According to what is considered psychologically normal, from a Jungian perspective, the pre-Oedipal self (which stays with us as a layer of consciousness into adulthood) and the ego (a later, more mature development, enabling us to come to terms with reality) should work in tandem, with neither aspect of the mind dominating the other one. Certainly I think that this is the norm for black and white Africans in Zimbabwe, for the most part.
What came to me as a cultural shock -- and something I could neither fathom nor initially come to terms with -- was the way in which white Australians had a very different psychical construction than the one I had been used to. In their case, the ego dominated and mastered "the self" -- something that in Jungian terms is related to ego-inflation.
It was this cultural difference -- more of an epochal difference -- that I found it so hard to come to terms with (and still do).
2 comments:
That is my culture shock coming to be a professor. I don't know whether it was regional - professors tend to be from the East and South, in my experience and I am from the West. It seems to me to be white male capitalist culture.
Yes, if we are brought up elsewhere, we always feel like our rhythms are somehow wrong, and that we need to kind of take conscious control over all the functions that ought to be automatic. Living in a culture that is very different from the one that you were brought up in is exhausting -- like you had to make breathing a voluntary activity, rather than just allowing it to occur.
Post a Comment