consumption, a denied trauma response, repressed sexual orientation, any number of things. But the “feeling” is nowhere grounded in reality.
When we learn to balance both deep psyche and waking life, we do so from a place called the medial realm. This is a vantage point for considering the whole — but boundaries pertain, and we cannot drag an expression from deep psyche into waking life, and give it form at will, and declare it “real.”
Or have we forgotten this? I’ve often wondered about the activist heraldry of unicorns, creatures which have never existed in material reality. Is this an indication that they do, in fact, know what’s impossible, but insist on it anyway — and insist that we believe along with them?
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Related:
Healing from Trauma: Sharon Blackie on Presence, Embodiment, and Slow Living (Part 1)
Healing from Trauma: Sharon Blackie on Presence, Embodiment, and Slow Living (Part 2)
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Navigating by Shadow 
I confess I skipped your articles after I saw they involved Jungian psychology. I think we can probably abstract certain common themes in the human psyche, but I think Jung got a bit carried away.
Your point here about the trans activists attempting to substantiate the imagined is a really good one, but Jung was doing the same thing, as far as I can tell, with his ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes, which he thought more real than actual people (not unlike Plato’s idealism).
Usually, at some point, theory bumps up against the empirical world (which it should have drawn on to start with) and is debunked. We have to imagine causal connections before we can gather data to test any of our hypotheses, of course, and Jungian concepts, are useful, which is why they are so attractive.
You made me think of the background to this phenomenon, the development of artificial intelligence, “augmented reality”, and social media with its tendency to repeat the lie of limitless personal potential. Meanwhile – IRL – we get mentally sicker, more addicted, more aware of our conspicuous, unsatisfying consumption. Civilization might collapse soon. We have no control.
Reality sucks. But we can, apparently, BE anything we want in this brave new world by an act of declaration. Girl, boy, sparkly unicorn. Bizarrely, we can demand people change the pronouns they use to refer to us when we’re not even there, or lose their job. If we’re kids, and we don’t want them to, they can’t even tell mum and dad. It’s like Brexit for individuals – take back control; have a sex change.
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I’d call it depth psychology. Blackie and Estés give the nod to Jung, but their focus is on mythos and the folkloric, what we cache into them, what we draw from them, and why they seem to persist in common experiential themes. More often than not this is going on beneath the waking intellect, along with implicit memory (where unprocessed trauma seems to hang out). There’s a lot happening here with brain states and commonalities of subconscious experience; more if you get into the Johns Hopkins work with psychedelics (that’s its own book). Jung’s focus was more spiritualized and hermetic. I wouldn’t call this Jungian, we’re already too far over into neuroscience from where he laid his groundwork.
Personally I file the “augmented reality” stuff on a transhumanist shelf. I’d like to blame Silicon Valley or cyberpunk or the deconstructionists, but the in vivo began with Magnus Hirschfeld, maybe earlier. There was already a Mary Shelley reanimator sort of vibe in literature, so — who knows? Maybe tech had to catch up with what people were already darkly imagining. That it was a very bad idea to begin with and tech still can’t force it to happen — I don’t know what to say about that. Except I do believe that sadists and masochists exist, and some of them get grant money.
My point is regular (non-affirming) CBT and talk therapy are good starts, but the way trans believers speak and demonstrate their thinking go way beyond the cognitive. They talk as if deep-psyche stuff is literal and self-evident and materially explains who they are. Except it doesn’t do that in any sane or coherent way. So, you know . . . what’s going on with that?
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You know quite a lot more about all this than I do, Estelle, by the sounds of it, and I’m pleased to see you don’t conflate Jungian ideas with reality. I used to be very much into mysticism, and now (after my conversion to naturalism) I’m often too eager to nudge in that direction.
It is all a fascinating area, and there is value in those archetypal themes. I think it was Estés I had a tape of years ago when I was doing my counselling training, and I loved it – she told several traditional tales, “fairy stories” we used to call them – Little Red Riding-hood comes to mind – and analysed what the characters represented.
I’ve not delved into the Hopkins stuff, but this reminded me of research and conjecture from the field of archeology I read about in “Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods” by David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce, which related many of the shapes in ancient rock carvings to those typically reported and drawn by people experiencing psychedelic trips. They conjectured (you can’t really hypothesize about something that presumably can never be known) that ancient people took psilocybin, fly agaric, etc., and considered the altered states to be so significant that they carved the shapes they saw into cave walls: spirals, diamonds, starbursts, lozenges, zig-zags. The central focus and relationship with rituals of life and death indicate these experiences of another world formed the central theme of their religion. It’s possible it even caused humans to invent religion!
It’s a fascinating read, if one remembers the speculative nature of it, but it’s a compelling and monumental idea – religion came from hallucinations! The authors go on to describe the significance of caves, both in psychological terms (womb-like, Mother Earth, source of food, and final destination of bones) and the practical opportunities caves offer for psychological change, like sensory deprivation.
When I mentioned augmented reality, I was thinking just of the overlay of virtual information or “unreality” onto our real world via apps and other tech, but it certainly dovetails with transhumanism. Again, drawing shapes on and scarifying the skin, or adding piercings, is as old as the hills, and our imaginings of transfigured humans goes back at least 40,000 years (with the Lion-man figurine … or Lion-woman), and probably a lot longer.
So there is reason to be pretty sure these kinds of themes are common to all humanity, with cultural variations, and they are therefore very useful for analysing our unconscious minds, dreams, etc. (or cutural curiosities like the trans explosion). It’s just that some assume these themes must be “out there” in the spiritual realm – how else do we all see them? – rather than through the nuts and bolts of genetic inheritance and absorption of our culture’s expression of them. Foxes probably dream about catching rabbits, and rabbits probably have nightmares about being caught.
Thanks! I’ll have to catch up with the posts I’ve missed now. 🙂
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Jung had some very interesting ideas about consciousness, and I think they were a good counterbalance to behaviorism. But yeah, I think we have to be very careful about attempting to “map the mind.” I’m not so sure that consciousness (apart from brain function) is that predictable, and I’m also not sure how universal “universality” really is. There are commonalities in imaginal themes and motifs, of course, which is very cool and compelling. But where’s the ultimate source? We can’t say for sure. I think we have this cultural compulsion to take mystery (in the original experiential sense) and build doctrine and dogma around it, and you know the rest. But the map isn’t the terrain.
I also think excessive screentime is doing some weird and distorted things to our interaction with the imaginal realm, and it’s creating real deficiencies of natural-world sensory input and provoking odd states of disembodiment. That always has me looping back to the folkloric, which has some brilliant things to say about re-embodiment and maintaining one’s balance.
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