Ecological Intelligence (10 page)

Enter Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961), two courageous twentieth-century pioneers of depth psychology, both of them drawn to clinical medicine and healing, both of them turning the telescope inward in their attempts to comprehend the dynamics of human nature. Between them, what they saw and how they articulated it serves as the fifth great wake-up call of the past six hundred years. It was a dual contribution, one from a mentor and the other from a disciple who would inevitably go his own way. Between them, they tried to make sense of another space, another great wilderness—the human psyche.

Freud, who coined the term
psychoanalysis
, gave us the words
ego
,
superego
, and
id
to describe his tripartite division of the human personality. The id, a word and suffix first used by German biologist G. Weismann in 1893 to describe a unit of germplasm, was borrowed by Freud to describe the uncultured, instinctual impulses of human behavior. He was referring to our brain stem–oriented animal nature. He described the ego as that part of the human psyche that corresponds most closely to one’s autobiographical self—a controlling self that holds back the impulsiveness of the id in an effort to delay grati-fication until it can be found or expressed in socially approved ways. This was another way of describing the dialogue, or tension, between the inhibitory frontal lobe and the brain stem demands for immediate gratification. The superego, he said, was that part of the personality that corresponds to the notion of conscience, the part that controls and censors one’s behavior through learned moral and social values. The pull of the superego is much more toward one’s culture and conventional wisdom than to one’s biology. Freud was well aware of this, for he recognized in this tension the seeds of human neuroses. He proposed that the neuroses of civilized men and women resulted from the alienation of our egos (including the superego) from our primal, animal drives. In other words, we ignore our biological origins at great cost to our mental health. He was describing the consequences of the Human-Nature split.

In his analysis of human behavior, however, Freud went deeper than the ego. Putting his credibility at stake, he became the recognized spokesperson for that potentially fathomable realm of the human psyche—the unconscious. He saw it as the home of hidden agendas, the domain of repressed personal memories, motivations, and wishes, the reservoir from which our dreams and fantasies originate, as well as the source of what came to be known as Freudian slips. These are those memorable words or intentions that we deliberately try to suppress but that, in certain social settings, we inexplicably and embarrassingly let slip or act out.

In support of what he believed was the universality of the role of the unconscious mind in human behavior, Freud turned to mythology.His famous analysis of Sophocles’
Oedipus Rex
led the way to a plausible yet controversial theory of human psychosexual development. Drawing on an aspect of the famous Greek myth in which the hero unwittingly murders his father and marries his mother, he coined the now famous Oedipus complex to describe the unconscious sexual attachment of infants to parents of the opposite sex. He dared to propose that all infants relive the theme of this ancient myth in that they subconsciously wish for the murder or death of the parent/competitor of the same sex in order to have the other all to themselves. It is easy, steeped as we are in the taboos of society, more especially the incest taboo (the title of one of Freud’s books), to dismiss his incestuous/murderous theory as distasteful and nonsensical. However, when we care to think about it, it is not that farfetched. It is only in rare exceptions that children do not want their mothers—their breasts, their approval, their security, and so on—all to themselves. It is at the root of sibling rivalry and of the way that children can, for their own benefit, play one parent off against the other. It is primal behavior, which, properly parented, is nothing to be ashamed of.

While Freud and Jung, as we shall see, differed in their interpretation of the depths and the function of the unconscious, both men understood dreams to be the language of this mostly hidden domain. Both of them treated our strange nocturnal images seriously, believing that they were invaluable as pointers to the uncovering of repressed memories, wishes, and conflicts when assessing the mental status of their patients. For both men, to know thyself was impossible without an understanding of one’s dreams.

In his description of the causes of human neuroses, Freud sometimes came across as pessimistic, a genius embroiled with theories of death wishes, of deepseated envy and anger in young males with regard to their fathers, and of unexpressed sexual frustration in women. However, to put this into perspective, we need to remember the period in which he was living. It was called, ironically, the Victorian era, a patriarchal period of intense suppression of the feminine, a time when women were disenfranchised, when “decent” ladies covered them-selves from chin to foot, and when feminine protest was dismissed as “hysterical,” from the Greek
hysterikos
—the wandering womb. A brave, brilliant, and lonely man, Freud pushed the envelope of self-awareness in a way that no one before him had dared to do. As with Darwin, it is impossible to be indifferent to Freud, and although his theories remain contentious, his influence in modern psychology is indelible.

C
arl Jung introduced the collective unconscious, archetypes, projections, individuation, and the concept of the human shadow into our psychological vocabulary. Like Freud, Jung was and remains contentious for similar reasons. Pioneers of the science of subjectivity, unafraid to examine the dark side of human nature, what they had to say about the human psyche was very new and it wasn’t particularly pleasant. They both had a huge respect for the symbolic as well as the emotional world of humans. To me, they differed in another way.

If Freud was revolutionary, Jung was evolutionary, and it is in this light that I believe the full significance of the latter’s contribution to modern thinking is yet to be acknowledged. Extending Freud’s notion of the individual psyche comprising the ego and an unconscious domain that was strictly personal, i.e., a reservoir of repressed personal memories, Jung suggested that the unconscious mind, in addition to the personal unconscious, included a vast collective dimension as well. He called it the collective unconscious. It was a tacit acknowledgment of the evolution of consciousness, more especially the more-than-two-million-year psychological history of our species. Irrespective of creed or culture, he believed the collective unconscious to be the domain of survival-oriented memories, myths, motifs, and patterns of behavior common to all humans. Jung called these ancient survival patterns the archetypes. To understand the significance of these survival patterns is to have a better understanding of human nature. It is to understand why human myths, fairy tales, and legends are so important to us. It is to have a better understanding of the forces behind vocation and the human search for meaning.

From
archetypos
, “first-molded” or “original,” the archetypes are the psychological equivalents of our biological drives or instincts. Genetically primed, they are a product of the collective history of human existence, of language, memories, and the human ability to adapt. Jung recognized them in our uniquely varying but patterned responses to situations of conflict, danger, distress, nurturance, disorder, need, falling in love, competition, and so on. I see them always emotionally charged, linked to at least seven well-established basic emotional command systems in the limbic part of our brains. Elegantly described by neurobiologist Jaak Panksepp, these systems are survival oriented, interdependent, complementary, compensatory, and they exist in every mammal. The situations that trigger them are therefore archetypal. Panksepp divided these into systems of:

•Seeking, involving the emotions associated with curiosity, interest, expectations, and the possibility of reward

•Pleasurelust and the associated emotions activated by achieving what has been sought

•Angerrage and the range of emotions triggered by the frustration of failed gratification

•Fear-anxiety and the emotions associated with having to deal with the frustration

•Panic-distress and the range of emotions associated with loss, sorrow, separation

•Care and the emotions surrounding protection and nurturance

•Play and the emotions associated with rough-and-tumble, competition, and learning

Panksepp’s work is a reminder that the survival role of feelings and emotions in humans and other animals should not be underplayed or ignored for, as neuropsychologists Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull write, “we not only
experience
emotions, we
express
them.” Our emotionally charged perceptions make us want to “do something.” And we do so in many ways—fighting, fleeing, hiding, laughing, challenging, crying, blushing, and so forth. They add: “The perceptual aspect of emotion has a compulsive effect on us. We simply cannot lie back and feel our emotions.” Gripped by the impulse to respond, the historical archetypal pattern, be it of a hero, mother, father, savior, lover—as many archetypes as there are situations—is activated in the psyche of the doer. The spontaneous act of “doing something” is an archetypal act. From altruism to opportunism, they are reenactments of ancient motifs, themes, and patterns that are evolutionary and of profound survival significance. They cannot be called upon at will. Instead, because they arise from the
felt
experience of lived events in actual lives, they constellate spontaneously as the psychic expressions of instinctual processes. The archetypes give our biological drives a human face.

To honor the gods, then, is also to honor the archetypes. But that is our choice. We are not automatons. Learning is an important part of our survival as well and, as we know, in the process of becoming more aware of our emotional responses, it becomes less difficult to predict the situations in which they will be aroused. This means as we feel ourselves being drawn into a situation we can choose to modify our response. We can learn to say yes and no to the archetypes.

And so, what does the depth psychology of Freud and Jung, more especially Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious and the archetypes, have to do with ecological intelligence? Firstly, it is a reminder that the human psyche is a part of the evolutionary process. Secondly, it adds insight to the importance of psychological thinking—of developing a greater awareness of how and why we think and behave as we do and, more importantly, of allowing ourselves to be changed by that awareness. Thirdly, it introduces the notion of a collective consciousness and the implication that we exist in a “field” of information and influence, what I call a “mindfield.” Finally, if we are to take the admonition “know thyself” to heart, it will help us to understand a little better two crucial archetypes of Jung’s analytical psychology—the self and the shadow.

J
ung described the self with a capital
S
. He recognized it as a phenomenon historically older than the ego and out of which the ego evolved or developed. The Self is an archetype representing not only integration or movement toward wholeness and toward a personality that is unique, but also the organizing survival force of Nature in every individual. To me, this, more than the ego-self, is the self that Apollo in his admonition was urging us to know.

To know this self is a lifelong process—what Jung called the process of individuation. Marie-Louise Von Franz, an analyst and longtime colleague of Jung, described this process as “discovering what it means to be authentic, of discovering that which can only be given by the Self—one’s vocation and with it, one’s natural authority.” In this light, individuation also implies, in every individual, the possibility of an emerging ecological intelligence. Individuation means coming to know, little by little, that we are not the masters of our fate, but we can choose our attitude toward it. Dylan Thomas, for example, made his attitude clear in the famous lines of his poem:

Do not go gentle into that good night…

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And then there is Greek writer and poet Kazantzakis:

I am but a bow in your hand, Lord.

Do not leave me

For I will rot.

Do not bend me beyond my strength

For I will break

But bend me beyond my endurance

And let me break.

Individuation is ultimately a humbling process. As it is with insight, so it is with individuation—it is unlikely that we ever fully achieve it. It is as if, from time to time, we can touch it but we can never quite grasp it. In other words, we never become individuated. It is therefore not about perfection or about putting an end to personal suffering. Instead, it is a process of learning to see the world with both “eyes,” of waking up and of becoming conscious of the nature and the inevitability of suffering—a far better situation than to suffer blindly. Many of our great writers and poets knew this instinctively. An example is Albert Camus’ stunning analysis of the myth of Sisyphus (the man who challenged the gods and whose punishment was to push a rock up to the top of the hill only to watch it roll back down again). Camus reminds us that “to suffer one’s fate consciously is to be stronger than that rock.”

Individuation, then, is an individual matter but it cannot be done alone. We are, after all, a social species—we act, we interact, and we abstract. It is impossible outside of humanity, outside of work, and out-side of relationships and that includes our relationship with the Earth and every living thing. It is ongoing. And it is difficult, for one reason more than any other—it includes the enormous task of encountering and of trying to come to terms with the human shadow—the dark side of our nature. To explore this side of our nature and to take it seriously is to begin a process that will inevitably lead to a profound change in the organization of the way we think about ourselves, about social change, and, by no means least, about the human-animal interface.