Imitation and the Archetypal Adult

In The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey, I mention five pathologies that I relate to the idea of the Archetypal Adult. In this brief presentation I mention an additional one, which Jung speaks about – imitation. In the Red Book he writes, “The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship.”

In Two Essays in Analytical Psychology he writes,

"The human being has one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility from the collective point of view, is immeasurably detrimental from the standpoint of individuality; the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology can never dispense with imitation, for without it the organization of the masses, that of the state and of society, is quite simply impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and moral contagion."

            

Imitation is a shadow-side of the self. The Self means authenticity, and in its wholeness it includes its opposite – imitation.

This beautiful ten-minute video, which you can watch here, was created by Karol Domanski and Adam Kosciuk.