Imago animi sermo est. ~ Seneca.
Speech is the mirror of the mind, says Seneca, and I feel as if this quote is mine, and at the same time as if it is not. What kind of mirror am I supposed to be, and what does it mean to mirror back the myriad words and things that have surrounded me, as a product of human culture, on every side.
Recently, I have been learning the pain of not feeling real, as well as the pain of hearing that I have made another to feel a pain that is similar to this pain that I have. The pain of not being seen, not being heard. That is not cool. That is not the person that I want to be, and what this series Imago Animae, will explore and attempt to name are some of those experiences. Hiddeness, estrangement, and alienation.
The words of Leonard Cohen resonate within me at a deeper level. “Every soul is like a minnow, every mind is like a shark… I know, but very little, what happens to the heart.” It is enough to make a person want to weep.
Instead of tears, what I put forth are words, words that are in one sense simply screamed out into a void. Yes, the world can see these words, but what can they know of the pain that crafts them. If speech is the mirror of the mind, if the psyche can indeed convey something of that interior world, it often seems to be through a glass darkly, as St. Paul put it. This mirror of the mind is not a mirror that always offers perfect clarity.
Nevertheless, one strives to be known, and also to know. To be an instrument of peace in a world where warfare, not only in the public sense of bombs being dropped, but in the private sense of interior struggle has become the default. A world of hungry sharks, definitely, but a world in which minnows still exist.
Carl Jung defined the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man, the mirror of the animus in a woman. The term imago he used to define an unconscious or distorted mental image of a significant person. The term imago animae, then, suggests a distorted or idealized feminine failure in the eyes of a man. A failure to integrate the unconscious feminine side properly, resulting in damaging and unrealistic projections. Jacques Lacan, building on the language of the imago, offers it up as an unconscious, idealized, and formative image that plays a key role in the mirror stage of psychological development. For Lacan this imago is inherently alienating, since the child’s original experience is polymorphous. The coherent reality mirrored back to the child in this stage is external, objectified, and therefore, in a certain sense, false. False, or, at the very least, imaginary.
The ego, at this point, is viewed as an object, and so the self-experience that one achieves is that of regarding the self as an object, rather than an authentic subjective awareness. We are here working in a domain of illusions, of projections, of misperceptions.
The task is to become free of this world of illusion, and to integrate the self more fully. So, the question here is whether this fragile ego thing is a vehicle capable of expansion, or whether it has to be totally destroyed. This will likely form one of the central questions of this Imago Animae series. As I put into writing, or into speech, these mental impressions of what I have hitherto considered to be my “self” have any real consistency, or are they just fleeting impressions? Is consistency at variance with a full experience of the “self”?
How does one escape the hall of mirrors, and come to a place of authentic encounters and real conversations? It seems, too, that a lot of contemporary fears around artificial intelligence, or the brain rot experience of social media overuse might come into play. As a society, have we really ended up creating systems of communication which simply take us further and further away from lived experience in a meaningful fashion, and trap us in prisons of the mind? Can there be authentic encounters, meetings of the mind, that take place solely in the virtual realm? What is the reality of those encounters, heavily mediated, as they are, by rapacious and predatory conglomerates; those shark-like minds which prey upon the fragile souls?
This series will include reviews of various authors and thinkers in the veins of psychology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, but more than that it is intended to be a personal exploration, working through some of the questions about being, reality, and alienation that I have.
Stick around, if you like, and see what I have to say. A mind, most likely, that is madly off in all directions, but maybe there is some core of wisdom, something that you can take away from my meanderings and that will help guide your own journey.
Maybe not.
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