Why do we repeat certain psychological themes as we live…patterns, habits, repetitive ‘memes’, sequences, ways of doing things that come to be our ‘reality’, helping us to feel comforted and/or stabilized? In general, we tend to attract to ourselves more of our “favorite” thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We spend much of our time circling around these “favorites” in mostly unconscious ways. The question is what attracts such themes to us (even in those situations where we are trying to change)?
Carl G Jung wrote volumes on these “strange attractors” (a term from quantum physics), referring to them as “archetypes”. From Latin archetypum and Greek arkhetypon, the word means pattern, model, type, mark, and has been used to refer to the ‘first form or original pattern from which copies are made’ – if Plato comes to mind here, you’re on the right track! While that may give us some location in an abstract way about the nature of patterns recurring generally, it doesn’t explain why or how individuals are compelled, sometimes haunted, by specific archetypes.
Before we go there, it’s important to point out that part of Jung’s rupture with Freud was around exactly this, i.e., how to look at what stirs and drives us. For Jung, it had to do not just with sex and death (Freud’s two favorite movers of instinct, emotion, thought, and behavior) but instead, more expansively, with the many different and varied forces moving in the unconscious, both the personal and the “collective” unconscious. As far as the latter goes, Jung believed this larger, more universal cauldron contains memories and ideas inherited from the past, as well as those collectively fermenting in the present. It also, for Jung, holds future possibilities, whether or not picked up on by the human race.
But back to the original question – why do certain specific themes or “strange attractors” live in or nearby to specific individuals, going around and around and around? I’m asking this question with a counsellor’s eye, keeping in mind its range – that is, from unhappy habits (read: addictions) all the way to future visions (read: inspirations). Regarding the former, we might ask, what is to be done about them, how can we break free, and/or how can we make use of them to our advantage rather than just being held hostage to them? Regarding the latter, the questions are more like, what is it, where did it come from, and how can I bring it into fruition, make it real?
In each case, dealing with either ‘the low’ or ‘the high’, there is a strange attractor involved, some kind of seed crystal around which matter/energy gathers, pulling to it more and more material. Unless we understand the way of this – how collections begin, move, grow, influence. sometimes possess us – we will not understand human psychology (or anything else).
[Please see next blog/post for more about this!]