Expressions of the self

Whilst procrastinating this morning, (as usual?) I avoided my urgent tasks by checking on blippers I subscribe to. As those who visit here will know, I am not a great communicator, only rarely commenting on other blippers' contributions, and I often fail to acknowledge those who comment on mine. As I have mentioned in the last few days, I have been reluctant about expressing my true feeling about local issues that are and will affect the town and the council, the outer world.

Anyway, this morning I commented for once about a blipper's observation of 'thinking' too much. This of course got me thinking, but actually it also resonated with me. I then mentioned in my comment about Carl Jung's proposition of the four functions of the psyche, and it touched something inside me.

I started to wonder about the nature of what we choose to blip possibly being a reflection of an inner, and possibly unconscious, state more than we realise, which I think would be a good thing. The four functions Jung posited are - 'thinking' and 'feeling' paired together as having opposite tendencies, and similarly 'sensation' and 'intuition'. You could imagine viewing them as arms of a cross pulling away from the centre. He said that an individual's innate conscious orientation will be towards one of these four, and through the principle of compensation, its opposite will then be unconscious. The leftover other two or pair, as partially conscious or auxiliary functions, may then serve the superior function.

I remembered I had a book on the shelf next to my desk called 'Jung for beginners', written by Maggie Hyde and illustrated rather in the style of a comic book by Michael McGuinness, published in 1992. As soon as I opened it again, I felt (note, not thought) I would try to use it for today's blip. But before getting the camera out, I ended up scanning through the whole book and was taken back into my past, which included a long period of 'dreamwork training' with a Jungian psychotherapist, which I'm delighted to say I started practising again a few months ago.

The images I have chosen from the book here include a section called 'Mandala: the path to the centre', where Maggie Hyde mentions that Jung began to sketch small circular drawings every morning, which seemed to reflect his inner state day by day. Would he have approved of blipping every day too?

But on the left hand page is the end of the previous section called Mythopoeic Imagination. It describes the period in which Jung started writing, in a way that has subsequently been referred to as automatic writing.
..... 'For three days, in 1916, he was taken over by an episode of automatic writing, producing the 'Septem Sermones ad mortuos' (The Seven Sermons to the dead)'.

The first time I heard of Carl Jung was in 1970, when Julie, my girlfriend of the time, who I lived with for three years, heard about the Septem Sermones that had been printed privately for Jung's friends, now being more widely available. So we made a journey to the famous Compendium Books in Camden Town, and came away with a copy which I never read, as it seemed completely oblique to me then. It wasn't until I was in my forties that I approached Jung's work again, and it totally transformed my understanding of the world and I realised there was an inner as well as an outer life, available to all.

If you go large you can probably read all the words.

Another Jungian related blip