Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology Reflections of the Soul
The Original Meanings of Reflection
The “momentary flashes of consciousness” we recall when we look back on our childhood have usually grown together in adults into a more or less continuous field of egoconsciousness.
But still earlier, before these momentary flashes were consciously recognized as inner experience, they existed as preconscious components of human existence and expressed themselves mainly in unconscious action.
Jung surmised that the unconscious impulses to ritual actions, in comparison with the teachings and theories formulated in myths or in religious systems, were practiced at an earlier date and were the precursors of the latter.
He observed, for example, that the African natives on Mount Elgon spit on their hands at sunrise and held them out to the sun without “knowing” that this action has a meaning.
“They had always done this.” Seen in the light of today’s psychological knowledge of symbols this gesture means: “Oh, God, I offer up my soul to Thee”-but, as we have just said, the deed precedes the word by a considerable period of time.
The same law prevails in respect to the “momentary flashes of consciousness.”
They, too, were originally represented in symbolic form and given a ritual application in the shape of glittering small stones or other shiny, mirrorlike objects to which were ascribed the power to drive away spirits.
The ethnologist Richard Gould reports a good example of this which he observed among the Australian aborigines.
He and his wife stayed for some time with a friendly family group of thirteen aborigines who, untouched by civilization, lived by hunting and by gathering plants and who had retained their original age-old outlook and way ofliving.
Even when the heat was extreme a fire was lighted every evening and kept burning throughout the night to keep away the mamu (the evil spirits). But so far, no mamu appeared.
One day Gould decided to go away for a couple of days with the oldest man, who was the spiritual leader of the group.
His wife remained with the others.
In the evening after this decision had been made, the children became restless and reported that they had seen two mamu skulking around in the twilight.
Two men of the group who were versed in magic took two shiny fragments of mother-of-pearl they had found in a mission station and, pronouncing exorcistic formulas and making a great show of aiming, shot them from their bows in the direction of the two mamu.
They then assured the others that the mamu had disappeared.
It is likely that some of the men who were to remain with the white woman without the authority of the presence of the old man may have had some unorthodox thoughts, especially as these aborigines are not at all prudish in their views about sex.
But evidently they did not experience these temptations as coming from within; their sudden restlessness was caused by two undefinable evil spirits.
The, glittering, reflecting pieces of mother-of-pearl acted as countermagic, as “apotropaic reflection” in the literally concrete sense.
The magicians asserted that the fragments came back to them at the right time-re-flexio !
Thus even the phenomenon of “momentary flashes of consciousness” was originally experienced as projected onto an outer object.
Whoever remembers these “momentary flashes of consciousness” from his own early childhood will know that they are always connected with strongly emotional states.
This emotion is at its peak at the moment of the ”flash” and usually subsides at the same time.
It is as if the brief light of consciousness broke up the stifling obsessive emotion.
Objects that “reflect” can therefore drive away spirits; the reflection calms the affect or the excited state.
That is why when Perseus killed Medusa, the sight of whom turned people into stone, he did not look directly at her but instead took his aim with the help of a mirror.
He could thereby protect himself from being overcome by emotion; rigidity is caused by an excess of strong emotion, as is shown in the catatonia of schizophrenics.
Perhaps it is worthwhile in this connection to take a look at the concept of reflection in physics.
All light, as we know, is produced by the motion of electrons, either spontaneously, as when an electron changes its energy level in the atom, or when it is set in motion through the impact of a photon.
In the second case reflection and transmission result.
Neither of these events can take place, however, unless the electron has a certain freedom of motion and is not too firmly held in its atom.
Normally, when light hits the electrons held at a certain energy level in a single atom, the energy of the light can be absorbed by the energy of the electron.
If, however, the atoms are held tightly together in a kind of crystalline lattice-structure, it can happen that electrons are able to move about freely inside the lattice and are no longer bound to one atom.
In this situation the electron does not absorb the light energy but radiates it back.
Viewed as a physical phenomenon, therefore, reflection depends on the presence ofcertain atomic lattice-structures.
The fact of the matter is that although the larger groupings, the atoms, are mathematically -held together more tightly and with more force than usual, certain electrons have precisely for this reason more freedom of motion.
Miraculously, as it would seem, the possibility of reflection in the unconscious area of the psyche is connected with an unknown factor that reveals itself on the threshold of consciousness, in dreams and in spontaneous fantasies, as a crystalline mathematical structure, namely, the symbol of the mandala.
That psychic center which is represented by the mandala itself and which, as we know, Jung has called the Self is, when it represents reflected wholeness, very often symbolized by mathematical structures mostly of quaternary subdivisions and is often illustrated by the symbol of the crystal.
For primordial man the phenomenon of mirrors and mirroring had the quality of a miracle; for him the mirrored image was a reality in its own right. Spiegel} the German word for “mirror,” is cognate with the Latin word speculum and goes back to Old High German scukar} “shadow-holder,” from skuwo} “shadow,” and kar} “vessel.” In Old Indian, a mirror was thought of as “self-seer” or as “seer of Doppelgangers.”
The mirrored image was regarded as shadow or as Doppelganger, that is, as an image of the soul, and the mirror therefore possessed great magical significance; it was an instrument for becoming objectively conscious of one’s soul by means of reflection, in the literal sense of the word.
Mircea Eliade has collected abundant documentation on the part played by shiny or glittering objects as protection against psychic dissolution by evil spirits.
In his book on shamanism, wherein he discusses the initiation rites of shamans and medicine men of innumerable peoples, he describes a ritual in which the novice’s entrails are symbolically extracted, cleaned, and replaced by small shiny stones and glittering chips that give him magic power over the spirits.
Crystals themselves often have the same function of subservient spirits; they mirror events on earth or reveal what is going on in the soul of a sick person.
In many places mirrors are used as a defense against the evil eye of both human beings and of spirits, because it was thought that mirrors throw the harmful “rays” back upon their source.
In Spain, in Tripoli, and generally in China, mirrors are used for this purpose.
A similar purpose is served by “fear masks,” that is, revoltingly evil-looking distorted faces that show the demon his own image, from which he flees in terror.
Reflecting objects have thus had, from time immemorial, a numinous significance for human beings.
The oldest experience of a reflecting object may well have been that of the surface of water. In what follows I am relying principally on the excellent book by Martin Ninck, Die Bedeutung des Wassers im Kult und Leben der Alten.
Ninck shows that in the world of antiquity water was always thought of as chthonic, as having sprung from the earth, and that it was always associated with what he calls the “night conditions” or “night-states” of the soul: intoxication, dream, trance, unconsciousness, and death.
These states were all connected with the mystery of watery depths.
Psychologically, water is one of the most frequent symbols of the unconscious, and hence the depths of the water were thought of in many places as the source of all prophecy and of use in seeing phenomena from the “Beyond.”
The great gods with knowledge of the future-Nereus, Proteus, Thetis, and, in the Germanic tradition, Mimir-are all water divinities. In the water one can see one’s own shadow, one’s Doppelganger, one’s soul-image, separate and objective, and also the disembodied outlines of the dead and of gods.
The custom of obtaining secret information by staring into avessel of water, the so-called hydromantia, is therefore practiced throughout the world.
In the Middle Ages, in our own cultural tradition, burning candles were placed around a circular vessel filled with water and the demon was evoked; the spirit answered with images on the water’s surface (imagines aquae
impressae).
In ancient Patras (Greece) a form of magic was practiced that combined both mirror and reflecting water.
A mirror attached to a thread was lowered into a well to the water’s surface and its reflection indicated whether a sick person would recover or die; in Lycian K yenai, on the other hand, the same thing was seen directly in the reflecting surface of the water of the well.
In European folk magic the use of an “earth-mirror” was widespread.
A box was filled with earth, a glass disc was laid on it, and this disc reflected what was sought. In some places the magic power was imparted to the mirror by leaving the disc for three days and three nights on the face of the buried corpse of a woman who had died in childbirth.
The association of earth and death with the prophetic powers of water and mirror is especially important in this connection.
In Virgil, Aeneas receives the final prophecies just as he is about to descend through the lake of Avernus into the kingdom of the dead.
Closely related to the water-mirror is the dream oracle, which is also often sent by water divinities.
The unceasing transformation of the dream images is like a subterranean current, whose gods can likewise change without cease.
The symbolization of the unconscious by water with its mirrorlike surface is of course based in the final analysis on a projection.
Nevertheless, the analogies are astonishingly meaningful.
Just as we cannot “see” into the depths of the waters, so the deeper areas of the unconscious are also invisible to us; we can draw only indirect conclusions about them.
But on the surface, on the threshold area between consciousness and the unconscious, dream images appear spontaneously, not only seeming to give us information about the depths but also mirroring our conscious personality, although not in identical form, but rather in a more or less altered form.
The mirroring is always by way of the symbolic image that has a place in both worlds.
Even though during a dream we feel just as identical with the dream-ego as we do with our daytime ego, our dream-ego nevertheless has some features that astonish us when we are awake.
We may, for example, perform bold deeds in a dream that we would never dare to undertake during the daytime, or our dream-ego may exhibit other qualities and attributes we have never seen in ourselves.
In contrast to a physically normal mirror-image in an undisturbed and undistorted surface, the ego mirrored in dreams is sometimes greatly altered,
as is indeed the case with all other dream images.
Our dog can talk in dreams, objects blend into hermaphroditic forms, people who resemble overlapping photographs of two acquaintances appear, and so on.
But as soon as we begin to interpret the dream according to the rules of the art, an idea of what we are like begins to emerge from the symbolic dream images and it will astonish us again and again with its relentless objectivity. In his essay ”
A Psychological View of Conscience,” Jung reports the dream of a businessman who on the previous day had been offered what appeared to be a perfectly honorable project, which he was inclined to undertake.
During the night he had a dream in which he saw his hands and forearms covered with black dirt.
The dream was advising him not to become involved in the matter, and in fact it turned out somewhat later to be “dirty business.” ~Marie-Louise von Franz, Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology Reflections of the Soul, Page 179-185
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