A collaborative blog by Nicholas Toko, Jungian Analyst in training and Margot Stienstra, Jungian Analyst.
Introduction
In our last blog we introduced Jung’s “map of the soul” of psyche, comprising the relationship of consciousness to the unconscious. We identified certain important characteristics and considered possible parallels in Artificial Intelligence. We want to gain some clarity about this in order then to look at ethical implications of this human invention and the ongoing interaction: To what extent will it be a reciprocal relationship with mutual ethical consequences?
Today we can learn a bit more of the nature of psyche as Jung conceived of it and witnessed it as psychiatrist and pioneer psychotherapist, building on the earliest philosophers entertaining the notion of consciousness and unconsciousness, and in collaboration with Sigmund Freud and others.
Elaborating on Freud’s famous model of the iceberg, likening the human unconscious to the unseen majority component of the iceberg under the ocean’s surface, Jung differentiated between the personal and collective layers of the unconscious. Our sense of consciousness tends to just manage to entertain the likelihood of some degree of unconsciousness that can elude our personal awareness. Jung further makes distinctions between a cultural layer of the unconscious and more broad collective unconscious that exists for everyone since it is comprised of all that was relegated as irrelevant, or had insufficient palatability or purpose to quite make it into consciousness, or never came to consciousness in the first place.
Ego
Here is where the ego’s assumptions, discussed last time, come into the picture. The ego can be said to be preoccupied with adapting to the outside world and adopts a persona (from the Greek word for mask) to achieve this. But what of all our being and energy that we do not direct towards finding acceptance and understanding outside of ourselves? We do not only exist for others, and our interactions with others often trigger emotions that are not always easily comprehensible.
Persona and Shadow
The persona too has a complement, in fact a compensatory counterpart that Jung called the shadow. We stumble upon its consequences when encountering anything beyond our immediate understanding or when we are forced into a new insight. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. But usually it is our feelings that tip us off that we are missing something.
Our emotions apparently exist to help us regulate our experiences of life. Our autonomous complexes mentioned last time are the emotional discharge of our experienced incongruities between the ego’s efforts to portray a helpful persona and the world not always interested in cooperating on the ego’s terms. The dance between the persona and shadow is a more personal way of thinking about the ego and some compensatory phenomenon that apparently tries to keep it in check for coping, learning and developing.
Projection
We don’t know enough about the extent to which this is experience of discrepancy is unique to humans, but we could be said to require greater elasticity to self-regulate between body and mind, with its instinctual, emotional and reasoning efforts. We must admit this failure to be consistently met in understanding and accord is one of the most strenuous aspects of human life. Sometimes, well, rather often in fact, in a trying situation the ego becomes fatigued and irritable, and settles for judgments on what’s happening. In psych-speak, this is called projection; we assign our judgments to something or someone external. And sometimes there is relief in doing this, though not always. We cannot carry the discomfort; it needs to go elsewhere, often without question, or maybe even our awareness.
Does this happen in products of Artificial Intelligence? Or in our creation and expectations for it?
Important is to realise projections contain a lot of energy rather wasted in that its productivity and usefulness tend to be illusory and short-lived. What might be the advantages of not giving away all that energy in false of half-baked assumptions about others? Do we have higher potential or must we settle for less desirable (to us and to others) presentation of ourselves?
Thus we can speak of withdrawal of projections, becoming sufficiently conscious of our need to disown undesirable or undeveloped aspects of ourselves. In our next blog, we’ll learn more about Jung’s model of Typology on which the better knows Myers-Briggs model and personality assessment are based. We’ll see that we each have a fairly spontaneous way of orienting ourselves in the world that is helpful to persona building and toa certain extent successful functioning. Yet there is more to be developed to be better able to relate to difference, to others whose orientations differ from our own. You can begin to imagine the implications and possibilities in the modern world if we could discharge our restricted vision and presumptions about “others.” Let’s leave off here for now. Here are some questions to continue finding relevance to AI…
What might be considered the Shadow in AI?
Are there projections (assumptions / presumptions) we tend to make about AI?
What personal / collective growth can we foresee by gaining more consciousness of our projections on AI and withdrawing them?
Is AI capable of making projections? Can AI currently project on humans? Can you think of examples?
Could AI be designed or evolve to be able to be aware of its projections? How would this be transformative as it is for humans?
As we did last time, let me reiterate a bit differently what we learned about Shadow and Projection:
Awareness of our projections and complexes is key to self-awareness, as they contain a lot of invested energy that often contains distortions of thinking, affecting feelings, behaviour, and thus relationships. We can begin to wonder about our projections onto AI, and its potential for projecting.
We can learn to withdraw projections and reclaim energy for more constructive and enlightened use.
Learning to withdraw projections is vital for the transformation Jung called individuation. We can contemplate the dynamics within AI’s evolution that may resemble an individuation.
Until we meet again, here is some helpful reading:
Margot
Recommended reading:
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