I’ve enjoyed a meander into Tim Boucher’s website this evening. He has a good sense of coex systems and patterns of the psyche.
CIRCUS CHARACTERS, History, Archetypes & Symbolism by Tim Boucher (Dead link)
Internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20100317104050/http://circuscharacters.org
The circus is a place where dreams and reality intersect, where the limits of human ability and perception are tested and surpassed. It is a place of escape from the everyday (to “run away and join the circus”), a place of spectacle & entertainment, and a proving ground for the human imagination. In this article, we’ll explore some of the primordial archetypal characters from the circus and carnival tradition, and connect them with pastiche of historical context and symbolic meaning.
12 oct 21
Fixed link
Hey, thanks for the link. Surprised I didn’t find this earlier. Curious what you mean by ‘coex systems’….
Hi Tim
https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2004/birth-trauma-and-its-relation-to-mental-illness-suicide-and-ecstasy-by-stanislav-grof-md/
I use that jargon freely as I selfishly write this blog mostly for myself!!
Glad you found it tho.
I think I understand quite well what you’re talking about, actually. I like the “COEX system” nomenclature for that way of organizing experiences. I did a lot of writing with this method a couple of years ago when I was sort of delving through some deep archetypal material in my own psyche, you could say. A lot of it has been deleted from my site at this point, but I would tend to open up a particular image cluster and “explode” it out into associations, both of my own feeling-toned impressions and memories and also popular cultural connections. It was a methodology that I found to be extremely powerful at the time, but something which I simply couldn’t figure out how to frame in words for “lay” audiences that weren’t actively experiencing the probing and release of this sort of phenomenon!
Years later, its something I’m only beginning to figure out how to communicate with and about. The notion of COEX systems helps a great deal, thanks!
Dear Tim where can one get hold of your book / article: ‘The Acrobat’, Circus Characters, History, Archetypes and Symbolism.’ I tried your website http://www.circuscharacters.org but it doesn’t seem to exist anymore. I would love to give it a read.