On Staying Awake: Getting Older and Bolder (Sleepnot Trilogy by Daryl Sharp

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But this is not in itself pathological. Complexes are regularly personified in dreams, and one can train oneself so they become visible or audible also in a waking condition. It is even psychologically healthy to do so, for when you give them a voice, a face, a personality, they are less likely to take over when you’re not looking. We like to think we are masters in our own house, but clearly we are not. We are renters at best. Psychologically we live in a boarding house of saints and knaves, nobles and villains, run by a landlord who for all we know is indifferent to the lot.

Such are the necessary activities if one is serious in pursuing what Jung called the process of individuation. When I was a young man, I was concerned to figure out where and how I might fit into the larger picture, how to make a mark. I had a fantasy that somewhere there was a big book of collective wisdom that contained prescribed solutions to all life’s problems. Whenever you found yourself in a quandary you could just look it up in The Big Book and do what it said. ) Such a fantasy is symptomatic of an active father complex.

47 “Mind and Earth,” Civiliaztion in Transition, CW 10, par. 53. 58 The Archetypally Complex Journey 59 It is not . . a question of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. 48 Archetypes . . 49 Jung used the simile of the spectrum to illustrate the difference between instinct and the archetype as an “instinctual image”: The dynamism of instinct is lodged as it were in the infra-red part of the spectrum, whereas the instinctual image lies in the ultra-violet part. . ) So, to sum up, an archetype is a primordial, structural element of the human psyche, an instinctive, universal tendency to form certain ideas and images and to behave in certain ways.