And then behind those two things; behind the shadow and the anima- and the animus,
there's a final archetype, which is the archetype of the self and that's...
Jung believed that the self was what you were as a
totality.
And that's a hard thing to understand but,
but, you could think about it this way, you could think about the self as the- as the
Total of what you are now
Plus the total of all those things that you could still be.
So, it would be you as a reality plus, you as potential.
And that's a strange idea, right?
Because we don't really know how to understand the idea of potential as modern empirical people, because potential
Virtually by definition is not yet manifest
And also, not a straightforward thing to either measure or conceptualize by the same token.
Everybody acts as if they're- they have potential. Unrealized
potential and so...
you...
Generated up a category to account for that
Which he felt was expressed in all sorts of symbolic way. So, for example
The wise old man like- like the wizards in- in the movies that all of you have seen in the last five years
It's always the same wizards. Sometimes it's even the same actor. It's like that's an archetype of the wise old man and
For Jung, Christ was an archetype of the self as well, and I told you why that was to some degree and, it's partly because
The Phoenix is also an archetype of the self because the Phoenix is something that can die and be reborn and so the Phoenix stands
For the part of your personality that can let one thing go,
one part of you,
Which is in the live part can let that go and burn up, so to speak, so that something new can be born
Because you very seldom gain something
Before you let something else go
Becau- that's partly because what you already assume
can be the worst impediment that you have to-to- learning something new and it's
Complicated because sometimes, what you know worked in the past
You know, so you can think about that.
Maybe you're a perfectly well adapted 11 year old and you're still acting that way when you're 15, it's like well
It's hard to let that go because it worked and you put a lot of effort into it
But unless you let it go the new personality isn't going to be able to manifest itself. So you have to stop being a child
Before you can be an adult and there's a sacrifice that goes along with that
it's also a sacrifice that parents have to make, right? Because in order for a parent to
encourage you to adopt the responsibilities of an individual they have to allow you as a child to die and
Freud's
observation on that phenomena was that many parents and
He believed this was particularly characteristic of mothers, because of their tight
bond with their children and the dependency that that
implies, that it was particularly difficult for a mother to let her child die so that an adult could
manifest itself in that child's place and that's
fundamentally, in many ways the,
Oedipal complex. Okay. So now I'm gonna show you some of these things again because the thing about Jung is that
it's not easy to understand what he has to say, and
It's not a simple thing to explain it, and his books are complicated
Although I don't think they're any more complicated than they have to be like, I don't think Jung is obscure
I think he's just difficult and then beyond difficult, he's actually frightening
So there's lots of reasons that people don't like Jung.
