The big problem with Jung is that he formalizes everything. He designs an entire categorical map and superimposes it on the subconscious.
By so doing, though, he all but makes it impossible to retrieve from it what was hidden there, long ago, by the ego, as the result of a traumatic event.
Jung tries to explain, by his categories, how everything in the subconscious makes sense, and why it moves the way it does. This is wrong headed. The question is the opposite: what doesn’t make sense, and why?
The subconscious is not some entity seperate and distinct from the ego. The ego is simply coherent awareness. When that awareness encounters something it cannot handle, it breaks the coherence and laminates a narrative that excludes from consciousness what was, nevertheless, a conscious experience. The subconscious is a repository of orphaned egoic experience.
The subconscious must rather be deformalized. An a priori structure precludes finding a hidden one. Traumatic repression is hidden structure.
Wherever incoherence exists, there the trail is.
This is why it can be said of repressed trauma that “you already know.” Only the ego “knows.” Repression is, when it happens, an egoic act. When “the light of the ego is shone on the id,” as Freud put it, assimilation is instant because, rather than bringing light to some distinct category previously unknown, you are bringing back into the egoic narrative fold what was already egoic narrative before it was repressed and the light in that room, so to speak, shut off.
It follows that one cannot hold incoherence against a person.
It also follows, however, that a person that has repressed trauma, by virtue of having structurally central and personal aspects of themselves hidden from themselves, along with violent emotions that natutally spring, egoically, from such experiences, cannot be trusted.
Where the ego no longer holds narrative control over these structurally central and personal aspects, everything the violent, even abnormal (as they are the result of abuse so abnormal that it cannot be handled and is repressed) emotions that spring from it dictate gets implemented, with some paper thin narrative stand in to “fool” the ego. This “fooling” is why even people that commit the most fucked up acts never think of themselves as evil. The reason thr ego is “fooled” to begin with is that the ego is the sole means of conscious functioning, emotions themselves cannot implement action. All ego will have a narrative thread, the only alternative is unconsciousness, literally being knocked unconscious. Decision making is inherently narrative.
The sheer navigational dexterity needed to keep such an egoic narrative functional is what gives the psychopath the psychic expertise that later gets called “charm.” It is what makes them such excellent manipulators.
Other forms of traumatic repression will be far more anxiety ridden, full of false starts and hesitation and fumbling. The subject does not learn, does not want to learn, how to keep an egoic narrative that is clearly diseased functional. Violent emotions are felt as alien invasion.
Only the psychopath, so to speak, “embraces” the disease.
This is why psychoanalysis will cure all traumatic repressive complexes, but for psychopathy.
Egoic narrative is a bothersome thing to go digging into. A very good reason is needed. It’s the very same reason a very good reason is so often found not to touch it for any reason.
Imo psychopathy isn’t based whatsoever on ego-experiences repressed into the subconscious. Psychopaths never had anything to repress and don’t suffer on any level. They are legit dead inside from an empathetic perspective, the manipulation and the charm naturally comes from living their lives among empathetic people, something the psychopath could never imagine and experience, but they have to learn to mimic their outward expressions.
I think what you’re talking about could more like be some aspects of Narcissistic PD and Borderline PD, and even there many NPDs don’t suffer at all.
What I think you are missing is that humans are animals with predictable biological structures, which includes the psyche. Aberrations do not happen for no reason.
The psychopath is abused to a heavier degree than other trauma survivors. They also are already a weaker type from the beginning. So when the two things clash, the feeling of powerlesness generated by the abuse is so poweful, that it wipes out their empathetic drive. Keep in mind that empathy, thinking others are worth a shit, requires also that you think you yourself are worth a shit. Wishing well for others requires the ability to feel well, which implies feeling power.
A psychopath feels perfect powerlesness. I wonder if you can even imagine that. Complete mercy to whatever irresistible adult force fucked with them. Zero control or say over their own bodies.
Their drives are the same as all humans, they still need the same emotional sources. But they can’t get it like others can. The only way they can relate to power, which is the feeling around which most of the human psyche unfolds from, is through that horrific abuse. So is any idea they have of contact with another human being, which they also need just as bad as everybody else. They are not worth a shit, so why should anybody else be? Nobody wept for them, so who should weep for their own victims? There is no evil here, or evil intent. Just a desperate need to shake off the orphaned emotions from a traumatic experience.
I believe your judgment, both of the psychopath and of the narcissist, springs from anger towards them. I invite you to take a more clinical view. Pain is a great motivator, specially for horror.
There is no reason to believe that being smooth, or charming, or cold and calculating, supposes no suffering. It simply hides it well. If pain is such a motivator for horror, and most humans instinctively know this, then hiding it has to be a first priority for these criminals.
I disagree, imo psychopaths don’t have the psyche you speak of. They keep voluntarily turning their brain/mind regions on and off. I don’t think you’re talking about psychopaths.
This is one of the big misteries, in my experience there seems to be a secondary reptilian-like “psyche” that kicks in, when the frontal-lobe-driven psyche stops working. Often this has nothing to do with abuse. I think it’s a failsafe mechanism.
Imo one of the biggest mistakes one can make in life is viewing psychopaths as psychologically “human”.
I think that is an emotional response to a horrific disease.
But human they are. The less you mythologize it, the more you can get into the intringuli of how it works, and the more you can, if needed, do something about it.