Date: 04-26-2025
Tags: fear archetypes mythology integration
Source: Pan: The Archetypal Source of Panic Disorder - This Jungian Life
Pan's Boons, 2025. Digital Composite. Yours Truly.
PAN: the archetypal source of panic disorder
“Our irrational anxieties, fears, and panics are related to the excessive repression of the instinctive life. With the rise of Christianity, there was an enormous shift in attitude toward the instinctive life. Fantasies of Purity caused a split between earth and spirit, the demonization of sexuality and instinctive impulses. All in favor of a kind of transcendent perfection. As the culture shifted, parts of ourselves became massively repressed.
When we think of repressed sexuality, it’s interesting in this context because Pan is the most fundamental of the fertility gods.
Freud observed that when instinctive satisfaction is blocked, there is an enormous buildup of unsatisfied instinct which takes on the toxic character. And that toxic quality can be vented, out to the side so to speak, like volcanic material that is boiling and pressing, creating all of these vents off to the side, trying to move some of the heat and pressure out in indirect ways. The human psyche is like that. If we say No to Pan, and we do that, that pressure is going to show up sometimes in strange places.
The restorative process is understanding the archetype of Pan. Allowing ourselves to really imagine what Pan is as a psychological function. And to be able to give Pan his due. Give him his homage. His support. So that those energies have some place to live in the psyche and they’re not rumbling like a volcano, ready to explode underneath.” - Joseph, This Jungian Life
“And one of the difficulties that we’re having when we’re treating somebody with a panic disorder is that they think the war is in the college exam, or in the supermarket, or in the neighbor… and so Panic sets in as a scattering intensity, but they haven’t placed the real war. It’s a substitute war.
The thing that you think is the problem is rarely the problem. But it shows up there. And that has to do with the way that the psyche projects unconscious information. And there may be a symbolic legitimacy to the projection.
When Panic happens, the war is somewhere and we have to courageously find the REAL war. (Look to the instincts.) The war is almost always against one or more of the instincts. These instincts are part of the natural Forest of the psyche, and Pan is the Lord of the forests.
Jung’s List of Instincts
- Creativity
- Reflection
- Activity
- Sexuality
- Hunger
Where is my war with creativity? Where is my war against sexuality? Etc.
When the ego is at war with any or all of those realms, the instinctive world is capable of emitting a kind of shrieking quality to stun the ego and send it into a sort of decompensation so that the forest might try to reestablish the naturalness of the personality. It is an attack against the egos arrogant supremacy.”
Quote
“It is a fact that if an impulse from one or the other sphere comes up and is not lived out, then it goes back down and tends to develop anti-human qualities. What should have been a human impulse becomes a tiger-like impulse.” - Marie-Louise von Franz
Quote
“But you can give thanks for the terrors which shake you from sleep with ferocity because their dawning in your awareness is already the promise, the beginning of their retreat.” - Toko-pa Turner, Belonging
Link to original
Links to: You Might As Well Go After the Dragon Tarot - Externalizing Archetypes so as not to be possessed by them