Marion Woodman If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life.
If we are blindly living out an archetype, we are not containing our own life.
We are possessed, and possession acts as a magnet on unconscious people in our environment. Everyday life becomes a dangerous world where illusion and reality can be fatally confused.
A life that is being truly lived is constantly burning away the veils of illusion, gradually revealing the essence of the individual. Psychoanalysis can speed up that process.
Sometimes people experience themselves as caterpillars crawling along. Externally, everything seems fine.
Some deep intuitive voice, however, may be whispering, “It’s not worth it.
There’s nobody here. I need a cocoon. I need to go back and find myself.”
Now, they may not quite realize that when caterpillars go into cocoons, they do not emerge as highclass caterpillars, and they may not be prepared for the agony of the transformation that goes on inside the chrysalis.
Nor are they quite prepared for the winged beauty that slowly and painfully emerges, that lives by a very different set of laws than a caterpillar.
Even more confounding is the fact that friends and relations who may be quite happy caterpillars have no patience with a silent, hardedged chrysalis that is all turned in on itself—”selfish, lazy, selfindulgent.”
And they have even less patience with a confused butterfly who hasn’t adjusted to the laws of aerodynamics.
Still, it is amazing how often other caterpillars, inspired by butterflies, sacrifice their landlubber condition, make their own chrysalis and find their own wings.
Jung writes that coming to consciousness is “the sacrifice of the merely natural man, of the unconscious, ingenuous being whose tragic career began with the eating of the apple in Paradise.”
The chrysalis is essential if we are to find ourselves.
Yet very little in our extroverted society supports introverted withdrawal.
We are supposed to be doers, taking care of others, supporting good causes, unselfish, energetic, doing our social duty.
If we choose to simply be, our loved ones may automatically assume we are doing
nothing, and at first we may feel that way ourselves.
We begin to look at our primeval muck as it surfaces in dreams.
All hell starts to break loose inside, and we wonder what’s the point of dredging up all this stuff.
We argue with ourselves: “I should be out there doing something useful.
But the truth is I can’t do anything useful if there’s no I to do it.
I can’t love anyone else, if there’s no I to do the loving.
If I don’t know myself, I cannot love myself, and if I do not love myself, my love of others is probably my projected need of their acceptance.
I am putting on a performance in order to be loved. I fear rejection. If nobody loves me, I won’t exist. But who are they loving? Who am I?” ― Marion Woodman, The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation, Page 20-23
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