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The Archetypes of Self in Leonard Cohen's Suzanne.
Carl Jung (1875-1961) outlined the notion of Self as formed from the Persona, Shadow and the Anima/Animus, as conceptual "content" individual psyche:
‘The concept of the self is essentially intuitive and embraces ego-consciousness, shadow, anima, and collective unconscious in indeterminable extension. As a totality, the self is a coincidentia oppositorum; it is therefore bright and dark and yet neither’. (JUNG 2014, 107-8)
The persona, as consciousness, ‘ego’ and ‘knowing-self’ form the consciously identified and fashioned external appearance of an individual (JUNG 1991: 140). Below the surface of the persona, forms the shadow-the ‘denied and repressed’ (JUNG 1991: 124) aspects- still subsiding as ‘living part of the personality’, which according to Jung ‘cannot be argued out of existence or rationalised into harmlessness’ (JUNG 1991: 20).
Jung claimed that through the ‘door of the shadow (…) we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors’ (JUNG 1991: 23). Jung’s analogy of the ‘door of the shadow’, through which the prime integration of the Self commences, alludes to Blake’s didactic prescription in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’ (BLAKE 1928: 191).
The poetic infinite in the analytic sense may be regarded as the "unseen" unconscious forces beneath conscious appearances, which give rise to the anima/animus as the inner dimensions of self.
Jung characterised his notion of the anima as the unconscious “subordinated” feminine aspects of a man, existing as the intrinsic inner foundation of his psyche, as Jung reasons:
‘Either sex is inhabited by the opposite sex up to a point, biologically speaking, it is simply the greater number of masculine genes that tips the scales in favour of masculinity. The smaller number of feminine genes seems to form a feminine character, which usually remains unconscious because of its subordinated position’ (JUNG 1991: 27).
The tendency of the anima to appear as ‘active personalities in dreams and fantasies’ (JUNG: 1991: 23) culminated in Jung’s characterisation of the anima as a ‘magical feminine being (…) (and) the chaotic urge to life’ (JUNG 1991: 25: with the ‘world beyond and the eternal images, while on the other hand the emotionality (involved) in the chthonic world and its transitoriness’ (JUNG 2014: 337). Jung clearly perceived an esoteric potency in regards to the anima, as the emotional, psychic internal condition of men.
On the relation of psychology to art, Jung conceived of a work of art as ‘suprapersonal’ in that it has ‘escaped from the limitations of the personal and has soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator’ (JUNG 2001: 994). By Jung’s analytical method a poem may be judged as an independent “personality”. But, taken in its entirety, the work of art presents, according to Jung ‘a finished picture’, as analogous to a symbol derived from the ‘creative process’, which ‘consists in (the) unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work’ (JUNG 2001: 994).
To surmise, the analysist’s role is to locate the forces by and through which conscious personalities are influenced and guided to thought and action, however directly or indirectly, by the unconscious, subliminal undercurrent of forces in the psyche.
Sources:
BLAKE, William (1927), Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, London, The Nonesuch Press.
JUNG, Carl Gustav (1991), The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, translated by Richard Francis Carrington Hull, London: Routledge `
JUNG, Carl Gustav (2014), Collected Works of C.G.Jung: Alchemical Studies Volume 13 London: Taylor and Francis
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