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The Alchemical Romance of The Fifth Element. Like The Matrix, the 1997 film The Fifth Element mines the feverishly imaginative world of comic books. But whereas The Matrix derives from Marvel Comics and manga, The Fifth Element draws its visual punch from French comics, formally known as bande desinee (BD), familiar to readers of the American magazine Heavy Metal, which reprints a great deal of comics from Europe. Bande desinee is, like manga, a medium and not a genre. Any number of types of stories are produced, usually in hardcover oversized albums. But the most familiar form of BD to American readers are the kinds of outrageous and decadent science fiction yarns serialized in French magazines like Pilote and Metal Hurlant.

These sci-fi stories are characterized by lavish, nearly-baroque art and design, and a narrative sensibility that emphasizes sophomoric nihilism, sadistic violence and decadent sex. The dizzying visual imagination of the BD sci-fi subculture is mirrored in The Fifth Element . Psychology's Magician. Algis Valiunas The great modern doctors of the mind have made men realize as never before the strangeness of their own psyches, and no psychologist has uncovered, or invented, stranger psychic marvels than did Carl Jung (1875-1961). Although his name still lingers on in pop-psychology circles, the substance of Jung’s ideas and his analytical psychology techniques is fading from memory. Perhaps he is now most remembered as a favored disciple of Sigmund Freud who later became Freud’s most reviled apostate. The split between Freud and Jung presaged today’s division in how we think about the mind: we are fixated on the notion that our inner lives can be investigated through methods of rational inquiry like those so successfully applied to physics and chemistry, but we cannot shake the lurking feeling that our psyches are in reality beasts hidden in shadow — that they can never be fully brought out of the woods into the full light of day.

But was not the last magician. A Spiritual Searcher. Depth Psych.

Myth

Synchronicity. Individuation. Glossary of Jungian Terms. The Chaos of Jung's Psyche.