ST Jung, Bly and all that jazz - literary/psychological influences on the ST

Since it has really taken off in the spoiler thread, I have decided (with mod approval) to set up a thread dedicated to discussing the psychological/literary influences on the sequel trilogy that have been mentioned by Rian Johnson and others.

The starting point for this is two tweets from Rian, found here and here.

• [Asked if he read Campbell to prep for VIII] No, but I reread some Jung and listened to a bunch of Robert Bly lectures. Close.
• Modern Man In Search of a Soul is a good place to start for Jung. Bly - A Little Book About The Human Shadow

I'm no Jung scholar but there are obvious parallels between his writing and the dilemmas and conflicts found in SW, especially in terms of the symbolism and the dark side as a representation of the shadow.

While I'm even less familiar with Bly, he seems to draw from Jung in a variety of interesting ways. You can find lots of his lectures on YouTube, and I share this one primarily because he brings up Star Wars in it:



So, what - if anything - do you think this might say about the sequel trilogy, and Episode VIII in particular? Do you reckon Rian's extra-curricular reading will feed into certain characters' stories and particular elements of the plot more than others?

The safe bet would be that this kind of symbolic layering is most relevant to the Rey, Luke and Kylo thread of the story, but I'll leave others to properly explain why.

 

Good idea to branch this off into it's own thread.

I think what we're looking at is the idea that Luke, and the Jedi characters will need to learn to absorb the shadow by the end of the st, which means moving beyond a simple polarised good vs evil binary (though evil can still exist) and learning to balance the light and the dark within each of us, reconciling the two.

I read A Little Book on the Shadow today and these are some of the random passages that left out that could possibly be a jumping point for ideas in 8 and beyond (or not, either way it;s fun to think about. There is lots to mull over and digest, some may leap out at you, or it may not. Interested to see what people think (I will try not to impose my interpretations on the quotes yet).

we might call the shadow “the dark, unlit, and repressed side of the ego complex,” the Jungian analyst Marie Louise von Franz says in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. “But this is only partly true,” she adds, lest we get caught in the negative connotation of the image. She tells of an occasion when Jung, impatient as always with Jungians, dismissed a nit-picking discussion of the concept by protesting, “This is all nonsense! The shadow is simply the whole unconscious.” The definition Von Franz settles on is neutral and lucid: “…in the first stage of approach to the unconscious, the shadow is simply a ‘mythological’ name for all that within me of which I cannot directly know.”

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He knew that “if any help was going to arrive to lift me out of my misery, it would come from the dark side of my personality.”

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We notice that when sunlight hits the body, the body turns bright, but it throws a shadow, which is dark. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

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One could speculate that because ancient Chinese poets, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, tried to reconcile the dark side and the light side

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Plants are asleep, and so they live always in the dark side, though their leaves reach out for the light. So we could say that each weed in our back yard unites dark and light (maybe something to do with trees?)

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Our culture teaches us from early infancy to split and polarize dark and light, which I call here “mother” and “father.” So some people admire the right-thinking, well-lit side of the personality, and that group one can associate with the father, if one wants to; and some admire the left-thinking, poorly-lit side, and that group one can associate with the mother, if one wants to, and mythologically with the Great Mother. Most artists, poets, and musicians belong to the second group and love intuition, music, the feminine, owls, and the ocean. The right-thinking group loves action, commerce, and Empire. You see how my mind is split, so that my description of the world encourages polarization.

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Hatred of the Yin side of the circle begins as a small thread in the first American cloth. Hatred of Yin at the start gave New England a fierce energy; but three hundred years later, the same hatred drains people and leads to some sort of spiritual death.

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So a decision taken privately, as a part of one’s inner life, to fight the dark side of oneself—and this fight the Protestants particularly recommended—can cause “the conscious” and “the unconscious” to take up adversary positions; and the adversary positions can quickly spread to foreign policy, and influence decisions. The crow doesn’t arrive: we divide animals in the Ark into good and bad, but the crow doesn’t arrive. We make all the male porcupines and sloths sit on the right side of the room, and the female porcupines and sloths on the left side of the room, but the crow doesn’t arrive. The two halves of Yin and Yang do not join. We forbid the herons to dance, and we force the mice in their crowded quarters to bring all mice infants to full term, but the crow still doesn’t arrive. What do we do then, to encourage the crow to arrive? That is the subject of this little book. The division insisted on here of dark and light is very stark, but that’s how we’ll begin.

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When the uncomfortable talent (i.e. the Dark Side) is well exiled, all that is left inside is a thin, gray, wispy substance, hardly noticeable in daylight.

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So the person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent.

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So, following the path of attention, one notices where the anger goes, and precisely whom we become obsessed with. We become entangled with people who are virtually strangers. That’s odd. The metaphor is this: if we maintain eye contact with that person, we can damage him or her by our anger and hatred. If we break off eye contact and look down quickly to the right, we will see our own shadow. Hatred then is very helpful. The old tradition says that if a man loves God he can become holy in twenty years; but if he hates God he can do the same work in two years.

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Bly: Have you ever seen anyone walk in the sun and yet the shadow was missing?


Booth: It would have to be a very thin person.


Bly: Terribly thin. Perhaps transparent.



Booth: But transparency could imply either that a person is insubstantial (maybe a way of looking at Snoke?)

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Apparently what we’re hearing in “Iron John” is a narrative reminder of old initiation rituals in northern Europe. The older males would teach the younger males how to deal with shadow material in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm the ego or the personality. They taught the encounter more as a kind of play than as a fight.

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When the shadow becomes absorbed the human being loses much of his darkness and becomes light and playful in a new way. The unabsorbed shadow can darken the air all around a human being.

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OK—then I’ll withdraw the term “light.” Marie Louise von Franz says somewhere that a human being who has done work with the shadow or absorbed the shadow gives a sense of being condensed. Other people willingly give him or her some authority in moral matters. If a teacher has worked with his own shadow, she says that students, no matter how young they are, sense it, and discipline in that room will not be difficult, because the students know that the teacher has his crow with him. Other teachers, she says, who have not worked with their shadow, can talk about discipline all day and never get it. I like the idea that the work a person does on his or her shadow results in a condensation, a thickening or a densening, of the psyche which is immediately apparent, and which results in a feeling of natural authority without the authority being demanded.

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Another way to put it is that people under thirty-five cannot teach themselves or others to eat the shadow. The initiation rituals hinted at in “Iron John” imply and suppose old men who teach younger men how to eat the shadow.

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Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Straus is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them. But expressing is not any more admirable then repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them. Joseph Campbell describes the two opposites as two horns; and if we get hooked on either, we die. Baker Roshi remarked that in Zen the student tries to imagine a third possibility. It goes like this. In meditation, he said, one might allow the anger to come in, so that the whole body burns with anger. The anger is not repressed; your whole body is anger. One may want to feel that anger for three or four hours. During this time one is neither expressing it nor repressing it. Then, when the meditation ends, one has the choice to express the anger or not. The ego or personality can make the choice later, to express it or not. Moreover, expressing it might not involve the kind of scarifying scene in which you scream at someone and wear tracks in your brain. In fact, the anger might be expressed by some witticism on the phone that would take twenty seconds, but the listener wouldn’t forget it for five years. The personality would find an appropriate way to express anger which would support playfulness, give honor to the anger, and yet not contribute to the disintegration of its own organized psyche.


Booth: As usual, what you are saying requires growth. You’re not talking about jumping back to childhood and pulling things out of the bag.

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We’ve talked little about the relationship between shadow and evil. It is clear that the shadow is not to be identified with evil, but how does evil fit in?

Well, let’s try to make a distinction. The shadow energies seem to be a part of the human psyche, a part of its 360-degree nature, and the shadow energies become destructive only when they are ignored. The shadow energies remain a part of or belong to the human community. But our ancestors, some of them, had a sense that evil is something quite different. It comes from beyond the human community; it flows in from an archaic principle that still exists in the universe—many Gnostics believed that—or from the dead, who have passed out of the human community. And from that point of view evil can be dealt with or recognized, but not absorbed. We know it’s dangerous to imagine that we could have friendly relationships with all forms of destructive energy. Such humanistic confidence is too optimistic. There may be powers in the universe outside the human community and hostile to the human community. But our conversation has been about shadow primarily.


Booth: We come back then to the idea that the shadow is what is hidden from us, and it is not something destructive in its very essence.

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Many ancient religions, especially those of the matriarchies, evidently moved so as to bring the dark side up into the personality slowly and steadily. The movement started early in the person’s life and, in the Mysteries at least, lasted for twenty to thirty years. Christianity, as many observers have noticed, has acted historically to polarize the “dark personality” and the “light personality.” Christian ethics usually involves the suppression of the dark one. As the consequences of this suppression become more severe, century after century, we reach at last the state in which the psyche is split, and the two sides cannot find each other. We have “The Strange Story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” The dominant personality in the West tends to be idealistic, compassionate, civilized, orderly, as Dr. Jekyll’s, who is so caring with his patients; the shadow side is deformed, it moves fast, “like a monkey,” is younger than the major personality, has vast sources of energy near it, and no morality at all. It “feels” rage from centuries of suppression.


How did the two persons get separated? Evidently we spend the first twenty or twenty-five years of life deciding what should be pushed down into the shadow self, and the next forty years trying to get in touch with that material again. Cultures vary a lot in what they urge their members to exile. In general we can say that “the shadow” represents all that is instinctive in us. Whatever has a tail and lots of hair is in the shadow. People in secular and Puritanical cultures tend to push sexual desire into the shape under our feet, and also fear of death; usually much ecstasy goes with them. Old cave impulses go there, longings to eat the whole world—if we put enough down there, the part left on top of the earth looks quite respectable.

 

Great topic! I agree that symbolic layering or language of symbols are most prominent in Rey, Luke and Kylo thread of the story. I'm gonna tag Mungo Baobab excellent post

which gives us an example of Jungian symbolism in Star wars and potential new symbolism in VIII.

However, thanks to Satipo passages from the Little Book of Shadow, I'd say that The Shadow is also applicable to Finn cause Storm Trooper is his shadow. I think that we will see different kinds of shadow - shadow as an organization (FO/Storm troopers to Finn), shadow as a person (Kylo to Rey or Kylo to Ben or something along those lines), shadow as a power (Force/Dark Side to Luke or Rey or Kylo or all 3).

 

Yes, I'd agree about Finn.

Thinking of Letter Never Sent, and given that the only rumours we have on Luke, Rey and Kylo have them on Ach-To pretty much, I wonder if a good deal of the film won't actually lump these three together somehow, like an inversion of Vader and Palpatine trying to turn Luke.

There was another quote in the book that really made me think of Finn. I'll try and find it.

 

Balancing both the light and dark side within one's self is exactly what Grey Jedi, you know that group people hate so much from the old EU, do. That's an idea I once brought up about Luke and was mocked for it because people hate the term Grey Jedi. Now I never believed the term would become canon but the concept I always felt would one day make it into the live action films. Glad to see it just might be happening.

 

This part, I think , may be alluding to nature, or the forest, as symbol of the unconscious - caves are often used to represent this too, of course.

"Plants are asleep, and so they live always in the dark side, though their leaves reach out for the light. So we could say that each weed in our back yard unites dark and light"

It's no accident that in TFA, Rey and Kylo's confrontations occur in forest environnents. I'd even go far as to say that Takodana is representative of Rey's subconcious, with Kylo as the invader, whilst the chilly darkness of Starkiller Base's forest represents Kylo's subconcious.

Also, this is the Jedi and the Sith, isn't it?

"So a decision taken privately, as a part of one’s inner life, to fight the dark side of oneself—and this fight the Protestants particularly recommended—can cause “the conscious” and “the unconscious” to take up adversary positions; and the adversary positions can quickly spread to foreign policy, and influence decisions"

"Baker Roshi, during a little talk one day, remarked that ordinarily in our culture we have only two ideas: either we express or we repress. Either one represses anger or one expresses it. For example, it could be said that Richard Straus is repressing certain negative emotions, whereas punk rock is expressing them. But expressing is not any more admirable then repressing. The Western man or woman lives in a typical pairing of opposites that destroys the soul. Either we defeat Communism or we are defeated by it. Either a man dominates women or he is dominated by them. "

I think that the Jedi's problem with acknowledging and intergrating their dark sides, and the origins of this problem, will be addressed.

 

Satipo having Luke, Rey and Kylo together on Ahch-to is a great subversion of expectations that VIII would copy ESB. And as you say, possible inversion of the Emperor's Chamber. So wherever they go from there will be unexpected because few expected Luke, Rey and Kylo to have a sitdown so early. I bet most people expected something like that to take place in IX in Snoke's presence cause shadow of ROTJ.

Mungo Baobab

Wow, this is so great, especially the bolded. It's interesting that they did touch upon integrating dark sides in Clone Wars in this episode:




So I expect they take it further.

 

Btw, it's an idea I arrived at via a debunked Reddit 'spoiler', so you know, highly speculative, but I quite like the idea that Luke's 'rock meditation' on Ahch-To is the cause of the stormy weather and winds that ( may possibly ), cause one of the KOR ships to crash land. Kind of a Jedi Prospero.

Anyway...this might possibly be similar to what Buddhists term Wrathful Practice, which is being described here:

"Baker Roshi remarked that in Zen the student tries to imagine a third possibility. It goes like this. In meditation, he said, one might allow the anger to come in, so that the whole body burns with anger. The anger is not repressed; your whole body is anger. One may want to feel that anger for three or four hours. During this time one is neither expressing it nor repressing it. Then, when the meditation ends, one has the choice to express the anger or not."

 

I'm glad to see people migrating the discussion over here! While I shared the post in the spoiler thread, this is probably a better home for it. I basically wrote a blog exploring Kylo Ren as Luke's shadow. While I don't overtly bring Jung into the discussion, I definitely think you could view the parallels and inversions between Luke and Kylo through a Jungian lens.

https://journalofthestarwars.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/kylo-ren-the-shadow-of-luke-skywalker/

 

Mungo Baobab - there is more in the book about trees and plants - and how their roots delve deep into the darkness while their roots seek out the light. They are an embodiment of balance.

 

Rabs I think your are right that we will see concepts from EU appear in ST under different name or without any particular name, but we'll know it's those concepts. Journal of the Whills that makes unsubtle hint at the Grey Jedi, whatever they choose to call them, brought the concept into canon via TFA novelization. And Snoke said "the new Jedi will rise" where "the Jedi" would be sufficient. So new could well mean new as in new kind of Jedi that we haven't seen before in the movies.

Ok, I have to admit I had to google the name to see what reference is for. But now that I do know, I'd say you cracked a spoiler. Way to go!

 

Good point. With Takodana being lush, green and lively, growing, sunny and springlike.

And the encounter on Takodana being dead, cold, nighttime, lifeless, leafless and winter like.

 

Good point about Yoda absorbing his shadow in the Yoda arc. I do wonder if some of Luke and Rey's journey (and possibly Kylo's) will be more along those lines. More metaphysical. We've also seen hints of that kind of approach in Rebels too. What I'm also curious to know is, are we going to see or hear about the Bendu is episode 8? That character, or certainly the idea of a third path, has been set up for a reason.

 

See. I thought they would go this route in TFA, with Phasma being the representative of the whole Stormtrooper "shadow" idea as a whole.

But the film treated Finn's encounter with Phasma as a quick joke. So now, I don't know if Finn has a "shadow" or not.

 

Yeah, It would be different and would obliterate all talk of ESB or Yoda 2.0. Still, who knows. Probably miles off.

 

Mungo Baobab

cerealbox

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That all reminds me of images of the World Tree



Bifrost is the bridge between worlds. Han was killed on the bridge. from there, Kylo stepped out into the snowy SKB. In Norse legends, ice and cold present the realm of dishonored dead (he's dishonored himself and is dead inside). So like in all legends, Netherworld or Land of the Dead is in the roots of the tree. On the top is the tree itself, Home of Gods. But our tree is dead. It should be the home of the Force but doesn't appear to be anymore. Unless someone brings the balance? This may be more suited in Trees thread but since this is also a thread about symbolism, maybe it could fit?

 

Shadows of the Darkside....Rey sitting on Snoke's throne

 

Could be a good title, as could Shadow (s) of the Light or something else along those lines.

 

Shadow of the light

 

It could be amazing. I've thought for a while that we might see Ren and Rey having to defeat a greater evil together somehow (some kind of dark crystal vibe) but having Luke be the one guiding them could be even more interesting. Almost like Frodo, Sam and Gollum, only with Gandalf instead of Sam lol.

 

Also notice the empty space to the right, Snoke requires balance? The force is unbalanced.

 

You're onto something. Luke is definitely going to have bigger and more important role than just Yoda 2.0 trainer/mentor. And yes, drama, theosophical clashes, lore, character building, etc. I expect this part of the movie to be more cerebral, one or two big lightsaber fights notwithstanding, and Resistance more action-y. Not that Ahch-to will only have people sitting around campfire and talking. If Raiders influence applies to this portion of the movie than there will be plenty of suspense and thrills to be had.

Dark Horse that's an amazing find and idea! According to Visual Guide/Dictionary/other, he revers Kylo as "the perfect embodiment of the Force, a focal point of both light and darkside ability." Also, as discussed in Trees, Han said "Snoke is using you for your power." I think you're onto something.

 

Maybe they venture into the temple? We've seen a lot of temple stuff in Rebels that was fairly epic in scope. And I agree, Rian is not going to just rehash ESB. People have consistently said "weird". I heard "bold" way back and that 8 would take us into much fresher territory.

Might be worth looking for the aura of darkness around Kylo in the walkway confrontation as well.