Impressiveness #6

This is my final post on impressiveness.

In the quote I posted earlier - Quote C - Jung discussed an ancient text, The Shepherd of Hermas. In the text, a woman makes such a strong impression on Hermas that when a feminine spirit appears to him later, the spirit takes on the appearance - the image - of that woman.

This also occures when a man's inner-feminine nature, the anima, or a woman's inner-masculine nature, the animus, takes on the image of another person. Jung calls this projection - projecting your own psyche onto another person, making that person and your own anima or animus (or whatever inner-figure it happens to be) indistinguishable from that external other. Jung, Sartre and others have written that love isn't possible without a degree of projection, and that the realization of projection can end love.

My interest here is in impressiveness and it's connection to images. The image alive in your unconscious psyche is able to break through the barrier into your conscious awareness when it causes you to become impressed by an external object with matching qualities.

I wrote in an earlier post about a tree that made an impression on me. In reality it wasn't the tree that impressed. It was an internal image trying to make me consciously aware of it by projecting itself onto the tree. This is why I consider it important to watch for moments of impresssiveness, because in those moments we learn most about ourselves. This is also why the connection between impressiveness and images, especially in dreams and in art, becomes important to understand.