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
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.
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