'Our' Monster

It might be wise to 'civilize' the instinctual shadow-monsters of the Deep Mind in anticipation of a looming survival threat else they erupt in raw form and overthrow the fragile, civilized ego-mind, make them instead controlled forces for adaptation to crisis, rather than have them agents of chaos-- panic, psychic immobilization, paranoia and atrocities, grasping at the nearest means offering salvation, or worse.  Cultures do this archetype shaping in anticipation of possible emergency, seeking to tame the raw archaic instinctual response, making it 'our' monster.

However, there is a possibility that an adapted monster will revert to type, just as a dragon-slaying Hero-archetype figure often becomes the next dragon-monster-- though the dragon-energies were originally assimilated and used for good, they turn bad.  A possible way to maintain the line between good and bad is through the influence of an even more powerful archetype-- the Uber-Self, or God, or whatever you want to call it.  But even that can turn bad, as we know, so nothing is foolproof.

Jung came to the conclusion that unleashing the instinctual powers on a mass level in order to drive necessary adaptation was too dangerous-- only an elite of highly-trained persons could perhaps engage and handle them wisely.  Maybe so.  Maybe a class of something like Jungian druids, acting as an evaluating, guiding, even steering, institution might come to be seen as necessary to keep civilization from going wrong, though my skeptical modern mind finds this unlikely to come about, and in a form that worked.  But if the threat to survival is unmistakeable, one must try to invoke 'our' monsters, I suppose, rather than to continue to do nothing.  Dragons, anyone?