Archetypes, Unconscious, and Deep Thoughts

[helluin]

Welcome to the world of we-are-more-than-we-know.

"Knowing" being only one aspect of experience, which intellectual training has taught us to consider the whole of experience. That which cannot be proved, argued, debated, analyzed, dissected, and most of all quantitatively measured slips through the cracks.

I have been a plodding scholar, literary critic, and grammar teacher for some 20 odd years, with two scientist parents, and recently discovered a rather different way of looking at the world which I'm still digesting. The chief tenet is science is useful but cannot cope with intangibles. Oh, and logic doesn't always help either, because human nature, and by extension a lot of the natural world, is NOT logical.

So, that's the background for this topic. My actual topic is archetypes, dream, and the unconscious, because they pop up a lot in Final Fantasy games, especially X, where the relationship between dream and death is especially explicit. In the Final Fantasy series, a number of archetypes are hopping up and down waving colorful streamers to anyone who's paying attention.

So. First. The unconscious and the Self, Jungian style.

A little over a hundred years ago, Mr. "it's all rooted in biology" Freud framed the concepts of ego and unconscious. The ego is the part of us that says "I", the voice in our head that keeps a running narrative, the discriminating function. The unconscious is everything else: a repository of memories, a crucible of unrealized or forgotten wishes, urges, desires, fears, and whatever it is that makes us crave Auron and stay "just five minutes" when we know we're about to be late and prefer chocolate over vanilla. Psychology has spent the last hundred years trying to figure out what exactly is down in the unconscious and what to do with it. Analyze it and dredge it to the surface? Confront it? Surf it? It's the Great Intangible. But those unseen depths dictate what we want, how we feel, what scares or thrills us, and pretty much all the emotional tone of our lives. The ego is like the computer screen -- what's active right now. The unconscious is everything else down in the computer, and there's an awful lot of it you never see.

Dreams are a time when the ego switches into coasting mode and surfs those lower layers.

Now I come to archetypes, which is what I was aiming for.

Jung and Bastian and others noticed an odd phenomenon, first in mythology, and then in the dreams of individuals: there are common motifs, patterns, recurring images and characters which keep popping up again, and which hold special resonance for us. The one-eyed wise self sacrificing god. The old warrior. The witch, the seductress. The mother and child figure. Jack going out to seek his fortune, or Tidus the Blitzball player, or a farmboy on Tatooine. Apparently moogle-like critters with big eyes are another. There is a Beauty and the Beast myth of some sort in nearly every culture, and there's usually a Cinderella. And so on. Jung was especially intrigued when his patients would report dreams with extremely specific mythic images that he recognized from alchemical texts or Egyptian paintings which his patients could not have known. What was going on?

Bastian, a folktale scholar, called these recurring motifs "elementary ideas", and Jung hit on the idea of "archetypes" which exist both in mythology and in individual psychology. Mythology, Jung felt, was simply collective psychology of a culture: the collective unconscious, where experience and ideas of a people slowly get crystallized into dreamlike images, stories, and tales that don't make rational sense but like dreams satisfy and express emotions, wishes, beliefs, and all that stuff that bubbles up during life.

Jung had the basic idea that within human psychology there are seeds -- complexes -- archetypes -- which are not themselves specific mythological figures (the hero, the giant, the mother goddess, Kali), but which are psychological tendencies and patterns that tend to inspire similar images. Archetypes are the sand around which pearls form. Everyone has the mother goddess archetype, but it's going to manifest as the Virgin Mary in one culture and Isis and baby Horus in another. These ideas are not simply transmitted by contacts with other people. They really are innate to human psychology. (This was Jung's conclusion, and the conclusion of mythographers and folklorists and psychologists after studying many stories and dreams where contact was out of the question. It is still a topic open to debate but I don't want to get into that here.)

The archetypes are seeds in the unconscious. Jung wasn't really that interested in why they exist or what makes them happen; he was more interested in studying, cataloguing, and comparing recurring motifs that he found in both his own patients' dreams and world mythology. However, he had two ideas about what might be causing them.

First, he reasoned, human experience has followed certain patterns for millions of years: birth, death, ageing, sex, marriage, loss, eating, courtship, motherhood, fatherhood, etc, etc. If environmental pressure slowly leaves its stamp on our physical structure (evolution), then experience of these common patterns would tend to leave a stamp on psychic structure. Those with profound respect for mother, deeply-ingrained, were probably on the whole probably going to survive more often than those who don't. Over a long period of time, we'd tend to get "structures" or complexes in our psychological make-up shaped by common experience. So that is the collective unconscious -- not really shared between individuals, but passed down and inherited in the psychic equivalent of DNA. What that mechanism for inheritance is, we can no more guess than Mendel could guess about chromosomes -- we have no way of measuring it.

Jung later found this explanation somewhat unsatisfactory. He ran across so much evidence for implausibly linked phenomena (synchronicity, he called it), where one person's experience seemed to be linked by no causal factor to another's, that he started to suspect that our psyche/soul is not solely a by-product of biochemistry, or even if it is, it is more than the sum of its parts, and awareness is not necessarily constrained by matter. Experience -- that which makes us alive, think, feel -- is one of those intangibles which science can't measure very well. Jung began to doubt that skin and bone defined the borders of consciousness, because consciousness is not a physical phenomenon. So he became open to the possibility that the psyches of individuals (the "alive" part of us) may be able to interact in some form or other with others. He never tried to define how, since it can't be defined.

He also began to feel that the archetypes and complexes (charged knots of wish/want/possibility/fear in the unconscious) within us are almost separate entities of us. Our ego isn't in control of them, but must interact with them. "I" does not decide, "I'm going to dream about an elephant trying to cross a swimming pool tonight". Something else within us does.

Now, I do have a point here, although mostly I'm just sharing some interesting concepts and a different way of seeing things.

Fantasy characters tap into archetypes, complex, and the unconscious, and let us explore them in a more direct way, just as dreams do. They are not alive. And yet they are to a certain extent autonomous and separate from us, doing things we don't expect, expressing wishes, desires, fears and needs we don't know are buried in our unconscious. We need the young hero. We need boss fights and monsters. A lot of folks feel a great affection for chocobos -- why? What is it about cuteness and locomotion, yellowness and a big poofy tail and a beak, that go "ping" for us? Others feel great satisfaction at whopping big swords -- why? Is it really just a substitute penis, as Freud would guess, or is there a little more meaning behind a weapon, a length of metal, a piece of technology that helps us carve up the world? Why do FFX characters have a recurring pattern of one eye, or mismatched eyes, or strange eyes? Why is it that FFX has so much emphasis on death, the underworld, and dreams being united by pyreflies, and why is the Farplane like the death/dream gate in Greek mythology?

I'm not really looking for answers or logical debate here. I'm simply trying to stir up questions. Look at Final Fantasy and see where you find mythological figures that remind you of Ben Kenobi or Medusa or Loki or Changing Woman or Pele or the roadrunner or Moby ****. Push past the "aha, they are similar!" discovery, which is interesting, and see if you can feel some of the emotional tone, charge, meaning, depth behind these figures. The old one-eyed swordsman is not simply like Odin: he expresses some deep truths which are very different from the one-eyed witch with the powers of death who seems disturbingly akin to Hel.

Notice how the pull of certain figures in these video games is so strong for us that we get carried away with them, identify with them, love them, wax eloquent about them. Why? What is drawing us to think that so-and-so is "cool" or another is "lame"? Why do we care?

I

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Notice how the pull of certain figures in these video games is so strong for us that we get carried away with them, identify with them, love them, wax eloquent about them. Why? What is drawing us to think that so-and-so is "cool" or another is "lame"? Why do we care?

For me, Aeris is one of those characters.

Because I think she embodies all the qualities that I either see in myself, or wish that I had. And I don't mean that in a Mary Sue kind of way. Things such as her spirit, self confidence, purity and innocence and so on...

There is also another character I identify with from another show, "Shadow Weaver" from the She-Ra cartoon series. While the personality of Shadow Weaver may seem completely opposite to that of Aeris, there are also qualities in her that I see in myself, either now or potentially.

So yeah, two seemingly opposite characters and personalities and I love them both.

Very well thought out!
To me, people play games for happiness (as most of you already know), fantasy characters are just that - fantasy. Not real, which is why people enjoy them. Because they can't be them in real life, which is different, which is to most people 'cool'. To me, I don't consider anyone in any video-game similar to me because I have the mindset that "These are not real people, but I am." They are fantasy because it's peoples fantasy to be different than who they really are, people can't accept the fact that they are not the only person in this world, that they are only one in six billion, it disgusts everyone to a point... you know, not being able to do magic, or wield a 6" sword, or hell even have a talking cat. But thats why they came out with video-games, so people wouldn't have to be 'disgusted' with sociocultural norms, and they can 'live', as some would call it, a different life than they are normally by switching on the PS2 and popping in FFX.