"Personal shadow is the bridge to [...] mass psychoses"

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Hoofdcategorie: Engels

Categorie: Training

Geschreven: donderdag 10 november 2016 08:46

Gepubliceerd: donderdag 10 november 2016 08:46

Geschreven door Bart

Define [ make a stand ]

"The personal shadow is the personal shortcomings of things which every human being could be conscious of which is not archetypal. For instance, such things as greed for money or jealousy, inferiorities which everybody has but prefers not to know about. If one is jealous or if one is suddenly possessed by wanting money [...] one could know about it if one is honest with oneself. But the collective shadow has to do with the dark side of the archetype of the Self, that means, [it] is the shadow of the God image. In the Christian tradition, it would be the devil. And that has always been personified and felt as something which has not [...] directly [ to do ] with the human being. [I]f somebody is possessed by the devil, he is much worse [...] he is not human. It's demonic. [B]ut [...] generally that merges. First you have this area, of dim, dark side, and behind it lurks the other. I've [...] seen that, when Germany went to the devil in Nazism, people fell into it through their personal shadow. For instance, they didn't want to lose their job because they were clinging to money. That was their personal shadow. But then they joined in with the Nazi movement for that reason and did much worse things than they would have done normally under normal social conditions. So you can say the personal shadow is the bridge to the collective shadow or the open door to the collective shadow. But the collective shadow comes up in those terrible mass psychoses. It's like if you have your room, and there is one door not shut, and there the devil can come in. And if you know your personal shadow, you can shut all the doors."

Marie-Louise von Franz  in 'Matter of Heart' (1986), a film about C.G. Jung by Mark Whitney.

"You run the job, but I run the show."

Actor Ben Johnson as Jack Beynon in Sam Peckinpah's 'The Getaway' (1972), written by Walter Hill, based on the novel by Jim Thompson.

"The psychological relationship between leaders and followers can, at times, be compared to that of hypnotists and their subjects. As leaders reawaken (trough the compelling, authoritative nature of their massage) past relationships of dominance and submission, they create in their followers a desire to be taken care of, inducing dependency relations that intertwine significant figures from childhood with contemporary figures. Past and present fuse in the person of the charismatic leader, and he or she becomes the depository of the followers' fantasies and hopes. In other words, followers "idealise" the leader. This […] process […] results in a release of tension."

'Are leaders born or are they made? The case of Alexander the Great', written by Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries with Elisabet Engellau, first published in Dutch in 2003. English edition published in 2004 by H.Karnac (books) Ltd, London.

"Although the ability to convey belief is an important asset, real belief is most convincing. This is also true to the polarisation of good and evil, we versus them. Again, it is a common political tactic to attempt to unify the populace against the outside enemy, the rhetoric of polarisation is most effective when, as in the case of Hitler, they are absolutely believed to be the source of the problem, they are evil, and to eliminate them is to eliminate our problems. Greenacre observed that, in order to be effectively charismatic, it is a great asset to possess paranoid conviction. Although there is no necessary relation between charisma and paranoia, when the two are linked, some of the most fearful excesses of human violence in history have occurred. [ For the ] ideal-hungry follower, the posture of total certainty, of total conviction on the part of the leader, is very attractive to one besieged by doubt."     

'Narcissism and Politics, Dreams of Glory' written by Jerrold M. Post, first published in USA in 2015 by Cambridge University Press.

"[…] Verily, verily, I say to you, Ye seek me not because ye have seen signs, but because ye have eaten of the loaves and been filled. Work not [for] the food which perishes, but [for] the food which abides unto life eternal  […]"

Jesus of Nazareth as quoted by John the Presbyter in 'Gospel of John', written between AD 65 and 85, translated by John Nelson Darby in 1867.

"Fascism is BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD, BAD!"

Paul Verhoeven on the 'Starship Troopers' (1997) commentary-track.

"[…] "fascism" is the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society, with its machine civilisation and its mechanistic-mystical view of life. It is the mechanistic-mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa. […] In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character […] Fascist mentality is the mentality of the subjugated "little man" who craves authority and rebels against it at the same time […] When a "proletarian" general covers his chest with medals, on both sides, and from the shoulders to the belt, he demonstrates the little man trying to outdo the "real" great general […] In the rebellion of the masses of abused people against the empty niceties of a false liberalism […] One cannot make the Fascist harmless if, according to the politics of the day, one looks for him only in the German or Italian, or the American or the Chinese; if one does not look for him in oneself; if one does not know the social institutions which hatch him every day [E]very social order creates for itself in the masses of its members that structure which it needs for its main purposes. […] There is an important relationship between the economic structure of a society and the mass-psychological structure of its members. It is not merely that the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class. What is more important for the solution of practical problems is the fact that the contradictions in the economic structure of a society are also anchored in the masspsychological structure of its members. Otherwise, the fact could not be understood that the economic laws of a society can have practical effects only through the activity of the masses who are subject to them [...] The crook who wants to make money from people's illness calls his poison "medicine" because he knows very well that he could not sell it if he called it poison [...] It remains to be seen what part politics will play in the eradication [ i.e.  to remove (something) completely: to eliminate or destroy (something harmful); derived from the Latin word "radix" which means "root" ] of the political emotional plague and what part the consciously organized functions of love, work and knowledge."

'The Mass Psychology of Fascism' written by Wilhelm Reich, first published as 'Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus' in Germany, 1933 (!) English translation by Theodore P. Wolfe  on line available as Pdf    

"Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
 [...] Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV?"

'Mercedes Benz' by Janis Joplin (1970) as 'remixed' by Glenn Gould in 'The Solitude Trilogy, Part 03: The Quiet in the land' (1977)