Beyond The Ego and Psychological Mythical Reality

This essay is about psychological reality. Paradoxically, psychological reality is mythical. It is dreamlike. There is psychological reality, i.e. we are conscious beings with unconscious experiences. Just beyond the conscious mind the psyche is constantly in a dream-state. Hence when we drift off to sleep all of that dream-world takes over.

The repression of the conscious ego relaxes its grip and soon lets go altogether and the more “real you” takes over, the fantasist. Hence the child who has watched a horror movie that night (and was frightened by it) will have nightmares due to his conscious defenses sleeping and the fantasy material (that he has turned into symbolic images of fear) breakthrough. Likewise the mother whose child has perished in a tragic accident, whilst not being able to repress her horrific feelings consciously, will have absolutely no success if she ever gets any sleep, because again, her repressing conscious defenses will be down.

Admittedly they are extreme examples (especially the latter) but the psyche is constantly dreaming anyway in a dialogue with consciousness. The fact of the matter is that even if ones life is mundane the deeper part of the mind will be day-dreaming and if a hypnotist were to make the conscious mind sleep or to go to the borderline of waking consciousness and sleep, the individual would experience his dream world reality. This is totally irrespective of the intelligence or excitement of his life, or of any other factors.

Hence Depth Psychology speaks of MYTHICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY. The “Mythical” is an apt description of all of the fantasy-like material just beyond the surface of narrow ego consciousness. Obviously “Psychological” is self-explanatory whilst “Reality” stands for the fact that whilst the material is mythical it is nevertheless undeniably real. I mean that it is “real” in the sense that, say I ask you to say to yourself (non-audibly) the alphabet. So you say in the secrecy of your own mind, a,b,c,d,e,,,..x,y,z. You know that you have spoken those words. It’s real. It’s psychological reality. This may seem obvious but it’s a different type of reality to that which physical scientists deal with. Physical scientists deal with the literal world of concrete reality. Depth Psychology deals with the mythical world of psychological reality.

People are however prone on one extreme to dismiss such psychic reality as “only psychological” whilst at the same time taking the psychological in their own lives all too literally. The question becomes, why would people take psychological life literally? That is a good question because in taking psychological life too literally one becomes neurotic. Our fantasy, dreamlike psychological reality is not the same as the physical reality that is “out-there”.

Yet (for example) the nervous and frightened child experiences (due to chronically misguided) interpretation, the psychological world as massively real. Everything impacts on her as if it were a threat. It isn’t about the outer world in such a case. Other children are happy with the same outer world experiences. The frightened and nervous child thus, has false perspective. Now, the clever person may argue here that all children have a false perspective, or that, if all of psychological life is mythical, there is no “true perspective”.

Correct, but there are degrees of health and ill health. I do not say that the nervous and frightened child should be dismissed with a shake of the head. Now such a child (if the psychologist Alfred Adler is to be believed) may end up over-compensating for this nervous fearful psychology by becoming a power-tripper in adult life. All the words associated with “power” are relevant here, dogmatic, pedantic, pretentious, one-sided, narrow-minded, close-minded, and so on. It could be said that such a person swaps “out of control” fear for “control-freakery”.

So in a sense he is still in a world of neurotic fear. He’s up-tight and due to exerting such a large amount of control over himself, he is bound to do the same over others. Jung calls that “projection”. So to return to the question, “Why would people take psychological life literally?” I have answered that question in the example case just given. Again, I have given an admittedly extreme example to begin with. But again, the example can be applied to virtually everyone. This is because the archetype that is activated in the example of the adult power-tripper is that of the cultural ego.

Thankfully mythical psychological reality is the psychological nature for all conscious human beings whether living 30,000 years ago or now. Hence we always have a wider context for our psychological dispositions. Un-thankfully the ego often feels repelled at this and blocks the potential psychological health of the wider psyche. Yet the ego is not literally real either. It is just an archetypal disposition. But it is the culturally dominant one. And this ego power spreads like the disease that it is through all things. Its disease infects individuals, the fields of knowledge, societies etc etc. Yet if one can embrace the Depth Psychology that I will outline here, and include within that embrace, the destruction of one’s ego, then it is claimed here that one will be psychologically, better off.

Part 1: Narrative

Reading stories, assuming that they are enjoyable, wakes up vast unconscious aspects of one’s psyche. One cannot wake up vast unconscious aspects of their psyche through an individual choice of their ego. If the individual ego had such a simple light “on and off” switch then we would all know about it and I wouldn’t be writing this and Freud and Jung would have been on the dole queue.

One of course has to enter the story on-trust. Sometimes the story will be boring and we will have wasted our time and energy. But if we never enter a story on-trust then we will waste our whole life. Because, unfortunately, the human psyche is largely unconscious (i.e. unaware) and (as said) it needs the vast majority of it to be awakened and it cannot do this itself.