It’s a moment in my life that sits in bold relief… a portal opening into a new world, capturing my imagination and tangibly directing the course of my life.
My family was a newspaper family, especially so on Sunday mornings after mass, when the New York Times was disassembled and digested section by section, reader after reader. A high schooler sitting on the terrace with the Book Review, I can still feel myself there, reading about a book on depth psychology called Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman.
At that time and in that place, Freud was a distant oddity. No one I knew even mentioned psychology, let alone admitted to engaging in psychotherapy! Years before Oprah, I had caught no real glimpse into this underworld before this book.
Hillman studied with CG Jung, delving even deeper into what he called Archetypal Psychology. My mind was naïve and open as I read Hillman:
“In Jungian practice the word Shadow, Self, Ego, Anima, and the like refer to the structural components of the personality. These basic structures are always imagined to be partial personalities, and the interplay between them is imagined more as in fiction than in physics. Rather than a field of forces, we are each a field of internal personal relationships, an interior commune, a body politic. Psychodynamics become psychodramatics; our life is less the resultant of pressures and forces than the enactment of mythical scenarios…
“As Jung refined his insight into these complex persons, the persons of our complexes, he discovered that their autonomy and intentionality derive from deeper figures of far wider significance. These are the archetypes, the persons to whom we ultimately owe our personality. In speaking of them, he says that ‘we are obliged to reverse our rationalistic causal sequence, and instead of deriving these figures from our psychic conditions, must derive our psychic conditions from these figures… It is not we who personify them; they have a personal nature from the very beginning.’
“Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them.”
I can still remember the troubling sense of structural disintegration within my mind, as I dropped my now-seen assumptions and allowed Ego to step back into the lineup of all The Little People of my psyche. Through that interior shift, all were autonomous and none was in charge. I no longer knew who I was but intuitively grasped that Hillman was pointing me towards where I needed to go.
I am not one but many people living on the interior stage of my own existence.
And it’s all about how we engage them that matters.
Decades of a slow and circular process of realization and integration has only clarified this reality. I am empty space where archetypal figures come and go, expressing their dance, their warnings, their truths. It is only when I identify wholly with any one of them that trouble begins. When consumed solely by one narrative, I am lost.
With the pitiable scene in our country, the abject failure of our democracy and decency in this time, in all times to a degree, I am compelled towards defiance that is alighted within—to create and defend a democracy within my own psyche.
As in the collective, this is no easy task. It requires me to respect each voice that arises, no matter how disagreeable or foul to the majority’s sensibilities. It means I cast no vote for one party to the exclusion of another and listen—recognizing they are all me. In this arena of tolerance, the most objectionable among me naturally tempers and what emerges is a kernel of truth, a necessary piece of the puzzle. Like stage actors, they offer up their lines and, when heard and absorbed, willingly exit. Peaceful coexistence is naturally available, like the brilliant sun behind our cloudy minds.
But this is an inside job that few in positions of power (think, The Tyrant, The Sycophant, The Killer) are taking up. Look around and behold The Shadows of the many running amok. To move freely among them is to first move freely within one’s own inner democracy.
Until next time…