"Arrival" - a Jungian psychological review

Rating: 8/10 (19 November 2016)

The film "Arrival," based on the "Story of Your Life" by author Ted Chiang, is a tale about the self-realization of an individual personality. Treating the whole story as an individual's dream or series of dreams, we can interpret it as a projection into drama of what a person undergoes who is integrating new information into a larger personality or individuality, a process that C. G. Jung also called individuation or the realization of wholeness.
The 12 UFO spacecraft, called shells, and the seven-legged aliens that they enclose, are self-symbols, symbols of the integrated wholeness of psyche which combines both what is behind and beyond time and space, on the one hand, and the perceiving ego consciousness conditioned by the time and space forms of perception, on the other hand. The numbers 7 and 12 point symbolically to completed creation (7 days of creation, 12 months of the solar year), meaning completed consciousness and entire personality. They also invoke the astrological (7 planets, 12 star signs) equivalence of what is above (the macrocosm or overall order of psyche) and below (the microcosm or human individuality). These symbols want to be understood by and fully enter into human life, as Jung describes in his book on UFOs and throughout his collected works.
As can happen, the confrontation with the self-symbols overwhelms the ego, projected in the film as the mainly masculine world at large, and causes it to fragment, close down and fall into isolated complexes that cannot communicate with each other. Each complex, depicted as a region of the world with its own language, has adopted a hostile attitude to the unconscious, unknown material that has penetrated consciousness in the form of the aliens in their mandala-like shells. Adoption of the hostile attitude, or turning a fearful face to the unconscious, causes misinterpretation of the alien's intentions and provokes the psychological disintegration.
By contrast, the protagonist Louise maintains an open and courageous attitude to the information arriving from the unconscious; in response, the unconscious shows a friendly and helpful attitude towards her. Louise is blessed with a resilient ego consciousness and a capacity to interpret and integrate material from the unconscious thanks to the help of the aliens, the personifications of archetypal forces in her dreams and visions, and a supportive masculine figure, Ian. She is assisted by the appearance of key archetypal symbols in the form of the eternal or divine child (a daughter she might have had in the past or might have in future) and the wise old man (General Shang).
The aliens give access to the unified world that lies beyond and behind the space-time world of consciousness but that also embraces it. Contact with the self-symbols gives Louise access to knowledge of her future, meaning her psychological potential, most often communicated by her daughter, symbol of the eternal or divine child. Critically, she sees an image of her future book, meaning her realized capacity to understand the aliens' symbolic language, which is another child of her own creation born of a union of masculine spirit and feminine relatedness and their joint generative power. She is also given access to a dream image of communicating with the key player, the at-first evil but now empathetic General Shang, who tells her how and what to communicate to him to resolve the crisis that has engulfed and threatens to destroy the world (ego consciousness).
Importantly, Louise is the only feminine character of any importance in a film dominated by anxiety-driven masculinity. She is surrounded by men who, with the exception of the scientist Ian, mistrust and fear the aliens and are prone to hostile action towards them. In the film, this power complex is epitomized by the at-first dictatorial and threatening General Shang, exploiting the Western spectator's mistrust and projection of evil shadow onto the Chinese nation and its allies. Louise's contact with this hostile if earthly Other, which is needed in order to reintegrate the split off complexes and to consolidate the ego so that it can integrate the new knowledge, is termed treason by the leader of the American military who seeks to violently repress it.
Shang approaches Louise in a dream as a kindly father figure who communicates the key information needed to reintegrate the fragmented consciousness. Shang, who has been transformed by hearing the last words of his dying wife from Louise, the source of feminine relatedness, is the archetypal figure of the wise old man who points the way to the ultimate solution of the problem, which is to withdraw the projection of evil onto others, be they alien or human.
Once Louise has restored order to the world, she turns to completing the work of bringing the self fully into the world through the individuation process. The final step is the chemical wedding or sacred marriage that will give actual birth to the divine child; that is, to a life lived truly and fully with an accepting attitude toward its depth, sorrows and joys.
"Arrival" describes for us the self-realization of an individual. It shows in symbols what a human being can experience during an in-depth Jungian psychological analysis. It gives a feeling of what life can mean to someone who experiences and understands it symbolically. If that person is you, it means changing life into your life or, as Ted Chiang calls it, into the story of your life.
Chris Olson, Advanced Candidate, Independent Group of Analytical Psychologists (IGAP), London, UK