The Emotional Bag

Freud believed strongly that the manner in which we relate to others is heavily influenced by certain underlying psychological forces. He believed that such forces maintain their power by the very nature of our oblivion to them. They are experiential memories that embed themselves into our emotional brain, that aspect of consciousness that intuits and feels and discerns in the midst of our every moment. We tend not to be aware of the ways that these memories remain present with us, and our unawareness preserves the authority of their governance. We experience others, and so much of life, through the candle power of their projections and the innuendo of their interpretations.

Our mind is full of such a collection of images and symbols that we cannot begin to catalogue them. And most of those images and symbols lay dormant in the dark confines of Shadow, a term Jung coined to appreciate that aspect of memory and personality that we disown. Often, the Shadow becomes the most dangerous place of storage, for it requires such a vigilante guarding that the task of protection becomes the threat of projection. And so, we inflate our Shadow by repressing these experiential images and symbols, and we become insecure and defensive and cynical to the same degree. So, for example, the pretentious pomp and circumstance of some colorful personality may betray the insecurities and fear of vulnerability that lie within.

Our interpretations in so many dimensions of life become suspect, given this possibility. Whether on another human being, some corporate institution, the sub-human world of creatures and environment, or the super-human world of ideas and philosophies, we are at risk for projecting the threats of childhood: the way a coach cursed and slung us into the mud by the sidebar of a face mask; the way two friends mocked or betrayed, leaving us in silence and agony; the way a pastor listened with such careful eyes to our heart's sharing with quick darting glances to the business and files of his office, uncharmed by the grace of the moment; the way the lunchlady screeched at our clumsiness with such fire and terror that our hearts pulsed with anxiety.

So often, our encounters with others and with God is so heavily determined, or at least influenced, by such embedded experiential memory (images and symbols), that our unawareness of their presence allows them an almost total dominance of our personality in the world of the Other.

And so we doubt with a hesitancy that exposes a fear of the potential for threat all around us, in relationships, in ideas, in the way we grapple with faith. The presence of destruction and vengeance and hatred permeating the societies of the world exposes the reality that, in fact, a dreadful sort of existential anxiety is not unmerited. Pavlov taught us that certain stimuli naturally stimulate certain responses: the smell of appetizing food stimulates a salivary response; touching a hot frying pan causes us to jerk back reflexively in pain; an overbearing, tyrannical supervisor produces in us anxiety and the psycho-reflexivity of emotional cowering, or self-protection. We live in a fallen world, and our God has embedded within us a capacity for self-regulation, including the sort of psychological features that Freud called "coping mechanisms."

Besides educating us on the fine points of classical conditioning, Pavlov further taught us that such healthy "coping" responses can be corrupted. Every time we encounter an intense situation that produces anxiety, bits and pieces of experience associated with the original stimuli (e.g. food, frying pan, and overbearing personalities), burst forth. These are the shards of experience filed away in our Shadow as the emotionally-loaded experience-laden images and symbols that we so often project onto our world.

We are absorbed in a cloud of sin and brokenness and evil which has veiled the very fact that the course of our existence is determined on a far broader scale than we could have imagined. I believe very firmly that it is only through a spiritual bond with the image and symbols of the invisible God that we may be free from the shadows of sin embedded within, for only by the light of Christ can this kind of psychological darkness be dispelled. And only in the illuminate grace of spiritual redemption may our soul's fullness be restored.