The Psychology of the Individual

[Mole]

The hallmark of literate cultures is individuality, while the hallmark of spoken cultures is the collective.

And the hallmark of individuality is psychology. We see this in all modern art forms: they are suffused with the psychology of the individual. We take it for granted and regard ourselves as individuals.

And the hallmark of psychology is the pathological psyche. This is the psyche who has failed the life task of individuation.

Individuation is a difficult life task to successfully complete, as we start in symbiosis with our mother, and must start to see ourselves as separate from our mother, then as separate from our family, and separate from our cultural tradition. No wonder so many of us fail to completely individuate.

And failing to individuate, failing to become a whole, self sufficient individual, we seek pathological substitutes such as mbti, where the whole individual is replaced by sixteen types.

The sixteen types fall short of the collective we find in spoken cultures, and the sixteen types fall short of the individuation we find in literate cultures.

The sixteen types are a kind of halfway point between the individual and the collective.

 

[Pionart]

Love to hear you, Moley.

 

[GIjade]

The hallmark of literate cultures is individuality, while the hallmark of spoken cultures is the collective.

And the hallmark of individuality is psychology. We see this in all modern art forms: they are suffused with the psychology of the individual. We take it for granted and regard ourselves as individuals.

And the hallmark of psychology is the pathological psyche. This is the psyche who has failed the life task of individuation.

Individuation is a difficult life task to successfully complete, as we start in symbiosis with our mother, and must start to see ourselves as separate from our mother, then as separate from our family, and separate from our cultural tradition. No wonder so many of us fail to completely individuate.

And failing to individuate, failing to become a whole, self sufficient individual, we seek pathological substitutes such as mbti, where the whole individual is replaced by sixteen types.

The sixteen types fall short of the collective we find in spoken cultures, and the sixteen types fall short of the individuation we find in literate cultures.

The sixteen types are a kind of halfway point between the individual and the collective.

Individuation - why.

 

[Mole]

Love to hear you, Moley.

My warm muzzle whispers in your ear.

 

[Mole]

Individuation - why.

What a good question.

When we read a book we do it alone, we do it in silence, we are training to be an individual.

When stories were spoken aloud to an audience, we all listened together, and we all felt together, we were all training to be a collective.

The first printing press was invented in 1440 and eventually it gave us universal literacy and the modern world. And to function in the modern world we need to be an individual, we need to attain individuality, we need to individuate.

It is important to remember that no matter how powerful the literate individual is, they only arrived in history in the last few hundred years, and for the last two hundred thousand years, we have not lived in a literate culture, we have lived in a spoken culture. So for most of the history of humanity we have lived in a collective, and only just recently we developed universal literacy and the literate individual, and the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

 

[GIjade]

[MENTION=3325]Mole[/MENTION] - what difference does it make if we are individuated or not though.

 

[iauiugu]

[MENTION=3325]Mole[/MENTION] - what difference does it make if we are individuated or not though.

Not directed at me but

I see the difference as a mark of how literally individual a person is -- the extent to which they aren't mostly programmed by others and the world they live in, that they aren't more or less the same as the next guy in their collective. Believing the same thing. Reacting to similar events the same way.

That they don't just go along with the norm, or react against it, but take a path in life that isn't tethered to the standards of collectives by either measure.

So the difference made for me is the extent to which one is truly alive and not merely a product of their time or place. The extent to which one has free will.

I don't see the point of being alive if I am merely a passive vessel from which collective energies flow.

I don't see type as something in-between the individual and the collective, but a map and tool to help people reach individuation, to recognize gifts and blindspots on the road to coming into oneSelf.

The way Jung did

 

[Mole]

Not directed at me but

I see the difference as a mark of how literally individual a person is -- the extent to which they aren't mostly programmed by others and the world they live in, that they aren't more or less the same as the next guy in their collective. Believing the same thing. Reacting to similar events the same way.

That they don't just go along with the norm, or react against it, but take a path in life that isn't tethered to the standards of collectives by either measure.

So the difference made for me is the extent to which one is truly alive and not merely a product of their time or place. The extent to which one has free will.

I don't see the point of being alive if I am merely a passive vessel from which collective energies flow.

I don't see type as something in-between the individual and the collective, but a map and tool to help people reach individuation, to recognize gifts and blindspots on the road to coming into oneSelf.

The way Jung did

Jung was psychotic and took his orders from Field Marshall Hermann Goering.

 

[iauiugu]

Jung also formulated the psychological notion of individuation that you are focusing on here

 

[Mole]

Jung also formulated the psychological notion of individuation that you are focusing on here

Jung was a highly literate individual with no understanding of the epistemology of the electronic media (emedia).

Following Jung is like following Jesus who believed that physical and mental illness was caused by demons, and he believed he could drive them out.

 

[LovecraftianMonstrosity]

Sometimes if I practice, I don't see individuals at all. Persons seem like special cases of a more generalized phenomena so the differences between any two seem so minute. Imagine two matrices that have many of the same elements in the same order with a few elements changed. Sometimes I see humans as moving "clouds" of these kinds of matrices. It is hard to see the individual.

 

[iauiugu]

Jung was a highly literate individual with no understanding of the epistemology of the electronic media (emedia).

Following Jung is like following Jesus who believed that physical and mental illness was caused by demons, and he believed he could drive them out.

by emedia you mean the thing that didn't exist until decades after his death, right? why do you bring this up?

if by 'demons' one is speaking metaphorically in personifying antisocial and self-destructive personality traits, and one accepts contemporary evidence of the power of the mind to cause psychosomatic conditions and likewise be cured through placebos, then these notions of jung and jesus are less absurd than they are impressively before their time.

 

[Mole]

by emedia you mean the thing that didn't exist until decades after his death, right? why do you bring this up?

if by 'demons' one is speaking metaphorically in personifying antisocial and self-destructive personality traits, and one accepts contemporary evidence of the power of the mind to cause psychosomatic conditions and likewise be cured through placebos, then these notions of jung and jesus are less absurd than they are impressively before their time.

Great Caesar's Ghost, the emedia began in 1840 with the invention of the electric telegraph, followed by the wireless, the telephone, the television, the computer and the internet.

Carl Jung was right in the middle of the emedia but was blind to it. We can perhaps understand this by knowing he was suffering from a florid psychosis.

And in the first century demons were not metaphoric, they were believed to literally exist and cause physical and mental illnesses. Of course they were wrong about this as they were wrong about so many things.

 

[iauiugu]

Great Caesar's Ghost, the emedia began in 1840 with the invention of the electric telegraph, followed by the wireless, the telephone, the television, the computer and the internet.

Carl Jung was right in the middle of the emedia but was blind to it. We can perhaps understand this by knowing he was suffering from a florid psychosis.

And in the first century demons were not metaphoric, they were believed to literally exist and cause physical and mental illnesses. Of course they were wrong about this as they were wrong about so many things.

How was Jung blind to emedia? What aspect of it should he, in your mind, have not been blind to

What is this long-term psychosis you are speaking of with Jung? He, like many public intellectuals, argued for the validity of altered states, and his work is a testament to his philosophy. If we depended on sobriety for human advancement we'd probably still be sharpening our spearheads.

I am aware the demons were literal with Jesus; dividing the literal from metaphor has been a persistent struggle for poor humans. given (as the academic embodiment theory posits) they are processed the same way by the mind, i suppose it is a great achievement that we have now modernized demonhood into academic jargon like 'pathology' and 'psychosis' and 'sociopathy' and 'disorder'