To go further, a spike of rice pressing on a female head was called ‘ Wei’ (Fifth image above from left), and there is no matching translation in English or Spanish for this word. It means obeying, feeling wronged but having to contain it. This is one who knows that they would be unfairly treated, but must remain silent, pleasing others and bending over. The idiom Wei Qu Qiu Quan means to bend over and repress the negative feeling, avoid conflict with others in order to keep the relationship harmonious. Again, the last word ‘Hao’ (Sixth image above from left) is a female with a boy child, which means a woman shall give birth to boy child, that means Good.”
Sharon Ma goes on to point out that Carl Jung writes of the collective unconscious as populated by instincts as well as by archetypes. She suggests that the sequencing of words in a person’s name and the Chinese character is a form of collective unconscious itself. The characters can be traced back to ancient rituals, and they conveyed social expectations.
Dr. Ma’s deconstructing analysis suggests that deeply held assumptions about the role to be played by women in Chinese society are reinforced by the naming of women and characters assigned to female-related functions. There is “nothing” in these name-sequences and Chinese characters. They are just “arbitrary” or historical “accidents.” At the same time, there is “something” very important in the potential unconscious influences of these frequently engaged sequences and characters in Chinese life.
Assumptions, Leadership and Hope
A noted British psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, proposes that something is always seeking to emerge in groups, especially when anxiety pervades the group (Bion, 1961). Much as Chinese characters may influence the fundamental way in which those emerged in the Chinese culture view their world and their relationship with other people, Bion suggests that one of three basic unconscious assumptions (nothingness) dictates how members of a group view leadership and how they interact with the reality (being) they are facing.
These three assumptions concern the presence of wisdom in the group, the presence of courage in the group, and the presence of a vision of the future in the group. Members of a group tend to embrace one of these three assumptions and typically assign wisdom, courage or vision to the leader of the group. I wish to expand on what Bion has proposed turning to the psychology of anticipation and introducing hope, as a related psychological process. I wish to do not a deconstruction of Bion’s model, but instead a bit of construction.
Anticipation: I begin by reviewing a bit of what I have written about anticipation (Bergquist, 2026a) and referenced in previous essays in this series on nothingness. I have proposed that we human beings live primarily in our immediate future. We anticipate what is about to happen a few seconds or few minutes from now and adjust our behavioral plans based on this anticipation—emulating the Test-Operate-Text-Exit (T.O.T.E.) model proposed many years ago by Miller, Galanter and Pribram (1960). Our affective state is also influenced by what we anticipate.
