Symbolic Mental Representations in Arts and Mystical Experiences

Primordial Mental Activity and Archetypal Constellations

Giselle Manica

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000075694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Symbolic Mental Representations in Arts and Mystical Experiences explains how the individual's conceptualization of reality is dependent on the development of their brain, body structure, and the experiences that are physiologically confronted, acted, or observed via learning and/or simulation, occurring in family or community settings.

The book offers support for Jean Knox's reinterpretation of Jung's archetypal hypothesis, exposing the fundamentality of the body – in its neurophysiological development, bodily-felt sensations, non-verbal interactions, affects, emotions, and actions – in the process of meaning-making. Using information from disciplines such as Affective Neuroscience, Embodied Cognition, Attachment Theory, and Cognitive Linguistics, it clarifies how the most refined experiences of symbolic imagination are rooted in somatopsychic patterns.

This book will be of great interest for academics and researchers in the fields of Analytical Psychology, Affective Neuroscience, Linguistics, Anthropology of Consciousness, Art-therapy, and Mystical Experiences, as well as Jungian and post-Jungian scholars, philosophers, and teachers.

Chapter 1

Introduction to the understanding of archetypal constellations through the lens of primordial mental activity

This book is inspired by my doctoral research that investigated how the neurophysiology of brain, the affective and somatic experiences and acts of the body, and the processes of language acquisition and use are deeply interconnected in the attribution of meaning that individuals emotionally and rationally ascribe to phenomenon. My focus of attention in discussing this intersection of a-rational and cognitive spheres of knowing for the emergence of personal understanding upon phenomena is centred in what Jung, Jungians, and post-Jungians describe as archetypal constellations. These are taken as central to my analysis because in reviewing the relevant theoretical literature that approaches them, it is divulged that their manifestations entail:

• a lowering of the individual’s consciousness,
• the happening of highly-charged affective situations,
• the occurrence of intuitive processes,
• the activation of a type of thinking that encompasses contents taken as previously unknown to the individual, but felt as if known, and
• a synergetic dynamism between the perception of a person/thing, of an action, or of a thought and the meaning of the event that unfolds in the immediacy of the interaction of the perceiver with her/it, as if there was an underlying reciprocity in the anticipated or predisposing ‘reading’ that the individual has of (A) the perceptual spatio-temporal mappings used to code the ‘metaphors’¹ that structure the phenomenological reality with (B) specific contents of her inner life.

In this sense, manifestations of archetypal constellations are privileged instances to evaluate how affective tones, images, behaviours, and thoughts coalesce in the experience of an event, being as if consistently unified. In considering this consistence, it is essential to emphasise that the occurrence of an archetypal constellation creates an archetypal field in which the expectations held in the inner reality of the individual are as if reflected in – and lived through – her outer reality. This archetypal field depends on the manifestation of a strong affective interrelationship that allows for an archetypal image borne by the individual (A) to be projected and matched to the quality of the acts or speech manifested in that who or which interacts/relates with her (B), determining a certain course of action or thought in the one who perceives (A) this given relationship. In considering the outcomes that can result from the constellation, we have that, depending on levels of awareness, types of attention and perceptual biases, quality of affective regulation, and personal capacities for modulating affects into identified emotions, individuals involved in an archetypal ‘field’ of interrelationship can actualise, enact, or symbolically resolve the situation undergone by them.

In the cases in which the archetypal inclination is discharged in the actions of the body, that is, in behaviours – through actualisation or enactments – I expose that an activation of subcortical areas of the brain, which, in the context of interrelationships, is what scaffold the possibility for meaning to be formed, does not become satisfactorily modulated or gradually suppressed by the cortical areas, overwhelming the capacity of the individual to develop a cognitive approach to the situation that is at hands, or compromising the logicality of this capacity. In this sense, the ways in which the individual ‘feels’ a situation are taken not only as the emotional background to an occurrence, but as the unfolding of the situation per se; hence, the feeling becomes the happening, and not that which propels towards it, and her reactions to it are, accordingly, expressed by how this feeling is sensorily experienced in the body. To support this starting claim of mine, I discuss the latest research deriving mainly from a correlation of (A) an appreciation for the philosophical concepts of the historic-social study of consciousness, and (B) knowledge from Analytical Psychology concerning the affective foundation of rationality and imagination, with the most current research in the fields of [Affective] Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Attachment theory, Embodied Cognition, and Cognitive Linguistics.

It is also important to affirm that, in providing this interdisciplinary perspective on archetypal constellations, I do not intend to validate Jungian theory with regard to brain physiology. Instead, I see this book as a [survival] strategy to recruit more practitioners to our field, for it aims to speak to and compel also a younger audience of readers interested in mental health discussions, an audience that is currently over exposed to the knowledge that derives from Cognitive and Behavioural psychological practices, and that, perhaps, is unaware of how distant psychoanalytic claims on human nature are the driving, yet unspoken forces behind the greatest contemporary neuroscientific ‘discoveries’.

With this in mind, I discuss aspects of the manifestation of unconscious physical affects and feelings of the body-proper that primarily articulate the possibility for the elaboration of the symbolic-centred aspect of psychic reality. My intention is to accentuate the inseparability of the mind-body dilemma; that is, debating how the affective- and perceptual-somatic adaptation to reality and the development of cognition are interdependent, and how in the experiences undergone by individuals according to the contextualisation achieved in relation to their emotions and their cognition thereof, either mental health or mental pathologies, result. In addition, I encompass in these discussions the ways in which caregivers, as the primary agents who act and dialogue with the infant with the objective of helping it to ‘digest’ the intensity and impact of its emotional waves, are influenced by cultural, inter-generational, religious, and financial variables in their construction of the caregiving environment and observe how the infant’s temperament is an active and defining aspect in the formation of the attachment bond, impacting the quality and appropriateness of the parenting skills.

Thus, the main objective of this book is to introduce the concept of primordial mental activity (henceforth PMA), coined by Michael Robbins² (2011) as the mental capacity that, in my understanding and probably not his, biologically participates in the priming, storage, and activation of archetypes-as-such (as they are developmentally discussed by Dr Jean Knox – 2003, 2004 –, hence, image-schemas), and affords them their fundamental affective tone, thus rendering them more than merely psychic images, since they become clothed with an emotionality that, in their manifestation, impacts the individual as if transcending her ego. Here, PMA is presented as the neural circuitry (a neuronal network formed by anatomical and functional connections among distinct circuits) that, being responsible for the non-rational and affectively-charged sensory-perceptual and motor adaptation of individuals to life, scaffolds and codes, through the bodily states it physiologically processes, neural maps that re-describe into mental representations (archetypes-as-such/image-schemas), the emotional information that is absorbed from and expressed in interpersonal interactions, giving meaning to these experiences through the enactment or symbolic exchange that occurs within them.

Hence, I aim to communicate how the discussion of affects, perception, image schematic compounds, Mirror Neuron System (MNS), somatic states, inducers, effectors, and markers, all concepts associated with the operations articulated by PMA, participate in the occurrence and accumulation of qualities of embodiments (experiences of bodily states) which, being felt, acted, imitated, imagined, or simulated, underpin the literal meaning of the words that are used to conceptually communicate content (especially emotional content). Thus, in this book, cognition is approached as influenced by the individual’s bodily experiences in the physical world, which participate in the formulation of abstract concepts and of abstract thinking – which is mainly metaphorical.³ Thus, I show how the symbolic derivations of archetypal contents are dependent on and influenced by the body – by how it is felt, isolated, and interchanging with other bodies (animate and inanimate), that is, moving, sensing, perceiving while simultaneously estimating, and developing also an emotional approximation to the concepts of mass, length, distance, density, time, temperature, pressure, etc., building from the regularities of the affects it undergoes in relating to them the character of the significant themes that will be recurrent to the individual.

With these ideas in mind, I discuss further the concept of archetype, that, although central to Analytical Psychology’s discussion of it being the gateway for access to psychic contents – images, myths, metaphors, symbolic representations – via the collective unconscious, is riddled with difficulties in its theoretical definition. In Jung’s perspective, archetypes-as-such are described as irrepresentable factors, the biological dispositions that sustain the core that dynamically organises experiences for the personality, which reside in the collective unconscious, underlie universal human themes,⁴ and engender their different qualities of expression. Archetypes-as-such become known to consciousness indirectly through: (1) the activation of archetypal images (Jung, 1947/1954, para. 417), which, being culturally elaborated, present the ‘character of a fantasy idea’ (Jung, 1921/1971, para. 473), and (2) the activity of personal complexes – clusters of affectively toned ideations – that gather around them (Jung, 1949/1961, para. 744), and arise as a result of personal and archetypal conflicts (Jacobi, 1959, p. 25). These representations of archetypes-as-such that structure the understanding of the experiences already acquired by the individual (Jung, 1918/1970, para. 10), or participate in the precipitating stages of incoming occurrences, are unconsciously activated in and elected from within the individual,⁵ through her sensory-affective perceptions and hence become actualised experientially.

Since archetypes-as-such constitute the structure of the collective unconscious, the latter then represents a much ‘deeper layer’ of the unconscious, understood as a universal formative field of ‘contents [thought-forms] and modes of behaviour’ (Jung, 1934/1969, para. 3). For Jung, the collective unconscious is impersonal (1916/1966, para. 449), inherited (ibid., para. 459), and corresponds to the ancestrality of the meaningful structural elements of the human psyche; hence, it is both the creator and container of expressions of human experience. In this sense, when a lowered level of consciousness taps into it, archetypes-as-such, mediated by archetypal images, give to the themes that compose the individual’s psychic processes their ‘specific charge’ (Jung, 1952/1972, para. 841), through the experience of the affective states they evoke by the attunement to the quality of being in the world that corresponds to the embodiment of a given image. Remembering with this affirmation that the affective image that surfaces to consciousness may be incarnated in the self or may be observed through its projection in the significant others that relate to self, unconsciously orienting consciousness in its relatedness to reality.

Thus, classically speaking, the archetype-as-such ‘is a tendency to form such representations of a motif’ (Jung, Franz, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements and credits
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction to the understanding of archetypal constellations through the lens of primordial mental activity
• Part I How discussing the structure, affective charging, and functioning of the body within the occurrence of archetypal constellations can support the developmental view of archetypes
• Part II Impressions and expressions of the body’s mind in mystical experiences and arts
• Part III Affects, image schematic compounds, and patterns of behaviour – links between body, concept, and culture
• Index