Psychology 230S: Personality and its Transformations

1. Psychology 230S: Personality and its Transformations Jordan B. Peterson

2. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations

3. Graham’s dream: • Graham’s dream • entering kindergarten, at five: • descent into the belly of the beast • He told me, in the presence of his family, that dwarf-like beaked creatures who came up to his knees had been jumping up at him and biting him. • Each creature was covered with hair and grease, and had a cross shaved in the hair on the top of its head. • The dream also featured a dragon, who breathed fire. After the dragon exhaled, the fire turned into these dwarves, who multiplied endlessly, with each breath.

4. I asked him, “what could you do about this dragon?” • He said, without hesitation, and with considerable excitement: • I would take my dad, and we would go after the dragon. • I would jump on its head, and poke out its eyes with my sword. • Then I would go down its throat, to where the fire came out. • I would cut out the box the fire came from, and make a shield from it.”

6. Mikhaila’s idea: • Spontaneous fantasy manifested August 10, 1997, by my daughter, Mikhaila (aged five years, eight months) while playing “prince and princess” with Julian (her three-year old brother): • Dad, if we killed a dragon, we could use his skin as armor, couldn’t we? • Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

8. An evolutionary arms race between early snakes and mammals triggered the development of improved vision and large brains in primates, a radical new theory suggests. • The idea, proposed by Lynne Isbell, an anthropologist at the University of California, Davis, suggests that snakes and primates share a long and intimate history, one that forced both groups to evolve new strategies as each attempted to gain the upper hand.

9. To avoid becoming snake food, early mammals had to develop ways to detect and avoid the reptiles before they could strike. Some animals evolved better snake sniffers, while others developed immunities to serpent venom when it evolved. • Early primates developed a better eye for color, detail and movement and the ability to see in three dimensions—traits that are important for detecting threats at close range. • Humans are descended from these same primates.

10. Meaning… (but much more than this (polysemy)) • Emblematical of Reason overcoming the lower Emotion nature: or of Mind controlling Desire. The horse and rider signify intelligence under the direction of the will: and the dragon is the lower nature which wars against the soul - the selfish nature which devours the innocent and obstructs liberty and justice …. • Gaskell, G.A. (1960). Dictionary of All Scriptures and Myths. New York: Julian.

11. Initiation: Archaic Conceptions • The shamanic initiation • Three routes to Shamanism • Spontaneous vocation • Hereditary transmission • Personal quest

12. “But, by whatever method he may have been designated, a shaman is recognized as such only after having received two methods of instruction. • The first is ecstatic (e.g., dreams, trances, visions); the second is traditional (e.g., shamanic techniques, names and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret language. • This twofold teaching, imparted by the spirits and the old master shamans, constitutes initiation.” • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

13. “In Siberia, the youth who is called to be a shaman attracts attention by his strange behavior; for example, he seeks solitude, becomes absent-minded, loves to roam in the woods or unfrequented places, has visions, and sings in his sleep. • In some instances this period of incubation is marked by quite serious symptoms: among the Yakut, the young man sometimes has fits of fury and easily loses consciousness, hides in the forest, feeds on the bark of trees, throws himself into water and fire, cuts himself with knives.

14. The future shamans among the Tungus, as they approach maturity, go through a hysterical or hysteroid crisis, but sometimes their vocation manifests itself at an earlier age -- the boy runs away into the mountains and remains there for a week or more, feeding on animals, which he tears to pieces with his teeth. • He returns to the village, filthy, bloodstained, and it is only after ten or more days have passed that he begins to babble incoherent words.” • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

16. “The strange behavior of future shamans has not failed to attract the attention of scholars, and from the middle of the past century several attempts have been made to explain the phenomenon of shamanism as a mental disorder. • But the problem was wrongly put. For on the one hand, it is not true that shamans always are or always have to be neuropathics;

17. on the other hand, those among them who had been ill become shamans precisely because they had succeeded in becoming cured. • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

18. I should like even now to stress the fact that the psychopathology of the shamanic vocation is not profane; it does not belong to ordinary symptomatology. • It has an initiatory structure and signification; in short, it reproduces a traditional mystical pattern. • The total crisis of the future shaman, sometimes leading to complete disintegration of the personality and to madness, can be valuated not only as an initiatory death but also as a symbolic return to the precosmogonic chaos, to the amorphous and indescribable state that precedes any cosmogony.” • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

19. What is the “precosmogonic chaos?” • LATENT INFORMATION: Explicit philosophy • “Pure experience” is the name which I give to the original flux of life before reflection has categorized it. • Only new-born babes, and persons in semicoma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows can have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats; • full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don’t appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate, and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. • William James (1905). Journal of Philosophy, January 19, p. 29

20. LATENT INFORMATION: Imagistic or dramatic representation • “No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is other, • Incoherent, coherent – same. • And it fades! And it’s infinite! AND it’s infinite!… • Don’t you see the difference, don’t you see the identity? • Constantly opposites united! • The same me telling you to write and not to write! • Extreme – extreme, extreme!… • Something, and other than that thing! • Intoxication, and otherness than intoxication. • Every attempt at betterment, – every attempt at otherment • – is a – • It fades forever and forever as we move.” • William James, in the throes of nitrous oxide intoxication. Quoted by Tymoczko, D. (1996). The nitrous oxide philosopher. Atlantic Monthly, May, 93-101, p. 100.

21. Now, as we know, for archaic and traditional cultures, a symbolic return to Chaos is equivalent to preparing a new Creation. • It follows that we may interpret the psychic chaos of the future shaman as a sign that the profane man is being dissolved and a new personality being prepared for birth. • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

22. According to a Yakut informant, the spirits carry the future shaman to Hell and shut him in a house for three years. • Here he undergoes his initiation; the spirits cut off his head (which they set off to one side, for the novice much watch his own dismemberment with his own eyes) and hack his body to bits, which are later distributed among the spirits of various sicknesses. • It is only on this condition that the future shaman will obtain the power of healing. • His bones are then covered with new flesh, and in some cases he is also given new blood. • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

23. One of the specific characteristics of shamanic initiations, aside from the candidate’s dismemberment, is his reduction to the state of a skeleton. • We are here in the presence of a very ancient religious idea, which belongs to the hunter culture. • Bone symbolizes the final root of animal life, the mold from which the flesh continually rises. • It is from the bone that men and animals are reborn, for a time, they maintain themselves in an existence of the flesh; then they die, and their “life” is reduced to the essence concentrated in the skeleton, from which they will be born again. • Eliade, M. Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. Rites and Symbols of Initiation

24. Mikhaila’s dream (3 yr 9 m) • Mikhaila: Julian’s eyes falled out • and then • he falled into pieces • Dad: (what sort of pieces?) • Mikhaila: Julian pieces • and the bones falled out too • then • a hole got him • and there was water in it • and when he came out he was big • Mom: (Julian isn’t a baby anymore?) • Mikhaila: No he’s a big boy • and a bug with legs got him out • ‘cause bugs can swim • and the hole was in the park • and it moved into the back yard • and he falled in it • a tree burned • and left the hole.

25. The Creative Illness • Ellenberger described the characteristic elements of the creative illness as follows: • A creative illness succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for a certain truth. • It is a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression, neurosis, psychosomatic ailments, or even psychosis. • Whatever the symptoms, they are felt as painful, if not agonizing, by the subject, with alternating periods of alleviation and worsening. • Throughout the illness the subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation.

26. It is often compatible with normal, professional activity and family life. But even if he keeps to his social activities, he is almost entirely absorbed with himself. • He suffers from feelings of utter isolation, even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal (like the shaman apprentice with his master). • The termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration. • The subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent transformation in his personality and the conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world.” • Ellenberger, H.F. (1970). The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, pp. 447-448.

27. Many of the nineteenth and twentieth century figures recognized universally as “great” – Nietzsche, Darwin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Freud, Jung – were all additionally characterized by lengthy periods of profound psychological unrest and uncertainty.

28. Personality • habits and schemas of interpretation • designed to extract desired resources from the environment • exploration (a process) produces adaptation (a state) to the unknown (a “place”)

30. Personality and its Transformations • Psychotherapy • reconstructs habits and schemas of interpretation • promotes exploration in the attempt to produce adaptation • the extraction of desired resources from the environment • alters habit and category • what makes a category “real”? • functionality • accordance with the empirical facts, as they might be established

32. Transformation • Paradise • Paradise Lost • Redemption