Key concepts for making sense of The Hopper Guy
I have often heard, “If you want to make god laugh, make plans.” I know people who say, “Expect miracles.” Look, things happen all the time that are hard to explain or find a cause for. But you don’t plan your monthly budget based on winning the lottery.
What you deny in yourself, you will live out because you are not on guard against it. Read more at What is The Shadow?
Click below to find out more about Carl Jung's ideas and how they can help.
Carl Jung's Ideas and How They HelpI’m going to begin by describing some concepts that are key to understanding Jungian philosophy. Then I’ll describe the processes that these entities instigate or partake in. After that, I’ll show you how you can use these to better understand human behavior.
There’s a good simple definition of basic Jungian entities and processes at Psyche‘s web page.
In his book Assholes: A Theory, Aaron James defines assholes for us, so that we know who are assholes and we (non-assholes) can try to address their behaviors and effects. An asshole “allows himself special advantages in social relationships in a systematic way”; is “motivated by an entrenched (and mistaken) sense of entitlement”; and is “immunized against the complaints of other people.”
“If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.” -Mark Twain
And my corollary: “Do the right thing first. There’s less to regret.”
Carl Jung (1875-1961; pronounced “Yoong”) was a psychologist who worked when modern psychology was an emerging science. He studied under Freud, who found patients’ psychological problems often resulted from experiences earlier in life that were repressed into the subconscious. Jung noticed that some patients’ subconsciouses seemed to contain items that were not directly related to their lives. He set about trying to discover what other psychic contents might be in the subconscious.
What he learned in his research led him to label parts of the subconscious that did not come from an individuals’ direct life experiences. They were part of what he deemed the universal unconscious (i.e., they were not individual and they were not the subconscious that Freud was studying, which was based on personal lived experience). These included reoccurring stories, images, emotions, and patterns, which he called archetypes. And there was a part of the subconscious that seemed to consist of everything that the individual when in society was not: this he labeled the shadow.
He and others who followed him continued to explore these aspects of the mind and found how they went a long way toward explaining human behavior in ways that other explanations did not. As Joseph Campbell, one of Jung’s followers, once said, “an economic theory of human history could never explain a Chartres (Cathedral) 
. Meaning: there is something else at work in humans than mere day-to-day concerns. Some universal unconscious aspect (I’ll call it here “a need for spirituality”) drove many people in Chartres for hundreds of years to come together to build a place of worship more magnificent than any business or home.
So then, what is in this universal unconscious that we all have inside of us? And how can it help us understand our own behavior and that of other humans? Let’s begin with two of the most important concepts/aspects: archetypes and the shadow. Understanding these two concepts is important to understanding the overall view of how the universal unconscious affects human experiences and behaviors.
One of the best known of Jung’s concepts is the archetype. Understanding the concept of archetypes is not simple because you cannot touch or see them. Jung said, “[T]hey can be recognized only from the effects they produce.” [“A Psychological Approach to the Trinity,” CW 11, par. 222, note 2.] 
Jung described archetypes as “… systems of readiness for action, and at the same time images and emotions. They are inherited with the brain structure – indeed they are its psychic aspect.” [“Mind and Earth,” CW 10, par. 53.]
“It is not … a question” Jung wrote, “of inherited ideas but of inherited possibilities of ideas. [“Concerning the Archetypes and the Anima Concept,” CW 9i, par. 136]. 
Archetypes are collective; “the effects they produce” are individual (according to Jung). So how can we show that they exist and what they are?
In a famous experiment, newborn baby bird chicks were separated from their mothers as soon as they were born so that they could not yet have been taught anything and could not yet have learned anything from experience. The researchers then flew over their heads cardboard cutouts of a bird that is not a predator of these little chicks, and they continued to peep for their mother. Then the researchers flew a cardboard cutout of a bird that is a predator of these chicks. 
The chicks stopped peeping. The archetype of that predator bird’s shadow was inside each chick at birth, and it set off the behavior of being quiet so as not to be discovered and preyed upon. This image had been passed down because it was important for the animal to survive that the image be in the animals’ brain/mind to touch off the proper behavior when the experience arose. This to me is one of the best examples of both how archetypes act and proof that they exist.
I first heard this from my then yoga teacher, Gabriel Halpern. Like those who say, “I know I should leave my abusive relationship, but . . . “
My corollary is “Do the right thing first; there’s less to regret later.”
Another Jungian concept is the shadow. Jung’s original definition was the “shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality…” [CW9 paras 422 & 423].1 
The word “shadow” for this concept is now commonly used to mean the negative side of someone’s personality, the parts of themselves of which they are unaware, or their negative or violent traits (though it may be another person’s or culture’s shadow defining as “negative,” as we shall see below). A distinction needs to be made between the shadow and how it is negatively manifested.
Most of the things you hear or read about the shadow commonly use words like negative, denied, ashamed, etc. Wikipedia’s entry on Jung’s concept of shadow has as the first line of the second paragraph, “Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspects of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative.” 
But Jung’s own definition went on to clarify, “If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that … shadow does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities ” [CW9 paras 422 & 423].1 One of his most famous students, Maria Louise von Franz, cited a woman Jungian therapist who worked with some of the hardest criminals in jail and found that their shadows were incredibly positive. 
When Jung described the shadow as “negative,” it was more in the sense of a photographic negative 
or a negatively charged particle in physics 
. Negative for him was a scientific term and not a judgment. It was negative in that it was not lived out or processed. It would be no truer with these words to say that everything one actually did in real life was positive in the sense of good. It is merely positive in the sense of being manifest like the positive image of a photographic negative: it has been brought to light.
Every physical reality begins as an image. Read more at What are Archetypes
Click below to find out more about Carl Jung's ideas and how they can help.
Carl Jung's Ideas and How They Help
