Graves/Jung Stages of Individuation (1-4): Chapter 1 Part of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Charting Individuation
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The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow.… Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it …[s]ometimes a nixie gets into the fisherman’s net.… The nixie is an even more instinctive version of a magical feminine being whom I call the anima.… Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up to then had hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself. – C. G. Jung., Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious in CW 9, par. 44-66 |
A probable reason for his prolix tentativeness, his primary data came from his own experiences over seven years when he approached madness. He encountered the Shadow, Anima, and Archetype of Meaning as personified beings in ecstatic visions (which is why, following some translators, I capitalize the English of such concepts). Throughout his later writings, Jung makes clear that the final archetype in the sequence is the Self, the union of conscious and unconscious. The above passage wanders back and forth, first mentioning the Shadow, then doubling back to the “nixie” or Trickster, a more archaic pattern. The very name of his additional “archetypes of transformation” suggests that they also had some part to play in the development of the mind, but he does not specify their relationship to the sequence. Instead, his voluminous works search world literature and mythology for widely occurring images, which are thereby simply presumed to be archetypal.
In my Behind the Great Wall, I gave a psycho-linguistic interpretation of what makes imagery archetypal. I did not understand, though, their sequence until I encountered the research of the psychologist Clare Graves. Successor of Abraham Maslow as head of the American Psychological Association, Graves had spent his life trying to synthesize all the competing psychological systems. Since the time of Sigmund Freud, psychology has tried to chart human development, but each pioneer could only detail a small section of the cartography, for instance, cognition (by Jean Piaget and David Ausubel), ethics (by Lawrence Kohlberg), personality (by Jane Loevinger), and identity (by Erik Erikson).
Graves’s original hypothesis was that each theoretician envisioned a different ideal as crowning human maturation, so he sought to determine what the major ideals were. In collaboration with colleagues, he classified essays of students asked to define maturity (i.e., the target of development). He found that each essay extolled one or another of three aspirations: the Virtuous Person, the Successful Professional, or the Empathetic Humanitarian. After open admissions added to his classes, he recognized a fourth type: the Unscrupulous Winner. Later, based on further research, he raised the number of ideals to eight and arranged them in a series, based on evidence that societies and individuals developed from goal to goal in that order (though not at the same pace). He never insisted that this meant that one ideal had more absolute value than another. The higher-numbered ones merely possessed greater complexity and therefore greater adaptive power for dealing with accelerating global change.
Being based primarily on college essays, Graves’s sequence comprises
a series of highly conscious states, people’s deliberate aims. Conversely, drawn
from dreams, visions, and myths, Jung’s archetypes form unconscious complements to
Graves’s stages (By “unconscious” Jung did not mean completely inaccessible to awareness,
only temporarily outside of attention such as momentarily misplaced memories, which
may surface at a later time, or the sympathetic nervous system, which yogins can
control.).
Up to whatever stage society permits, development has a definite, albeit paradoxical,
mechanism: trying to reduce complexity increases it. To maintain the worldview within
a Gravesean stage, an individual represses the cognitive dissonance (everything that
does not fit). If there is much of this, it overwhelms the energy available to suppress
it. Bringing memories from earlier Gravesean stages, the spill usually triggers a
temporary regression–a retreat toward simplicity that actually makes one’s present
problems worse by removing complex resources. (Graves himself noticed that unsolved
existential problems precipitate change of stage.) Being whatever consciousness rejected,
the repressions have a configuration roughly its opposite; therefore, the spillage
changes the polarity of consciousness from individual-oriented to society-oriented
or vice versa and increases complexity by incorporating previously repressed data.
This makes psychological health not static but dynamic and dialectic. Given the accelerating
pace of social change, this process has become increasingly necessary. (Graves’s
most extensive presentation of his system is an unfinished, book length manuscript
of which I am one of the editorial consultants, but it is not yet ready for publication.
Its primary editors, Chris Cowan and Natasha Todorovic have made some otherwise unpublished
works by Graves available at http://www.clarewgraves.com as well as Chris's own association of stages with colors:
1/beige; 2/purple; 3/red; 4/blue; 5/orange; 6/green; 7/yellow; 8/turquoise.)
Stage One: Survivor/Fool
Except in infants that have not yet formed a trusting bond with their caregivers, the first stage appears usually because of circumstances that prevent participation at a higher level. In Cast Away (2000), for instance, Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) crashes on a desert island, forcing him to spend every moment surviving. Comparable excitement energizes the beginning of each level, e.g., the thrill of competition at stage three, the enthusiasm of conversion at stage four, and non-stop commitment to one’s profession at stage five.
What, though happens below the surface to those stage beginners’ lives to balance these extremes? The mind represses cognitive dissonance between a stage’s Weltanschauung and actual experience–in stage one, the isolated individual’s unsatisfied desires for human relationship. Ignoring these requires ever more energy until the process bankrupts the psychic economy and the repressed begins to re-emerge. At first, it manifests in compulsions. Thus on the island in Cast Away, the protagonist, in the grip of emotions he cannot otherwise express, takes the time to create a surrogate companion by dobbing a face on a ball; then he risks his life to save it from the ocean. In purely utilitarian terms, this whole activity (particularly the risk) seems foolish. It resembles what the psychologist D. W. Winnicott termed a “transitional object,” a doll or pet through which a young child practices partnering skills without having to manage the challenges real human relationships require. In modern society, some homeless or severely alienated adults regress to stage one, often expressing the archetypal side of it by talking to themselves as to an imaginary companion, a common response to seclusion.
To name this archetype, I turn to the Tarot. An archetypal sequence according to Jung (CW 9, part I, par. 81), its Major Arcana begin with the Fool. Like the Fool in King Lear, the protagonist of this card manages crude wisdom through a very primitive tie to the psychological depths that also threaten to overwhelm his or her weakly developed consciousness. The card depicts this situation as an animal, usually a dog that tries either to alert the Fool to an approaching abyss or push the Fool into it.
Although stage one itself has become relatively rare today, traces
of it surface in any tense situation: the heart beats faster and adrenaline floods
the blood stream as if the threat were to survival itself. As an influence on later
levels, it emerges in fictions of adventurers who survive on their own–the psychotic
pirate with his parrot, the film-noir anti-hero who has to name his gun because he
has no other friends, or the lone barbarian who talks to animals. As a primitive
precursor of socialization, the stage’s unconscious aspect (fantasizing relationships)
has some part in most children’s literature, underlying an array of talking animals
or toys. (Graves described stage one with the phrase, “Express Self Now for Survival.”
These tag phrases by Graves are quoted from Woodsmall and James, 174-177.)
Sequences Focusing on Stage One: scenes of island solitude such as in The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1954) and in The Black Stallion (1979); openings of Tarzan films that
portray his growing up among apes.
Stage Two: Truster/Trickster
It arises when fantasy proves so inadequate that individuals seek real families/tribes, for which fantasies have partly prepared them by letting them practice with extensions of themselves, who thus can be trusted. Trust serves as the prerequisite for tribal life, dependent on having sufficient faith in its culture to acquire a language, mythology, and other normative patterns. (Graves’s phrase for this stage was “Sacrifice Self Now for the Tribe….”).
Complete credulity and acceptance, however, would be as disastrous as paranoia; thus, a very common figure in tribal mythology (according to Jung) is the archetypal Trickster, whose deceit, selfishness, and tendency to violate taboos offers a release of repressed instincts as when tribal clowns act out obscene humor during rituals. S/he is the Hermes figure: thief, prankster, sexual icon, and leader of souls to the world of ghosts (which represent the inner depths). S/he invented hermeneutics to give a voice to them. His/her self-expression and freedom from collective norms serve as a precursor of the next stage.
Conservatively trying to avoid leaving stage two, tribes, however,
employ taboos to preserve the status quo. For instance,
…when the young men return from the warpath they are not feted as heroes, nor are
they allowed to strut about the village displaying their bloodstained weapons. Instead,
they are disarmed, segregated in huts outside the village, given purgatives or sweat
baths, and fed on bread and water until the spirit of war has left them and they
are themselves again (Harding, 102).
Only when such traditional safeguards break down (e.g., in Shaka
Zulu, 1986) does the society move to the next stage.
For thousands of years, tribes were so well adapted to their environments, they had
little need to evolve. Their worldviews and reality differed, but not so overwhelmingly
as for repressed cognitive dissonance to drive them to higher-numbered stages, except
after ages of drift or when encountering representatives of those higher-numbered
stages.
Movies Focusing on Stage 2:
A Man Called Horse (1970), Emerald Forest (1985), The Mission
(1986), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991), Black Robe (1991),
Medicine Man (1992), Spirited Away (2001), and practically any film
treating extensively how to make, preserve, or break a tribe or family, i.e, many
sitcoms.
Stage Three: Unscrupulous Competitor/Hero
While developing from infancy to early childhood, individuals usually switch from trustingly basking in the family or tribe (stage two) to competing with one another for attention and with their parents for authority (stage three). In societies, the latter arrives when internal or external problems cause what was a tribe to learn the military techniques to conquer its neighbors and the political ones to turn its temporary war chief into a permanent monarch (with a pecking order of lesser winners beneath him or her). Hyperbolically, Graves phrased stage three: “Express self now, the hell with others.” Since healthy maturation constantly adds skills, stage three should retain caring for kin (learned at stage two), but this places no restraint on exploitation of strangers; and if the entrant into stage three comes from a dysfunctional family or tribe, even kinship ties may be ineffective.
Neither case provides much foundation for societal order. Being an unscrupulous winner requires repression of kinder feelings, which coalesce into this stage’s “archetype,” the self-sacrificing Hero, who understands that honor (the chief goal at stage three) comes from good deeds rather than through brutal intimidation. In Greece, the Heroes received divine honors after their deaths because of the assumption that they would continue to help the living. To the extent that the gods, goddesses, muses, and so on exchanged aid for honor, they served as greater heroes, though, in Greek myths, many deities merely personified aspects of conscious level-three, the Unscrupulous Competitor. Such clearly self-sacrificing deities as Dionysus, who dies for his followers, seem to have arrived late in Greek mythology, as if the unconscious aspect of stage-three, the Hero, had taken a long time to enter consciousness even enough to shape myths. Once this archetype surfaced, heroic stories offered roles to which people could aspire deliberately, lured to do so by cravings for respect, but actual heroism requires the unconscious to override self-preservation.
Since even today stage three (learning to deal with conflict and
competition) remains crucial to individual development, the Hero persists as a major
figure in cinema about every period–not just the pre-modern world. Exemplary of this
continuing relevance, in the movie Pay It Forward (set in twentieth-century
America), the teacher of an eleven-year-old boy challenges him to change the world.
To do this, the boy places those he helps on their honor to aid three other people,
who in turn must benefit still others–good spreading exponentially. An ardent wrestling
fan, he dies courageously fighting to protect the weak against bullies (unscrupulous
winners). His honor survives him, as evidenced by the massive crowd at his memorial.
He has not quite reached stage four in that he constantly ignores rules to accomplish
his goal, as do his followers (such as his street-person grandmother, who aids a
fleeing felon).
What appears so remarkable about his achievement is that today few people stay in stage three long or intensely enough to embody the Hero. The stress of enduring lawless competition and the censor of authorities at higher levels push the young into mimicking stage four, rather than truly evolving this far on their own. Despite its Greek name, the details of Freud’s “Oedipal complex” described Viennese children frightened from stage three to four by adults really at five. The offspring thus sensed that their parents were incongruent with–indeed, hypocritical about–imposing stage-four rules. This incongruity impeded the children’s complete acceptance of stage four and eventually created a market for psychiatry. Further complicating development, in the Occident, odd-numbered stages conform to stereotypes of masculinity, even-numbered ones to femininity, opening people to ridicule each time their stage and gender seem to differ, e.g., the stage-three girl derided as “Tom Boy” or Freud’s picturing a boy’s rise from stage three to four as a metaphoric emasculation.
Movies Focusing on Stage 3: all the Bond and American Ninja Films, Peter Pan (1953), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Highlander (1986), Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), Gladiator (2000), and innumerable other action films.
Stage Four: the Virtuous/the Shadow
This stage substitutes moral or patriotic rules for the hero’s
spontaneous self-sacrifices, thereby creating a very conscious order. Very young
children simply trust that what they are told is right (stage two) and slightly older
ones think that they only have to obey people who are bigger, stronger, and less
sensitive than they are (the conscious side of stage three). According to Piaget,
between five and seven, children develop elementary desire to play with logical organization
and from twelve on they may amplify this into mature skills with abstractions. Opportunities
to develop organizational skills nonetheless depend on one’s culture. Tribes have
no openings for accountants. Eventually, however, a large kingdom needs a bureaucracy
of educated clerks (at stage four) to administer and promulgate the rules.
At this stage, people presume rules flow from God’s Will (or from the Nature of Things or from the Little Red Book). They express the only Truth–a cosmic orderliness contemplated with the same pleasure as putting in its place every stamp or baseball card in a collection. At stage four, actions are either correct or incorrect (not somewhere in between). Unlike stage three’s “shame culture” (where malefactors only fear loss of “face” or honor), stage four brings a “guilt culture” (where remorse comes from violating absolute Order). Stressing the patience required for such virtuousness, Graves phrased stage four “Sacrifice Self Now for Salvation (or Attainment) Later”–a painful procedure.
Trying to live those rules consequently breeds an “archetypal” Shadow, a collection of all the impulses and exceptions contrary to the society’s dominant systematization of Truth. Like the other archetypes, it gradually absorbs much-needed energy. Thus despite virtuously trying to contain the monstrous green Shadow that takes possession of his body, Bruce Banner (the Hulk), in comic books, cartoons, and live action films, periodically succumbs to it, thereby receiving healing and empowerment. Comparably, The Mask (1994) and The Shadow (1994) fantasize the Shadow as a source of abilities that the good can utilize in their struggle with evil. Another, stage-four theme is the felix culpa or fortunate fall, whereby the reformed sinners’ transgressions render them more knowledgeable and stronger than before becoming aware of the Shadow.
Since stage four still constitutes the highest level much of the population reaches, movies frequently adopt its perspective–that the Shadow is evil. The Shadow, thus, is often presented as a devilish tempter, sometimes explicitly a sub-personality within the protagonist, as in Fight Club (1999). Surreptitiously in viewing such movies, a stage-four audience partly identifies with that Shadow, thereby venting repressed longings (while pretending to condemn them).
Movies Focusing on Stage Four: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), Forbidden Planet (1956), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Lolita (1962, in contrast to its more complex source), Total Eclipse (1995), Daredevil (2003), and anything else about temptation versus morality.
Continue to: THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 1 Part 2
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