Earlier in the week, someone asked what is meant by “wholeness” in analytical psychology. This was a good reminder to post now and again about what the concept means, and why we write about it. Let’s begin with the idea that the typical person is a mass of unconscious, fragmented parts that must be recalled to the whole. Jesus taught several parables about seeking and finding that which is lost–that of the lost coin, the pearl of great price, the Good Shepherd. Just as to the West Christ represents an archetype of wholeness, so too Buddha represents this counterpart to the East. Each teacher called people to come home to themselves and, ultimately, to a place of transcendent, universal belonging. This place of return, belonging, and wholeness is a universal theme found in world religions, shamanism, origin stories, and folk and fairy tales worldwide.
One seeks a spiritual hearth whether the God to whom one returns is seen as a personal aspect of God, as in Christianity, or the impersonal aspect of God pursued by Buddhism. I believe, as did Carl Jung, that the personal quest for wholeness is a spiritual quest at its deepest root, and that any attempt to separate out the spirit results in disease or illness. Depressions,1 conflicts, neurosis, and other types of suffering exist as signposts to tell us that we are going the wrong way. They invite us to return home again to our true selves.
Daryl Sharp, editor at Inner City Books, wrote a handy little Jungian primer called Jungian Psychology Unplugged. 2 It is one of my favorite books for explaining Jungian ideas, for it’s short, sweet, and quite easy to read. Though Sharp died in 2019, his work lives on through his books and recordings, which can be enjoyed at Inner City.
In the book, Sharp writes:
When you’re self-contained, psychologically separate, you don’t look to another person for completion. You don’t identify with others and you’re not victimized by their projections. You know where you stand and you live by your personal truth–come what may. You can survive cold shoulders and you can take the heat. You have what Jung calls an undivided self. Well, more or less.
When you are self-contained, you have your own sacred space, your own temenos.3 You might invite someone in, but you’re not driven to, and you don’t feel abandoned if the invitation is declined. You respect the loved one’s boundaries, their freedom and privacy, even their secrets; you give them space and you don’t knowingly push their buttons. You don’t judge and you don’t blame. There is interest in, and empathy for, the other’s concerns, but you don’t take them on as your own. Shoulders may be offered to cry on, but there is no plaintive plea from one to the other to be “understood.”
Make no mistake: Understanding what someone is saying is different from being asked to understand who is saying it. The former depends on your thinking function, and may overlap with feelings of empathy and compassion; the latter is an unconscious bid for power. Understanding oneself is difficult enough; understanding others is their responsibility, if they are inclined to do so and have a mind for it. What one can know of another is just the tip of an iceberg; the far greater part of anyone’s personal identity is beyond the ken of an outsider.
For that matter, those who have worked on themselves enough to be comfortable with who they are–as opposed to those arrogant souls who are simply narcissistic–do not need, nor do they ask, to be understood by others. I am what I am; take it or leave it. The appropriate attitude for a long-term working relationship is not understanding, but acceptance (74-75).
Sharp writes later in the book that, once a person has found their individual path, they are bound to feel estranged from those who have not. People who have worked on themselves, especially those who have worked particularly long and hard, don’t care to spend much time with those who haven’t. Sharp says that although this seems elitist, it’s only to be expected; along with a sense of vocation, we come to realize that our time on earth is precious. “You become reluctant to squander it,” Sharp writes, “on those who don’t know who they are or why they are here, and are not inclined to ask” (148-149).
Those who hear the call to adventure and respond become, he says, “redeemer personalities–leaders, heroes, beacons of hope for others. Individuals with personality have mana” (149).
The appropriate attitude for a long-term
daryl sharp
working relationship is not understanding,
but acceptance.
I like the idea of having mana, and I’m willing to do the difficult, involved work of enlarging my mana pool. In many different Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) such as Final Fantasy or EverQuest II, fantasy characters have a mana pool, a well of power from which they draw the energy to do magic, to fight monsters, and to heal. This power pool can be enlarged, and it can be depleted.
One reason MMOs and other fantasy games have never gone out of style is that we have the sense that this well of power from which one draws. One can have mana and grow the mana pool, or one can be a spiritual pauper. Those living marginal and unconscious lives, abandoning acres and decades of unlived lives don’t have the power to do magic, to fight monsters, or to heal anyone.
People on the Quest–those who have begun to individuate and those who have become personalities–ah, now they have wells of mana. They know how to replenish their wells; they know when and how to use their mana. They are heroic, magical beings.
endnotes
- What is meant is a normal depression associated with the process of transformation, not a clinical depression. ↩︎
- Sharp, Daryl. Jungian Psychology Unplugged: My Life as an Elephant. Toronto, Canada: Inner City Books, 1998. ↩︎
- The temenos is a protected place in which inner work can be done. It is from the Greek τέμενος, a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to kings and chiefs, or land set apart from common uses and dedicated to a god (such as a sanctuary or other holy place). ↩︎
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