The Crisis Is 15-16 Years Old. Refusal To Incarnate

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The husband of one of my colleagues, with whom I worked in a psychiatric clinic, was an ethnographer, through her we became infected with an interest in this science. Gradually, we began to compare the knowledge about a person and the social aspects of his life, accumulated in ethnography, with the realities that we studied as psychologists.

It turned out that archaic ideas about the world, as well as ancient rituals and ways of organizing life, are still manifested in the life of a modern person. And what Jung described as "archetypes" is only a special case of the manifestation of those first "imprints" from a collision with the world, which have been preserved in the memory of mankind since those ancient times.

One of these ancient rituals or rituals that attracted our attention due to the fact that the memories of them in one form or another appear in the psyche of modern people, was the initiation rite.

We can still observe rudiments of this rite in various communities. For example, the rite of initiation, or initiation into a certain social status, is still found in the Russian army. It is associated with such a phenomenon as hazing, and manifests itself in the form of a rite of transferring young soldiers (spirits) to old servicemen. Initiation rites are found in some universities. In them, the initiation of newly entered applicants into students takes place.

In ancient times, the initiation rite performed the function of transferring young men to the status of adult members of the tribe. In order to become an adult, a young man had to die in the status of a child, and then be reborn in a completely different status - an adult: a warrior, a hunter, a man.

So that the fact of "symbolic dying" as a child does not remain a mere formality, the neophytes were led through cruel trials. They had both psychological and physical effects, so that it really seemed to them that death was very close, and they had the illusion of dying.

After the symbolic death came the turn of a new birth, which was also accompanied by special trials, and sometimes even torture. And as a result, the “newborn”, who went through all the pains of dying and birth, became a full-fledged member of the tribe.

The initiation rite usually fell on a period of 15-16 years. To our surprise, we found that a significant proportion of young men who are admitted to the clinic for examination have an inexplicable fear of death and an acute unwillingness to become an adult, to part with childhood.

After that, we began to examine and test other young men of the same age. It turned out that the fear of death in one form or another manifests itself in their tests (we used drawing tests, D-D-H, pictogram and Rorschach test).

We called this syndrome "incarnation failure."

If we put aside different nuances and subtleties, we can say that during the age crisis of 15-16 years old, “archaic fears” begin to penetrate into the psyche of young people. Within Jung's concept of the collective unconscious, one might call these fears "archetypes."

It turns out that the quite justified fear of the initiation rite that young men experienced in ancient times somehow penetrates from historical memory into the souls of modern boys and brings some of them to a state of acute neurosis.

In the most introverted and contemplative young men, in whom this "neurosis" manifested itself in a rather strong form, images and experiences appeared in tests and descriptions, very much similar to what our ancestors could experience when they were passed through the initiation rite. In panic before the impending threat, they frantically clung to their childhood, they noted a surge of infantilism and hatred of everything "grown-up". And, as already mentioned, they were haunted by an inexplicable fear of death.

The psyche on an unconscious level struggled with the archetype penetrating into consciousness. And the appeal of teachers and parents: "It's time to say goodbye to childhood and finally become an adult," drove these "neophytes" into a state close to neurosis.

As mentioned, we have called this syndrome "incarnation failure."

It was assumed that adolescents are simply afraid of a change in their social status, since this event is associated with death, they seem to refuse to incarnate in the image of adults.