BlissNinja

Personifying

Jung’s early work with word associations did not rest with quantifying results; he personified them. He discovered complexes which were invested with feeling, intention, autonomy, and fragments of consciousness. They were independent entities because they behaved as such. The same complex can alter the association of words, show itself as unwanted symptoms, and appear as a person in a dream. Dream persons are complexes walking around; symptoms are the irruption of these persons into our normal lives. Our personal complexities are indeed the persons of our complexes.

Where other psychologists might have used a so-called objective and neutral language of numbers, structures, or functions to account for the
same disturbances, Jung reverted courageously to the direct mode of personifying which in his day was still considered a primitive formulation.” He stood firmly by his method of naming, explicitly comparing
it with the spontaneous speech of the insane and the noncivilized. What was radically courageous then we now take for granted, so easily imagining ourselves to play roles, enter into games, and be composed of
different characters.

James Hillman , are-Visioning Psychology pg.21/22

“Jung’s animism is tightly tied to his notion of anima,” which is the word he uses for one’s personal and personified soul-image. The Anima Is a person and anima is a conceptual notion and anima means soul. Jung calls her “she,” and she it is who creates conflicting confusions and attractions, who brings moods and desires and neurovegetative symptoms, who kindles the peculiar fascinations of fantasy that turn
one’s head, and yet also conveys a vague sense of interiority, a sense of soul.”
~James Hillman

A person may converse with her, as for example, when a poet talks With his muse, a philosopher with his daimon, a mystic with his tutelary angel, or a madman with his hallucination. We find her in mythology In countless forms, and expressly as the maiden Psyche. ~ James Hillman

Jung’s position here states that the fundamental facts of existence are the “fantasy-images” of the psyche. All consciousness depends on these images. Everything else–ideas of the mind, sensations of the body, perceptions of the world around us, beliefs, feelings, hungers–must present themselves as images in order to become experienced. ” ‘Experience’ is, in its most simple form, an exceedingly complicated structure of mental images.”‘ Should we ask: just what is psyche? What do you mean by psychic experience and psychic reality?
The answer is: fantasy- images. “Image is psyche, ” says Jung. “The psyche consists essentially of images . … a
“picturing’ of vital activities.” In the beginning is the image; first imagination then perception; first fantasy then reality. Or as Jung puts it: “The psyche creates reality
every day. The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy. “
Man is primarily an imagemaker and our psychic substance consists of images; our being is imaginal being, an existence in imagination. We are indeed such stuff as dreams are made on. Since we can know only fantasy-images directly and immediately , and from these images create our worlds and call them realities, we live in a world that is neither “inner” nor
“outer.” Rather the psychic world is an imaginal world, just as image is psyche. Paradoxically, at the same time these images are in us and we live in the midst of them. The psychic world is experienced empirically as inside us and yet it encompasses us with images. I dream and experience my dreams as inside me and yet at the same time I walk around in my dreams and am inside them.
James Hillman

Because our psychic stuff is images, image-making is a via regia, a royal road to soul-making. The making of soul-stuff calls for dreaming, fantasying, imagining. To live psychologically means to imagine things; To be in touch with soul means to live in sensuous connection with fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the
basic reality of fantasy.
~James Hillman

Anima manifest

…….🔥🔥🔥🔥Anima🔥🔥🔥🔥……..

This vision cannot be enacted unless archetypal persons strike us as utterly real. To experience imaginal reality, a psychic function–the specific function of the imaginative soul–must be active. This soul person is the person of our moods, self-reflections, and reveries, of our sensuous longing beyond the sensately concrete, the spinner of fantasy who is the personification of all unknown psychic capacities that lie waiting, drawing us seductively, uncannily inward to the dark of the uncut forest and the deeps below the waves. Anima means both psyche and soul, and we meet her in her numerous embodiments as soul of waters without whom we dry, as soul of vegetation who greens our hope or blights with symptoms, as Lady of the Beasts riding our passions. She is father’s daughter and mother’s daughter, and my sister, my soul. She is also a worrying succubus drawing off our life’s juice, a harpy with talons, a cold white wraith with mad addictions–but a nurse as well, and a serving maid, a Cinderella nymphet, vague with no history, a tabula rasa waiting for the word. And she is also the Sophia of wisdom, the Maria of compassion, the Persephone of destruction, compelling Necessity and Fate, and the Muse.

The multiplicity of her forms in fictions and lives, and the intensely personified and intensely subjectified reality of her nature, bespeak a world into which she calls and over which she rules.

James Hillman

Birthing Snake

(Birthing Snake)

I am in a bedroom somewhere and I can feel my belly wriggling around very actively. IT is different and I think ‘this is it, baby is coming’. Then a small snake is born and crawls from my vagina and out the bottom of my shorts to the floor! I am in awe, and find it strange at first but then I try to catch it and it crawls under the bed. When I look under the bed to see it, I has changed into a cloth snake, made of white fabric, and it seems to have a bit of patchwork and is sewn with thread and the eyes are sewn on etc. But it is moving around like normal. Then I grab it and look at it closely trying to figure out what it means. Next thing I know, it is a robot, with metal wires, and what seems to be microchips on it, all pieced together but a bit crudely. I think to myself that ‘Mother” has been experimenting again?!

(Dreamtime 11-10-2005)

Polycentricity

Clinically, this polycentricity would be condemned as schizoid fragmentation, demonstrating the ambivalence of a center that cannot hold.
But mythically we might look for a God in the disease, perhaps Hermes-Mercury or the Trickster. For schizoid polycentricity is a style of consciousness and not only a disease; and this style thrives in plural
meanings, in cryptic double-talk, in escaping definitions, in not taking heroic committed stances, in ambisexuality, in psychically detached and separated body parts.

Or this style of consciousness could be given another clinical name: hysteria.” Then we might look for Dionysus and his community, where self division, dismemberment, and a flowing multiplicity belong to a mythical pattern. Again, consciousness is not heroic and fixed to one point, but seeps as if through mystical participation in a processional
of personifications, interfused, enthusiastic, suggestible, labilc. Whether schizoid and Mercurial, whether hysterical and Dionysian, there are archetypal patterns at work, Gods affecting our styles of consciousness.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning psychology pg 35

Anima

As the latter, anima has a series of meanings." First. (a) she is the personification of our unconsciousness-our stupidities, follies, intractable problems. Then (b) she is a particular personification appearing in a particular moment- call girl, shopgirl, schoolgirl--who presents a precise image of the current emotions of the soul. She is also (c) the feeling of personal interiority. She brings the sense of having an interior life, changing events into experience that means “me." She makes possible the inner ground of faith in myself as a person, giving the conviction that what happens matters to the soul and that one's existence is personal and important." She thus (d) personalizes existence. Anima, moreover, is (e) that person by means of whom we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of
consciousness. Functionally anima works as that complex which connects our usual consciousness with imagination by provoking desire or clouding us with fantasies and reveries, or deepening our reflection. She
is both bridge to the imaginal and also the other side, personifying the imagination of the soul. Anima is psyche personified, as Psyche in the ancient story of her by Apuleius personified the soul.

So the movement into psychological existence proceeds through her in one form or another. The movement through the constructed world of concepts and dead things into an animistic, subjective, mythical
consciousness, where fantasy is alive in a world alive and means follows anima. She teaches personifying, and the very first lesson of her teaching is the reality of her independent personality over and against the habitual modes of experiencing with which we are so identified that they are called ego, I. The second lesson is love; shé comes to life through love and insists on it, just as Psyche in the old tale is paired forever with Eros.

Perhaps the loving comes first. Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul. And this connection between love and psyche means a love for everything psychological, every symptom or habit, finding place for it within the heart of imagination, finding a mythical person who is its supportive ground. The connection between love and psyche means as well bringing a psychological eye to all of love's manifestations-that all its mad and deviate cravings seek ultimately the connection with psyche.

Whether we conceive of this interior person as Anima or as an Angel, a Daemon, a Genius, or a Paredros, or one of the personified souls in the traditions of ancient China and Egypt, this figure is indispensable to the notion of human personality. Some traditions, in fact, have asserted that an individual without his soul figure is not a human being. Such a one has lost soul.

James Hillman , Revisioning Psychology

Mister Dream

Can you Spell it out for me, misterDream?
Can you tell me how to open the twisted screen? 
In the back room 
of this microcosmic vacuum 
sits a dialectical demon 
with a face that looks like me...
spilling simple satire with the fire of certainty. 

Can the foggy mirror be wiped clearer, 
by the hand of the man 
who refuses to stand 
for the nearest and dearest
 hearts of the clan? 

Let's see, let's discern the irony... 
The mires that we have chosen to believe 
that seed this dying creed 
of iron deeds locked in steal 
with grips of fear on fiery steeds ..... 
Twisting the plot 
and trotting thru electricFields 
that yield the knots and tangled spokes 
from the turning Wheel that broke the Seal 
between 
WhatIs & WhatIsNot. 
For Real. 
Man. 
What a crazy Plan .  
A Game of Planes and PassionsOfPan 
dancing thru 
the degrees of Am. PM me with the lowdown, 
whisper in rumors of what's going around, 
we can thicken the desperate drama 
and Play like Clowns.... 
Tricksters testing Paradox 
and Talking UpsideDown, 
we can rockAndRoll through Sight and Sound
 as the chessboard wavers 
on the merryGoRound.... 
SinEwaves savoring Light as the curtain goes down..... 

Scene One is seen Thru, 
it was Planned Too.... 
Dangling Dialectic from the ceiling 
of this BleedThrough.... 
Hegel wrote the words to spell out the Game 
that's played 
in the dressing Room 
as the audience waits, 
debating the nature of isolation 
as Indig.Nations fates are flavored 
with States of Vexation 
as Altered Carbon caters to the next mutation.....

Shadows  shadows  shadows on the wall, 
good guys bad guys rise and fall, 
breath by breath and life by death 
and brick by brick we build the Wall, 
one by one and None by All....
Too mixed up to heed the Call....
Three times Charmed with shock&awe 
as For the record the Lines are drawn.......
Phi.ve times LifeTimes 
Venus FlyTrap dines on Tangled EyeCons 
in the dance of Dreaming dodecahedrons....
Sixual Mayhem birthing through Us & Them 
in triangular penetrations 
of particulars
 in WaveWeaves of instinctual variations ...
Sexagonal vibration 
as the Exact Middle Compromise of Creation
interrupting Infinite Potentiation.... 
A rupture of the hymen that seeks satiation.... 
Virginal Seven in Deep initiation 
never divided
 nor multiplied inSide of TenTs of Mind 
that abide in Destin(ysAb)ation
.....zen.... Within.... 
The W.Eight of the Gate of the Octave 
that initiates the Fate
 of the sacred States of Self
 inDwelling in Games of Play 
in Nine Lives ReWinding
  on hard drives and BytesOfTime 
spitting Neurolinguistic  prayer
 in rhyming software 
that invites the Tribe
 to Dive Into 
the broken binary groove of Moving Truths ....
Wholeness 
split 
into Ten threadBare bits
 of DecaDent Twists of the loom 
as looping recursion creates diversion
 in hateful versions of fleshExcursions 
as ELeven RightAngles Dangle from heaven 
as Self appointed gods&angels 
of the ArcOftheCoven In tangled tests 
of woven GovernMent.... 

Sovereign exploration
 of the Self InDignation 
that forces the faces of contortion 
of Space&Time 
to confront the Mirror of the Mind 
and gather the Fragments scattered Inside 
as Self ReMembers 
It Turns Its Own Tides 
and inJoys The ride 
of the Twelve archetypal Primes 
as the Rhyme subsides
 and the Waves enGraved in playful Mazes 
Fade into GroundZero .... 
The center of the Spindle of the Core Processor....
the chessboard squares dwindle 
and melt 
in predecessors of Jesting Jesters
 inGesting Lessons from Gestation ..... 

Ahhhhhh.....the Spell is Broken.... 
A simple Token 
as the spoken narration nestles into a quiet corner
 of this newly Woken Nation.....

Charleen Johnston
5-6-2020

Pathologizing

Images of the soul show first of all more feminine connotations. Psyché, in the Greek language, besides being soul denoted a night-moth or butterfly and a particularly beautiful girl in the legend of Eros and Psyche. Our discussion in the previous chapter of the
anima as a personified feminine idea continues this line of thinking. There we saw many of her attributes and effects, particularly the relationship of psyche with dream, fantasy, and image. This relationship has also been put mythologically as the soul's connection with the night world, the realm of the dead, and the moon. We still catch our soul's most essential
nature in death experiences, in dreams of the night, and in the images of "lunacy."

The world of spirit is different indeed. Its images blaze with light, there is fire, wind, sperm. Spirit is fast, and it quickens what it touches. Its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, powder-dry, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle, making forms, order, and clear distinctions. Although there are many spirits, and many kinds of spirit, more and more the notion of
"spirit" has come to be carried by the Apollonic archetype, the sublimations of higher and abstract disciplines, the intellectual mind, refinements, and purifications.

We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, prefer-
ing labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the "patient" part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It Is water to the spirit's fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit
into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty. Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury-to use an image from St. Augustine -a confusion and richness, both. Whereas spirit chooses the better part and seeks to make all One. Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior.

They differ in another way: spirit is after ultimates and it travels by means of a via negativa. “Neti, neti," it says, "not this, not that." Strait is the gate and only first or last things will do. Soul replies by saying, "Yes, this too has place, may find its archetypal significance, belongs in a myth." The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything
can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.

I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried.?? For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither
truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one's soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There is no "pneumopathology," and as one German tradition has insisted, there can be no such thing as
mental illness ("Geisteskrankheit"), for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall
conform with models enunciated for it by spirit.

But from the viewpoint of the psyche the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psycho-
pathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a
kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.

~James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology pg.68-70

Rejoining Soul and Symptom

Rejoining Soul and Symptom

Many modern methods of psychotherapy want to retain the spirit of analysis but not its soul. They want to retain the methods and forms without the pathologizings. Then the doctor can become a master, and the patient is metamorphosed into a pupil, client, partner, disciple- anything but a patient. Analysis itself is called a dialogue or a trans-
action, for "therapy" smacks of pathology. The focus upon inwardness and the goal of integration of the interior person may remain, but disintegration tends to be excluded, without which such integration has
no significance. In their view, falling apart is never for the sake of the parts, the multiple persons who are the richness of psychic life; falling apart is but a phase preliminary to reconstituting a stronger ego.

These approaches that would synthesize rather than analyse, integrate rather than differentiate, and keep the therapeutic rituals without the pathological contents, neglect one of the deepest insights resulting from the last century of psychotherapy. The psyche does not exist without pathologizing. Since the unconscious was discovered as an operative
factor in every soul, pathologizing has been recognized as an inherent aspect of the interior personality. Freud declared this succinctly: "We
can catch the unconscious only in pathological material." And after her last visit to Freud in 1913 Lou Salomé wrote:"... he put exceptionally strong emphasis on the necessity of maintaining the closest and most persistent contact with the pathological material. . .”

Pathologizing is present not only at moments of special crisis but in the everyday lives of all of us. It is present most profoundly in the
individual’s sense of death, which he carries wherever he goes. It is present also in each person's inward feeling of his peculiar differentness which includes, and may be even based upon, his sense of individual “craziness". For we each have a private fantasy of mental illness; "crazy," "mad, “insane”-
all their substitutes, colloquialisms, and synonyms-
-form a regular part of our daily speech. As we cast our internal deviance from us with these exclamations about others, we are at the same time acknowledging that we each have a deviant, odd
second (or third) personality that provides another perspective to our regular life. Indeed, pathologizing supplies material out of which we build our regular lives. Their styles, their concerns, their loves, reflect
patterns that have pathologized strands woven all through them. The deeper we know ourselves and the other persons of our complexes, the more we recognize how well we, too, fit into the textbook sketches of abnormal psychology. Those case histories are also our own biographies. To put it in sociological language: nearly every individual in the
United States of America has been, now is, or will have been in the hands of professional soul care of one kind or another, for a shorter or longer period, for one reason or another.

Discovery of the unconscious has meant the widespread and overwhelming recognition of the psyche's autonomous activity of pathologizing. That discovery and that recognition have led to one even more significant: the rediscovery of soul. But unfortunately and mistakenly we have confused these three interrelated discoveries: the unconscious,
pathologizing, and soul. We confusedly believe that everyone needs professional therapy as if that is where soul could be refound. But this is not so. For then we are confusing the rediscovery of soul during
the twentieth century with the place where it happened-- therapeutic analysis. But therapy or analysis was not the carrier of that discovery.
Psychopathology was. Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul. The persistent pathologizings in Freud and in Jung and in their patients- pathologizings that refused to be repressed, transformed, or cured, or even understood- led this century's main explorers of the psyche ever deeper. Their movement through pathology into soul is an
experience repeated in each of us. We owe them much, but we owe our pathologizing more. We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.

Analysis has merely given psychopathology a hearing outside the asylums, prisons, and church institutions where it had been kept; the new therapy provided the only place given secular sanction for a prolonged and intense involvement with pathologizing. Symptoms were the very point and focus of its attention. So analysis offered the vessel
into which our unconscious pathologizing could be poured and then cooked long enough for its significance to emerge, for it to make soul.
Out of psyché-pathos-logos came the meaning of suffering of the soul, or the soul's suffering of meaning.

Again a confusion beset this experience: a special state of being- “being-in-therapy"- seemed required for this discovery of soul through pathologizing, and so for many people therapy became a religious ritual, even replacing religious ritual. One was “in" analysis, and analysis was “in." There were the initiates: those who had been analysed. And there were the others: those who had never even been in therapy or had not been “properly” or "thoroughly" analysed. To
refind the sense of soul one had to "go through" analysis with its regular appointments, its techniques, and its stages of "beginning an analysis." "working through," and "terminating." Inevitably and without knowing it, the ritual of analysis had produced a new cult of soul. Finally, some have taken this religious direction literally, declaring that actually this is what therapy is all about, an expression of the religious activity of the soul: the psychotherapeutic movement is correctly a religious movement; therapists are indeed a new kind of ministers to soul--gurus or priests.

In this movement toward religion pathology now tends to be left behind. By shifting its ground from pathology to self-development, recent analysis no longer recognizes the primacy of affliction. One goes
to therapy to grow, not because one is afflicted-as if growth and affliction excluded each other. A gulf has developed between soul and symptom. On the one hand analysis regards itself as a professional contract for solving problems, a variety of medical science without soul, ritual, or mystery. On the other, it imitates the transcendental disciplines, foster-
ing ritual, community, and teachings. Pathologizing again foundered upon its old division, illness or sin, and a further division emerged. Now, to be in soul therapy for growth and realization of personality, symptoms are left out; to be in medical or behavioral therapy for relief of symptomatic afflictions, soul is left out. Soul and symptom have broken in
two.

This chapter and this book want to mend that division. By retaining psychopathology as a descriptive language of the psyche which indeed
speaks to and of the soul, I would keep psyche and pathology close together. If I seem to be making the soul sick again by such stress on pathologizing, I am at the same time giving sickness soul again. By
returning symptoms to the soul, I am attempting to return soul to symptoms, restoring them to the central value in life that soul itself has.

~James Hillman , Re-Visioning Paychology pg 70-72

Jezebel

Jezebel
paint yourself, a picture
leave nothing uncolored-
a mask, a picture of hell.
“Rid yourself”- they shriek
“the demon must fall”
around my body they swarm
casting their hatred  
like stones
to bury me.
I am Jezebel.
I am your sin.
I am the demons within.
Caress my solitude
with those soft, delicate hands-
father time?
Mother earth?
Holy ghost? 
…haunting the world
and its hells
I beckon you
   master divine
to let your lips meet mine.
I'll swallow you in lustful kiss
and wrap you in sinful bliss.
You cowards,
   afraid to create your own heaven-
but willing to cast me into 
     your hell....
How cruel my fate-
to be Jezebel.

March 2000

With great power comes….

The old adage ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. 

Having the ability to receive and Perceive anOthers feelings/thought/somatic  undulations deeply is something that definitely varies  between Bodies and Awarenesses. 

One who truly Sees and feels and Innerstands must find their way to a place of Intentional non-intrusion into anOthers Space on whatever level. The ability to penetrate and invade on a deep level must be Let Go Of , in a Sense. Literally….inSenses we Separate our sovereignty of Self from  OthersSelves to Play with boundaries and borders and blendings and bleedings and the blessings and Blissings that come from the Kissings that are made possible from that Sacred Solutio , this naked Coagula of souls inRatio Playing with tethers and teetering on the edge of WhetherOrNots and WhatIfs and WeDids. 

To Choose ….in Love….SatChitAnanda…..to Allow anOther to GenerateOperateDestroy subtleties in their own fertileField without piercing the hymen to steal the diamond of their own alchemical elixir…. Is perhaps the greatest test……of ALL.
 
(CLJ 8-7-2023)