Simply put, It is anti-life, life turning against itself, life “spell”-ed backwards.
In the traumatized soul (and to the extent we are not fully awake, we are all in a state of trauma, the trauma of not being one with ourselves), both Freud and Jung recognized that there is a factor within the psyche which, once it gains a certain momentum and seeming autonomy, continually keeps neurotic, unproductive suffering alive.
There is an aggressive anti-wholeness agency within us, as if “made” out of our disowned, unexpressed, in-turned and inverted aggression twisted back upon ourselves, which actively cultivates and breeds dissociation within the psyche. The fluid, ever-flowing, self-reflective/reflexive process of the continually-evolving psyche en/unfolding itself over time becomes suspended, rigidified and frozen, stuck in time, in a seemingly never-ending and self-generating feedback loop.
This inertial, entropic and thanatic factor seems to be actively resistant to and set against us recovering, discovering and attaining our intrinsic wholeness. Jung refers to this dis-integrative factor as a “morbid” fragment of the personality which inspires a “will to be ill.” It is as if there is an unconscious counterforce to the faculty of the will, a “shadow of the will,” so to speak, that prohibits the synthesis of the fragments of our experience into the meaningful constructs and perceptions that make up a healthy, wholesome and coherent psyche.
- Paul Levy
