My mother is a ghost now. She died the last day of 2016. She was the person nearest and dearest to me for much of my life, yet it seemed we never quite understood and accepted each other unconditionally. She haunts me as an unfulfilled spirit when I have anxious thoughts, or fearful premonitions, or self-admonition, but also in old sayings, endearing quirks, and the names of flowers and trees. And she inhabits my dreams, mostly as an unhappy child.
Fe
“Everything has a purpose, clocks tell you the time, trains take you to places. Machines never come with any extra parts, you know. They always come with the exact amount they need. So I figured if the entire world was one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I had to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too. ”
I realized that, as symbolized by the water, there are life energies or archetypes which serve the universal purpose of potentially keeping us alive and on our path in service to the Self. These energies reside both within and without and are generally unconscious until we work to bring them to consciousness. …This is true even when we fall!
In a dream she showed up as twins. One who was quiet and could play by herself (like her father, Ti) and the other who was very precocious as she hung upside down from a tree (like her mother, Te), reflecting the inherent nature of the Opposing Personality. From the outset of our work her battle seemed to reflect inferiority about not being an extravert.
The portrait of Bob Dylan in the film “I’m not there” demonstrates how a lack of father-specific structure is compensated by a powerful and extraordinarily creative but volatile and defenseless Puer structure; and the movie further illustrates the tendency of the Shadow complexes to rise to repair such psychic vulnerabilities and restore equilibrium.
“What do you want?” asked one of the boys, his crossed arms over his chest authoritatively. “I want a drink of water,” I told him, but as I made a move to go around him, he stepped in front of me again. Before I could say anything or react in any way, he told me, “You can’t drink here. This fountain is for people. No monkeys allowed.”
Fight Club’s accomplishment is to elicit in us the instinctive fear, resistance, and embarrassment we all experience around the domain of our inferior function, whichever function that may be for us. The reward for sticking with the movie until the end is a catharsis that feels as if we have integrated our own inferior function.
… A wise employee will come to understand the culture of the company … and recognize that the team has long since developed a certain way of taking care of others. The team uses its auxiliary function, not yours, or the one your tertiary Child expects it to use. You cannot expect an organization to take care of you in the way that you want …
I think many of us would be quick to put our inferior and embarrassing Anima on the pyre, and happily satiate our Heroes. But the Hero needs to sacrifice its preeminence and allow the Anima to experiment and thrive if we are to find ourselves truly committed to what we do, not to mention fulfilled by it.
You can assert yourself … with an introverted function. You can take care of others … with an introverted function. You’re just not likely to do both these things with an introverted function, any more than one would do both with an extraverted function; our alternation of attitudes between the dominant and auxiliary takes care of that.