Archetypal Analysis

The spiritual emergence that happened in 2015 was not sudden in essence, even if it appeared that way. It felt like the point toward which everything in my inner life had been quietly moving. My inner world came into sharp focus, and I started to glimpse into one continuous experiential pattern.

Memories, feelings, and dreams that I had mostly treated as background noise suddenly became central, as the reality I had literally dreamt of in 2010 began to take shape around me. It felt as if reality as I knew it until then had shattered. I felt compelled to try to answer the question of God's existence for myself. Completely unaware of what I was setting in motion, I aligned myself with actions that honored my innate sense of integrity of self and refused what violated it, while remaining fair to the possibility of a hypothetical loving God out of principle alone. That alignment was not intellectual or merely moral but existential.

Fragments I'd carried my entire life began connecting into a coherent whole, and I found myself immersed in what I understood as God - an experience of overwhelming clarity, unity, and love, where everything felt like a paradox while nothing was a paradox - the paradox of paradoxes as I thought to myself then.

I do not see my experience as predetermined in any way, but merely a display of the relationship between cause and effect at the level of experience operating through agency. Unbeknownst to me, I aligned with love for Self and love for Other (God in this case), by refusing to compromise my inner truth. It was the culmination of a practice of awareness directed toward existential honesty, where my choice of authentic selfhood over the paralysing grip of inherited fear and dogma, while remaining fair to the possibility of a loving God would resolve the conflict between the inner reality I experienced and the cultural/societal expectations around faith.

I can easily see how such an experience could turn into full-blown psychosis. Even without crossing that line, it can certainly appear that way from the outside. After my experience, my vocabulary narrowed almost entirely to three words: Love, Truth, Light.

I saw them as both ethical and structural, and I was aware they were a compression of a more complex articulation, but short of relaying the experiential patterns in the entirety of my experience which meant pretty much my entire life, that was all I could speak when trying to describe what I had lived through. Add the word God and it sounds like a recipe for social disaster.

And while I knew that I hadn't lost touch with reality, I still faced the impossible question: how could I convince others I wasn't mad when, short of laying out all the patterns I could see in my experience, I could barely say anything beyond love, truth, light? I could see why these concepts mattered, but I couldn't yet articulate them in any reasonable way.

A short month later, I met A. - the very man I had literally dreamt of a decade before, and grown up labelling the Devil. It was very easy to place the devil label onto a figure belonging to what you believe to be mere dreams. Even if I was aware that it was an assumption and not truth, my reality was that I was scared in those dreams, and he was the man from two of those dreams.

When I met him however, I felt it would be too heavy and unfair to impose that label on someone who'd done nothing wrong. At the same time, I'd just experienced what felt like alignment with what cultures call God. In this context, encountering what cultures call the Devil no longer seemed entirely irrational.

A.'s presence lit up a cluster of patterns that I later found described in Jungian terms as archetypal ways in which consciousness organises experience - structural, affective, symbolic and relational patterns gathered around a single axis: God-Devil compressed Love-Fear, Light-Dark, Control-Trust. Jungian psychology was essential in helping me recognise experiential and archetypal structures, but from what I experienced, shadow seems to be less about repression and more about what consciousness has not yet integrated into coherence. In my experience shadow remains hidden only to the extent that awareness closes around it. When awareness stays open, the same material that appears as shadow in one becomes data for integration in another.

What happened with A. was in no way me projecting the Devil onto him, nor do I see A. as evil - not then, and not now.

I'd been aware and working through my relationship with the Devil archetype long before we met. I was able to do so because of one particular contrast I'd observed. I'd never had a physical type when it came to men - except for one very specific aesthetic: a particular combination of features A. fit into. I noticed how when I'd encounter men who closely resembled this particular configuration, I'd feel an instinctive aversion that struck me as odd. My attraction had never been based on physical characteristics, so such strong feelings based on appearance seemed unusual to me given my consistent pattern of behavior, so the question of why this particular type arose. It wasn't long until I was able to connect the type with the dreams.

It then took me some more time to unpack what these feelings were about: attraction combined with shame. The shame was a defense against acknowledging the attraction - which, through years of dreams featuring this type around whom I felt fear, I'd learned to associate with something dark and dangerous. I'd even resolved the shame and part of my fear by the time I met him. Shortly before we met I nearly got involved with someone the same type. It didn't end up happening, although for completely unrelated reasons.

When I met A., the pattern didn't activate because I projected it onto him. I did not impose the archetype onto him, but merely recognised it as a possibility. Projection would mean I made him into something he wasn't, and that projection never happened. I simply encountered in reality a person I'd dreamt of years before onto whom I had grown up applying the Devil label. The activation was structural and existential. He wasn't someone who merely resembled an internal pattern but the actual figure from two dreams that came true in precise detail years later, dreams I grew up labelling with this archetype.

When I met him, before having any awareness of our interactions in the dream, I actually didn't see the Devil. We connected over shared values, which sparked an attraction. Then, when the memory of the dream, and associated fear arose, it seemed too on the nose for me. I'd just experienced what felt like alignment with fundamental coherence, and now someone was triggering my oldest fear pattern?

It seemed too convenient and narratively neat. I thought: what are the odds I'd 'find God' and then immediately encounter 'the Devil' symbol - a symbol associated with a figure I didn't even believe in? The timing made me skeptical. I didn't dismiss the possibility, but I wasn't going to project it onto him, because the symmetry itself seemed too suspicious to me. I allowed it to co-exist with the other hypothesis - the devil existed alongside the self hypothesis. Both hypotheses emerged from the structure of the 2003 dream where I'd gone back and forth between these two poles.

The night before the dream in 2003, I'd been searching for information on tantric sex and could only find relevant material in an article about twin flames. I felt the twin soul concept was lovely, but I dismissed it as myth. That same night, I dreamt the first encounter with A., twelve years before it happened in eerie detail. In the dream, I'd gone back and forth between 'is he the other half of my soul', or 'is he the devil'?

Then, when I first met him in 2015, certain details felt too specific to dismiss. I saw someone whose values, language, and way of being, appeared to mirror my own, so I held both as possibilities without committing to either.

The Self hypothesis was based on actual observable data. I considered that whatever was true would hold equal value to me. Ironically, I had more evidence for a shared soul, than I did for him as the vehicle for the Devil archetype. I, however, allowed both hypotheses to run side by side. While I loved the idea of that kind of connection, it was also a hypothesis that came with 'Devil' as its contrasting pole. You know that saying 'The Devil doesn't come wearing horns and a red cape, but as everything you ever wished for' so I simply stayed open.

The first thing we connected over was our view on stereotypes - something I felt strongly about, and his statements shared the same conviction. Then, his unprompted use of words like 'unfair' and 'freedom' also struck me. They appeared to carry the same moral weight they held in my own vocabulary. When I invited him to correct my grammar after he complemented my English, his manner of engaging with it had me consider the same relationship with language as I had - precise, careful, weighted. Even his relationship with the very concept of reality resonated with my own. He seemed to engage with the world through the same philosophical lens. Then, based on words he shared with me that night, I was also able to see that people had also independently described our temperaments using virtually identical phrases: him as 'very chill', 'living on a cloud'; me as 'so calm I'll live to a hundred', 'living on a cloud'. Without me sharing my observations, he even remarked that we are very similar.

Then there was what I experienced as synergetic movement between our consciousnesses which was entirely new to me and not something I'd ever considered to look for, or even that I could encounter. It was the first time in my life I felt to use the word synergy, a word whose use he reacted to. It felt structural, like two awareness systems recognising similar patterning in each other, bouncing off of each other where even the silent moments felt pleasurably intense yet comfortable.

I couldn't help but observe what to me seemed like an unusual high degree of structural resonance - similar natural orientations, similar values, temperaments, interests, similar ways of organising experience. Later, learning he explicitly identified with human rights values, his training in philosophy and politics, his professional background, his seeming love of words and wordplay, confirmed that my perception of him, at least in these respects seemed to have been accurate. The structure of our shared experience seemed to point in that direction as well.

The polarity in the structure of the second time we met, where his reality was a complete inversion of mine. His seemed to be filtered through fear whereas mine was filtered through love. My attempts at inclusion, seemed to register to him as othering. I'd try to talk about my spiritual experience as a way to provide context for my reasoning, wanting to show him why I believed we may share the same soul, and he'd hear religious prejudice. Because I was far from having processed my experience, short of laying out the patterns and structure in my experience I didn't know how else to express what I needed from him in order to feel safe without offending him. Nor did I know how else to explain to him, why I believed we share the same consciousness. The more I tried to express inclusion, the more he seemed to perceive exclusion. It seemed like the archetypes had taken over our communication - Love and Fear unable to recognise each other. I understood Love and Fear as two sides of the same coin during my spiritual emergence, but it was much later that I would get to understand them as two poles of the same underlying field of reality - consciousness experiencing the full spectrum of reality from one pole to its contrasting opposite: love vs fear, god vs devil, self vs other, fair vs unfair with both poles seeming to be equally present in both of our fields at the same time but inverted.

Despite all of this, I, treaded carefully and didn't let go of the Devil hypothesis, especially given his ambiguity, and in absence of any confirmation from him. The Devil as contrast made it a safety issue for me, and I worried it would be premature to settle on the Self before I fully understood the presence of the Devil.

I was always aware of what the Devil symbolised - control, deception and manipulation through obstruction of reality/truth. While I was aware of the meaning/feelings behind the symbolism, I had yet to understand its exact roots and map it onto my reality.

I used to assign the Devil symbol in my experience, to individual agency rather than see it as a systemic pattern, even if it was the systemic pattern I feared most. I never feared A.'s Muslimness. I feared the ways in which the patriarchy might have shaped him. This was a fear I had regardless of the person in front of me, and one, I, once again, don't feel I projected onto him. Until the pattern stabilised as a pattern during his silence, I constantly hoped and allowed for different, kinder, more generous explanations as I understood the impossibility of the circumstance for both of us.

I, like all of us, grew up in the patriarchal system we all know and cherish, and had been a feminist before I even had the label. God was the first man I rebelled against over gender norms, so I wasn't naive when it came to how patriarchy operated, but having seen him feel as strongly regarding bias and prejudice, seeing he identified with feminist values, and having registered him as Self, had me feeling that he must be among the best of men society has to offer. The irony is that I still believe he is among the best of men society has to offer.

Despite my fear of the ways in which patriarchy might have shaped him, because I didn't understand the relationship with the Devil symbol, I didn't think patriarchy and the symbol had anything to do with one another. I feared the same patriarchal conditioning with any man, and the Devil symbol didn't encode physical or sexual violence for me - the most obvious patriarchal patterns, that I would expect to be encoded in such a heavy symbol.

His continued silence despite my visible distress, however, put things into perspective for me. His actions, within context, must be lowest on the scale of patriarchal operations and it is only now, that I can see the symbol as a representation that aligns with gendered power dynamics, one I've been much too familiar with my entire life, and one that sees the experience come full circle from what seemed to be his core wound around othering to mine.

The silence, the accumulation of behaviors on a background of recovered memory, emotional processing, and integration put them into perspective. From where I'm standing today, his words and actions read as the standard operating procedure of a dysfunctional system that threatens women's integrity, be it psychological or physical. A dysfunctional system that I believe started operating through a lack of desire to test, probe and engage with the shared reality, a reality I was very much a part of.

His treatment of me that second night, not only left me traumatised, resulting in memory loss but was a complete inversion of my reality, during which I felt my inner world was defined with no real attempt to understand it. This, followed by ambiguity, and then silence would have me question my reality for the following decade.

I now can't help but see his words and actions during that second night as psychological projection. He mocked and ridiculed my spiritual experience while implying I was engaging in religious prejudice. He made comments consistent with Eastern European cultural stereotypes while implying I was stereotyping his culture. His seeming blindness and the lack of compassion when faced with my distress: the verbal assault registered so severely that I nearly lost my consciousness, and his cousin needed to intervene to alert him. My state was visibly severe enough that a member of his family, Muslim man himself, and someone I can only assume was biased towards his kin and had witnessed him accuse me of Islamophobia, felt to intervene.

His words that night also made me feel as if my pattern recognition skills were evidence of pathology, while his are an asset he earns his living from. He made sure to state his analytical skills as if to point out my lack of them. And while I could never claim it wasn't consensual, the moment he became angry with me, whether or not he was making me feel like a sex object didn't seem to be a care he had, all while I was in a vulnerable condition, desperate for repair.

In 2017, despite telling him it all went beyond the romantic implications, his words, and subsequent actions reflect I was being reduced to just that: the woman whose only needs could be romantic - a transactional role women are often reduced to. And this was so when he never offered repair, or closure for an experience and dynamic he was equally responsible for creating.

His sustained vagueness, and subsequent silence took the experience from existential charge to existential crisis for me. He externalised the intensity and discomfort onto me - in 2018 he was telling me 'Let's keep in touch without the intensity' as if I was responsible for it, and as if the significant role he played in that intensity was invisible. He lit the match, and then blamed me for the smoke.

I was guilty and responsible for my and his discomfort. I didn't start in agreement with it, but his treatment of me the second night, followed by vagueness and silence had me emotionally internalise it.

These behaviors are not a reflection of his humanity, but an account of how a systemic pattern - one I find to be socially normalised and even acceptable - expressed through the reality we shared. I couldn't conflate his personhood with the archetype itself, nor would I want to flatten his complexity. Instead, I merely recognise that for whatever reason, he was a vehicle through which the archetype manifested, as after all this time, I can't help but feel that his choices maximised my discomfort while minimising his cost.

A. was the point where the patriarchal inversion of reality entered my field most acutely. From my perspective, it was gendered dysfunction that became the catalyst for the descent that followed. Profound coherence suddenly reversed into fragmentation that left me with no memory of the traumatic event, no explanation, and difficulty aligning myself with the actual reality of an existentially charged experience, in the aftermath of our meeting.

The first moment I realised how the fear in the dreams with the Devil figure consistently mapped to the constant threat of violence - mental, emotional or physical - girls live in from a young age, was during his sustained silence between 2023-2026.

His silence in the face of my visible distress, left me unable to interpret his behaviors charitably anymore, and felt every ounce like the torment I experienced in many of those dreams - a torment that was oftentimes accompanied by silence. During those times I would consistently find myself being triggered to remember some of those dreams with the Devil figure. In my particular case, this figure never harmed me physically, but there was constant fear, and what felt like psychological torment. His silence wasn't just absence. It was actively producing something. Every unreturned ask for clarity, every non-response to a visible and reasonable need, kept generating the same framing: that I was the unreasonable woman, that my need was the problem. I wasn't asking for his hand in marriage. I was asking for clarity about a shared experience that had existential weight and the silence kept insisting, without a single word, that even that was too much.

What made it recognisable was the tormenting quality of the silence - the same kind of torment I would experience in those dreams. The silence felt identical in affective content, and structure. It produced the same specific helplessness that was making me feel something other than a human being with normal human needs who needed unfairness acknowledged, who needed to be seen and heard. The same specific helplessness of needing something minimal and reasonable from someone who could give it, who should give it, and watching them refuse it. Not threatening words, not physical danger, but the particular cruelty of being left to dissolve in the gap between what you know is right and what is being acknowledged as right.

My body had been learning that particular quality of fear and torment long before A. arrived. The dreams had been encoding it since childhood. His silence was making me feel as if my need for clarity was the source of the problem rather than the withholding of it - the patriarchal inversion in its most everyday form. It doesn't require malice, just a social structure that validated his silence as reasonable self-protection while reading my persistence as instability or excess. It was this recognition that made the inversion of reality stop looking like confusion. When the silence consistently produced the framing that my need for clarity was excessive and his silence was reasonable, without a single word being exchanged, I could no longer believe I was dealing with someone struggling and confused about how to navigate an unusual situation. The mechanism was too consistent, too effective, too socially legible for that. And once this became visible, every other behavior that I didn't know what to make of previously, started landing differently.

I had started from understanding the strangeness of the context, and his position within it. In that context his behaviors could be read in multiple ways, as without the visible thread of patriarchy I saw a human being who was just as confused as I was. For a very long time, I thought he was having equal difficulty wrapping his mind around what had happened. However, the sustained nature that betrayed a lack of awareness of gender power dynamics to me, the accumulation of behaviors and the unreasonable silence made the gendered dysfunction visible as a pattern.

While this is anecdotal, someone I had once spoken with about spirituality, to whom I had recounted my experience, told me that many women have dreams in which they encounter a figure they call the Devil. If this were true, and if my experience of the Devil archetype encodes gendered power dynamics, then, it is possible for this to be true of other women's experience. It is possible that my experience is not unique, and that the symbol appears most visibly in collective feminine consciousness as the experience of patriarchy: that which threatens women's survival either physically or psychologically, rendered symbolically.

Upon some research it seems that patriarchy either predates the symbol or the symbol is almost as old as patriarchy. I do not refer to the Devil symbol per se but to whichever analogous that encodes the threat of otherness, self/other erasure, inversion of reality, chaos, deception, predation, control, the severing of love from truth, normalisation of distortion and the force that pulls relation into domination or fragmentation. Patriarchy may be one of the clearest social expressions of the Devil-pattern and the social system that institutionalised the pattern.

In the reality I shared with A., my experience started with intense intimacy followed by fear based accusations that reversed my reality and resulted in his withdrawal from a relational space he helped create. This was then compounded by years of unaddressed and unacknowledged reality, ambiguity, emotional whiplash with polite words like 'lovely', and 'sweet', and then complete silence and lack of accountability in the face of my visible distress.

His ambiguity and silence acted as distortion and obstruction of reality, preventing reality in an experience that held existential weight for me to stabilise. Coherence was prevented as Integration could not perform its movement because Differentiation was blocked in my case, leaving me unable to settle my relation to any of the axes of contrast involved - self/devil, love/fear, safe/unsafe, fair/unfair, trust/control, light/dark, justice/ injustice, belonging/ erasure, seen/unseen.

The symbols of the axes (God/Devil, Light/Dark, Love/Fear, Trust/Control, Self/Other); the principles Love - as integrity of my inner reality, and compassion for self; Truth as differentiation of reality in absence of clarity; and their presence or absence on any axis became the tool for both the articulation of the structure of reality and for regaining coherence. I held onto Love, and Truth as the tools I knew and trusted to be my way out when there was no reliable reflection from my external reality.

I, however, knew that if I betray my inner reality and world I will do myself a disservice. I engaged with it all despite social awareness of how I may look to the social and relational field, and chose to prioritise my psychological survival against optics. I was aware that my actions, and my words would likely be read as the woman fixated on a man, despite me consistently stating my need for clarity, my respect for his agency and autonomy. 

His silence didn't just withhold clarity but actively produced a reading of me. By not responding to a reasonable ask, it framed the ask itself as unreasonable. I wasn't asking for too much - but the silence kept insisting that I was, without ever having to say so directly. That felt like a specific kind of gaslighting that didn't require a single dishonest word. The absence did the work.

I knew the embarrassment was externally imposed and was produced by a system that preferred I surrender, absorb the incoherence, and abandon my psychological integrity. Despite my awareness of embarrassment being externally imposed, I held the line without being able to feel my way through it. Affect was still largely inaccessible in those days, and even when it became accessible my awareness of external imposition, combined with his continued silence, didn't necessarily dissolve the feeling. 

I oftentimes imagined how from the outside it looked like I had lost control, when in fact I did not. I was simply testing my reality. I saw no other option but to rely on the structural reasoning that betraying my reality however socially unacceptable would mean having to continue carrying the heaviness of an unresolved existential experience indefinitely. In this context, anything else would have been self-abandonment and willingness to self-erase which would have cost me, and me alone.

By articulating what I was experiencing structurally - recognising the unfairness of the obstruction, naming the absence and difficulty to differentiate in complete darkness, understanding why integration was failing - gave me the courage to push towards coherence even in absence of clarity from him. It was through persistence by generating data in silence, looking for stable patterns to connect the fragments, in trying to interpret the experience and establish my reality. It was slower, harder, and lonely, but doing so, meant I wasn't completely lost, and I could regain some control over my experience. I could see what was broken and why, and work on restoring continuity of self and coherence.

While I am aware that Jung is often dismissed in modern psychology, it is hard for me to ignore how textbook Jungian the God–Devil polarity looks. Given my experience, and observations I am tempted to diverge from his emphasis on projection and on integration through suffering, but I can recognise the core insight.

In my view, projection happens when we lack awareness of the archetype's existence which wasn't my case. In regards to suffering being a condition for integration, from my perspective what we sometimes call suffering is simply the discomfort of axes being restored and old patterns releasing and reorganising. I believe the pain belongs to a survival (physical or psychological) relevant axis where contrasting poles became tangled, or inversed and constellated into an archetypal symbolic representation.

The act of differentiation is the act of pole restoration, which in my case had blurred and remained suspended, and integration is the act of releasing the pain held in the archetype's symbol. I think that clarity over the pattern condensed by the symbolism is what gives way to the process of archetypal integration. I believe the restoration of my relation to the poles, could have been a much more positive experience than the one I had. I already had some awareness of the tangle and saw the possible meaning behind the archetypal symbolism. What I didn't have was a stable reality, but one that kept shifting from one pole to another. The suffering was a consequence of the disorientation and my lack of awareness of actual reality, something that the trauma's memory loss, and then his silence prevented access to.

I also believe that whatever I integrated was despite the silence which was what caused the suffering, and not because of it.

Based on my observations Jung's insight that such patterns don't originate in personal psychology alone, but arise from deeper structural levels of consciousness aligns with what I experienced.

The God/Devil pattern compressed the Light/Dark, Trust/Control, Love/Fear in my psyche since childhood. Based on my observations the axis speaks of coherence/inversion of coherence, where God is a symbol of absolute coherence, Light a symbol of the felt state of coherence from within, Love is the relational-affective component, and Trust the ability to stay in relation without domination. They are ultimately symbols of psychological integrity, with Devil/Dark/Control/Fear being their inversion that threatened my survival as an individual - my psychological survival.

While patriarchy is more often associated with overt violence, that wasn't needed for me to encode the threat of violence girls and women face. I considered many hypotheses given the heaviness of the symbol, including repressed memories. I went down memory lane and retrieved all sorts of memories. I even retrieved the memory that led to the first dream with the Devil archetype, but it didn't come as a consequence of something overtly heinous but as a consequence of the absorption of the fear women in my environment faced, andthe normalised stereotype filled language surrounding women.

Not only was the threat of violence a constant in my dreams with the Devil figure, but I was subjected to gendered power dynamics from birth, because the world I lived in defined me by my sex.

I believe the compression of coherence/incoherence became tangled in my early environment through mechanisms that are quite average under patriarchal norms. The incoherence lived in the inversion: what was presented to me as love often carried the qualities of fear, control, or erasure, while what protected my coherence and integrity could be framed as wrong, selfish, disrespectful or unloving towards Other. My child's body learned that certain needs - for reality, for clarity, for being seen and registered accurately - were already too much before they were even expressed. My psyche compressed this entanglement into the God/Devil polarity as the most readily available symbols for my mind to make sense of that tangle.

The Devil in my experience was not a metaphysical figure to fight, but a recurring axis in collective consciousness: coherence of self on one side, and reality distortion sustained by fear based mechanisms on the other. In this sense the Devil is mere socially normalised dysfunctional gender power dynamic given symbolic form. The pattern lives in families, in institutions, in cultures, anywhere truth is bent, and compassion and empathy withheld, in order to preserve comfort or dominance. The Devil is the patriarchy, at least in the structure of my experience.

A. being the vehicle through which the Devil archetype manifested does not exclude the Self hypothesis. It is not something I am partial to. If anything, I am more impartial now than ever, because it can no longer make or break my reality. Not only is the hypothesis still standing, because the amount of evidence - beyond what this site presents - demands it but I also believe I am registering it as truth. I have moments where I still go from certainty, to uncertainty - questioning my interpretation of the data. My reality is that I started from affective registration of the poles, and then the pole of Self blurred into the Devil pole, with me being left with no distinction between the Self and Devil poles anymore. While I have now narrowed down both poles I believe residuals, and resistance to an otherwise uncomfortable reality, and outcome may be present.