The autonomous psyche manifests in a kind of miraculous way from the darkness of the unconscious. I want to draw your attention to two of its attributes:
First, it is said to have “immense weight.” Keep in mind that we're dealing with the phenomenology of the Selfthe source of the autonomous spirit of the psycheso this notion of immense weight is an aspect of the Self
ML p.297It reminds me of a recent concept of astronomy that is quite helpful in understanding certain psychic phenomena. I'm talking about the concept of the black hole
ML p.297BLACK HOLE
The idea is that a dwarf star in the last stage of its evolution, implodes, so to speak, and falls in on itself with great power, creating a black hole. It is very interesting that this idea should appear in modern times because I think it corresponds to a psychological fact. I don't doubt that someday all our present cosmological notions will be recognized as myths, just as Ptolemy's notions are now recognized as myth. What we now think is science will, in the future, very likely be seen as mythin other words as a psychological projection
ML p.297Listen to this description of a black hole. This comes from the Micropedia of the Encyclopedia Britannica: The black hole in space is a postulated object whose mass is so intensely concentrated that normal properties of space in its vicinity are altered drastically and even light cannot escape the gravitational attraction with a certain distance from the center.The black hole is one of three postulated final stages of stellar evolution.Most properties of the black hole are not observable. Space-time around the object is so sharply curved that no light escapes, no matter can be ejected and all details of infalling matter are obliterated. No stationary external observer can see anything of phenomena occurring within a radius at which the escape velocity is close to the speed of light. This radius is called the event-horizon, or the Schwartzchild radius. This event-horizon is a certain distance from the black hole and within that horizon no events can take place or are visible. ( Micropedia, vol. 2, p. 61, condensed )
ML p.297The idea is that they all fall into the hole, you see
ML p.297Continuing: As the center is approached, the curvature of the space-time whirlpool continues to increase, becoming infinite at the central singularity. At such extreme conditions an outside observer cannot associate meaningful times with interior events and hence no communication is possible with an observer inside the Schwartzchild radius. All matter collapsing into the black hole is soon compressed to a mere infinite density, losing in the process virtually every property of its separate identity. ( Micropedia, vol. 2, p. 61, condensed )
ML p.297BLACK HOLE DESCRIBES ASPECT
OF THE SELF
I consider this to be the description of a certain aspect of the phenomenology of the Self. When this aspect of the Self is activatedand it is an imploding aspect rather than an exploding aspectthen all libido falls inward and none of it can escape the pull of that gravity. An example of this phenomenon is catatonic schizophrenia. I don't know that anybody sees catatonic schizophrenia in its original form anymore because people are medicated so quickly. But it is a very striking phenomenon in which the individual, so far as an observer can perceive, has no visible connection with the external environment. In other words, the “event-horizon” is of such size that there is nothing escaping there
ML p.298`SUCKING MOUTHS OF EMPTINESS'
We get lesser versions of the same black hole phenomenon in certain patients, in certain kinds of psychology. A term that Eleanor Bertine, one of the original New York Jungian analysts, used for this is particularly apt: she called people with such a psychology “sucking mouths of emptiness.” Smaller versions of black holes. And people of that kind walk into our offices every now and then. One of the ways you can recognize that psychology is how depleted you feel after you've been within the event-horizon of such a person. If you've been within that space, then part of you has been sucked into that empty mouth. I think it is a phenomenon of the negatively constellated Self that, in Dorn's text, is said to have immense weightin other words a gravitational pull, a psychic gravity that pulls stuff into it
ML p.298