Toni Wolff: ” To deal with the collective unconscious demands a solid ego consciousness and an adequate adaptation to reality.”
“The lucidity of consciousness rests upon dark unconscious seeds out of which grow objective cultural values. It is this unconscious background that is perceived by medial woman’s structural form….
‘Medium’ means in between, neither this nor that, something intermediate….
The medial woman is immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the spirit of her period, but above all in the collective (impersonal) unconscious. The unconscious, once it is constellated and can become conscious, exerts an effect. The medial woman is overcome by this effect, she is absorbed and moulded by it and sometimes she represents it herself. She must for instance express or act what is “in the air,” what the environment cannot or will not admit, but what is nevertheless a part of it. It is mostly the dark aspect of a situation or of a predominant idea, and she thus activates what is negative and dangerous. In this way she becomes the carrier of evil, but that she does, is nevertheless exclusively her personal problem. As the contents involved are unconscious, she lacks the necessary faculty of discrimination to perceive and the language to express them adequately. The overwhelming force of the collective unconscious sweeps through the ego of the medial woman and weakens it.
By its nature the collective unconscious is not limited to the person concerned further reason why the medial woman identifies herself and others with archetypal contents. But to deal with the collective unconscious demands a solid ego consciousness and an adequate adaptation to reality. As a rule the medial woman disposes of neither and consequently she will create confusion in the same measure as she herself is confused. Conscious and unconscious, I and you, personal and impersonal psychic contents remain undifferentiated. As objective psychic contents in herself and in others are not understood, or are taken personally, she experiences a destiny not her own as though it were her own and loses herself in ideas which do not belong to her. Instead of being a mediatrix, she is only a means and becomes the first victim of her own nature.”
Toni Wolff
Four Eternal Women: Toni Wolff Revisited – A Study in Opposites
Mary Dian Molton
Hello dToni,
You have very acurately described the drama that my companion of twenty years and I have lived. You are most right when you say that “to deal with the collective unconscious demands a solid ego consciousness and an adequate adaptation to reality. As a rule the medial woman disposes of neither and consequently she will create confusion in the same measure as she herself is confused”.
I is the hardest thing for me as her husband and her love to see her go through those moments when, as a mediatrix with hypersensitivity, she is prey to or experiences contents of the collective, or actual psychic projections from the consciousnesses of unbalanced others, as though she is affected/infected by an ‘alien’ presence.
I used to see those moments as indicators of her paranoia or schizoid tendencies, but now I wonder if there is not truth to the notion of malevolent occult phenomena.
I wish I knew what to do to help. We are both Christians, I new to the understanding Christ as the Archetype of Self Within ( a real presence therefore), she a devout fathfull follower and believer.
I left her at hometoday after she had recuperated from a night of wakefulness dealing with two women she was seing, that I could not.
I must say that as a christian, she is trying hard to distance herself from her roots, trying to divinize what she believes are the malevolent family sprits from her background, and/or the use of same by neighbors who sense her mediatrix gifts and would like to ‘have her soul’ for their nefarious purposes.
You can see how our experience grounds all the abstract from CGJung’s theories into a very concrete, meaningful, dangerous, dramatic ‘individuation/salvation’ process.
Thank you again