Play: Depth-integrative Performance

Carl Gustav Jung

Children think it is fun to dress up in costumes and indulge softly in tricks and pranks. Playing tricks reaches the core of many things that persons find funny. If seriousness harms one's vitality and health reserves, playing tricks or having fun in other ways could be among the things needed.

The emotional equipment of many decent people may be unable to acknowledge that serious sides of life may hint at problems or problem areas that need to be tackled and handled far better. And "better" in this contexts should mean in more integral, more integrative, more unified ways.

Fun at once reaches something essential, it is purported, and can go to the core of many things. Fun may give harmless outlets for nebulous needs and also for needs we may not want to acknowledge - for a while or for the time being.

Drama is playing tricks through some measure of illusions put into performance. In some cases dramatic acts may serve to de-mask facets of the establishment. It happens. "Mucking around" in seriousness without getting to the core of things could be drama too, it could serve as dramatic performance. The question is how fun it is to get involved in it.

◎ The core of drama seems to be play.

The mind-rubrication rooted in one's native scenery is not to be found yet

Many persons take tests and think test-taking is serious. Opposite to it, there is a handy tradition that helps persons to relax and get inspired from inside - from creative ideas, dreams and images, even from the scenery. Having inspired thoughts could mean "this is a time to go with the flow instead of getting typified and rubricated" as others find it fit and are served by, perhaps.

Watch out for tests others get influence by - maybe these tests should be looked on as schemes (schema) of others. Your alternative is to be open to forces from above - that could be from inside.

It is fine to get conform if the conformity in question is good-natured and also good for yourself

It is often great to get inspired and conversely, being told may reflect one is too tired inside to find out of things first-hand. If so, maybe one had better sleep and dream and meditate for a long while, till it is possible to inspect one's hard and idealistic struggles, the great passions and camaraderie that tended to justify your fare in the past.

Also reflect: The domain you're inside currently, must be expected to justify its own choices or raisons d'être by stratagems, strategies and with overt passions too, if heated.

You feel it to be good and natural to share ideals, aspirations and urges with others, organised, structured and with warm feelings into it too. These things could bring a sense of unity and conformity till the warmth and fondness felt for ideals etc., is burning low and something "frozen" or half-frozen takes over: it could be a show of this and that. Where that happens, a healthy community may sense it is time to get renewed somehow.

Often its pillars turns to artists to see what may lie ahead or needs to be tackled better.

Your current, great passions may signify you have had it! And that you have not got a clue to better ways too.

The depth of an issue can be revealed by how much energy and confusion it is "fattened" by socially.

"Images - those half-frozen ideals -"

If you come across spectacular performances revolving around common goals, those goals may not be felt to be very fine any longer. It may be difficult to come across persons and young folks that have warm feelings for them any more.
On the other hand, if the displays of the goals are decent and moderate, things might as well go well with the goals and those who uphold them. Opposite to this is parades where feeling flow, hysterical performances, and justifying images or solid pictures. Here is a story of a world-renowned psychologist, Abraham Maslow:

At the beginning of World War II, he was moved to tears by a patriotic parade. He decided to give up his career in experimental research in order to try to understand the causes of hatred, prejudice, and war.
"As I watched, the tears ran down my face. I felt we didn't understand - not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn't understand any of them. I felt that if we could understand, then we could make progress . . .
At that moment . . . I realised that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table . .
I wanted to make science consider all the problems that nonscientists have been handling - religion, poetry, values, philosophy, art.
I went about it by trying to understand great people, the best specimens of mankind I could find. (Maslow 1987, xxxviii)

If significant ideals or high-minded stuff gets "frozen" into art that later becomes decor, it could mean "another step down". It often happens that ideals an imagination-derived ideas in turn become art - including images - and that these frozen thought-forms then serve some culture.

In a historical light, art often represent the "half-frozen" and later "frozen" sides of a living community. Tendentious art may go into the half-frozen deals around, whereas so-called serious art and very established art deals with the frozen lots.

Visual art is by its very nature in line with trickery, maybe pretences. Art enlivens, but there are limits to it. When the limits are broken and the life that was inside them is ruined, the arts that explored those limits, tends to stop entertaining. It often happens.

Not everyone may be willing to expose or ridicule predominant facets of the culture he or she is raised inside and still is inside. But Sigmund Freud exposed much he did not like in his day, and fine clowns may both ridicule and expose a lot all year long. It is not good to be a clown.

One question is whether or how far the culture is vital. Another is how fit it is for normal id development and handiness.

Good norms are different than norms that put good, common adaptations at stake by some sort of circus emptiness.

◎ Conformity may go well if it is decent and all right and not just a veneer and culturally empty.

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Personality, Temperament, Traits and Character

"Psychological types" means minded types

Greek Hippocrates tried to explain differences among people by use of four postulated temperaments. They are quite commonly thought of as Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Melancholic.

Carl Gustav Jung stated that people differ in fundamental ways even though they all have the same amount of basic instincts (archetypes) to impel them from within. Thus, how we "function" could in part be due to solid preferences. And a preference for a given "function" could be characteristic, and if so we may be "typed" by this preference. Jung thought up some "function types" or "psychological types," and the mother-daughter team Briggs and Isabel Myers brought Jung's typology into play.

Myers (1962) formed a procedure for determining type in individuals, and by that opened the theory of types to research. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was designed by her, and decades of research by Educational Testing Services (a Research Institute) has gone into it. Vast amounts of information have been gathered about the behaviour and attitudes of the types in a wide variety of enterprises and walks of life. The MBTI purports to tell something significant around persons that are tested by it.

Misunderstanding each and every one through types is no small error and perhaps a great stride for making a living too

Perhaps we do violence to others when we assume their differences come from failings, flaws, afflictions and the like.

In misunderstanding others we may diminish our ability to predict what they will do.

And maybe "each has his own will and ways" over and above type theories.

Temperament and Character

Personality here (in this context) involves temperament and character.

TEMPERAMENT is a configuration of inclinations, an inborn form of pre-dispositions, a base from which character emerges through some underlying consistency, it is held.
CHARACTER is a configuration of habits, ie disposition, and the emergent form which develops through the interaction of temperament and environment.

It is thought that temperament, character, and personality are configured, and that we are predisposed to develop certain attitudes, certain actions. Those actions and attitudes are unified through what may be called TRAITS. Traits are thought to evolve together of necessity, and into some quite unified structure, and they preclude the emergence of a self-image.

Traits found or no traits found, there is no substitute for careful and informed observation. Candid and effective self-examination is quite foreign to most people. And if you are questioning yourself about your preferred attitudes and actions, the MBTI test could give some help. As for Freudian psychodynamics and conditioning theories, they largely dropped ideas of inborn differences in human action and attitude.

◎ Inborn predispositions may later manifest in favoured attitudes and ideas.

Jung on Play and Personality