the timboucher experience

I have three posts which currently deal with the concept of “participation mystique:”

1. From Jung’s autobiography about how he feels it with his patients
2. Suspension of Disbelief & Faith
3. That thing about cults and the bicameral mind
4. I also want to figure out a simple way to tie it into the Myth, Ritual & Belief article

Besides that, let me put together some snippets from the internet about it. This first one is a footnote on the page of a Wiccan:

A state of unconscious identification with the gods. It is a term taken from the anthropologist Luden Levy-Bruhl. C.G. Jung defines it further by saying that: ‘lt denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection… in which the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity.”

And then from a page about Jung and the “symbolic life“…

In both of these situations there is a `participation mystique’ more typical of what we who consider ourselves modern, associate with `primitive’ religious beliefs. In a state of `participation mystique’ the individual identifies with the external reality and is transported beyond him or her self. In the modern example the person participates in sport or politics as a sort of divine drama and is lost to her or himself and the blandness of everyday life for a while, fighting for `the Truth’ and against the (evil?) other.

There’s also this page about psychologically interpreting ghosts which has a tidbit:

Both Jung and Lienhardt have pointed out that the forces, which modern man interiorises and attributes to the unconscious (whether individual or collective), have in other cultures been exteriorised as personal forces acting on him from without. I hesitate to use the psychological terms, interject and project, partly because there is some confusion in the literature over their exact connotation: partly because both Jung and Piaget, comparing their psychological findings with the anthropological conclusions of Levy-Bruhl, speak of a primordial condition of participation mystique or indissociation, in which there is no distinction between interior and exterior, between subject and object, between the psychical and physical;

This one is one of the most straightforward explanations of participation mystique and projection (from an article called The Religious Mammal).

Jung writes about the unconscious and its ability to “personify contents. The resultant figures become real in the sense that they have an emotional impact on the ego and undergo change and development (Ibid., p. 117). In other words, whatever images are registered by a person in dreams or visions, these images may automatically, without the intention of the person, be understood by consciousness as “reality.” This does not imply truth or falsity. Because there are a multitude of inner images as well as bodily sensations, these can easily be “projected” onto other persons, making these other persons “special” in the extreme.

Projection is a special term that Jung uses to describe the fact that within the unconscious are archetypes of human experience, such as “the mother”, “the father”, “the wise old man or woman”, “the evil dictator”, the “mana personality,” and many more. Because they exist within the psyche, when we come in contact with a person or object that stimulates this archetype, we attribute this image to the person. For example, Levy-Bruhl used the term “participation mystique” to mean that a person is so identified with another person or object that he can’t distinguish between them. (Samuels, 105). Jung used the term to describe the phenomenon of projection. When a person is projecting onto another person or object, “a part of the personality is projected onto the object, and the object is then experienced as if it were the projected content.

• Sympathetic Identification
• Quote from Jung’s Autobiography
• Suspension of Disbelief & Faith
• The ecstasy of Rage
• Identification, Projection & Participation Mystique