Reflections on the Film ‘Arrival’
by Monika Wikman, Ph.D.
As most of us know, our world and all of its species hangs by a thread with the threat of annihilation. Jung saw this, felt this, knew this and addresses the reality from the depths of the psyche throughout his writing. It is the seminal foundation of Jung’s work with alchemy, as he illuminates the depths of the transmutations needed and possible for new consciousness to emerge.
Namely the film, as a collective dream, brilliantly portrays many levels of the alchemical transmutations our world direly needs for survival:
1. The sick context of our non-cohesive world today with each country’s defense structures (literally and psychologically) aimed at each other and ready to respond independently to the threat of “the other” with mass chaotic destruction and violence.
2. This world reality is brought to a head as potential contact with “the great other,” with the numinous, emerges full of danger and possibility. (In the film this is portrayed as contact with unknown “Heptapod” aliens, reminiscent of Jung’s deep psychological interest in UFO phenomenon.)
3. The film also portrays the stretch into the unknown, the grace we feel as danger transforms (in the hands of our heroine and the alien other) into discovery of a new mutual communion where human consciousness expands and transforms.
4. Between the bound in time and the eternal, the transcendent function transforms ordinary consciousness beyond time space coordinates (first depicted as the sentence structure in the linear conception of consciousness and transforms in the heroine’s hands into the circle of past-present-future in the now as perspectives mutually informing one another other).
5. A universal language of the heart emerges (no longer the Tower of Babel mythic problem) and unites all beings in this new potential that brings the ability to navigate the warring of opposites differently from these changes in consciousness at the INDIVIDUAL and COLLECTIVE levels.
6. The stretch of the transcendent bridge between ordinary human consciousness and “the great other” creates a transmutation our world direly needs.
The potential outcome living as a possibility in the field of the imagination is writ large across the screen and into our psyches as we take it in.
Importantly the “other” here is pictured as heptapod aliens/UFO phenomenon, yet is also relatedly known in various traditions that connect with the psychoidal mysteries as the primordial Divine Anthropos, the Ally, Khidr, Atman Cadmus, and so on.
In contact with this “other,” human consciousness grows the capacity to become more fully human and to transcend political cultural identifications and both psychological and literal war/weapon defense strategies.
What emerges is the gift of transcendent communion with resonant new unity intra-psychically and inter-subjectively among humans and the “other” in a subtle body permeating field whose language is love.
As the genius of this film and our own dreams intimate, hands from “both worlds” are currently working on these possibilities.
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Monika Wikman holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology {the degree of a Jungian analyst} from the Research and Training Center for Depth Psychology According to C.G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Zürich, Switzerland. You can listen to her interview with Laura London in Episode 24.