Across cultures, humans do not arrive on this earth a tabula rasa, an empty slate; instead, there is already something that is shaping our being. Astrologers categorize one’s birth under specific stars; both Greek and East Indian medicine classified the body’s composition to diagnose ailments and facilitate nutrition. Typology grew out of more than 20 years of Depth psychologist C.G. Jung’s observation of his patients, personal relationships, and collaboration with his psychic processes. Rather than classifying behaviors and observations, Jung’s model of typology is “concerned with the movement of psychic energy and how one habitually or preferentially orients oneself in the world” (Sharp, 1987, p. 12). In other words, typology does not categorize a person, rather the movement of their psychological process.
Furthering Jung’s work, Depth psychologist and typologist John Beebe (2005), intuited that the attitudes or functions of that psychic energy resembled a cast of characters, where the functions, positioned in a specific way, express psychological life in terms of self and shadow (p.42). Through insight gleaned from observing the archetypes in his dreams Beebe (2005) closed in on the images and reimagined them as eight main archetypes: hero/heroine, good parent, puer/puella, anima/animus, opposing personality, witch/senex, trickster, and demon/daimon; it is on the backs of these archetypes that the functions come into consciousness (p. 40). Dreams are places where archetypal energies materialize, as an archetypal image and the shape of the archetype is made known by the dream.
I wrote a paper about my dreams during the early days of the COVID Pandemic and Jungian Typology. It is now published in the online journal Personality Type in Depth. Below is a sneak peek. Read the whole paper here.
Humanity is being summoned to change its perspective in an assortment of ways. When a pandemic wipes the calendar clean, the heroes are not the rich, successful, and scholarly; the heroes are those at the bottom of the economic hierarchy: sanitary workers, grocery clerks, mail carriers, medical personnel, and gravediggers. The people who seldom are recognized for their contribution to society are inadvertently risking their health to maintain normalcy during isolation and self-quarantining. Survival forces a new perspective, one that includes mortality, anxiety, and the relationship to death. Sleep is a kind of death that paralyzes the body; it is the literal self-quarantine that happens at night; dreams can be considered a way of event-digesting.