Wild Mind. Bill Plotkin
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in which Spirit occasionally catches a glimpse of its own evolution through the consciousness of self-aware beings. Within this (upperworld) frame of reference, the Ego is entirely at home in the Universe and is cultivating a personal relationship with Spirit, sometimes experiencing itself as a child of Spirit, at other times as Spirit’s Beloved or Friend, Partner or Collaborator. A person with a mature Ego understands that by serving as an agent for Soul, she’s also serving as an agent for Spirit.
Immature Egos
A person with an immature Ego, in contrast, understands herself as primarily or solely an agent for herself — or at least acts that way, whatever she might believe. Western and Westernized cultures have devolved to the point that many of their members perpetually experience themselves as “looking out for number one.” They have little or no direct experience of Self, Soul, or Spirit (or of truly belonging to a human community or to the Earth community or of our interdependence with all things).
Because immature people experience the world, self, and others primarily through their subpersonalities, we can say that their subpersonalities are substitutes (subs) for Self, Soul, and Spirit. (This is another reason for abbreviating subpersonalities as subs.)
Essential Services Provided by Subpersonalities
As we’ve seen, the function of the subpersonalities is to protect us, especially psychologically and especially during childhood: they keep us safe by keeping us small. I mean small in the psychological and social senses: relatively powerless, nonassertive, harmless, invisible, and unaware; or, conversely, psychologically small by appearing socially, economically, or politically “big” through the wielding of immature, dominator power over others. The four groups of subpersonalities accomplish this in different ways.
The subs protect us by influencing us to act in ways they believe will reduce the chances of our being criticized by others, or humiliated, rejected, ostracized, disempowered, injured, left to die, or killed. Most of them are very good at what they do. Without them, most of us would not have survived as well as we have. We owe them a lot. Probably our lives.17
WHOLING, THE FOUNDATION FOR TRUE HEALING
The Nature-Based Map of the Psyche serves as a guide to the healing and wholing practices foundational to becoming fully human.18 By wholing, I mean the cultivation of the Self, including all four of its facets. Wholing — which enables us to understand both the limitations and the gifts of our wounded or fragmented subpersonalities — is a necessary step in optimal human development.
Wholing is the foundation for true healing. Some degree of personal wholing must precede any deep healing, not the other way around. In Western societies, many believe we can’t be whole — truly loving, highly creative people contributing to the world — until we have sufficiently healed from our childhood wounds. But I believe the opposite is closer to the truth: Deep psychological healing is the result of learning how to embrace our woundedness and fragmentedness from the cultivated perspective and consciousness of the Self. We must to some degree cultivate our wholeness before we can truly be healed. Wholing comes first and is foundational.
In the predominant paradigm in Western psychotherapy, the therapist acts as the agent of the client’s healing. The mature therapist accomplishes this by being present to the client with the resources of the therapist’s Self. It’s the therapist, in other words, who supplies the wholeness.19 This Western mode of psychological healing provides a great service, especially when the client has little access to her Self, but this is not the sort of in-depth healing from which we most benefit. It’s more of a temporary fix or a relatively shallow healing that might later reveal deeper wounds. The more in-depth healing occurs when we learn to embrace our fragmentedness from our own wholeness. This is self-healing — or, more precisely, Self-healing (healing accomplished by an Ego rooted in the Self).20
But once we get started in our wholing, we can begin Self-healing; and Self-healing accelerates our capacity for wholing. Wholing and healing reinforce each other.
Personal wholing and healing, however, require more than simply developing relationships between parts of our own psyches and between our selves and other humans. Psychological wholeness also necessitates a mature and reciprocal relationship with the more-than-human world of which we are members. We are served therapeutically and in so many other ways by nature, yes, but it is also vital that we each step up to our responsibility and opportunity to protect and serve the natural world. We can do this in any number of ways, including planting trees, preserving and restoring habitat, eliminating waste and pollution, protesting ecological crimes, and helping to change the laws, policies, and customs that enable such crimes. Engaging in the good hard work of such service may, in fact, be one of the most effective paths to our individual psychological healing — for many people, ecological service alone (including service to our fellow humans) may be more therapeutic than psychotherapy.21
A true adult is in conscious relationship and service to our mysterious and endangered world and, more generally, is a creative, joyful, and contributing member of the Earth community. Our private psyches are meant to be public resources. The personal contributes to the cultural, and vice versa. The personal also contributes to the ecological, and vice versa: as healthy humans, we enhance our more-than-human environment, and we have no life at all, of course, without a thriving environment.
THE PROCESS OF INDIVIDUATION
Individuation is the word Carl Jung used for the cultivation of the psyche into a coherent whole, the process of becoming one’s “true self.” I think of it as the process of becoming fully human. From the perspective of the Nature- Based Map of the Psyche, the goals of individuation include the following:
•Cultivating our awareness of and our ability to embody the four facets of the Self
•Becoming aware of how our subpersonalities operate and then embracing them from the holistic perspective of the Self, in this way integrating our subpersonalities within the functioning of the 3-D Ego
•When developmentally ready, embarking upon the descent to Soul in order to discover our ecological or mythopoetic place in the world — “the truth at the center of the image we were born with” — and then cultivating our ability to embody or manifest this place or truth
•Developing a personal relationship with Spirit and/or cultivating our capacity to be conscious from the perspective of Spirit
•Applying ourselves to the developmental tasks of the life stage we’re in, as well as to the most incomplete tasks of earlier stages (a nature-based perspective on these tasks and stages can be found in what I call the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel, introduced in my book Nature and the Human Soul)
ASSESSING OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH
In addition to serving as a guide to the development of wholeness, the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche provides a constructive, person-affirming method of psychological assessment. It’s an aid for identifying the innate psychological resources that are most in need of cultivation in an individual, how to go about this cultivation, and what sorts of symptoms are likely to become apparent when these resources are unavailable.22
A COMPLETE PORTRAIT OF THE PSYCHE
After considering our humanity from nature’s holistic perspective, it seems fair to conclude that previous maps of the psyche offered by Western psychology have been incomplete. The principal intrapsychic elements identified by the major schools of psychology are all represented on the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche (not because I was specifically attempting to include them, but because the seven-directions matrix suggested them), but none of these schools have included all the elements identified by the Nature-Based Map; most incorporate fewer than half, and many essential distinctions are missing.23 Twentieth-century Western psychology provided many advances in our capacity for self-understanding, but it developed in a time and within a cultural framework that limited its vision, making it difficult for us to see the whole picture.
In contrast to earlier Western models of the human mind, the Nature- Based Map of the Psyche has been constructed