10, Infantile
“The recollection of infantile memories and the reproduction of archetypal modes of psychic functioning create a wider horizon and a greater extension of consciousness, provided that one succeeds in assimilating and integrating the lost and regained contents. Since they are not neutral, their assimilation will modify the personality, even as they themselves will have to undergo certain alterations.”
— Carl G. Jung
Jung speaks of an infantile amnesia at the root of a patient’s neurosis. Maintaining that a reconstitution of these dissociated memories quells a narcissistic self-absorption and in turn leads to holistic healing.
Homo sapiens are, relatively, a very nascent bud along the phylogenetic tree. Toddlers in comparison to our elderly roommates; the enigmatic octopus, the meticulous ant, even the bizarrely clever slime mold and many scores more. We really are the unruly brats animating an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ motif.
“The greatest mistake an analyst can make is to assume that his patient has a psychology similar to his own.”
— Carl G. Jung.
For the most part; we have consolidated a narcissistic self-schema. We have self-ordained our idiosyncrasies as solely proximal to God. We’ve precipitously attempted to funnel a sovereign principle, that threads constellations over all Earth’s epochs, into our constrained subjective ‘I’. Juvenile hubris; dandelions kissing thunderstorms.
Mind you, “we” in this context refers to the western civilisation modality impinged on the globe through european colonisation. Aristotle’s Biology fermenting through the Scientific Renaissance; we have inherited a schema that places nature as adjunct. Something beneath ‘man’ as opposed to amalgamated with. Far off from a holisitic egalitarian schema ubiquitous across indigenous cultures.
“So He drove out the man; and He placed cherubim at the east of the garden of Eden, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”
— Genesis 3:24 (KJV)
Our neurotic proclivity to decimate our environment are nothing short of ostentatious tantrums. Prideful irreverence; our tower of Babel lobbing to close the chasm between amour-propre and God. Tantrums driven by this exclusion from God’s immutability & immortality; our lingering dimorphism of shame and grief.
“If you seek perfection unconsciously you will seek death. Don’t seek perfection in life.”
— Sadhguru.
Perfection eliminates need for growth; learning; evolution. Paradoxically, perfection occupies stagnation.
“Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it.”
— James Stephens.
“The apex of evolution!”; we claim. Infantile perversions of Noah’s arc hauling as many species as we can along our stride to ‘perfection’. Theatrics whelming over our sepulchral death drive. Delusions of grandeur feeding entitlement; distracting from our fear of transience. This death anxiety blinds us to our own constitution within natura naturata. We forfeit on assimilating the libido into our ‘higher self’.
“[Libido] denotes a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise. Libido is appetite in its natural state. From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex, and emotional states or affects, which constitute the essence of libido.”
— Carl G. Jung.
An illustration of this death anxiety resides in Frankenstein’s intense repugnance towards his creation. The creature is a mirror; a deep introspection imposed on Frankenstein.
“For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”
— Victor Frankenstein.
His libido animating through this cadaver patchwork profanes his self-image. His schema strains to accommodate his essence reflected through rot. Frankenstein, overcome by the elements, eventually dies in his plight to quell the grotesque rather than subsume it.
God made flesh… lacerated; the ‘Ecce Homo’ motif. Pontius Pilate’s infamous words from the gospel of John 19:5 (KJV). “Behold, the man” encodes our hubris; feeding our inability to reconcile death. An effigy personifying our ecocide through deicide. Rather than reinstate a holistic schema through assimilating the libido; we instead shrink God into our image and reduce God to something corruptible.
Unlike Frankenstein’s quest to suppress and kill his creation, God incarnate descends into the ‘grotesque’ and is transfigured ‘into his glory’.
“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”
— Freidrich Nietzsche.
