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Soul Search

© Bonnie McCarson

In my last article I reflected upon the brokenness of humanity and how I see it reflected by the brokenness of individuals. The concept is certainly nothing new. I have been enjoying several novels that reflect the same idea in Native American culture centuries ago. The characters in the novels speak of individuals having multiple souls, and in some cases, the people have been so wounded that their souls have become dark. It is from the dark side that self-destruction seems to come upon the culture. This dark side in Jungian terms, of course, would be the shadow.

Mythology, fairy tales and literature often portray the dark side of a culture or group of people in a single figure - the villain. In the long poem Beowulf it is easy to characterize the hero Beowulf as good and the villain Grendel as bad. Writer John Gardner, however, in his interpretation shows another side of Grendel, one designed to invoke some sympathy for the monster. And one of my students recently in an essay pointed to what she saw as an unheroic trait in Beowulf - his hubris.

When we look at characters, or people, in black and white terms as simply good or simply evil we may overlook something. And if we look at our own shadows and the shadow side of culture as simply evil and try to abolish it, again we may be guilty of some oversight. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Jung speaks of myths as "symbolic expressions of the inner unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection." (Jung 6)

For individuals the drama of the psyche we see played out in old stories is reflecting parts of the individual. The fact is we cannot simply abolish the parts of ourselves we don't like and be all good. If we think we have, we may have merely driven them like Grendel back to their dark, swampy lairs from which they sneak out in another form. We may be caught up in a bit of hubris ourselves. The older Babylonia epic Gilgamesh gives us a better solution. When Gilgamesh, a king who the gods decided had too much hubris, learned of Enkidu, the wild man of the forests, he had Enkidu brought to him and wrestled with him. Then the two became best friends. The experience changed both characters. This part of the Gilgamesh story mirrors the psychic changes of opposites within ourselves when consciousness and integration take place.

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