Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and the Jungian collective shadow

¶ … Collective Cultural Shadow and Confrontation with the Archetypal

During the 1960s, a musical group called Jefferson Airplane created a popular song called White Rabbit, based on the Lewis Carroll children's fantasy Alice in Wonderland. In the book, Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole into a world that is bizarre, where she has an adventure of encountering strange and fascinating characters. In the rock song by Jefferson Airplane, "One pill makes you larger and one makes you small, and the ones that your mother gives you don't do anything at all... Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall.... Call Alice when she was just small." The rock song and the children's story, decades apart in time, are nonetheless reflective of the human collective shadow; those traits in ourselves that represent our collective experience of our alter egos or darker sides, or our collective cultural shadow. We know today, of course, that the incredibly talented voice of Grace Slick was singing about the experience experimenting with drugs that taking place during the counter culture revolution of the 1960s; and Lewis Carroll, it has been alleged, was catering to his own darker desires when he penned he created the story of Alice while sitting on the river bank with two young sisters, one of whom he grew an unnatural attachment to that caused him to pursue her the rest of his life (Kincaid, 1998, p. 126). These collective experiences comprise our collective cultural shadow, and it is this shadow that when faced with the antithesis of the archetypal characteristics of our society that cause us to cross the street when we see a homeless person, or to stare in horrified wonder at a gruesome traffic accident, or for prison guards to become the tormenters of the tormenters incarcerated behind bars. It is the manifestations of the collective experience that the collective shadows sees in the archetypal face of the mentally deranged, and fears.

Lyn Cowan (2002) quotes the psychiatrist, Carl Jung, as saying:

Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life.... With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught, so that life should be lived....(p. 1)."

C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious)

Cowan discusses at length the notion held in modern psychology that people can accomplish any kind of change, especially social change (p. 3). Cowan goes on to say that the idea that people can bring about change so long as that change is in the best interest of society, is flawed.

This view of change inflates it and makes it moralistic and unrealistic, placing a heavy burden on individuals who cannot change and who are not moral wretches because of that. Not everything in the individual psyche can be, or should be, changed, any more than a cottonwood tree should be required to change its appearance to that of a redwood because redwoods are bigger, more impressive, and privileged to live in federally protected national parks (p. 3)."

Cowan does, however, acknowledge that those changes which can be brought about the people in the nature of the benefit of society as a whole, are worth an effort at least to work towards changing (p. 3). Cowan suggests that the west is beginning to exhibit a collective psychosis of sorts, "a flattening of psychic life" that is becoming evident through psychopathic tendencies (p. 3). Her concern, she says, is evidenced by the increase in violent crimes, and the increase in the number of serial killers - some of whom have yet to be identified or apprehended (p. 3).

While Cowan's concerns are valid, she fails to recognize the psychopathic social conditions that have given rise to the increase in destructive forces of human nature: homelessness, to which society turns a blind eye pretending not to notice that an individual, and sometimes his family, have succumbed to the pressures of the capitalistic society in which we live, and have, under those conditions, failed to thrive. This is the collective shadow that turns a blind eye to these conditions and allows it to continue, even when the social infrastructures, like homeless shelters, prove to be insufficient in helping to relieve or address the problems. These kinds of social band-aids do not heal the deeper social problems. Unhealed, the problems exacerbate and lead to other forms of psychopathic behaviors about which Cowan is concerned.

These social problems have become the rabbit hole, which, by the time we are adults, we have gained the collective experience which allows us to avoid falling down that hall; although we do, when curiosity compels us, take a peek on occasion.

The Archetypal

The archetypal is the antithesis of the collective shadow, or that way in which the collective, unaware of their dark shadow, tend to perceive themselves. In western culture, the archetypal is the patriarchal society, where women have been slow to emerge as independent personalities separate and apart from their fathers and husbands. The archetypal collective perceives women who are not married, or who are without a mal by which to define themselves, as aberrant manifestations of something gone horribly wrong.

In terms of the space that Hamilton spoke about, he helps put into perspective the archetypal space, saying:

Archetypal architecture finds poetic expression in Chateaubriand's portrayal of his family home, Combourg. Connecting inner space and time, identity and the world, psyche and the text, Combourg becomes a focal point in the Memoires from 1826. Its mythic potential has been pointed to by critics in the images -- "du cote de Combourg" (Le Youanc70) and "haunted memories" (Rollo38). Moreover, a view of Combourg as a place of subjective reality, concrete but evolving in significance (Barberis292-93), prepares the description of Combourg as "a mythic place" existing "outside of time" (Salesse29, 11). The subjective reality of Combourg as perceived by an adolescent surpasses its historical, geographical context to reveal an ominous configuration of space and its corresponding pattern of psychic development. Underneath its lyrical description lies the stark reality of another archetype, the negative Father, a patriarch whose pervasive presence is made concrete through the spatial organization of family life (p. 101)."

In a journal article appearing in the Yale Law Journal, Ariela R. Dubler (2003) talks about women in society's shadow of men; that an impoverished woman is perceived by the court system to be a failure in marriage (p. 1641). If a woman is not married, this causes her to be suspect by society as perhaps being defected or amoral or even a lesbian - whether she is or not. It is reflective of the archetypal image by which the collective identify with in a patriarchal society. The unmarried woman is as difficult for most of us to explain as is the homeless man who was once a CEO of a fortune 500 company.

For a long time, the archetypal image of the ideal family was the family of the hit television show that ran from 1954 to 1977, Father Knows Best. Actors Robert Young and Jane Wyatt provided the images of the ideal parents, faced with, in today's world, seemingly mundane challenges involving their family of three children: two girls and a boy, the ideal family. Then, of course, there was the less archetypal family, the family that was presented as less ideally normal, but not so far from the mainstream as to pose a threat to the archetypal family image; Leave it to Beaver (1957-1963). The mother, a beautiful blonde, played by actress Barbara Billingsley, might actually be said to have supplanted Jane Wyman as the "archetypal" American mother. Billingsley, a stay at home mom, always dressed in a neat dress, pearls and high heels - not flat shoes to do the laundry, vacuuming, and mopping of floors.

It is from these unrealistic archetypal images that during the 1960s the darker shadow side of American culture began to clash with. The result was the counter cultural revolution of the 1960s, wherein young people went to seemingly great extremes to look and behave opposite the archetypal image, which soon became known as "the establishment." At a point in American history, during the years of the Vietnam Conflict, it would have served Americans well to have found a way to blend the archetypal with the new; but that did not occur. Part of that which kept the two from meeting on a common ground was the Civil Rights Movement, which the young people of the 1960s was very much in support of for the most part, but which because it was about change in attitudes, laws, and social behaviors, loomed as a threat to the people who resisted the change.

Instead of coming together in support of social changes, for the most part, Americans have demonstrated a stubbornness to change. If that which is subject to change defies the archetypal image with which Americans have become accustomed, and with which the collective identifies, then the tendency of Americans is put that challenge or contrasting image aside, or, better, to lock it up so that it no longer poses a threat to the archetypal. In some instances, such as the prison system, as we see in Monster's Ball, the archetypal, when exposed to the dark side, begins to manifest its own buried shadow side, and often the conditions become antagonistic.

Author Arjen Boin (2001), talks about the institutionalization in prisons and leadership roles and models. On the leadership in American prisons - which should be provided by the individuals in charge of inmates, the guards - Boin says, noting the difference between the federally operated Bureau of Prison's systems compared with the system employed by the individual states:

The high degree of institutionalization found in the U.S. federal prison system is not the result of coincidence or fortuitous circumstances. The federal prison system did not have an extraordinary budget.

The BOP did not achieve operational uniformity by imposing a restricted or purely custodial regime upon its inmate population. The BOP is, as we will see, one of the most progressive prison systems in the United States. Nor is this degree of organizational unity facilitated by an "easy" inmate population. It is sometimes supposed that the BOP has to deal with a different class of inmates as a result of federal crime definitions; white-collar criminals are thought to dominate federal prisons, whereas state prisons have to deal with the violent inmates. However, inmate statistics do not support this assumption (DiIulio, 1991) (p. 81)."

Here, the states' dysfunctional systems have become the archetypal image of the prison, shadowing the federal DOP systems, which have been, at least by Boin, deemed as the better model of guard-to-prisoner modeling (p. 81). The states' prisons are a clear example of how the shadow can take over when that which is being shadowed is of a nature that society wants to ignore or disregard. Very much like homelessness, child abuse and neglect, and other prevalent social ills coursing through the veins of contemporary American society.

Found in an article in European Judaism (2003), one paragraph in the article in particular helps to make more clear the clash between the shadow culture and the archetypal image of that culture.

The worst catastrophes endured by humanity have always been the result of a lack of communication between countries or societies, with confrontation and violence taking over from dialogue. In order to combat an enemy with greater conviction and ferocity it is always indispensable to dehumanize him, to turn him into scum, to project on to him our most monstrous imaginings: in short, to demonize him. This is an eminently cultural undertaking: to replace the objective perception of reality with mirages reflecting our fears and our hates, thereby replacing human beings with ghosts, depriving them first of their inherent reality and then abolishing them from life altogether. Religion, ideologies and nationalisms have traditionally provided the arguments and pretexts for this dehumanizing debasement of the enemy, something which inevitably precedes the genocides and holocausts that fill universal history with horror and blood (p. 17)."

This helps create the visualization of the clash that occurs when the archetypal and the shadow meet. It explains the American states' prison system, the treatment of the mentally ill, the disregard and avoidance of homelessness, and the blind eye turned to other social issues like child abuse.

In the closing paragraphs of the same journal article, another paragraph gives rise to hope for the changes that will come about as a result of the process of globalization:

In a famous essay, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), T.S. Eliot predicted that in the future humanity would witness the renaissance of local and regional culture. At the time his prophecy seemed rather daring. However, it is likely that globalization will turn it into reality in the twenty-first century, something that should delight us. A rebirth of minor local cultures will restore to humanity that rich, multiple variety of behavior and expression that -- from the end of the eighteenth century, and in particular during the nineteenth -- the nation-states exterminated so that they could create the so -- called national cultural identities. This extermination -- sometimes not in a metaphorical but in a literal sense -- is something that tends to be forgotten, or to put it more appropriately, that people try not to remember, because of its grave moral connotations (p. 17)."

Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles (2004) use the example of young Elian Gonzales, a Cuban child whose mother, in route from Cuba to Florida, drowned trying to reach America, the place where she might pursue freedom, opportunity and the American dream (p. 16). Instead, following his mother's drowning death, young Elian, placed in the care of his family member living in Florida at the time, became the subject, and victim of, American shadow culture. Singer and Kimbles describe what transpired this way:

young Elian Gonzales - a Cuban boy - was miraculously plucked from the very sea south of Florida in which his mother had just drowned. She perished trying to flee the economic and political hardship of Castro's Cuba and start a new life in the "promised land" of the United States. Within a very short period of time, Elian Gonzales became the center of a psychic and political drama that stirred the emotions of at least two nations. The response of Elian's Cuban American relatives and friends who had already settled in Miami made little sense to most Americans, who do not share the same historical experience or mythic story of their origins, survival, and renewal (p. 16)."

It was not the story with which the American public could identity; withholding a father's biological child from him in lieu of an idea, the idea of freedom and the pursuit of the American dream. Rather, it was felt by most Americans at the time - who also, and with little objection - witness on national TV the young child being "rescued" from the home of his relatives by armed FBI and other law enforcement agents under the direction of then U.S. Attorney General, Janet Reno; following the orders of her boss, President William Jefferson Clinton; that young Elian belonged with his biological father. That a life in a communist country was less suppressive than life in America with family members so long as the child was raised with his biological father (p. 16).

The events surrounding Elian's brief stay in the United States was perhaps one of the most strange clashes between the American archetypal and the cultural shadow because Elian's mother died trying to reach American shores. That Americans did not develop a protective nature towards Elian, but stood divided as to whether or not the child should remain with relatives in America, or be returned to his biological father in Cuba remained a hotly debated topic right up until the moment when the federal agents stormed the home where young Elian was living and spirited him away. The child was subsequently returned to his biological father in Cuba, and shortly thereafter the father and child were shown on television seemingly happy in the company of one another, and Americans quickly forgot the story of Elian.

The short-term memory surrounding the clashes between the cultural shadow and the archetypal is another seemingly consistent element in those situations. Americans are very quick to forget the overshadowing of their archetypal by their darker side.

The final thought here is that we may never see a reconciliation between the collective shadow and the archetypal image, although institutions and individuals would be well served if Americans could reconcile the two. However, to reconcile the two would mean that the collective shadow would have to be acknowledge, and has Jung has demonstrated, it remains largely a manifestation of the subconscious processes of the social order. Given that, we will have to rely on the individual efforts of philanthropy and those who focus on a just cause to stimulate the conscious of the collective towards the light.