Microsoft Word - ELTLS-V4N2-p46 English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies ISSN 2640-9836 (Print) ISSN 2640-9844 (Online) Vol. 4, No. 2, 2022 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls 46 Original Paper Carl Jung and Education Rich Murphy1* 1 32 Pinecliff Drive, Marblehead, MA 01945, 781-789-7093 I watched a movie from 1982 the other night. It recalled for me the Jungian symbol or archetype schema that many directors used at the time and perhaps some continue to. Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Wells, and many others used the scheme or fell into it: Persona, shadow, anima, etc. The objective was for the persona to break clear of mother, avoid the shadow character, and mate with the appropriate anima. The shadow is the alternative to the persona who is linked to death, The Terrible Mother. There were three main animas: The blonde or naïve anima, the brunette or the experienced anima, and the redhead or the evil anima. One can see how “Citizen Kane’s” persona confuses the animas, choosing incorrectly each time, and one can watch “The Witches of Eastwick” for the lampooning of the anima archetypes. Marilyn Monroe often played the naive anima, always escaping from the trouble all around her. Feminists were certainly critical of the anima as a symbol of passivity. The two villains in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” (1959) for example make up the shadow character, Phillip Vandammand Lenard, for the persona Roger Thornhill (or Kaplan) who is having an identity crisis.Even the name “Vandamm” with the pun “damn” hidden in it, tells us that he is the shadow. The innuendos in the script of the two villains, Lenard and Vandamm, suggest that they are more than workers or team members, and their misunderstanding Thornhill for Kaplan almost kills Thornhill that acts as a kind of guardrail that brings Thornhill back to more innocent that she first appears Eve Kendall. We can see the shadow at work in other Hitchcock films including “Rear Window,” where L. B Jefferies is a voyeur and Larsisthe shadow, the “other,” who murders his wife. When I first started teaching, I used the schema often when teaching films to students as part of the introduction to literature course. If it is still used in films, it must be twisted so that I haven’t recognized it. Certainly, by the 1990s it was almost unrecognizable. Luck had it that I watched two movies from the era of my early teaching days though I hadn’t seen. Then, I compared “Still of the Night” 1982 and “China Moon” 1994, a twelve-year difference in production. The shift isn’t so damning of gender roles if at all though one that twists in a gradual pulling away from the schema via the shadow or “other” and the anima. The mass culture mindset may not notice the shift, but a shift is there none-the-less. The night sky in the title or implied of both movies tells us that the unconscious is at play in the storyline and characters. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 4, No. 2, 2022 47 Published by SCHOLINK INC. In 1982’s “Still of Night,” we watch a punctual psychiatrist who became one just as his mother did. He followed the advice of his mother as he did as a little boy. With his mother in his daily life, he has trouble with relationships with women. (No woman is good enough.) His male patient (his shadow) and philanderer is murdered, and he decides to investigate for himself having recently met his anima (a blonde) who is linked to the murdered shadow via an affair. It takes a psychiatrist to unravel his own troubles in his own life also. He is suspicious of his most recent love interest, the blonde, who may be the murderer. It turns out that another woman known to him via his patient, Gail, a red head (a Jungian schema cliché), murdered his shadow after a breakup and nearly murders the psychiatrist, Sam, and Brooke, the blonde. We also learn in a soliloquy while standing alone in the dark that the blonde mistakenly aligned herself with her father the way that the psychiatrist aligned himself with his mother. By the movie’s end, Gail appears as Brooke’s shadow. With the death of the red head, Samcan put distance between his mother and himself enough to love the blonde. (Note: Gail falls from a balcony when after encouraging Brook to jump, attempts to push Brooke off.)The Jungian schema is intact. In China Moon the persona, an honest cop named Kyle ignores his shadow as inferior, a trainee when the shadow is very intelligent in his manipulation of the persona and the events that kill the two of them. Lamar, the younger cop is also a romantic rival. Though the shadow leading the persona to his death seems a closing of the Jungian schema loop, the anima (Rachel) is left wealthy but without her abusive husband, her lover, and the man she hired (and then called off) to kill her husband. (She ends up killing her husband and later Lamar.)She seems a shadow at this point, having sought a gun for hire (the honest cop’s understudy) in a bar at night where she meets the honest cop and falls in love. I hadn’t thought about the Jungian schema in movies in decades. So, I was surprised by the old movies and their underpinnings, but it brought a smile to my face. The heavy-handed treatment of the Jungian schema in the first movie is subtler, weaker in the second. To be sure I had enough information to make the judgement I am making in this paper, I watched one more from the era, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The movie The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1988 flips the North by Northwest use of the schema. North by Northwest uses the Jungian model as its focus and the international relations as a side dish if you will. In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the model is the side dish of Tereza and Tomas, and the international relations is the focus. If the model is the side dish of the movie, Tereza and Tomas are in the traditional heavy world where Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence theory holds. However, the Soviet Union may be a shadow of America where Sabrina ends up. However, America is represented as the place of light so “being” would be what casts a (Sabrina’s) shadow that defies any future recurrence. All is happenstance and chance. Regardless, we can stretch the schema, but at some point, it snaps. It is broken in this film. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 4, No. 2, 2022 48 Published by SCHOLINK INC. I told students at the time, the late 1980s, that these symbols would change as time went on, a kind of shifting baseline. I pointed out that as the anima became active, it becomes animus and as a competitor to the persona. I also pointed out that the shadow often suggested homosexuality as in some Hitchcock movies. However, as homosexuality became more accepted in our culture, that easy out for the director was not going to be possible. So, either the schema was going to go through major changes or be disregarded altogether or left behind all together. (I think it has been disregarded along the way through the decades.) I haven’t thought about the schema in movies in quite a while, and so may have missed the subtle changes. During this writing, I find it fascinating to add that Jung got the symbols from folktales and mythology. And that may be where the weakness was. Traditional cultures have been all about producing the next generation to keep the culture going, so the shadow was the Freudian death drive that engaged the Terrible Mother, death. To avoid the Terrible Mother the persona needed to listen to the Wise Old Man, choose the right anima for himself, and avoid the shadow. Today, there is much tension between the urban dweller and the rural people, or the professional class and the working class. The changes that have happened in the schema have a lot in common with the tensions the west is having today. If we think of what James Gee calls primary discourse as the language, beliefs, behavior, and biases of family, friends, and neighbors, a recycling of that discourse goes on to each generation. It is a part of what is called traditional culture or tribal culture where humans leaned on each other with trust or were designated a scapegoat. (We can see this in a most clearly in older, less developed cultures) The Enlightenment, through its emphasis on reason, ushered in through education, secondary discourse (again, as Gee suggests), the languages of liberal arts and of specializations. For the traditional cultures, those changes affected their status and discourses, first experienced by Europeans but then the whole western world. Those who don’t join in are what is designated “the left behind.”Many of these people struggle to make a living, some are homeless, and some give up to opioids alcohol, or suicide. As young people go off to college, meet new people, and learn new ways of thinking and perhaps do all this in a different country, the students take on a secondary discourse usually in a field of study for the most part. However, by meeting other students in other fields, the secondary discourse “frees” the group from their primary discourses though it may imprison them in the secondary discourse. A graduate either learns to use meta-discourse effectively or is unable to communicate across disciplines or to primary discourse users. The graduates engaged in their fields and professions see back home as a little backward. Those with a secondary discourse may not know that they show distain, but the folks back home know that they are being looked down on and become resentful. The professionals are so engaged in getting ahead that they can’t see the slights, the lack of sincere respect, and the bubble they live in. Those who didn’t go to college also see empathy as pity and that triggers anger. www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 4, No. 2, 2022 49 Published by SCHOLINK INC. To go a little deeper, the working class has not been incentivized and so is forgotten, while the college educated for the most part has been incentivized to go to college to make a living while in debt (unless their parents have paid for the school loan). Incentive is manipulation from outside, and one is punished for not acting upon the manipulation. Because incentive seems to be the only motivation, many graduates have allowed themselves to be used and perform their jobs half-heartedly, a patch to obtain a lifestyle merely. The work does not come from their identity, their ongoing practice. Science and finance fields reward greatest, so many students seek these degrees. To find the driven college educated worker, companies often look to recent immigrants who haven’t been caught in the net of manipulation. For this reason, the United States is failing itself by not investing in the younger generations who were born here and will suffer in the future for the lack of care. Perhaps a better approach to education might have been to recognize the individuality of each young person and trust in the wound that nature provides each sometimes called the primal wound (Slavoj Zizek’s Hegelian wound)and allow, encourage, educate the student to compensate and overcompensate and grow from there as they will in the various fields of study. Philosophers and good thinkers such as Zizek, Peter Sloterdijk, David Deida (Buddhist), Robert Greene (motivational writer) have been endorsing this line of thinking pulled from the Perceval Mythology, what gives the wound cures it. The individual drive brings purpose, identity, commitment, and self-discipline to the Homo sapiens species. The method would leave fewer behind and provides an honest dedication to the country and the individual citizen without manipulation or extraction via student debt. An additional benefit would be that the method comes from the mythology of traditional cultures, thus practicing what is learned in early education or from story books at bedtime. Jung would approve, I am certain. In fact, the professional class, those who own a secondary discourse (the enlightened and modern) have biases, superstitions, and are more isolated from each other than they wish to admit. Jung might argue that these people’s moral and spiritual world have been decimated, leaving them empty and disoriented, leaving them searching for meaning to their lives. And while many live in the city they often live lonely lives with no spiritual connection to purpose. Anthropologists have seen, how when tribes or cultures are dominated from the outside, they lose their way and stop reproducing or lie down and die starving themselves as the left behind. Such thinking would suggest that the rural American may follow the tribal cultures (and why today orthodox religious groups push back aggressively). However, while the enlightened have sought to engage the outer world to make it more comfortable, the inner world of this group has lost its moorings. The loss may not be individual only but as pathological to that enlightened culture or tribe. Having dominated the outer world from “self” outward, many professionals having lost contact with their inner worlds, have been found to suffer from many mental illnesses. The findings may be a sign that the enlightened are turning to the inner world that has become unmoored from long hardwired needs, beliefs, and expectations. What will the educated and enlightened find, and if helpful, will it be www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/eltls English Language Teaching and Linguistics Studies Vol. 4, No. 2, 2022 50 Published by SCHOLINK INC. found in time? Giving up from a lack of inner purpose may be the destiny of the educated man and woman. It would probably happen through domination to the rural working class first, but it could happen to the empty vessels who work on objective life and leave the interior life to question without an answer. Primary and secondary discourses have may have a lot to do with the Jungian schema and its possible demise in film. However, it seems science fiction is attempting to create myths and folktales about science, much the chagrin of positivists. Film is a popular medium that looks to make money via ticket sales. Popularity is its funding source. There are more people in the city than in the country. Most directors want to reflect the contemporary urban culture.Thus, in cities as in movies women are active in careers, gay people are not less than straight people, and the wise old man isn’t needed with the young inventing, innovating, and providing solutions to problems never solved before. The only symbol that seems to hold (but how long) is the mother: Mother (Good Mother) of birth, for now, and the Terrible Mother of earth (and the death drive) that embraces each of us as carcass or ashes. With the disappearance of the binary emphasis and the opening for “nonbinary” codes of behavior the explosion of young people in American exploring the nonbinary has had an enormous effect on the college campuses. Nonbinary is the open of the unknown where the binary as a tool of order also acts as guardrails for young people in the process of becoming. It is one thing to recognize the terror of the unknown nonbinary but another to embrace it. The embrace gives capitalism and science the nod to engineer the genome, permission that should be rescinded to save the Homo sapiens from extinction. References Deida, D. (2017). The Way of the Superior Man: A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire (20th Anniversary Edition). Paperback – Sounds True; Reprint edition (February 1, 2017). Gee, J. P. (1989). Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction. Journal of Education, 171(1). Print. Greene, R. (2013). Mastery Penguin Books; Reprint edition (October 29, 2013). Jung, C. (1968). Man and His Symbols. Mass Market Paperback – Illustrated, September 1, 1968 Sloterdijk, P. (2014). You Must Change Your Life Polity (1st edition) (July 14, 2014) Zizek, S. (2011). The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? Verso; First Edition (October 1, 2001).