Wild and Unknown

The Lady of Shallott is one of my favourite pictures. It hung on my sister's bedroom wall and as teenagers we used to wonder why she looked so melancholy. Love lost and lonely ourselves, we thought the lady in the boat might be waiting for someone.

The poem, The Lady of Shalott' by Alfred Lord Tennyson, tells the story of this young woman in medieval England, imprisoned on an island near Camelot. She must weave a colorful web and only watch the outside world through a mirror. If she looks at Camelot directly, she will be cursed.

This looking at the world through a mirror and the curse of daring to look directly at her wished for destiny results in her death, before she reaches the palace of Camelot. Never quite reaching her destination and her longing are pictured above in “The Lady of Shalott” (1888) by John William Waterhouse. The mirror and it's curse play a potent role in this story and still today it has its impact in the form of technology. Think of the selfie.

At this pivotal time in history, we are more concerned with self-image than ever, in part because of the way we view ourselves and others online and that the world is changing necessarily. The internet plays a huge part in the way our sense of identity is defined and this influences our world-view. I heard someone say that the internet is like a giant mirror we created to see ourselves in. We each have our own relationship with the entity that is the internet. It is huge, complex and layered.

Darian Leader, the modern Freudian Analyst said that when the baby first sees himself in the mirror is when he first learns to hate himself. This is because he sees the other baby as a threat and ends up rejecting himself. Social media is like the mirror, we hopefully look for some kind of acknowledgment that our existence is welcome and because of our natural inclination towards a negative bias, we get a huge hit from not getting that recognition.

Jaron Lanier, the American computer scientist, computer philosophy writer and futurist said that the trouble with the internet is that it has no context, therefore it makes sense that posting on social media is a like throwing a pebble over a mountain. You never know where it will land or how. The carefully crafted content probably lands very differently to the way it was intended. How we register in people’s minds on social media is laden with incomplete gestalten, the unfinished business of our interactions, unacknowledged attempts at recognition and existence.

Unfinished business is at the heart of Gestalt therapy and the aim is to close the gestalt, complete a process and get closure, however large or small. Think of all the times no response was made or about ghosting on dating apps or anywhere else for the matter.

A epidemic of self-crises could be the result of an alarmingly diminished sense of who we are in the age of the internet. Apps that run our lives with algorithms designed to know our behaviours, preferences and habits are worrying.

Checking our phones all too frequently and looking up anything and everything answers questions in an instant but do we retain the information? I heard Elon Musk say he could feel TikTok altering his mind and so he deleted it but the irony is that I saw him say it on the very app he was talking about. I too deleted it.

My mind was filling up with tiny snippets of information but not real knowledge. My algorithm showed me a myriad of therapists and life coaches, some expert and some not qualified, all churning out content for the masses. I could be seriously misguided by the therapist who claims to know me better than I do.

Artificial intelligence grows itself based on its own learning, a bit like algorithms, which has a sinister feel, much like the film, Her with Joaquin Phoenix as a man in the not to distant future with a new piece of operating software on his personal computer. She has a beautiful voice and seems interested in knowing him. You can guess the rest.

With this in mind, the writings of Carl Jung offer some comfort, some reassurance and some sanity. I believe this time in history represents a stage in human evolution that will require us to rethink our concept of selfhood and know ourselves in a different way. Aspects of ourselves that have been forgotten, lost in the wilderness of the internet that are as yet unknown, unseen, unheard and perhaps misunderstood need to be found.

To restore a sense of self and belonging in the world, exploring self-identity through archetypes can be liberating. I started working with archetypes many years ago drawing on the work of Caroline Myss, the theologian and teacher of all things spiritual. I propose to form a group where a safe exploration of your archetypes can further personal development in way that enriches who you are. The unique shape of the group with all its participants who bring to it their own energy, personal style and archetypal patterns will inform the process and our findings. Look out for my online and in-person workshops here.