WORK IN PROGRESS
This article discusses the PC / Console game franchise Assassin’s Creed in the context of psychology.
Carl Gustav Jung ( built a theory or a model in which he finds a link between how our biology, psyche, dreams, religion & symbols are linked together, in a way that can give us meaning, in terms of value assignment.
Jung claimed that in the same way we are born ‘designed’ to breathe air with a nose and two nostrils, we are also already born with a capability to extract meaning. That design is based on evolutionary principles, so it takes form due to natural selection. In this context, there is no sense in talking about goals in terms of evolutionary design, because the development process of evolution does not have a goal, other, only a process of formation.
The first question we have to ask ourselves, is what happens, if there is such a structure, of our psyche, predestined by our biology ? A lot of people feel threatened with this question because it can come reductional towards us as humans, it would mean that there is ‘one way’ to structure our psychology, that there is a ‘right’ way to develop. Well, two things :
First, we as humans have a predestined capability for language which is determined by our biology, other animals cannot understand us fully because of the difference in our biology, though some communication is possible until a certain level. We can also develop many languages which can vary a lot, and we are able of learning and acquiring them.
Secondly, a person can become or born blind, and it does not mean that this person would not live a full life. But a life without being able to see is very different from a life which one is able to see, the same achievements can potentially be made, but methods would be different.
I mention this, in the sense of traditionalism which can be related to Jung. He suggested something that we can call ‘normal development’ or something that Freud called ‘conformity’, it means to function at ease as an individual in society, nothing more. Modern society now find these notions limiting and therefore disregards many of them. Although, it is right, that we as people, do not all need the same things, we have different needs. Rebellion and change are also important parts of development in individual and social levels.
C.G. Jung
The game borrows some ideas from Carl Jung in terms of psychology. I will just touch them briefly. Jung’s idea’s is made up of a wide spectrum. Some of can prove not useful, though other ideas he had are already rooted in our culture, in books, in films, in behavioral science like ethology etc’. Many modern interpretations link Jung to contemporary theories in science (like the book : The Two Million-Year-Old Self).
Jung thought dreams to be the non-physical place where we confront our dreams and our symbols as ‘secret holding’ keys. The symbols in our dreams represent universal possible truths (Aletheia’s), which can be unconcealed through narration and experience.
For Jung, being a man before the age of technology, only dreams were available as an arena where imagination was not limited by physical reality. For us being able to utilize technology we allow a state, similar to dreams, when we are playing computer games. We build a narrative, a parallel reality, where one can take an active part and play, make choices and experience a story in an active way, in a way that is close to reality.
Memory, sensual feelings and responses such as adrenaline, dopamine & endorphin release, are triggered by the high degree of reality technology and computer gaming are able to provide. It is probably what makes it, is more accessible than a book or theater for many people.
The collective unconscious
“[Jung] conceived them to be innate neuropsychic centers possessing the capacity to initiate, control, and mediate the common behavioral characteristics and typical experiences of all human beings. Thus, on appropriate occasions, archetypes give rise to similar thoughts, images, mythologems, feelings, and ideas in people, irrespective of their class, creed, race, geographical location, or historical epoch. An individual’s entire archetypal endowment makes up the collective unconscious, whose authority and power is vested in a central nucleus, responsible for integrating the whole personality, which Jung termed the Self.”
Anthony Stevens. “Jung: A Very Short Introduction”
The theory or model that Jung developed, claims to have inherited universal elements and patterns in every person. Those can be a result of our biology and evolution in terms of the structure of our psyche, the mechanism that is responsible for our behavior.
There are shared universal elements between all of us, some of them Jung called Archetypes. As an example we can take the mother archetype : a child seeks biologically and mentally for a relation with a mother at an early age. The child is experiencing that person as a mother, and it becomes active as a mother complex, a structure of a psyche and also our biological body which is important to function ‘normally’.
The physical side of it as an example is that children need to breastfeed, and they are designed naturally to do so, in the same way our body is designed for air, light etc’ from the beginning of our life. We fit the form of the world.
In the same way parents, wife, children, birth, and death are inborn in a child as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes.
There is a whole field of expertise developed just to research these mechanisms also in animal behavior, it is called ethology. Social behavior from a biological point of view.
Language is studied at early age in the same way, unconscious infrastructures design to deal with language and communication. Thinkers like Noam Chomsky calls the universal / archetypal mechanism of basic language formation deep structures.
The shadow
Odin takes the role of the shadow, following Eivor, the dark unconscious, a dark companion. Every persona, every individual’s psyche holds always two sides of the same coin. Every person has a choice, and therefore the awareness, the consciousness of it’s doing, the results of our actions. Regret is part of it. Our dark thought are kept out of sight, our anti-social behavior and our manifestations of will for power.
Keeping our shadow out of sight is an act of submission to what Freud called the super ego and Jung called the moral complex. The moral complex forms on the basis of an archetypal imperative to learn and maintain the values of the culture into which we happen to have been born.
Therefore Odin is the symbol of the Norse mythology, when he fights Eivor one has to ask himself why does he have control over Eivor’s axe, as a phallic symbol that symbolizes Eivor’s ability to control and to make a choice. This would fit easily into Freud’s theories.
Ego defense mechanism are Repression, Denial and projection. Odin is a projection of Eivor.
Not only do we repress the shadow in the personal unconscious, but we deny its existence in ourselves, and project it out on to others. This is done quite unconsciously: we are not aware that we do it. It is an act of ego-preservation which enables us to deny our own ‘badness’ and to attribute it to others, whom we then hold responsible for it.
Shadow projection can function, therefore, as a major threat to both social and peace, for it enables us to turn those whom we perceive as enemies into devils or vermin that it is legitimate to hate, attack, or exterminate.
Jung’s theories and the gender issue
Jung acknowledged that environmental factors exert an enormous influence over a person’s psychological development. He held this to be as true of gender awareness as it is of development of the persona, the shadow, or the psychological type. The specious idea that gender differences are due entirely to culture, and have nothing to do with biological or archetypal predispositions, still enjoys wide currency in our society, yet it rests on the discredited tabula rasa theory of human development and is at variance with the overwhelming mass of anthropological and scientific evidence.
Another important thing to mention, Jung’s models, in political correctness terms, are no longer fashionable or valid. His models are traditional in the sense that value extraction is only possible through looking at these models, side by side, next to history, arts, culture, science, putting it in a wider context.
The contemporary Nihilist fashion rules out any predispositions concerning individuals, not only cultural, but also biological or evolutionary. As said before, this is the tabula rasa of human development.
The only reason why I personally do not take this approach, and I do find the Jungian theory interesting, is that it enables me to understand, or in other words, enables me to assign value and meaning.
With no clear definition between entities like symbols, archetypes, gender, culture, beliefs, nothing is no longer unique and different; none of these entities would get more powerful as a symbol or value against its opposite, and a higher level of richness and tolerance would never be possible.
Mythology
This distinction accords with the phenomenological differences between the father and mother archetypes as represented in myths, religions, and fairy-tales. In mythology the dawning of consciousness is symbolized by the separation of the world parents, Father Heaven from Mother Earth, and the creation of light out of darkness. Light is one with consciousness and ‘illumination’.
In traditional mythology Father-love differs from mother-love: the father’s love is contingent love (i.e. it is conditional upon the adoption of certain values, standards, and modes of conduct) while the mother’s love is largely unconditional (i.e. it is usually sufficient for her that her child exists).
While the mother archetype finds universal expression as Mother Nature, Goddess of Fertility, Womb of Life, and Dispenser of Nourishment, the father archetype is personified as Ruler, Elder, King, and Lawgiver. The mother is abundantly endowed with Eros, the principle of love, intimacy, and relatedness, while the father is the living embodiment of Logos, the principle of reason, judgement, and discrimination. His word is law.
In the AC Valhalla game we see a deliberate mix of these archetypes, the message sometimes becomes less clear or nonexistent when we can no longer assign some traits to specific archetypes.
Anima and animus
Here we have to separate the name of the machine used in the Assassin’s Creed series and the psychological aspect of its characters. The name of the machine comes from Latin : animus (“the mind, in a great variety of meanings: the rational soul in man, intellect, consciousness, will, intention, courage, spirit, sensibility, feeling, passion, pride, vehemence, wrath, etc., the breath, life, soul”)
In the context of Jung’s theories, Jung called the contrasexual archetype the animus in women and the anima in men. He called the contrasexual complex the ‘projection-making factor. Existing in the subconscious (and the shadow), the animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros.
According to Jung every persona, male or female, has the opposite sex as a contrasexual complex in its shadow, but as long as he or she are incorporating the contrasexual archetype into their persona it will no longer be present as part of the shadow.
Transitions between life cycles
Every person goes to transition periods in his life development, the same as Eivor is forming a character. These rites of passage evolved in primitive societies. These rites – particularly puberty initiation rites, rites of incorporation into the hunter, warrior, or shamanic role, marriage rites, rites on the birth of children and the death of relations – possessed great value because they provided public affirmation of the fact that a significant transition had occurred and, through the powerful symbolism of the ritual, activated archetypal components in the collective unconscious appropriate to the life stage that had been reached: this archetypal potential was then incorporated in the personal psyche of the initiate
The individuation of the Self
Jung conceptualized individuation as an organic process. If man is predestined by its biology he can fulfill its psychological destination by developing the persona to its fullest. The timeless self, the two-million-year-old-man that is in all of us, is the product of evolution and growth as man as an organism which developed a psyche. Again, if biologically we are born fitting to breathe air, eat food and drink water to maintain a healthy body, Jung is suggesting that psychologically we are predestined to fit an ideal pattern, one who is made of the Persona, Unconscious and Archetypes.
In the game, the animus opens the gate to the timeless self, the two-million-year-old-man that is in all of us. Every generation experiences repeating patterns which are lessons for the future. They are learned from the past through a series of cases of human behavior.
“In the last analysis, most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us. And where do we make contact with this old man in us? In our dreams”
Jung, Psychological Reflections
The animus is the bed, the past experiences are our dreams, there we meet the archetypes :
