Last week, I wrote about the characters of Baltar and Six in the sci-fi TV series Battlestar Galactica. Such a relationship is not unprecedented.
From Carl Jung’s autobiography:
When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, “What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within me said, “It is art.” I was astonished… I knew for a certainty that the voice had come from a woman. I recognized it as the voice of a patient, a talented psychopath who had a strong transference to me. She had become a living figure within my mind. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 185)
Later I came to see that this inner feminine figure plays a typical, or archetypical, role within the unconscious of a man, and I called her the “anima”. (MDR, p. 186)
What Jung does not mention in his autobiography is that he had what he considered a disastrous affair with the patient in question, Sabina Spielrein. Perhaps this explains why, for a very long time, Jung was consistently negative about the anima.
What the anima said seemed to me full of a deep cunning… The anima might then have easily seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality. If I had followed her voice, she would in all probability have said to me one day, “Do you imagine the nonsense you’re engaged in is really art? Not a bit.” Thus the insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man. In the final analysis the decisive factor is always consciousness, which can understand the manifestations of the unconscious and take up a position toward them. (MDR, p. 187)
I find Jung’s attitude in this passage almost shocking. Such a lack of basic trust and respect between the persons of the psyche! Here are the roots of James Hillman’s reaction against Jung’s ‘psychic monotheism’—the decisive factor is always consciousness, but Jung keeps consciousness identified only with himself. Instead of encouraging the growth of her consciousness, she becomes only an instrument of his growth, who vanishes once she is no longer needed.
(There is another curious parallel between Spielrein and the character of Six—both were obsessed with the idea of the blending or hybridization of races. It was Spielrein’s fantasy that “Jung was descended from the gods, that their child, Siegfried, would heroically blend Jewish and Aryan qualities”. Make of this what you will.)
January 16th, 2006
A couple of days ago, I watched the entire first season of Battlestar Galactica.
OK. Humanity made the machines, called Cylons. The Cylons rebelled, left, and attacked again. Humanity’s survivors are on the run in space. But you know this, or can find it out easily. That’s not what I want to talk about.
The series has a character called Gaius Baltar, who suddenly finds himself sharing his head with his former lover, a Cylon mimicking human form—Number Six.
Six sometimes appears as a hallucination to Baltar, in which case he must talk to her out loud, where others can hear. At other times she appears in the house in Baltar’s head (which is modeled on his old house, which was destroyed during the Cylon attack). Six can control Baltar’s body by appearing as a hallucination and literally twisting his arm, but to speak to others she must persuade or trick him to say what she wants. (Some of these scenes are extremely amusing.)
The writers are deliberatly ambiguous when it comes to the subject of Six’s nature. Is she some sort of manifestation of Baltar’s guilt at unintentionally betraying humanity? A Cylon plot to make Baltar secretly their agent? Is Baltar himself a human-mimicking Cylon and unaware of it? The writers seem to hint at many different possibilities without actually endorsing any.
I personally found some of Baltar’s and Six’s interactions to hit rather close to home at times. They have this very emotionally charged dynamic that is actually quite familiar.
January 9th, 2006
Chris Wayan, of The World Dream Bank, has an interesting viewpoint on Jung.
I see more and more that just because I have been “swallowed by my anima” in Jung’s terms—surrendered to my dreams, treated “unconscious” forces and dream-spirits as my friends and equals, not as things—does not make me a fool. As I note my disagreements I see them not as symptoms of my immaturity in Jung’s view, but as defining my character and culture, deeply different from Jung’s—different from anyone likely to end up as a working therapist or an academic, for one thing!
There are other relevant parts scattered around the site—Wayan has a spirit wife, and a category on his site devoted to multiple personality dreams.
January 3rd, 2006
I had a textbook about a year ago which had three coauthors (Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World, Second Edition, by Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner). They had a novel way of indicating whose opinions were whose: they would use personal pronouns throughout, but attach numbered subscripts to indicate a specific author. (Luckily, they always wrote their names in the same order. I guess you could use letters instead of numbers…)
Some of the better samples:
The control zone is the region that must be physically guarded to keep out intruders that might be attempting to eavesdrop. A well-shielded device will have a smaller control zone. I1 remember being told in 1979 of a tape drive that had a control zone over two miles. Unfortunately, most control zone information is classified, and I2 couldn’t get me1 to be very specific about them… (NS, p. 17)
It does nothing other than its intended purpose (I1 have analyzed the thing carefully and I2 have complete faith in me1)… (NS, p. 21)
If you really care about all this, we1,3 recommend my2 book Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols. (I2 modestly abstain.) (NS, p. 427)
I1,2 found all of this very amusing.
(They also quoted Alice in Wonderland at random intervals, which made it approximately the best textbook ever.)
December 29th, 2005
Carl Jung was Freud’s student and apparent successor until they parted ways intellectually. In Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR), he recounts the period following his break with Freud, when he was thrown into a state of disorientation that lasted several years:
I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. (MDR, p. 173)
Jung decided that since he knew nothing about where this might lead, he would do whatever occurred to him: he “consciously submitted to the impulses of the unconscious” (MDR, p. 173). He built model towns by the lake; experienced strong fantasies and wrote them down.
In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent… I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl… The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. (MDR, p. 181)
Jung also had a long-lasting inner figure called Philemon, who was a pagan with “an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration” (MDR, p. 182). Here he writes about the insights given him by his experiences:
Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity… I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. (MDR, p. 183)
Jung’s experiences had a very large influence on the school of psychology he went on to found. I will have to write more about Jungian psychology at a later date.
December 26th, 2005
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Relative State is devoted to exploring the topic of plural psychology. Ever since man first called himself ‘I’, there have been others…
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