Heidekolb's Blog
On Not Writing and Missing Parts ~ Jungian Reflections
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Why has it been years since my last entry? As so often with our actions, or lack thereof, motivations are not always easily brought to the forefront, often buried beneath rationalization and explanations.
To some extent I experienced and saw in others the effects of a not insignificant over-stimulation triggered by the daily bombardment of words and images accelerated by the increase of social media. A digital whirlwind blowing us away. What could in proper measure inspire and connect became an instrument of confusion and destabilization. Too many images, too many words, too many opinions, each one claiming a sense of righteousness
Why contribute to the clutter?
We don’t know what to take in any longer in our era of fabricated facts, fake news and deliberate manipulation in the service of some clever marketing scheme.
Our inner landscape often does not provide much help either. Our fragmented selves, each part with their own “voice” pull us in different directions. The outer and at times inner voices as well have become a shrieking and painful cacophony. Where is the center? Where is the orient?
Pieter Bruegel, the Elder ~ The Tower of Babel (1563)
So much noise, so little listening, so little worthwhile to hear. Uncertain times.
Why bother writing?
A few months before the catastrophe of World War I began in 1914 Jung looks “into the depths of what is to come” and describes his vision of “the enormous dying and the sea of blood”…..A darkness seized the world, the terrible war arose…And so we had to taste hell. (Red Book, p.274)
Civil War victims in Syria ~ People and children massacred in Ghouta by chemical attack, 2013 (Wikipedia)
Jung continues: “I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality, your love became hate, and your understanding became madness. Why did you want to comprehend the darkness! But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates this grasp….You are completely alone in this struggle, since your Gods have become deaf.”
The felt appreciation of how much life needs death is one of the cornerstones of Jungian thought. Death, not as an abstract concept but as a deeply felt reality expressed as empathy for the other, in all its manifestations, human, animals and other life forms. Gaia herself. And eventually also, we may open up to our own suffering as irrelevant and small, so our heads want to tell us, it may appear compared to the attacks we inflict and witness on the screens that have become our reality-shaping tools.
I began to wonder if I had answered my question of why not writing for so long. Probably, to some extent. But one answer is never the full picture. Easy to forget, hard to practice. More digging in silence. Sitting with nothing.
Often it is helpful to revisit the “crime scene”. In my case, I reread my last entry from. “A Dangerous Method ~ The Movie~ Part I”. Part II was never written. The “why not” is only speculation. I was not ready. I did not what it was. Who knows. But “it” knew and “it” had to patiently wait until I was ready to hear it. I now know what could not be written then. Part II is the tragic story of Sabina Spielrein.
Sabina Spielrein 1918
I am grateful to my colleague, Jungian analyst Ilona Melker who has done extensive research on Spielrein and who confirmed for me in her unpublished presentation at the Jung Foundation how much Spielrein was not only used as a muse by both Freud and Jung (even that without any acknowledgement, as Melker points out) but how many of her findings were appropriated and contributed to the emerging theories of both Freud and Jung. How closely her ignored paper “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” is related to Jung’s understanding of transformation and how much life needs death to renew itself and to Freud’s concept of the death instinct. Acknowledged only in footnotes. Sabina Spielrein, a pioneer and one of the first female psychoanalysts perished together with her two daughters, both of whom were talented musicians. They were shot dead along with the many thousands of Jewish residents by an SS squad in 1942.
Women as footnotes. We tend to oscillate between how much has changed and our denial of what has not. We are entering a new political climate with renewed hostility towards the feminine and psyche, and therefore also on women as the main carriers of projections of the feminine. All are under renewed attack by a now seemingly institutionalized form of greed and indecency by a changed and potentially dangerous political atmosphere, where climate change denial, ruthless exploitation of the planet’s resources, attacks on women and anyone who fits the definition of “the Other” are fighting to become the new normal. From demanding obedience to the law without pondering questions of ethics and morals.
Patriarchy is a dying. But not dead yet. It may take a few more generations. We are in the midst of a political backlash to prior attempts towards a more integrated culture. Authoritarian structures wrestle for the upper hand. If we can, we need to be vigilant. If we can, we need to show up with a voice. But if the voice is not there yet, if we cannot yet hear what needs to be said, then we need to sit patiently until we can hear what needs to be said.
And then, if one can tolerate the passing of time without judgment and surrender to the timeless nature of psyche, deo concedente, a word, a thought appears that wants to become flesh.
The Annunciation by El Greco
Tags: C.G. Jung, Freud, image, Sabina Spielrein, society, women, word, writing
A Dangerous Method ~ The Movie ~ Jungian Reflections, Part 1
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Please go and see this movie > adangerousmethod ~ It is a good one. I know I will see this film more than once. There is such a richness to it. It takes us back to when it all began. It takes us back to the old world of Victorian Vienna and Zurich, a period of suffocating moral constraints, yet also a period that brought forth new manifestations of a changing consciousness. It takes us back to a time before Jung was Jung, when Freud was the enfant terrible of Viennese’ medical world and that mysterious, and yes, most dangerous method of what eventually became the talking cure of Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology were still a bloody mess. David Cronenberg, the movie’s director, provides us with a glimpse into the labor pangs of one of the most important cultural events of the 20th century, the birth of the therapeutic, analytic relationship, albeit an endangered species today.
Freud, Spielrein and Jung, portrayed by Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender
The film introduces us to these three players of this birthing process. While Freud and Jung are household names in psychological circles, very few are aware of how Sabina Spielrein contributed to the formulation of psychoanalytic theory. After all, she was not only a woman, but also a sick and troubled patient. It is much less known that she eventually became one of the first female psychoanalysts and that as muse for both men, she not only inspired significant ideas in their theories, but may have in fact verbalized important concepts for the first time, without ever being credited for any of them.
I attended a screening of this film. David Cronenberg was present for a Q & A. In one of his comments he remarked on how he was primarily interested in showing that new relational territory Jung had entered with his patient/most likely lover Sabina Spielrein. Cronenberg was not interested in elevating or demonizing any of the players of that curious love triangle. It seemed he rather payed homage to Jung’s and Spielrein’s courage as they stumbled and fell into their desires and fears lurking out of the recesses of their psyches.
They did not yet know what they were getting into as Jung put Freud’s theory into practice. Boundaries were not yet clearly delineated of what was to become the sacred, precocious and highly dangerous space of the analyst/patient relationship. May we withhold all judgment for now, as Cronenberg did so beautifully in his film, and simply honor the courage and tricksterish folly as Jung and Spielrein ventured deeper into new territory of their inner landscape.
A unique relationship develops as patients dare to find words for the images sent forth from their psyches’ secret chambers. The analyst must follow and relate without judgment. The process of following and relating in earnest will take the analyst to unknown, possibly frightening and dangerous places within himself. This is the nature of the work. It is its excitement and its danger.
This openness towards another is erotic in its truest sense. Yet we must remember that Eros is a god, an archetypal force, that can and often does wreak havoc with our minds and personas, especially if they are built on the shaky grounds of collective values.
The psychoanalytic relationship has become much more refined but has also lost much zest and verve since its early inception. We do know now that sexual contact with patients causes tremendous, sometimes irreparable harm to their psyches and is to be resisted at all cost, even if desired and initiated by the patient. (I believe this to be true not only for psychoanalysts, therapists, but for most teachers, mentors, practitioners and “gurus” of all creeds). Yet while the concrete enactment must be denied, the often heart and gut wrenching power of eros, which may or may not manifest in a sexual way, needs to be consciously held, sometimes even suffered in any analysis worth its salt. But without love there is not much chance for transformation. Yet the shadow of authentic eros is power driven predation and the field of psychotherapy has seen its fair share of it, and still does in many ways.
There is much to learn from the courage and mistakes of our analytic ancestors. It takes courage to see and be seen and to relate and accept what is within ourselves and the other. Mistakes will happen in all our relational lives, inside and outside the consultation room. It takes even more courage to acknowledge them as such.
Salute to the bravery of all the seekers, patients and analysts, analysts and patients as they subject themselves to mutual scrutiny.
The film is based on John Kerr‘s scholarly and carefully researched book with (almost) the same title ~ A Most Dangerous Method ~ an excellent book, I highly recommend it.
For those who wish to dive deeper into the history of psychoanalysis I suggest, The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger.
In the Beginning there was the Word ~ C.G.Jung-The Red Book Reflections
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I am not a great believer in words..but I guess the more people believe in words the more powerful they can be.. (thank you Mona K). I came across these words in my twitter stream just as I pondered Jung’s imaginal encounter with “the Anchorite” in the Red Book (RB), in which the two of them discuss the meaning of words.
We are shaped by the spoken and, to even a greater degree, by the written word.
The Anchorite (an inner, imaginal figure) speaks to Jung: “Surely you know that one can read a book many times – perhaps you almost know it by heart, and nevertheless it can be that, when you look again at the lines before you, certain things appear new or even new thoughts occur to you that you did not have before”.
What is suggested here is to appreciate the “word” as a symbol and not as a sign with a definitive, unmovable meaning. A symbol is a door into the unknown and language, the word, can be such a portal. We all the know the power of poetry or of a book that transported us into another world. A good piece of writing can take us to very unexpected places, if we allow it to happen. “A succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have unambiguous language”, the Anchorite proclaims.
Like a tightrope walker we are asked to perform a delicate balancing act.
Words and language allow us to grasp and assimilate the nature of reality. It is hard to detach the word from human consciousness. “What was word, shall become man. The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness“, Jung writes. He also says that “this striving is worldly and constricted” and the mysterious addition that this striving “belongs to the deepest layers of the divine creative plan”.
Initially the limited, narrow range of meaning provides security. We need to believe the illusion that we know what is what. Jung writes, “the unbounded makes you anxious since the unbounded is fearful and humanity rebels against it”.
The paradox: We must build walls of meaning in order to emerge as conscious beings out of the chaos, but then these very walls must be broken down, because “words should not become Gods”.
One way of measuring ego-strength and maturity of personality is to assess a person’s capacity to tolerate ambivalence. This capacity is closely related to the ability to feel empathy. It is all about tolerating otherness. Empathy is the genuine ability to see the world through the eyes of another. Another who is truly different, someone who cannot be easily understood. It takes effort (and ego-strength) to make room for another standpoint, another meaning. There are many ways to be right. We have reached maturity when we can give up tour need to be right without losing ourselves and our values.
Imagine ~ making room ~ imagine that the entire universe is within you and every person, every other living creature is a parallel universe ~ no either/or, no right or wrong
“He who breaks the walls of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples”, Jung writes. We need to break down the prison of stale and empty words. We need to dismantle inherited belief systems, which have lost the spark of life. We need to give up the delusion that a word in itself represents truth. It does not matter whether the word is in the Bible or in another writing considered sacred, in your favorite novel, on the internet or in one of our ingrained thought patterns. The word may give us temporary security. That may be necessary for some time. But the evolution of consciousness cannot be stopped, it can only be resisted, which makes it harder. The evolutionary trajectory of life pushes us towards new meaning. Meaning full of juicy freshness and uniquely individual. This is what Jung’s entire life’s work was about. But this encouragement comes with a warning. Jung writes: “But no one should shatter the old words, unless he finds the new word that is a firm rampart against the limitless and grasps more life in it than in the old word”. We find this over and over again in Jung’s work. Jung who parted ways with Freud, because he believed that the unconscious did not only need to be tamed, but was also the source of rejuvenation and great treasures, was also acutely aware that its forces were so powerful that it could sweep us into the chaos of psychosis at any time.
The word is a container and a prison. We need to find the balance on the tightrope. Words, stories, narratives create our lives. As we grow, our stories, memories and narratives can change. Are our narratives, the way we think about ourselves still true? Are they still meaningful in the sense that light and life are pulsating through them? Or do they need to be shed like a serpent leaves its old skin behind?
Nothing is forever. We are always becoming.
On Samhain, Archetypes and Psyche’s Experience of the Nurturing Darkness ~ The Red Book Reflections
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Every year I lament the end of summer. Until about this time of the year, when I can sense a major shift of energy. Darkness is settling in. There are so many shades of darkness. I will single out one for today. It is the shade that belongs to Samhain, one of the great doorways into the dark.
Tradition has it that the veil between the upper and the lower worlds is the thinnest on the night of October 31 to November 1st. It is a night of welcoming and honoring the dead. In the old days it was a time of divination and communication with the spirit world. It is the beginning of the new year, because the Celts appreciated that new life begins in utter darkness. Although originating in the pre-Christian Celtic tradition, Samhain belongs to all people who are open to the cycles and movements of nature.
Let us understand the meaning of Samhain from a Jungian psychological perspective. Maybe because our culture has lost the connection to the natural and nurturing aspect of the dark, we are currently so terribly dominated by the devouring and destructive side of it. The darkness of Samhain is of an introspective, reflective nature. Qualities our dominant culture is not supporting. Imagine, letting go of all the noise, the distractions. Imagine, allowing yourself t be alone ~ with yourself, only your breath leading the way.
All fears and resistances belong to the ego, which initially refuses to acknowledge the existence of another realm of reality. The natural world knows no such fears. Imagine, walking into the darkness of not yet knowing ~ and listening, and seeing.
The dead come to visit in this night, it is said. They may come with messages or they simply need us to acknowledge their existence. The knowledge, but also the sins and wounds of our ancestors live within us. This is a psychic fact that C.G. Jung very much understood. Psychic life, the life you and I know and experience, emerges out of and continues to be embedded in an archetypal field. Archetypes are ultimately unknowable but very specific patterns of energy which we experience as images and affects. Our relation to the archetypal world connects us to our ancestral history, including our animal and microbial past. Yes, that far back can psyche reach. An archetype is like an old watercourse along which the water of life has flowed for centuries, digging a deep channel for itself, Jung writes.
If we manage to quiet the chatter within us, then the world of the forgotten past within us will be at its most available tonight, according to the tradition of Samhain.
But we do not have to peer that far. In the shadow that we carry are also all the traumas, wounds and unresolved issues of our recently deceased relatives, parents and grandparents. I have learned (thank you Malidoma Some : ) that the departed souls of our relatives need us as much as we need them. There is a unique power of healing that only our waking consciousness can generate. Some of us are plagued with psychological disturbances, which we have psychically inherited from those close to us who have died. Every unresolved trauma or other unresolved psychic issue is passed on from one generation to the next, until the chain is broken. Breaking the chain means bringing the dark into light, making what has been unconscious conscious. That is the job of the living and only we can do that. That is our purpose in life.
Jung writes in the Red Book (RB) “If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never ending, the life of history and inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race”. Before we can become who we are meant to be, before we can live our own life, we must descend into the shadow left by those who have gone before us.
If we surrender to the natural movement of the soul, we can and must bring forth pieces of the personal and collective unconscious that need to come into the light. This is growth. This is healing. This is becoming.
The sheer beauty of Jung’s writing in the RB shines forth in this quote and elucidates this thought. See it, hear it with your senses open to the ever-present symbolic reality: ” As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again…you wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths….You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts….but with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you..
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.”
At Samhain the veil may be the thinnest, but the work of connecting to the ancestors, of acknowledging the archetypal realities is not over when this sacred night has passed. But it could be the beginning of a new attitude.
Samhain has turned into Halloween. We have learned to slip into a disguise, so we are not recognized by the wandering “evil” spirits. But maybe we want to remember some of the old ways and honor the dead. As Jungian warriors we may want to sit quietly and reflect on what has died within us, what traumas have we inherited from our personal and collective ancestors. What is it in our lives that needs to be faced and owned? Who are the hungry ghosts in our soul? How can their energy be released and transform in the light of consciousness?
Sit quietly ~ there is work to be done on your journey of becoming and it begins in the darkness of this night.
A Blessed Samhain to All
For all new life forms in the dark.
A Glimpse into the Labyrinth of Relationships ~ C.G.Jung ~The Red Book Reflections
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At times relationships can feel like a nightmarish war zone. 
Whether the bond is romantic or sexual does not matter. Nor is it of any significance whether the partner is of the same or opposite sex. What matters is whether the “other” got under your skin. You know it when you feel it. An attraction, an affinity, a blissful roller coaster which can quickly break down all the coping strategies of a carefully created and nurtured persona. At times it may feel like madness knocking. That is not what we had in mind when we opened ourselves to another! Needs and emotions we never thought we had are gushing out of us. We may then find ourselves at a crossroads, though initially the choice of way is hardly in our control.
One thing that might happen is that all our defenses kick in and we regain what feels like ground under our feet. The inner whirlwind of affect is warded off ~ at the cost of our soul’s longing for a true connection to the inner other. The notion that there is an inner other, imaged and personified as a being of the opposite sex is at the core of Jungian thought. At first the ego knows nothing about this dynamic. But psyche needs to become conscious of herself. This evolutionary push towards consciousness is archetypal, it simply is. If we resist it, we will be dragged along, kicking and screaming and raging at the world. If we accept this archetypal urge towards consciousness, we can learn to breathe through the ride, as bumpy as it may be. Jung expresses this notion of the inner other in the Red Book (RB) as follows: “You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself….you, woman, should not seek the masculine in men but assume the masculine in yourself”.
Psyche is bisexual. This is entirely unrelated to our sexual identifications. How do we then learn about the other within us? We unconsciously put (project) our unknown self onto another person. What we experience when these dynamics are enacted is a strong emotional reaction to another person. We might be irritated, repulsed, ticked off, but mostly, for better or worse, we might fall in love.We cannot help it because, as Jung says, “You are a slave of what you need in your soul”.
Let us consider the other direction at our crossroads. No doubt the less comfortable one, as the soul’s way always is. Welcome to our brave soul’s battle in her adventure of connecting to spirit.
Because ultimately it is through the contrasexual archetype that the world beyond ego, the transpersonal, spiritual dimension opens up to us. “The part that you take over from the devil – joy -leads you into adventure”. How might one read this statement in the context of relationships? I opt to offer the following: to not resist the pull of your emotions, to make room for your love and hate and all the shades in between them, without allowing the emotional storms to take over. Not to be overtaken is often the hardest part and may require practice and support. Most important, however, is to never lose sight that while our attention is entirely hooked on the other person, we are always exploring and learning about ourselves. We are always reaching for and touching on an aspect of ourselves in the other. 
Jung allows us a glimpse into the awkward and raw experience of his soul’s journey towards his feminine side. Writing from a man’s perspective in general and his own very private, subjective one in particular, Jung notes: “It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry”. A woman’s experience will be different, but in most cases she will also struggle with her acceptance of the masculine within herself. This is when love can turn into hate. Because “he” is so dominant, so controlling, so violent, so insensitive etc. “He” may be all of that but these qualities may lie dormant in the woman’s psyche, unbeknown to her, but usually experienced by others. “The feminine in man is bound up with evil…..the masculine in the woman is bound up with evil”. Not an easy statement to swallow, “Therefore people hate to accept their own other”, Jung continues. The darkness of what we experience as evil feels too much to own and therefore needs to be projected on the one we are close. Remember a time when the one you loved turned into a monstrosity? I do.
“But if you accept it….that when you become the one who is mocked the white bird of your soul comes flying. It was far away but your humiliation attracted it” Jung writes. Only then can we claim to be a complete person. Only then can we venture into relationship. On one hand a relationship into the amoral world of the archetypal cosmic psyche and the other hand into a fully fleshed out relationship with another person. Only then may we be able to see and love the person for who they are.
Oh yes, said Eve to the serpent, lead me into temptation. For I want to know.
Tags: C.G. Jung, Depth Psychology, emotions, eros, feminine, hate, love, madness, masculine, psyche, relationships, soul, spirit, The Red Book
Honor thy Devil and Trust thy Body ~ C.G.Jung~The Red Book Reflections
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Trust is a big word. It is also a tremendous psychic force. It is an instinctual capacity of the newly born. The baby trusts her environment, she trusts the hands of her caretakers as she begins her life’s journey in the world of manifestations and matter. 
It is pretty much down hill from there on. Some of the disappointments and betrayal are archetypal and in the service of evolution. The soul has fallen out of the cosmic womb and she needs to begin her journey home to the realm of non-duality and the One consciousness there is.
However all too often the cruel awakening into lived life creates a psychic trauma almost beyond repair. Clinicians working with childhood abuse or neglect know the dynamics. The child cannot help herself but love her caretakers. The horror that she may be experiencing must be split off and pushed far, far away into the deepest recesses of the unconscious. But the body remembers.
The betrayal of trust goes beyond the nuclear family. In our culture, the Judeo-Christian Western culture, our instinctual desire to trust is reinforced when we are taught right from the beginning to believe in authorities. Church authorities, government authorities, educational authorities, any self-styled person or group who claims to be an authority. Anyone is in the know, especially if there is a little media back-up. Women in particular suffered, as the masculine, embodied by the male, was imbued with authority. Too many men gladly accepted the projection. The taste of power is seductive,who can resist? And it turned many into domineering and deceiving despots who could not relate to the feminine in the outer world, nor to the realm of feeling and relatedness in the inner world.
Look out into the world and who is holding the power. The world is run and owned, literally, by psychopaths. We find the psychopath on the far end of the narcissistic continuum. Nothing and no one exists outside himself. An innate or cultivated inability to feel for and into others. A mind-boggling capacity to perpetuate and live with lies, although they may be subjectively believed to be self-righteous truths. The psychopath is the center of his own universe and everything in it is there to serve him.
The dilemma for us is that if we maintain the notion of an interconnected world and the idea that a unified field ties the universe and the world together, as Jung did, 
than what is represented by that terrible otherness of the psychopath that we feel we are no part of?
Jung, contemplating the dominant Christian worldview, writes in CW 6, quoted in the Red Book (RB), “The form in which Christ presented the content of his unconscious to the world became accepted and valid for all. Therefore all individual fantasies became otiose and worthless, and were persecuted as heretical, as the fate of the Gnostic movement and of all later heresies testifies.“
I do not wish to delve too deeply into Christian thought, but what Jung is saying here is that Christ was a human being who accessed and expressed the Divine through his unconscious and thereby led the way for us to follow suit. Not by turning him into the “authority”, the later church fathers wanted us to believe, but by showing the way. It is we who must walk the bittersweet road of life and find an authority within us that is truly deserving of our trust.
Jung never wanted to be the authority so many turned him into in his later years. But he showed us a way. And the way leads into the invisible world of the unconscious. Jung tells us of his meeting with the Red One, an imaginal figure in one of his fantasies. Imaginal but equally real as the ego world, he is to be met with respect and openness. Inner figures have a way of responding the way they are being met. Jung writes in the RB : “I know just as little who you are, as you know who I am”…..Surely this Red One was the devil, but my devil…I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I have learned in the Mysterium to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual.”
Disregarding, ignoring or pathologizing inner figures prevents the development of an authentic center of authority within us. Our inner knowing gets pushed further into the dark forest of the unconscious. It moves outside the grasp of psyche, but may settle deep within the cells & structures of our body and if we are lucky, yes, if we are lucky, the body develops symptoms. Every symptom has a story to tell and its meaning needs to be understood. We may have our moods, our little episodes of madness, a particular sensitive day with erratic behaviors. For centuries, women in particular have been pathologized as “hysterical”, nowadays as “borderline” or just as “hypersensitive” or “fragile”.
Your body can be your closest friend. It is always truthful even in its sickness and its symptomology. It responds when the soul has been betrayed, its trust abused. An outer authority or trusted partner may not be what they appear to be, maybe even pretend to be. A child does not yet have the strength to contain the abysmal betrayal. Her body must hold the bitter secret until her psyche strengthens. As women we can. Because there is a warrioress in each one of us. We must and can claim our inner authority. Civilizations may not prevail, partnerships may not last, but psychic truth will. Let us walk the road, together with all the men who are willing to join us.
Tags: abuse, Analytical psychology, authority, betrayal, body, Borderline, C.G. Jung, collective unconscious, Depth Psychology, hysteria, Judeo-Christian culture, Jungian psychology, mental health, narcissism, power, psyche, Psychology, psychopaths, religion, soul, The Red Book, trust, women
Of John Lennon, Oil Spills and other Evils ~ The Red Book Reflections ~ C.G.Jung
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Jung insisted that context is everything. He was right about that. In an inter-connected reality, every “truth” must be understood within its particular set of circumstances. It is only with this appreciation that I dare approach what could be otherwise construed as an inflammatory and outrageous statement.
Jung writes in the Liber Primus of the Red Book (RB) that “it is good if you want this greatest evil with your whole heart” (p.254). When Jung was writing this the horrors of the First World War were raging through Europe.
In a footnote a Nietzsche quote from “Thus spoke Zarathustra” sheds some light: “To redeem the past and to transform every ‘It was’ into a ‘I wanted it thus’ – that alone do I call redemption”.
Jung’s point is a call to claim ownership for the events in the world. War may be instigated by a handful of sociopaths, but if their war cries did not find resonance in the collective psyche, war would not happen. “War is over…if you want it”, John Lennon declared a few decades ago. Some may regard this comment as utopian or naive, I see it as congruent with Jung’s point.
A few years ago I lamented the Bush presidency in this country, when a friend pointed out that we the people have the kind of president we deserve. We did, whether we voted for him or not. Oh & on that note, John Lennon also said “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there ‘d be peace”.
As long as we don’t come to terms with destructive and “evil” tendencies within ourselves, as long as we choose to let these dragons slumber in the underworld of the unconscious, they will remain out of reach of our conscious awareness and therefore will NEED to be projected onto whoever lends himself to act out our rage, greed and will to power. These are archetypal affects, to deny that they are not in you, now that would be truly naive.
But war has not been so much on my mind lately. (It is still raging in various parts of the world, I know). Oil gushing into our ocean has preoccupied me. I cringe imagining the pain and suffering to wildlife.
Make no mistake, I loudly demand that those responsible for the mess and mismanagement be held accountable and rightly so, I maintain. But is there not another side? Is not anyone who has ever owned a car or owned some stocks implicated in the rush for the black gold? I know, the notion of interconnectedness may suddenly not feel so cozy anymore. The subtler reality is that we are all responsible. We are participating in the killing of the earth. We are puncturing an artery in our mother’s body (thank you SVE13), her thick, dark life-blood turning into poison.
The alchemists gave oil a unique symbolic role. It is present at the beginning and end of life. Crude oil is an image of the primal chaos which at this time is still spouting uncontrollably forth. 
Jung writes: “If you do not succeed in producing the greatest evil….you will never learn the violent deed and learn to overcome fighting what lies outside you…….If blood, fire and the cry of distress fill this world, then you will recognize yourself in your acts….May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men’s eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves….You cannot learn this, it can only develop in you. You cannot will (italics mine) this, it takes the will from your hand and wills itself ” (RB, p.254).
The eternal paradox. The psychic demand to let a natural evolutionary development take place, to surrender and self-sacrifice (from the ego’s perspective) and yet to be active and participating citizens of this world. Your way of life is a political statement, John Lennon remarked.
James Hillman echoes similar ideas when he writes :“Today we need heroes of descent, not masters of denial, mentors of maturity who can carry sadness, who give love to aging, who show soul without irony or embarrassment”. All three voices conjured up here, deplore us to not only point fingers but accept our role in a divine drama, that indeed we are the world.
“But fundamentally you are terrified of yourself, and therefore you prefer to run to all others rather than to yourself”, Jung writes. The Hopi elders were quite right when they urged us: “You are the ones you were waiting for “.
We are the ones who need to claim the beauty and the terror. We are the beauty and the terror.
Tags: alchemy, Analytical psychology, C.G. Jung, Depth Psychology, James Hillman, John Lennon, Nietzsche, Oil spill, soul, The Red Book, war
On Alchemy, C.G.Jung and Ecological Intelligence
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C.G. Jung was a radical thinker. He was a man who ventured into unknown psychic territory and wrested a map out of the unconscious, which he thought was able to link the present moment with a remote past. To his surprise Jung found in alchemy a model that he identified as the basis of our modern way of perceiving things. In other words, a model for how we experience reality. Alchemy provides a pattern of transformational processes right under the threshold of consciousness, which all energy follows.
The patterns are there. Seeing them is the challenge.
What is this curious practice called alchemy? There is more than one answer. For one it is the art of seeing beyond material surface. It is a way of seeing we have lost since Cartesian thinking removed the enchantment from our world. Common knowledge holds that chemistry evolved out of alchemy. That is true, but it was also the end of the alchemical vision, as chemists believed their experiments took place only on a mundane physical level.
Alchemists had a different vision. Alchemists knew that energy and matter could not be separated. They knew that there was no such thing as inorganic matter and that indeed all matter was infused with an element of consciousness. They knew that you and I are much more connected than mundane science wanted us to believe. They also intuitively knew what quantum physicists confirmed at a later age, namely the alchemical principle of the experimenter’s consciousness influencing the outcome. You and I matter! Our conscious and deliberate intent is much more powerful than the authorities in charge want us to believe.
No wonder that alchemists were discredited, persecuted, burnt at the stake and ridiculed.
Jung saw and understood that. There is a heretical and subversive aspect to Jung’s work , at least from the perspective of our cultural dominant, which I cherish.
Alchemy describes a pattern of transformation. All creation and transformation follow the cyclical movements of falling apart and coming together on the spiral of evolution. There is one and it falls apart and becomes two and of that a third (something new) emerges and out of the third comes the oneness again that is the fourth. (This is a paraphrased version of the axiom of Maria Prophetissa, a third century female alchemist).
This is the movement of evolution and it is the movement in the mandala in Jung’s work. 
If we transfer this movement into the evolutionary process of human consciousness then the falling apart (the two, the duality) represents a confrontation with a previously unknown content that ultimately belongs to the oneness that we are part of, but not necessarily conscious of. A constant flow between what is conscious and what is unconscious is established, which is best captured in the image of the Klein bottle 
As materialism and one-sided rational thinking weaken but still dominate the Western world view and as we have brought ourselves to the brink of our own destruction, we must ask ourselves: Where are we in relation to matter, to earth? Where are we in relation to psychic reality? The South African Jungian Analyst Ian McCallum suggests that we desperately need to develop what he calls “Ecological Intelligence”, an intelligence the alchemists seemed to instinctively possess.
McCallum describes ecological intelligence as a way of understanding and articulating our evolutionary links to all of life, to all living things, as a debt we owe to the earth and as our contribution to the evolution of human consciousness. An ecological intelligence is also an intelligence oriented towards the feminine principle. It is the fourth we have been waiting for. It may be the next step in the evolution of human consciousness. The feminine principle is the principle of relatedness and of completeness. 
Relatedness and completeness are the opposite of perfectionism that so often drives our inner and outer lives.
Ecological intelligence can be experienced as a deep empathy for the other in the outer world, but also for what feels other within ourselves. The other as it manifests in other races, ethnic groups, but MacCallum particularly sees the other in the natural world, in nature, animals, plants.
It is the beauty of our evolving relatedness.
..for beauty is nothing but the terror, which we are still just able to bear. R. M. Rilke
I highly recommend: McCallum,Ian: Ecological Intelligence. Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature. It is a wonderful book.
On Image and Duality – C.G.Jung – The Red Book Reflections
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In 1925, in the midst of working on the Red Book (RB) Jung wrote “It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic creatures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses as though they were patients and I was analyzing them”.
S. Shamdasani, the editor of the RB, noted that Jung found mythological work both exciting and intoxicating. Jung understood mythological images as symbols of the universal life force (libido) depicting the movements and dynamics of the autonomous, archetypal psyche.
Jung writes about one of his earlier visions: “On the night when I considered the essence of the God, I became aware of an image.” In this vision he dialogues with Elijah and his daughter Salome. Two thoughts strike me immediately as relevant for an understanding of Jung’s approach. One is his use of the word image.
An image is not to be confused with outer reality. Physicists provide explanations for the nature of matter and outer reality, but one thing is certain, our experience creates an inner image that is not the same as outer reality. The image is a subjective experience in the individual mind. It can be visual, but the experience of a sound or a physical sensation will also bring forth an image. A thought is an image. No question, there is an outer world and also an objective psychic reality, but it is only through the subjective capacity of cultivated self-reflection that one can – with some luck and grace – gain access and insight into the larger, transpersonal realities. An image is like a symbol. It is not to be taken literally or the door becomes a trap holding you prisoner in a concrete and narrow reality. An image is a doorway 
into another reality. A paradoxical situation, the image is you and is not you. You are the observer and the observed. A necessary duality has been created. Necessary because all creation depends on this duality and the forever shifting dance between the two opposing forces. A oneness has been torn asunder. It is in the liminal space in-between that new life can be born. In the context of self-reflection the new life can be a new insight, the possibility of a new pattern of experience.
In the context of a necessary duality, it is interesting that Jung when contemplating the essence of “the God”, encountered a male AND a female figure. The transpersonal may be a field of oneness, but the human intellect can only approximate the divine mystery of creation as two intertwined forces. As above so below. Think DNA.
These two opposing forces are often referred to as masculine and feminine, but one must drop all preconceived notions about gender or sexuality. Each individual psyche, male or female, is made up of these energy strands, as is the objective, archetypal psyche. Yang and Yin are more neutral descriptions. Jung elicited the principles of Logos (yang, masculine, foresight, legislation, ordering, willful) and Eros (yin, feminine, receptive, related, moving, dissolving) out of his visionary meeting with Elijah and Salome. Jung writes: The way of life writhes like a serpent from right to left, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Collectively and individually we are suffering an imbalance in this eternal dance that has favored the masculine principle. Where Logos rules order and persistence prevail, where Logos rules at the expense of Eros, it degenerates into dominance and abuse of power. In the individual this tendency can be associated to the sickness of the soul, known as the narcissistic personality. The problem of narcissism has been thought of as a characteristic of a dying culture. I can see this trajectory, unless psyche is irrigated by the flow of eros and balance is restored one more time again.
I am less interested in why Jung’s psyche chose Elijah and Salome as personifications of his unconscious thoughts. These are uniquely his images. It seems of much greater significance how he engaged these images. A method that later became known as Active Imagination. A technique that strongly emphasizes the duality principle. In other words, the ego, the “I” as I know it does not disappear in the face of the visionary figure. One must hold ones ground vis-a-vis an imaginative figure. They are to be met with respect, but not revered as gods, because they are not. Nor are imaginative figures spirits who have all the answers and will tell one what to do. They also don’t foretell the future. Our psychic images are real, but the essence of their reality is behind the surface of the mental image.
It is in this dialogue with Elijah and Salome, in that sacred, liminal space between them that Jung realizes: “If forethinking and pleasure unite in me, a third arises from them, the divine son, who is the supreme meaning, the symbol, the passing over into a new creation. I do not myself become the supreme meaning or the symbol, but the symbol becomes in me such that it has its substance, and I mine.”
Not one, not two. The paradox, nonduality requires duality.
Tags: active imagination, Analytical psychology, C.G. Jung, creation, creative process, creativity, Depth Psychology, divine, duality, eros, god, image, imagination, Jungian psychology, logos, mystery, narcissism, psyche, renewal, soul, The Red Book, transpersonal, yang, yin
On Jungians, Solstice and the Death of the King – The Red Book Reflections. C.G.Jung
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The publication of the Red Book (RB) has rekindled much interest in Jung and his world. People are fascinated with its imagery and often inexplicably moved by it. What is it about this book? Many people feel its soulfulness, literally, when they first hold it in their hands. The Red Book is in the truest sense of the word awesome. But what to do other than admire it? Who has access to Jung’s at times elusive knowledge? Is it only the world of Jungian analysts who inherit Jung’s world? That would be terrible. Jung would abhor that thought.
Are those who have experienced an in-depth Jungian analysis his rightful heirs? Maybe. There is a lot to be said about working closely, intimately with someone who has walked the walk before. There are plenty of wonderful Jungian analysts out there. But unfortunately psychoanalysis has been assimilated by the medical model and has lost, by and large, its connection to soul. It is a shame. Psychology is the science of the soul, but it has deteriorated into a mere management of symptoms for the most part. Mainstream psychology has forgotten that symptoms are messages from the soul.
Jungian work is soul work. There may be other ways than the traditional route. Jung did not want us to emulate him. Psychoanalysis was originally conceived as a new “Weltanschauung, a new world view, a new way of experiencing reality. Jung was particularly interested in rescuing the soul out of the clutches of what he experienced as a stifling dogmatic Christianity.
In the book “Who owns Jung?” ( by Ann Casement), the analyst Joe Cambray answers the question with “the one who emerges from Jung”. What does emerge for you out of an encounter with Jung? Where does Jung take you? What does Jung mean to you? When we look for meaning we get in touch with the soul.
Jung held on to his soul. He held on to his longings and his felt sense of wonder beyond the visible world. He held on to his visions outside the world of reason. He maintained an unwavering trust in her. “My path is light” his soul says and Jung answers in his vision, “Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness?” “I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity”, Jung reports from the same vision. His trust is tested to the brink. He becomes angry at his soul.
I wonder if anyone has ever experienced that when trying to be truthful to oneself, following one’s path, one ends up in a spot where one did not want to be at all? When self-reflection only conjures up accusatory self attacking images? How can one have trust, faith, in an elusive guidance from the invisible world that has lead one so astray? The rational mind will say that one has lost it, one may feel insanity knocking on one’s door. Jung did. “My thoughts were murder and the fear of death spread like poison everywhere in the body” Jung writes. He knows a murder needs to be committed.The king must die, long live the king.
Jung relives here the archetype of the year king. A cyclical life-death-rebirth deity that represents a pattern of creation and renewal in nature. The king that needed to die was Jung’s idea of reality . “So the reality is meaning and absurdity”, he realizes, and he captures the circling movement of the archetype of the year king as it enters his consciousness with the following words: “Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but evening comes from the day and morning turns into day. So meaning is a moment, and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a transition from meaning to meaning.”
The task is to tolerate the “absurdity”, when life shows us a face we don’t understand. To ask for meaning even then. Especially then. The challenge is to move with the spiraling twirl of our psyche. To let the king of our identifications die. To welcome the newness even if it still feels utterly insane. To trust nature. One’s own nature. That there is a central axis that holds the universe together and that there is also a central axis that holds us together. That we become an embodiment of the tree of life.
In a few hours the darkness will collapse in itself and light will move in. Winter solstice. Just a moment in the dance. But a moment of victory. New Life! Rekindle joy! 
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