Cosmic Game ER and Depth Psychology 2

How Uncanny and Double Trouble

Freud (1919/1955) wrote a paper called "The Uncanny," "Unheimlich." Unheimlich in German, is the “name for everything that ought to have remained . . . secret and hidden but has come to light” (Chapelle, 1993, p. 193). Chapelle (1993) tells us that the feeling of uncanniness is also a concrete example of the eternal return.

Uncanniness has to do with the sudden suggestion of special meaning where none was expected. Everyday objects and events become special through their seemingly spontaneous and autonomous recurrence. Repetition—unintended, involuntary, and seemingly autonomous repetition—serves here as avenue into a gratuitously offered revelation of extra meaning . . . the ordinary surfaces of things and their utilitarian crust become animated faces of a phenomenal world that is alive with a multiplicity of possible human dramas and meanings. The psychology of uncanniness is here a psychology of aletheia—of the world not as mere but as sheer manifestation and visibility. (p. 198)

The uncanny undoes the belief that life is merely linear development and history. No amount of uniqueness or fantasies of linear progress will stand in its way. Nietzsche would be proud. “It shows how life turns back on itself, using history to wipe out the sense of history” (Chapelle, 1993, p. 201). There is also a close connection between the psychology of the double and experiences of the uncanny. They both have to do with the return of the repressed in animated and autonomous ways. In the psychology of the double, we see that lost or dissociated parts seem to take on a life of their own. The myth of Andhaka is an example. Getting rid of a part of ourselves by cutting it off, whether physically or energetically, just makes matters worse. When we repress things, we are trying to deny them existence, but paradoxically these things seem to come out of nowhere and come back with a vengeance.

Instead of overcoming the unconscious as Freud suggested in his famous “where id was ego shall be,” we must live with the unconscious as Jung suggested; to see ourselves as part of the world soul—the anima mundi, an animating unconscious. This is exactly what Archetypal Psychology seeks to do. Rank, in his research on the double discusses a study that involved showing a mirror to a Fiji Islander who delightedly said “now I can see into the world of spirits.” The Islander's delight in the mirror image did not originate in ego love, but “in the fascination and love for the animated world that opens up in doubling.” For the Fiji Islander, the mirror image had nothing to do with vanity or personalistic self-reflection, but was a way of “entering into an animated world through the doorway of an image” (Chapelle, 1993, p. 222). This is why Rank made the connection between the double, the soul, the shadow, and image. Rank was the father of brief therapy and although excommunicated by Freud, Rank's other important work that reflects the eternal return includes The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909/1970), and The Trauma of Birth (1924/1999). We will discuss Rank's work later in relation to Grof’s work.

There may be something to Flip Wilson’s quip “the devil made me do it,” after all. Repress something, and it almost guarantees that the repressed will come to life in some way, and "come back to haunt you" as the saying goes. The repetition compulsion, uncanny experiences, the notion of the double, as well as Jung’s notion of synchronicity are like mirrors that “allow man to become visible to himself,” to see through the veil “allowing him to reevaluate himself” (Chapelle, p. 223).

Synchronicity—There are No Accidents

Although the eternal return points to the circularity of time, as Jung notes, it also has a tendency to meander or wander off course at times, as well. Jung’s notion of synchronicity, the idea of meaningful coincidence or acausal orderedness can be heard in the often used phrase, “there are no accidents.” With synchronicities, seemingly unrelated elements and events are in some ways uncannily linked together into coherent patterns of interrelatedness. In my dissertation, I have incorporated this principle of synchronicity as part of the methodology, with van den Berg's metabletics, which looks at “how the world is gathered,” to be able to reflect back and see cosmic play's aspects more clearly. This notion is also foreshadowed by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in “The Wanderer” chapter:

The time is gone when mere accidents could still happen to me; and what could still come to me that was not mine already? What returns, what finally comes home to me, is my own self and what of myself has long been in strange lands and scattered among all things and accidents. (Chapelle, 1993, p. 206)

Chapelle (1993) notes that “in those sudden and revelatory intuitions that makes us feel that we somehow always knew the invisible connections between certain things and that they are now suddenly becoming crystal clear” (p. 207) are akin to Jung's psychology of synchronicity which provide us with glimpses of enlightenment, a door into the soul of the world. Ironically, while writing this dissertation, I have had many uncanny experiences of the amazing synchronicities that have led to my endlessly getting caught in the ciruclus vitituos deus that is the eternal return. In a game I created entitled Monomythopoly ™, to illustrate themes similar to Grof’s work in other courses, I playfully added “Eternal Return Edition,” because I was vaguely familiar with the term at the time. However, it was not until I wrote this particular section, almost two years later, that I got an idea of the magnitude of what I was dealing with. I only came upon Chapelle’s work in 2004, while meandering off course on another diversion after I had completed almost all of the research on my dissertation. Jung’s work contains many more illustrations of the eternal return at work besides synchronicities.

In brief, Jung’s (1912/1976, revised 1952; 1912/2001) concrete contributions to the eternal return begin with the book that caused his departure from Freud, Symbols of Transformation (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido). In that book, Jung wrote “about the hero, the myth in which man had always lived” (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 171). Jung realized that he did not know what myth he was living, and later found that the creation of consciousness was his myth, which incidentally has the same eternal return, death-rebirth structure, if we take the “Job Archetype” (Slater, 2000, lecture) as an example. The individuation process is another example (Edinger, 1984) of this recurring pattern, as we will see later in the "Chicago" chapter. In Jung’s Analytic Psychology, the unconscious was not merely seen as a garbage heap of repressed personal contents, but was a place of literally mythic proportions, alive with primordial organizing principles known as archetypes. Jung explicated the structure and dynamics of these timeless archetypes as they work through archetypal images and complexes. Jung experienced the autonomy of the psyche and highlighted the spiritual, timeless dimensions of the soul. Death and rebirth in both myth and alchemy were of central importance, not to mention the fact that he conducted a seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that fills over 1500 pages in two volumes (Jung, 1988).

To Hell (or Hades) With the Whole Thing—Archetypal Psychology

As a continuation of Jungian thought, Archetypal Psychology also brings us back to our archetypal roots. Hillman’s (1979) declaration that depth psychology is Hades’s realm is intriguing. First of all, Hades, who in other circles is called Pluto, not to be confused with the Disney character with the same name, is also in some myths identified with Dionysus. Heraclitus also connects the two in one of his fragments (Robinson, 1987, p. 17, fr. 15). So, remembering the associative property from math class, if A=B and B=C then A=C, we are back to Shiva and Dionysus when we talk about Hades. Later, we will see the Plutonic significance of all of this, in the "Kaleidoscope of Culture" but for now we will quickly explore Hillman’s Hades perspective. Chapelle (1993) explicates:

The name Hades is a mythic shorthand notion or concept that says that in addition to everyday life’s concreteness and materiality, there is a double dimension of existence in the form of is immaterial self reflection or duplicate mirror image . . . .

We must let ourselves be drawn into the animated life of shimmering configurations that are visible just below immediate surfaces . . . .

The perspective of Hades is present whenever statements are prefaced with “as if”. . . . There are thus no facts in or according to Hades, only fictions to be enacted in life. . . . This underworld viewpoint, where things are neither facts nor proof is thus also the ideal position for asking what if . . . ? questions.” (pp. 226-227)

When we are ambivalent or obsessively worried about “what if something happens,” we have been abducted by Hades's, and Hades “turns the psychopathology of everyday life into a psychomythology for all times” and it is from Hades perspective that in Shakespeare “all the world’s a stage,” or “life is a tale, told by an idiot.” Everything is unchanging and archetypal in the underworld, so the eternal return is tailor-made for this realm, as we have already seen, and although Hillman doesn’t expressly refer to Nietzsche, Hades expresses this same idea. Chapelle (1993) further tells us that the eternal return can be used as a formula for gathering the riches and wealth of existence, as Hades is described by Hillman as the god of wealth and riches and superabundance of value (p. 234) that often lie hidden beneath the surface:

In the schema of Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses, the Hades prejudice comes after the liberating roar of the lion, which sheds the morality of a thousand and one commandments, and it is the self affirming creative play of the child. Here, according to the Hades prejudice, there is no need for redemption from outside or afterwards. Existence as it is here becomes its own underwriter and signatory . . . . Hades is life’s way of practicing self affirmation . . . . looking at existence from the viewpoint of Hades means esteeming it and affirming it and wanting to preserve it because it is valuable . . . . It is life’s built in Yes-saying to itself. (p. 234-235)

A Time of Transformation

Speaking of metamorphoses, Jung felt that we were living in such a time of change and transformation. In The Passion of the Western Mind (daunting in its scholarship, yet extremely readable), Tarnas (1993) shows how the Western mind evolved. Beginning with the Greek mind, Tarnas traces Western thought and its pivotal ideas to the Postmodern period. Our technological brilliance has blinded us to the fact that we are fragmented and living in a disenchanted cosmos, where the center cannot hold. In fact, the original title for Hillman’s (1992a) Re-Visioning Psychology was “The Center Cannot Hold” (Hillman, personal communication April 2004). At the end of the book, Tarnas quotes Jung from The Undiscovered Self:

[A] mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos—the right moment—for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science . . . so much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man . . . . Does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scales? (Tarnas, 1993, pp. 412-413)

Nietzsche announced the death of god, and articulated the eternal return. Depth psychology, and in particular Archetypal Psychology as an expression of the eternal return speaks about the rebirth of gods (D. L. Miller, 1974). Grof, as we will see, illuminates the death-rebirth experience. In The Creation of Consciousness, Edinger (1984) relates that the creation of consciousness was indeed Jung’s myth for modern man, to paraphrase Billy Kwon from The Year of Living Dangerously, we need to “add our light to the sum of light” (Weir, 1982). We are all unique experiences of consciousness, as previously mentioned, "little eyes in the big I of consciousness" (Goswami 2001, lecture). All of our experiences become part of the “collective treasury of the archetypal psyche” (Edinger, 1984, p. 23). I think that the way we do this is the same way that Shiva did it, the eternal return. Archetypal Psychology provides an intellectual way of eternally returning. After briefly descending into Chaos (theory) in the next section, we will then explore an experiential way of eternally returning through Grof’s work, and after explaining Grof's cartography of the psyche we will be able to see how the eternal return "plays out" in Grof’s work.

End of section, continue to A Crash Course on Chaos