Latent archetypes in obsessive and addicted patients

 

Damián Ruiz

If we simplify a lot, we could consider that the obsessive patient fights so that some unconscious aspect does not manifest itself while the addict adopts the attitude of escape from that same aspect or aspects. And these, on many occasions, represent unintegrated forces of the person’s nature, unconscious forces that are inherent to the essence of the being, but that, for some reason, have not been able to develop or have been repressed.

Let’s start from a premise I work with: genetics is more important (much more) than the environment. What I am saying is that at the moment of birth, even as an embryo, the child already is, and the environment will only help, improve, worsen or impede the development of everything that wants to express itself as a perceptible phenomenon.

The newborn comes with potential virtues and defects, for example, a possible high intellectual capacity and, at the same time, a tendency towards anger. A good environment and a good upbringing will allow him to develop the former and reduce the latter, but we could also find a blockage and an activation respectively, which would be an aggravation of the child’s possibilities.

When the circumstances of a patient with perhaps a certain obsessive predisposition are complex: abusive, harassing, generating fear, etc., there is the possibility that in childhood or adolescence, in an unconscious way, and to avoid anything ‘dangerous’ happening, he or she represses some aspects, probably very positive, of his or her personal development. In the case of addicts, the way to escape from complex situations would not be through this repression but, on the contrary, through an escape that distances them from psychic or emotional pain, and hence the possibility of entering the complex terrain of addiction to substances or other elements.

If the latent archetypes nesting in the person’s unconscious, in Jungian terms, are very powerful, necessarily the degree of repression or flight will have to be equally strong to hinder the emergence of such latent psychic configurations.

  • The unconscious stores data such as DNA predispositions, all that we have stored without being processed by the brain during our lifetime, as well as perceptual tendencies that focus on certain stimuli of external reality and that come from our genetic code.

In the end everything will be studied from biochemistry, physics and mathematics, but in the meantime it is necessary to use a more metaphorical conceptual language.

Let us imagine an archetypal nature: Artemis, one of the goddesses of the Greek Olympus, a free, independent, experimental, determined woman, connected to life and nature, who is born into an oppressive, rigid and fearful environment. The chances are high that her nature will be emasculated in one way or another, even traumatically.

Or a young Zeus, free-spirited, impetuous, arbitrary and intuitively connected with the best possible decisions on every path, the son of a Saturnine man (of Saturn), who looks at everything from sacrifice, rigour and effort sustained under a sceptical and materialistic idea of existence. The bond will be difficult, unbearable, and until he frees himself from the rigour, he may decide to escape ‘artificially’ from this way of life that is so alien and narrow.

In any case, it is essential to discover, at the beginning and during the course of therapy, what lies dormant in the person’s unconscious, not only to integrate it, but more importantly, to live it in practice and thus be able to build a reality without obsessions or addictions.

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