psychetopia

[psychetopia]

“I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” —Anaïs Nin

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote about the sea as a symbolic representation of the unconscious mind:

“The sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie beneath its reflecting surface.”

On an individual level, one metaphorically becomes a mermaid when they willingly dive into and explore their personal unconscious—unafraid of darkness, old traumas, and repressed yearnings.

It is a rejection of shallow living, and a challenge to the familiarity of life above sea level—the realm of the ego.

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“Of course it is a terrible dissonance, a terrible disequilibrium which society presents to us. External and Internal things should be in equilibrium. For absence of external experiences, the inward life will gain the upper hand, and that is most dangerous. The nerves and imagination then take up too much room in our consciousness. Every external thing seems colossal and frightens us”

From a letter written in 1847 by Fyodor Dostoevsky to his brother Mikhail

-Letter xv, page 43

Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky

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Jung’s architecture of the psyche

Eugene Taylor, The Mystery of Personality

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“There is a terrible emptiness in me, an indifference that hurts.”

- Albert Camus

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"Intuition is a perception by means of the unconscious.

C.G. Jung, 1957 Richard Evans Interview

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“The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal...the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought.”

Albert Camus (page 22)

-The Myth of Sisyphus

One's search for meaning comes from a drive that seeks to make unconscious aspects comprehensible, but Jung mentions in Man and his symbols, “no matter what instruments one uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass”(Page4).

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Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung's map of the Psyche. He described the Psyche as“the totality of all psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious including thoughts, emotions, memories, and instincts”.

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“Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering” .

Albert Camus(Page 13)

—The Myth of Sisyphus

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Ernst Caramelle

Video-Landscape, 1974

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Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. 

Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. 

Franz Kafka, “Letters to Milena”

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Very sorry to be forced to blur out her breasts, but FB punishes posting this fine old photo of Tsonga women if i don’t. Historic photo, majestic women, beautiful dress. Tsonga originally from southern Mozambique, now a majority in South Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu0z6zyc2J8