I had a client who had spent several years in Jungian analysis before seeing me. He used to dream of bears a lot, grizzly bears. I asked what he had gotten out of the analysis. He said, “I really learned that I had a very strong negative mother complex — my mother was never there for me at all. What I learned was that I had to take of myself, be a mother to myself. I started cooking, I started taking care of myself; I finally understood that Mama wouldn’t ever be there.”
One of the things dreams can be about is self-representations that are not fully integrated into the personality — in the situation mentioned above, the client had a “mother complex” that was devouring him. When he came to better terms with it, the dreams lessened and the bears went away.
The last two posts have been about Sarah Palin, as part of an attempt to understand what the fascination with her is for so many people and what the archetypal pull is.
In Sarah Palin, “Mama Grizzlies,” Carl Jung, and the Power of Archetypes, Adrianna Huffington writes:
To really understand her appeal, we need less policy analysis and more psychology. Specifically, we need to hear from that under-appreciated political pundit Carl Jung.
It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to — it’s her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are “inborn forms… of perception and apprehension,” the “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.”
This is the realm Palin is working in — I’m sure unintentionally — and it’s why she has connected so deeply with a large segment of the public. In fact, her evocation of mama grizzlies has a particularly resonant history in the collective unconscious. According to the Jungian Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism, “The bear has long fascinated mankind, partly because of its habit of hibernation, which may have served as a model of death and rebirth in human societies.”
Among other things, I would argue that it is not so much that Sarah Palin represents a Mama Grizzly, but more that she is missing important aspects of the Mama Grizzly, and that is why so is so drawn to them. Has anyone really looked closely at Sarah Palin’s mothering style? She certainly didn’t “take care” of Alaska when she was governor, and quit early.
Next post, more or less: The Shadow, Politics and the American Psyche
