Psyche and Interiority

There is a reason that those people whom they call intuitive introverts have historically been the ones who had a natural intimacy with intra-psychic phenomena and who have been the most apt at understanding imagery arising from the unconscious - notably the primary types of psychological fiction that are termed religious and mythological. Since it is the instinctive nature of the unconscious to reflect the innate properties of an object inside out – to image and project these characteristics – one would think that those whose primary disposition of perception is by way of intuition and introversion are naturally closer to this source and can consequently see and feel the primal movements of the psyche a lot more readily and clearly. It is a very curious thing I have observed, and I am not sure how to really explain it, yet I feel that some people are in their very nature a lot more like the unconscious, for the very reason that the psyche penetrates their physical structure so much more than other individuals. If you looked at such a person overall, the relative concentration of psyche vis-a-vis matter seems greater, leading effectively to a greater likeness of the human’s sense of being with the character of psyche than with the properties of the material world. What Jung called intuitive introversion is, in my experience, less a matter of energy flow or preferred style of making sense of the world as it is essentially a fundamental likeness with the nature of the unconscious itself. It is for this reason that individuals of this type of experience people and the objective world as far more immaterial - in every sense of the word. I have found this to be extremely important, because of theunderstanding that your own nature effectively mirrors that of the unconscious takes the focus away from you – it depersonalises your experiences and thereby creates a tremendous sense of freedom and openness in your attitudes. Intuitive introverts are often accused of being self-centred and trapped in their own interiority, however I have found the exact opposite to be true: the conscious realisation that your own imagination and the awareness arising from it is merely an image, a projection and an extension of that of the human psyche overall makes you far less concerned with who you are and whether you are of importance. I always knew this to be true in my heart, and I intuitively lived by this insight for most of my life, however it crept up on me, rather unexpectedly, when I started to see that the unconscious was creating some sort of story around my character: the psyche not only introduced me to a divine father image, but it also started to illustrate the story of the paradisical snake from her own, a completely different, angle than we know it from the Genesis. I grew very close to the parental images of the patriarch and the serpent, which the psyche also personified as an imaginal mother figure (as well as other shapes and senses) to me. It was from that point onwards, that I knew I was not only a “psychological type”, but that my experience was effectively a piece of fiction, an imaginal fantasy, representing a spec of psyche’s contemporary material reflections. Even though I am by nature perpetually drawn into my inner life and compelled to focus on the experiences there, I do not take any of it literally or personally, because of this understanding. It is precisely not “me” who I witness in the story that plays out in my inner life; it is psyche’s very own imaginal echo, its particular vision of my interior design. I nevertheless love observing and never cease to be amazed how psyche works, how it envisions me, and I gladly oblige to play a part in its unconscious fiction. It has served me extremely well to take the unconscious and its way of working seriously, all the while being delightfully aware that I merely exist as one of its own images.