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The Unconscious World of Dream

Psyche Greek for Soul
The 'totality' of the conscious and unconscious life. The mind considered as an organic system reaching all parts of the body and serving to adjust the total organism to the needs or demands of the environment.
The ego, the subject of consciousness, comes into existence as a complex quantity which is constituted partly by the inherited disposition (character constituents) and partly by unconsciously acquired impressions and their attendant phenomena ... Analytical psychology differs from experimental psychology in that ... it is far more concerned with the total manifestation of the psyche as a natural phenomenon - a highly complex structure....Carl Jung
To Jung, the psyche, like the living body, is a self-regulating system
The Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung, taught that the human mind or psyche is complex and is composed of parts, much like the physical body. He coined the word "complexes" for various unconscious parts of the psyche. Complexes are the focal and nodal points of psychic life (Jacobi, 1973, p. 37). He also divided the unconscious into two distinct regions, the personal and the collective. "Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes".
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in mythology - (Greek: �Soul�), in classical mythology, princess of outstanding beauty who aroused Venus' jealousy and Cupid's love. The fullest version of the tale is that told by the Latin author Apuleius in his Metamorphoses (The Golden Ass). According to Apuleius, the jealous Venus commanded her son Cupid (the god of love) to inspire Psyche with love for the most despicable of men. Instead, Cupid placed Psyche in a remote palace where he could visit her secretly and, by his warning, only in total darkness. One night Psyche lit a lamp and found that the figure at her side was the god of love himself. When a drop of oil from the lamp awakened him, he reproached Psyche and fled. Wandering the earth in search of him, Psyche fell into the hands of Venus, who imposed upon her difficult tasks. Finally, touched by Psyche's repentance, Cupid rescued her, and, at his instigation, Jupiter made her immortal and gave her in marriage to Cupid. The sources of the tale are a number of folk motifs; the handling by Apuleius, however, conveys an allegory of the progress of the Soul guided by Love, which adhered to Psyche in Renaissance literature and art. In Greek folklore the soul was pictured as a butterfly, which is another meaning of the word psyche.

more on psyche....

Gaia
The Gaia theory suggests that,
in some sense, the earth is "alive".
We are all a part of one organism.
A living organism, Planet Earth.

The Human Brain and Psyche
The human brain as a complex self-regulating system
The psyche, as defined by Jung {psychology}, as a complex self-regulating system
Jung's view of the psyche



5-21-05