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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Search for Re: Jung and King

As I'm not feeling well this week, let's keep this short.  What are we looking at this time?  Psychology.'

First up, an interesting concept called the shadow.

According to Wikipedia:  "In its more destructive aspects the shadow can represent those things  which people do not accept about themselves. Someone, for instance, who identifies as being kind can have a shadow that is harsh or unkind."  Although, there is another side to the shadow.  For "in its more constructive aspects, a person's shadow may  represent hidden positive qualities. This has been referred to as the 'gold in the  shadow'".

However, I prefer to focus on the darker parts.  After all, I want the House to bring out the worse in my people, and if it is the part of them that they are desparately trying to deny, but actually get turned into, all the better.

Next, an equally interesting topic that both Carl Jung and Stephen King talked about.   Heh, never thought those two would go in one sentence together, did ya?  But in his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King sees the Werewolf concept and Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr  Jekyll and Mr Hyde as about the Apollonian and Dionysian conflict.  What is this conflict?  In other words,  Apollo represents the moralistic, intellectual, noble side of us.  Dionysius represents the wild side, the side concerned with physical gratification and impulses.  Apollo is self-control.  Dionysus is the unconstrained. Apollo the light, the Dionysius the dark.  Order, chaos.  You get it.

Anyway, in Stephen King's words, I want to show "the Dionysian psychopath locked up  inside the Apollonian facade of normality . . . but slowly, dreadfully emerging."  I want to strip away the control, and show the shadow and the Dionysius inside my characters, and in the end, I want to show it consume the light, the morals, the order inside of each of the men and women in my story.  Well, maybe not each of them.  Just enough of them to make it interesting :-)

That's it.

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