Rollo Tomassi
Master Don Juan
As odd as it will sound coming from me, I detest Jung. There has never been a more potent advocate for AFCism in the history of psychology than Carl Jung. Feminist wallowed in his theories like pigs in sh!t in the late 60s and early 70s, and still do today. In fact every romantic comedy ever produced finds it's roots in Jungian ideology. He's personally responsible for the anima / animus "theory" that popular culture swallowed wholesale in order to uniquely identify better with the feminine (which of course got him laid by his patients quite a bit back in the day).jophil28 said:I do agree with a lot of the Jungian position. We all do have a "dark side " or a "shadow". However that does not mean that we have permission or a license to allow it to lead our actions.
There are great sources of personal energy and motivation rooted and available in our shadow side, but there are also the drives to misuse them to do evil.
That said, I don't subscribe to the 'shadow self' notion of Jung. I do however see a primal, instinctive nature in humans that is counterbalanced by aspirations to a higher sense of self. What Jung would melodramatically call the evil side or shadow self is really a mischaracterization of our biological impulses and our reactions to their prompts. Every sin we can commit finds its root in exactly this conflict, and not just in the behavior, but in the desire to act out that behavior. This was my point in the Desire Dynamic thread.
In my previous post I stated that I believe it's healthier to understand this conflict, recognize it, accept it and maintain a balance rather than unrealistically leaning to either extreme. There are equal dangers in leaning too far to the animalistic, instinctive hedonism, carelessly as there are in rigidly clinging to an untenable, guilt-wracked moralism. The one leads to excusing personal accountability for behavior as unavoidable (the devil made me do it) and the other leads to self-righteous, ultimately hypocritical self-loathing.
However, the classic social convention is such that we're expected to deny and repress that primal side and strive for the heady moral side. I'm not saying that doesn't have merit, but it makes that primal side "evil" or "shallow", and by that, it's just this aspiration to be honorable (and avoid seeming 'shallow') that's turned to the uses of manipulative persons to accomplish their very same primal agendas (i.e. "If you weren't so 'shallow' it wouldn't matter how fat I am and you'd do the right thing and marry me and adopt my illegitimate children") . It also casts the primal nature as something evil or twisted when in fact this part of our humanity is very useful and can be positive when channeled productively. A fireman running into a burning building to save a child may do so from a sense of duty and dedication, but he's still got to tap into that primal energy and say "ƒuck it, here we go!" before he goes in.
As an aside here, I've always found it really contradictory that on one hand we'll say "never base your estimates of a woman on her words, but rather her behavior" and in the same paragraph type that evolutionary psychology is pseudoscience. Behavioral and Evolutionary psychology are cut from the same cloth, they both look for answers based on the behavioral characteristics of their subject (in this case the genders). Attaching the word 'evolution' to anything is going to stir the sh!t pot as it is, but the principle of it is applying what we do know about behavior, biology, and the their past interconnections historically, and then postulating how they apply now. Of the various schools of psychology Behavioral and Evolutionary are easily the most scientifically grounded, yet they get lumped into the same distrust that cognitive, psychoanalytic and humanistic have earned.