01-20-2015, 08:29 AM
(01-20-2015, 04:50 AM)Utnapishtim Wrote: I was getting at Jungian archetypes. He posited [I'm oversimplifying] that certain universal symbols or emblems get reproduced across cultures throughout history. Our mythologies are rife with them: the Mother, the Warrior, the Great Flood, the Resurrection [from Osiris to Christ, for example] etc. etc. and that they provide us with mediums for coming to grips with individual and mass consciousness. He was a student of Freud, and also was highly interested in dreams. Mental illness is very fascinating. I learned from gerontology that the whole process of dementia occurs in this crappy paraphrase: the higher psychosocial functions start peeling away first; that is, the things we develop later in life such as higher order reasoning and whatever [again crappy paraphrase lol]...and all of the stuff we developed EARLY on are like the inner layers of the onion. Our brains "peel" from outside in...that's why there's so much fear and confusion - those things don't go away. We are left something akin to insecure teenagers...and fascinated children.I vaguely remember the archetypes and the bit about the universal consciousness and I know, as you seemed to state, that they use him to study mythology and what-not as well.
Dementia is very sad. I could see a poem about that being called "The Onion" or "A Peeling" or something like that. Though, you'd have to be careful with a subject like that.