Shackled Alice Encounters Carl Jung

“What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself” Carl Jung

We spend the early part of our lives involved in education and learning skills. However nobody prepares us for the times when we start examining ourselves, for the times we look deep within ourselves and ask, "Who am I really?" Of particular interest to me are the many contradictory, sometimes conflicting, aspects of my personality.

I'd like to introduce you to several fictional characters and one not so fictional: Audacious Deviant, Jeff, the one and only Shackled Alice, and Spooky.

According to Jung's theories on Archetypes; Audacious Deviant would be my animus (the female), Jeff would be my anima (the male), and Shackled Alice would be my shadow. Spooky seems to have modeled himself after Casper the Friendly Ghost and I suppose would be my self.

Audacious Deviant is a bit prissy. She loves to take long walks in the garden smelling the flowers along the way. She loves going to art galleries, rearranging her furniture, long flowing skirts with army boots, paisley scarves, and gossiping. She's really quite fun and a loyal and faithful friend. She loves animals and has two finches that she named Tank and Lula. She desperately wants a cat or dog but can't afford the upkeep.

Jeff loves to read, write, learn new things, computers, collecting movies, and he loves to laugh though he tends to be a bit depressed sometimes. He searches his soul and deeply examines hisself. He listens to alternative rock, especially the old grunge bands like Sound Garden, Pearl Jam, and Audioslave. On Friday nights you can usually find him dancing at a drum circle. He is the one always trying to figure out which character out of the lot is non-fictional, and is the one who is usually in charge of this blog.

Shackled Alice lives in the shadows of my unconscious and due to her tendency to get the others into trouble, has to stayed chained up there. She is the shadow side of my personality. She has a superior attitude, wears leather and lace, dark eye-liner, has killer tattoos. She loves to wear chains, body piercings, getting high, and can get herself into some seriously fucked-up situations. She also tries to kill herself and all the others when she gets pissed off or depressed. Any man without confidence, upon meeting her walking down the street, would be intimidated and step to the side. It's really a shame she has to stay tethered, and it is Audacious Deviant that lets her loose when Jeff and Spooky aren't aware.

Spooky is hard for me to write about because of his/her androgeny. Spooky really has no gender. He/She follows the moon cycles, checks his/her horoscope when he/she is in doubt, and reads tarot cards. He/She loves to study the different religions and loves it when he/she finds a similarity between them. Spooky is terribly shy but desperately wants to make friends. He/She wants to be able to go out and have fun but finds it difficult. He/She shares Jeff's love of reading and writing and sometimes Jeff lets him help with blogging. You might find Spooky burning Sage and casting a circle on one day and revering Shiva or Christ the next. Spooky was the first archetype Jeff found and that was because of a friend of his.

This post was originally started over a year ago as a draft and I have come back to it several times to add different aspects as I discovered them. The road of self-discovery is a hard but rewarding one and I urge each of you that reads this to take some time and think about the many facets of yourself. You might find the whole idea of archetypes of particular interest.

Enjoy Life!