The following extensive quotation is an excellent discussion of complexes, both from a theological and psychological perspective. In another section of this paper, Doran expresses significant disagreement with Jung over issues Jung raised in Answer to Job. The entire article, while difficult, is worth the effort. I selected this excerpt to add to our understanding of a basic Jungian concept—the autonomy and power of complexes.

From: J. Marvin Spiegelman (ed.), Catholicism and Jungian Psychology, Phoenix, AZ: Falcon Press, 1988.

“Jung and Catholic Theology,” by Robert M. Doran, pp. 55-59.

B. Complexes

The relation between the intentional spirit and the sensitive psyche, however, is a reciprocal one. If our intentional operations have a constitutive influence on the quality of our psychic life, it is also the case that the quality of our psychic life has a great deal to do with the ease and alacrity with which intentional operations are performed. There is, if you want, an affective self-transcendence that accompanies the spiritual self-transcendence of our operations of knowing, deciding, and loving, and that is strengthened by the authentic performance of these operations. But this affective self-transcendence is also a prerequisite if the sustained fidelity to the performance of these operations is to mark one’s entire way of life. And as we know all too well, the movement of sensitive consciousness can interfere with the performance of intentional operations. There can be felt resistance to insight, manifest in the repressive exercise of the censorship; there can be a flight from understanding, a desire not to judge, a resistance to decision, a habitual lovelessness. There can be other desires and fears that affect to a greater or lesser extent the integrity of our operations at the different levels of intentional consciousness. There may be required a healing of the psychic blockages to authentic operations before the sustained performance of intentional operations in their normative pattern of inquiry and understanding, reflection and judgment, deliberation and decision can characterize our lives. Intentionality analysis may very well provide the key to what constitute authentic psychotherapy; but it remains that such therapy may have to occur before one’s intentionality can be, not analyzed, but implemented in one’s own world and concomitant self-constitution.

Such therapy would be a matter of freeing the psychic energy bound up in what Jung called negative complexes, so that this energy is free to cooperate rather than interfere with the operations through which direction is to be found in the movement of life. Jung described a complex as “the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness.”²¹ But in the same paper Jung distinguished a negative from a purposeful aspect of complexes. Complexes usually function as compositions of inferior sensibility, but their negative traits can be transformed if the ego assumes toward them the proper attitude. The key to the proper attitude is to regard the complex not only as a symptom but also as a symbol. The symptom points backward to causation, the symbol forward to the reorientation and balancing of conscious attitudes. Complexes are the structural units of the psyche as a whole. Each unit is constellated around a nuclear element, a focus of energy and content, value and meaning. These constitutive units of the psyche enjoy a relative independence from one another and from the conscious ego. Even the ego is a complex of energies and representations bearing on the familiar, everyday tasks, functions, and capacities of the individual. The healthy psyche is one in which the ego remains in contact with other complexes, preserving them from the dissociation from conscious awareness that grants them a second authority that thwarts the aims and objectives of the ego. And the key to this contact is to adopt a symbolic approach to the complex. As we have just emphasized, what Freud would explain causally in terms of dissociation or displacement Jung will retrieve by symbolic association. The retrieval is not a denial of the causal approach, but a sublation of it into a viewpoint that balances Freudian archeology with a teleological approach. And, we have argued, the finality of the psyche can be disengaged with greater precision if one views it as a tendency to participate in the ever higher organizations constituted by authentic intentional operations.

The structure of consciousness disengaged by Lonergan provides a helpful framework for the incorporation of the complex theory into a contemporary Catholic theology. The levels of intentional consciousness constitute what Lonergan calls a creative vector in consciousness. It moves, as it were, from below upwards. “there is development from below upwards, from experience to growing understanding, from growing understanding to balanced judgment, from balanced judgment to fruitful courses of action, and from fruitful courses of action to the new situations that call forth further understanding, profounder judgment, richer courses of action.”²² To the extent that one’s consciousness proceeds smoothly and uninterruptedly from experience to insight, from insight to judgment, from judgment to decision from decision to new experiences, insights, judgments, decisions, one is effecting a series of cumulative and progressive changes in the world and in oneself. Moreover, each successive level entails a further degree of self-transcendence. To move out of the stupor of the animal to the intelligence of the human being, one must transcend the merely sensitive desire for participation in the rhythms of the body, as well as the intricate subtleties of the flight from understanding. To move from insight to truth, from what might be so to what really is the case, one must move beyond the state of noncommittal supposition and hypothesis constituted by the second level of consciousness, to the verification of one’s suppositions and hypotheses constituting the third level. And to do the truth, either by bringing one’s actions into harmony with what one knows or by the creative praxis of constituting the new world that should be but is not, calls for yet a further degree of self-transcendence. But the psyche has to participate in the self-transcending capacities of the spirit if one is to be able to perform these operations. And for that participation there may be required a depth-psychological discovery and healing of the affective obstructions to creativity. This depth-psychological maieutic will be an understanding and overcoming of negative complexes. But the negativity of the complexes received specific meaning when the psyche is understood as the sensorium of the transcendence through which human beings constitute their world and, concomitantly, themselves.

What we have said is tantamount to a theological sublation of the complex theory into the theology of moral impotence and the need for grace. Autonomous psychic complexes that would prevent one from participating in the creative adventure of the human spirit are to be regarded always as victimized compositions of energy formed as a result of the violence done to one’s psychic whether by significant others, oppressive social structures, or the misuse of one’s own freedom and responsibility. Psychic spontaneity as such is never morally responsible for its own disorder. Disordered complexes are the victims of history. Victimization by others and self-victimization usually conspire with one another in the genesis of psychic disorder. The constitution and causation of psychic disorder will vary from person to person, so that no general, exhaustive, or exclusive mode of causation may be determined. But what counts is that the causation is always a matter of victimization.

The process of understanding and healing negative complexes will often take a person back to his or her earliest memories or beyond. But healing is conditioned by the adoption of a particular attitude on the part of the subject affected. We tend spontaneously to believe that we can adopt one of two postures to our own affective disorder. We can either repress it further, or entirely renounce moral responsibility in its regard. Repression constricts the emotional energy gathered in the complex, and eventually this energy will be explosive. Moral renunciation, though, is just a capitulation to the power of the energies constellated in the complex, and simply strengthens these energies, making it ever more difficult for one to move to a new position beyond the disorder. From a theological point of view, victimized complexes are the fruit of the sin of the world, a dimension of what the Scholastics referred to a peccalum originale originatum. To the extent that one has freely conspired in their formation, they are also the fruit of personal sin. And the redemption of the energies bound up in these complexes must be effected, not by repression, nor by moral renunciation, but by a healing love that meets one at the same depth as the disorder. The victimized dimensions of ourselves will not be healed by judgment and condemnation, but only by mercy and forgiveness. Redemptive love must reach to the wound and even deeper, and must touch it in a manner contrary to the action that was responsible for the victimization.

There is, then, an alternative to repression and moral renunciation. But that, too, has its difficulties. The alternative is to participate in the compassion of a redemptive love in regard to our disordered affections. This means, first, recognizing that the complex is a victim of oneself or of history or of some combination of these, and ceasing to hate oneself for what one cannot help but feel. It means, next, adopting an attitude of compassion in regard to our affective disorder. It means, finally, allowing there to emerge from this recognition and compassion a willingness to cooperate with whatever redemptive forces are at hand to heal the disorder and transform the contorted and fragmented energies, even to consolidate these energies into psychic participation in the self-transcendent quest for direction in the movement of life.

The difficulty with this alternative is that it is impossible to implement, unless there be some power from beyond ourselves to release us into the requisite posture. For to be compassionate toward the negative emotional forces that derail us from the direction to be found in the movement of life is to be intelligent, reasonable, and morally responsible in their regard, and this is precisely what we are rendered incapable of by reason of the force of these complexes. Again, adopting the alternative is a function of an affective self-transcendence that is not at our disposal precisely because of the power of the complexes. Although the solution is clear, one is unable to avail oneself of it because the requisite willingness is lacking. And there is nothing one can do to provide oneself with that willingness. We can acknowledge the reasonableness of a certain manner of proceeding, and still be unable to act in accord with it. We are doomed to adopt toward the victimized complex one of the attitudes that will further victimize it. We cannot emerge from the vicious circle of disordered affective development. Let me add that moral impotence due to affective disorder is especially acute with regard to complexes rooted in one’s earliest experiences, in experiences coincident with or preceding one’s earliest memory. For these are often impossible to objectify in a way that illuminates us as to what we are negotiating.

If we are to reach a freedom to treat our emotional darkness with compassionate objectivity, that freedom must be given to us. We will not find it in a creative vector that moves from below upwards in consciousness. It must come from beyond the creative vector. In the final analysis it can come only from the reception of an unconditional love that puts to rest our efforts to constitute ourselves with inadequate resources. The love that can sustain the movement of the healing vector from above downwards in consciousness, moreover, is itself beyond all human capacity. All human beings are incapable of sustaining their own healing from victimization by the sin of the world, let alone the healing of another. Human love will simply further victimize unless it is itself free of the distortions and derailments of affectivity that are inevitable under the reign of sin. No human love will heal, unless it is itself participation in divine love. No human being can be the source of another’s redemption from evil.

A human love, moreover, that would truly participate in divine love, and so that could mediate healing, must be able to be a victim of the darkness of the one to whom it mediates the gift of redemptive love. Then the healing will be mediated precisely in and through the suffering of the one who loves. And one knows oneself to be sufficiently healed to be an instrument of divine love, only when one can endure precisely the same kind of suffering as that which caused one’s own victimization, but without being destroyed by it again.

There is much more that could be written about the dynamics of healing. But this is not the place for such comments. My purpose is to emphasize aspects of Jungian psychology that can be employed in Catholic theology, and at this point I have tried only to show that the complex theory can provide help to the development in interiorly differentiated consciousness of a theology of moral impotence, sin, and the need for and gift of grace.

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Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, in conjunction with the C.G. Jung Society of St. Louis, will offer a one-hour graduate-level course, "Fundamentals of Jungian Psychology," this Fall. The core of the course will be a Friday lecture and a Saturday workshop on "Shadow Work" October 5-7, 2007, in St. Louis led by James Hollis. I will facilitate a two week on-line discussion prior to the Hollis weekend and a two week on-line discussion following. Participants will submit a three-five page paper as part of the course requirements. Readings for the course will include: BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL by June Singer; WHY GOOD PEOPLE DO BAD THINGS by James Hollis; and an article from QUADRANT, "An Outline of Analytical Psychology," by Edward F. Edinger.



For more detailed information, please visit the Jung Society of St. Louis website http://www.cgjungstl.org/ or contact me at roseholt@aol.com or (314) 726 2032. For information about enrollment, contact Jared Ainsworth-Bryson, Director of Admissions, Aquinas Institute of Theology, at ainsworth-bryson@ai.edu

JUNGIAN READING OF THE ODYSSEY, Robert Fagles, trans.




INTRODUCTION to First Class


The word “Odyssey,” according to Webster, means: “a series of adventurous journeys usually marked by many changes of fortune.” In Jungian terms, the story can be understood as the ego’s individuation once a certain stage of development has been reached. We can liken it to the Biblical story of the Israelites. It took someone like Moses to lead the people out of bondage, through the wilderness, to the edge of the promised land. In this story, again looked at from a Jungian frame, a “Moses” kind of consciousness is necessary but only up to a point. Here Moses represents a gathering of psychic energetic forces, all leading toward a single goal–freedom for the personality. In other words, a degree of integration of the ego with an attendant increase in free will. A look at Biblical story as the code for the development of the personality would make for a fascinating study in itself. However, in this course we are going to read and discuss Homer’s ODYSSEY in hopes of finding relevance for us today.

Homer wrote down this epic poem some 2700-2800 years ago. The outline of the story, as summarized by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., is this: “A certain man has been abroad many years; he is alone, and the god Poseidon keeps a hostile eye on him. At home the situation is that suitors for his wife’s hand are draining his resources and plotting to kill his son. Then, after suffering storm and shipwreck, he comes home, makes himself known, attacks the suitors: he survives and they are destroyed.”

So, how are we to look for relevance in a story almost 3,000 years old? THE ODYSSEY emerged at a time when ego consciousness and its unconscious substratum were more closely allied than they are today. Today our individual consciousness is so well developed that, for most people, the existence of the unconscious is not even a consideration. But just because we are unaware of something doesn’t mean that “something” does not exist.

As we read and discuss, keep in mind that (1) the unconscious often personifies its contents, (2) events and experiences we explain today with notions like “hunches” or intuitions or luck or neurosis, our Greek ancestors explained as actions or interferences of the gods, and (3) the boundary between a waking and sleeping state was most probably not so well defined 3,000 years ago.

If you accept the reality of the unconscious, or at least can entertain the hypothesis that the unconscious exists, (and I assume you do or can since you are interested in things Jungian), then you can readily see that the unconscious personifies its contents because that is the way we are presented unconscious contents in dreams.

As for my second premise, that we have new notions and words for explaining what are truly ancient and universal experiences, simply consider how very recently much of daily phenomena were explained away by superstition.

Perhaps the best way to explain what I am driving at here is to consider some of the contributions of Immanuel Kant. One of Kant’s basic ideas was that there are two world, the phenomenal and the numinal. He argued that there is a great deal about the phenomenal world that we can understand and agree upon, that indeed our minds are constructed in such a way that we experience this world in the same ways. We all can agree about time, distance (width and length and depth), and cause and effect. The numinal world, Kant argued, we should leave to religion; There is little we can agree upon about it and for that reason shouldn’t try.

After Kant, much superstition fell away. (As modern events prove, there is little about the numinal world that we can agree upon and much we can fight over. Fruitlessly, I believe.) Standardization took root. We all have light bulbs that fit, time definitions that work for us. There is universal agreement about the measurement of length. Before Kant a foot was the measure of the king’s foot. When the king changed, so did the length of the foot. And cause and effect is such an accepted fact that few moderns can accept any other explanation for events.

Jung was a student of Kantian Philosophy. However, he took Kant one step further. He believed that the numinal world gives rise to the phenomenal and continues to influence and provide energy to it. The conscious mind and its unconscious substrate are Jung’s parallel notions of the phenomenal and the numinal. If we were inclined to use theological language, we would talk about the continuing incarnation of the godhead.

If you think about all this a little, it makes some sense. We are hard pressed to give up ideas of space and time and cause and effect in our waking realities. However, in the world we experience while asleep, i.e., when the conscious mind is somewhat shut down, the rules of space and time and cause and effect simply do not apply. That is one reason it is so difficult to work with and understand dreams–they force us to think “outside the box,” as it were. If we bring our conscious mind and its constructs to the dream, we will simply make the dream fit into one of our preexistent categories of understanding. If, however, we allow the dream to break up those categories, then dreams may possibly bring something quite new and original into consciousness. In fact, the very word analysis helps explain the work: lysis means “loosening.” The task in analysis is “loosening” the rigid consciousness that we work so hard to acquire in our first decades. You can see then why dreams so often contribute to a more creative consciousness.

You can see, also, why the work of analysis can lead us straight into conflict. A well-bounded, adapted, and functioning consciousness is necessary for the world, and there are great worldly compensations for it. It is the task of consciousness to discriminate and exclude. The price to be paid is that too much exclusion ay leave consciousness in a desiccated existence. “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Returning now to THE ODYSSEY. I urge you to read the story without giving it a whole lot of thought. Read it as you would read a novel. If something strikes you, note it for discussion. Let’s see together if in our reading and discussion we can feel our way into the world of Odysseus and his crew, into a consciousness somewhat emeshed with the unconscious background.

Homer’s great work is archetypal. By archetypal, I mean something very simple: an archetype is a pattern of human behavior. The two primary archetypes of THE ODYSSEY are “the journey” and “coming home.” Reading THE ODYSSEY may help us feel our way more deeply into our own archetypal patterns of journey and home.


Rose F. Holt
January 15, 2007

Our local Jung Society in St. Louis is extremely pleased to host Robert Moore in the Spring, March 30 and 31, 2007, for a Friday evening lecture and Saturday workshop. Details of the Moore event will be posted on the St. Louis Jung Society website (link on the left side of this page) soon. We urge everyone to sign up early as we expect a full house for this exciting event.




Here is a wonderful photo and quote that I copied from the Boston Jungian Society Website. That site address is: http://www.cgjungboston.com/


"One must never look to the things that ought to change. The main question is how we change ourselves." C. G. Jung

C.G. Jung in 1949

On September 15, 2006, the Saint Louis Jung Society hosted a panel discussion of four local Jungian Analysts--Sheldon Culver, Shirley, Fontenot, Ellen Sheire, and myself. My contribution to the forum follows:


STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Presentation for Analysts Panel Discussion - September 15, 2006

The question for this panel discussion, “What is rippling your waters?” is a good one for any of us to reflect on. It has surely provided a lot of reflection for me. I want to thank the Jung Society Board for this opportunity and for their very hard work to make these kinds of programs and events possible.

The subject that has most gripped me in recent weeks has to do with states of consciousness. It is an extremely broad subject but one that lends itself to some brief discussion.

Of compelling interest to anyone is: what is the state of consciousness that I find myself in and why is it important to know that state? Examining one’s own consciousness is a questionable endeavor for we are apt to find what we want to find rather than what is more objectively true.

It seems to be the case that each of us has a conscience that is a state sometimes discernibly different from our usual mode of being within ourselves. Even the word ‘conscience’ in its derivation (con = with and scio = to know) implies a knowing with something other. The effect of conscience is that we feel a dissonance, often in the body, when our ego state or ego action strays too far from this implied other. This often vague dissonance can be a most helpful guide in any examination of consciousness

How does one examine one’s own consciousness, especially while necessarily and hopelessly stuck inside it? I think the answer to this question is one of the most important that Jungian Psychology attempts to provide. Jung thought that by taking a very long view, by studying what others in different epochs had to say about certain issues, one could develop an Archimedean point of view. By “Archimedean,” Jung meant in a psychological way what Archimedes expressed for physical reality: Give me a fulcrum sufficiently removed, and I can apply force that can move the earth.

When Jung studies and comments on works from Eastern philosophy, world mythologies, and from ancient alchemical texts, he is giving us an Archimedean point of view for modern consciousness. Even though modern individual experiences are short-lived and limited; images from the unconscious fleeting and illusory; and states of consciousness sporadic and discontinuous, Jung demonstrated that an aggregate view—gained from many texts from many eras—shows an unfolding process in which all humankind is involved.

This process is not random. It consists of regularly occurring images, motifs, and patterns that Jung called archetypal (from arche = ancient and typos = imprint). Our experiences of archetypes go primarily unnoticed even though archetypes are universal and everyday. In subtle but powerful ways they determine our patterns of behavior. For example, most of us have lived through one such pattern, having experienced the sadness, loss, and sterility of a Demeter state of consciousness when Persephone (that youthful, forward-looking younger daughter state) is snatched away.

Or consider the pattern of Aphrodite, Hephaestus, and Aires. When Aphrodite and Aries have an illicit affair, Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus makes a net and entraps them, exposing the affair. That ancient myth describes the universal pattern of a consciousness that unwittingly sets up a situation to make sure his/her questionable behavior is uncovered.

Our modern consciousness, unmoored from the underlying and continuous unconscious, can get stuck in one state or can transition unnoticed from state to state. Today we label someone bipolar when he/she swings from Demeter to Persephone states, often with dire consequences. Knowing the pattern we are living, that is to say making the pattern conscious, may lead us to make different choices. And bringing an underlying unconscious archetypal pattern into consciousness has a healing effect. It is as if we need story, especially our own story, to connect us with universal human experiences and emotions—this universal archetypal bedrock--and to end our modern states of alienation from ourselves and others.

Why this need, we can’t be certain, but we do know that without story an individual grows ill. Dreams, in some fashion, connect us with our ‘story.’ When not allowed to dream, an individual will become psychotic in a remarkably short time.

Dreams are a fine way for examining our conscious state. When we remember a dream, it is as if the Dream Giver (perhaps the Self in Jungian thought) has filmed a drama from a point of view removed, then says, “Here, take a look at yourself and your relationships with psychic figures and events from my perspective.” Any of you who have examined dreams no doubt have seen archetypal figures and motifs in them, perhaps Mother, Father, Home, the Journey, Conflict, the Child, the Automobile, Moon, Sun, Stars, Earth, Fire, Water, Air, Sacrifice, the Scapegoat, to name a few.

Why all this interest in states of consciousness? I think with some degree of self knowledge, one can learn to choose one’s state without identifying with it. When identified with a state, one is trapped, things are as they appear. As one ancient put it: We must “learn whence is sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not. And if thou shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find God in thyself . . .” [Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 11, Para. 400]

Someone I know personally described disidentification this way: “When you look at your dreams, it’s amazing the information you get that’s different from your perception, information that gives you a different way of walking through life. You don’t have to go through it the same old way any more. I used to go strictly with my feelings that were raging around, would get stuck in them. Now I find that if I can go over them, process them, those feelings don’t hang around for days. I am unstuck then.”

Ultimately, there is a creative state of consciousness much to be desired. The best attempt I’ve seen to explain this creative state is from Toni Morrison:

“I’ve said I wrote The Bluest Eye after a period of depression, but the words ‘lonely, depressed, melancholy’ don’t really mean the obvious. They simply represent a different state. It’s an unbusy state, when I am more aware of myself than of others. The best words for making that state clear to other people are those words. It’s not necessarily an unhappy feeling; it’s just a different one. I think now I know better what that state is. Sometimes when I’m in mourning, for example, after my father died, there’s a period when I’m not fighting day-to-day battles . . . . When I’m in this state, I can hear things. . . . . It has happened other times . . . At that time I had to be put into it. Now I know how to bring it about without going through the actual event.” [Black Women Writers at Work, New York: Continuum, 1984, edited by Claudia Tate, p. 189-9]

You might ask a most practical and fundamental question: how do we self-examine, how do we discover precisely what our state of mind is? Here are some ways: (1) Paying attention to dreams and dream images, a topic I touched on earlier; (2) observing synchronicities that occur in our life; (3) watching for repeating patterns in our own behavior; (4) being mindful of the unintentional effects we have on others and on events; (5) mapping our own psyche for the complexes (which act like mine fields) that exist in our unconsciousness and that explode or erupt occasionally; (6) being more or less aware of the triggers that set off our complexes; (7) paying attention to our emotional state and its many variations and swings; (8) entertaining fantasies that can provide information to our ego state; (9) observing which characters we resonate with in literature and film; (10) noticing who gets under our skin and asking why; and (11) above all, having an awareness that ego consciousness is embedded in something larger than itself that exerts pressures, that influences attitudes and behaviors, and that has real affects.

In our shared interest in Jungian Psychology, we are making an additional effort. By relating to Jung’s ideas and the images he explores, by developing a relationship with them, we are in effect establishing a better relationship with the Unconscious. Or we are at least studying the map Jung provides for our own journey. The psyche, or the Unconscious, consists of images and patterns that picture vital activities which are full of meaning and purpose. When we do make the kinds of efforts I have described, it is as if a connection gets made from one’s small personal existence and experience to some underlying source of all existence and experience, and the individual has an ‘ah-ha’ realization that is satisfying and helpful. The ‘ah-ha’ is of the nature of the experience one gets when a mathematical proof “clicks”. There is a feeling of completeness and unshakeable certitude. Many of you may remember that feeling from your study of geometry in high school.

It would seem to be case, the Unconscious also gets something of an ‘ah-ha’ when connections between consciousness and the Unconscious occur.

The word psyche is a Sanscrit word that also means “butterfly” so that in the word itself is an understanding of the experience of transformation or metamorphosis. If the ego is an epiphenomenonon of the psyche, that is to say, the ego is formed on the substratum of the archetypal bedrock and takes on its patterning, then the ego, too, will be subject to psychic transformations. However, without an awareness of the underlying nature of the psyche and its pattern of regular, somewhat predictable transformations, the ego will simply be dragged through the transformations and may experience primarily the suffering. Or the ego may simply try to numb itself to all experience, in which case the baby has definitely been thrown out with the bath water. With memory, knowledge, imagination, patience, and perseverance, an individual can better weather the suffering and storms that are part and parcel of transformation.

I will be presenting a Study Group, "Introduction to Jungian Psychology," for the C.G. Jung Society of Saint Louis this Fall. The course will meet on eight Thursdays from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. Meeting dates are: September 7, 21; October 12, 26; November 9, 30; December 14, 21. We will be exploring fundamental concepts of Jungian Psychology. Our text, which will be provided to participants, will be a Spring Journal article by Edward Edinger. This study group should be of interest to those who want to familiarize themselves with Jung's theoretical foundation as well as to those who desire to refresh their understanding of Jungian Psychology. The study groups are always occasions for deep discussion of absorbing and enriching topics.

For more information or to enroll, go to the Society's excellent website: www.cgjungstl.org

The St. Louis Jung Society is offering excellent programming for this Fall, beginning with an Analysts Panel Discussion, "What's Rippling Your Waters?" on Friday, September 15, from 7:00 to 9:30 pm. Detailed information is available on the Society's website.

Rod Johnson, a writer and artist, who attended the last Jung Society "Jung Readings" Course on the subject of complexes, has captured the essence of parental complexes in his succinct poem, "Our Favorite Ghosts." Rod's poem:

Ghosts are with us all the time, hanging around,
Sometimes their presence is obvious, even obnoxious,
Like when I get bombastic with my wife
Who then smiling says, "Who let J.T. in?"
J.T. is that grandiose part of dad I try to keep locked up.
But you know ghosts. I'm told they go through walls.
Or, I come on weak, meek, disorganized, invite caring.
"Hi, Mom. Speak up. Wht do you need?"

Alone with my wife's live-in folks
We know we need to set places at table for the four
And leave room in the bed in case they demand notice.
They do deserve honoring but somehow
Always show their worst traits. Or are those
The only ones we'll notice them for.
Not for all the good stuff for which we
Want to take full credit.

Pat Spear, a friend with a long-time interest in Jung, read my blog essay, "The Ego as Complex," and very kindly sent me her thoughts on the subject of complex. Following is Pat's commentary:

In The Essential Jung Storr wrote that Jung seemed to link the complexes with unconscious personalities. He quotes Jung as saying that complexes can have us. Every constellation of a complex postulates a disturbed state of consciousness. The unity of the consciousness is disrupted and the intentions of the will are impeded or made impossible…(p. 38).

In The Portable Jung, Joseph Campbell quotes Jung as he describes how isolation can activate the unconscious (p. 331) and discusses freeing oneself from childhood (p. 339). "So that when in later years, we return to the memories of childhood we find bits of our personality still alive, which cling round us and suffuse us with the feeling of earlier times. Being still in their childhood state, these fragments are very powerful in their effect. They can lose their infantile aspect and be corrected only when they are reuinited with adult consciousness. This 'personal unconscious' must always be dealt with first, that is, made conscious, otherwise the gateway to the collective unconscious cannot be opened" (p. 339).

So to answer your questions: In my experience, the intention of the complex is to preserve the status quo, and is not conscious. It derives its energy as a split off piece of the personality in order to maintain its integrity. It begins as benevolent (i.e., when first established, its purpose is to protect the psyche) and over time becomes malevolent (cf. Kalsched). The triggers that set a complex in motion are an unconscious emotional field and sensory experiences, and in the case of addiction, the need for a “rush of pleasure” to restore balance or compensate.

The ego complex is a manager, like a director or conductor, with an intent to organize experience. (And now that I’ve written all this, I would like to say that not only does Jung’s theory now align with quantum physics, it’s also shamanic and exists in all the shamanic traditions I’ve studied from around the Earth.)
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Thank you for your thoughtful analysis, Pat. Should any other readers wish to add to this discussion, please e-mail me your input, and I will post it also.

THE EGO AS COMPLEX

According to Jung, consciousness AND the personal unconscious are made up of various complexes, one of which is the ego/shaow complex. The ego complex is somewhat different from other complexes in that the ego complex is the center of consciousness. The shadow part of the complex resides in the unconscious and consists of all those qualities not admitted to consciousnes, their having been excluded in the conscious development of the individual. That is to say, in our conscious, waking reality we experience life through one agency which we commonly call the ego. All those formative experiences not acceptable to the ego or which the ego has not the ability to incorporate are encapsulated in the shadow which remains unconscious as long as is necessary for the functioning of the ego personality.

At the center of every complex is an archetype. Archetypes, and hence, complexes, are composed of opposites: good mother/bad mother; punitive father/loving father; victim/persecutor, to name a few. Usually, the ego recognizes one side or pole of the complex but not the other. The one not recognized, or residing in the unconscious, we meet through projection. Thus, if we recognize (or identify with, i.e., think we are) the victim, we meet the persecutor 'out there' in our projections. Of course, to qualify for a projection the object of must have some hook that makes the projection possible.

But what, following this line of thought, would be the archetype at the core of the ego complex? It is--again according to Jung--the Self. Underlying the exprience of the ego, or the "I" of my experience, is the Self, the organizing principle and center of the personality that has the ego as its exponent in the world. Recognition of the Self as a reality has the effect of deposing the ego from its usual center and replacing it with some felt sense of 'other' of which 'I' become the subject. We find this idea usually expressed in religious language, such as: "Not I but Christ that lives in me," (St. Paul); or "My heart is restless, Lord, until it rests in thee," (St. Augustine).

Here is how one patient of Jung's expressed the sense of well-being and wholeness that recognition of the ego's home in the Self wrought:

"Out of evil, much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and by accepting reality--taking things as they are, and not as I wanted them to be--by doing all this, unusual knowledge has come to me, and unusual powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us in some way or other. This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them. So now I intend to play the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow forever alternating, and, in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to the way I thought it ought to!" [ALCHEMICAL STUDIES, Para. 70]

The ancient text, the I CHING, expresses the same notion in this (paraphrased) way: Only when we accept things exactly as they are and accept ourselves as we are, only then will a light form out of events to show us the way.

For anyone interested in further training/education in Jungian Psychology, there will be an Open House at the Chicago Jung Institute at which attendees can meet like-minded people, explore available programs and have questions answered.

Following is the announcement/invitation:

The C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago announces AN OPEN HOUSE RECEPTION for the CLINICAL TRAINING PROGRAM and the ANALYST TRAINING PROGRAM Friday Evening, January 6, 2006, at 6:30. For information and reservations call 312-701-0400.

The Clinical Training Program provides a two-year program for licensed mental health professionals in Analytical Psychotherapy--a therapeutic approach that utilizes a symbolic perspective within the context of a highly personal interactional field.

The Analyst Training Program prepares licensed and experienced mental health professionals for certification as Jungian Psychoanalysts through an in-depth study of Analytical Psychology as well as personal analysis and clinical supervision. The C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago is approved by he American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago maintains responsibility for this program and its content. Check our website for other programs www.jungchicago.org

You may also click on the link to the Chicago Jung Institute on this page.

INTENTIONALITY AND THE COMPLEX

In a paper Jung wrote in 1911 for delivery at an Austrailasian Medical Congress, he describes some of his research into the phenomenon of the complex. [“On the Doctrine of the Complexes,” C.W., Vol. 2, pp. 598-604] In this early paper, he makes some interesting statements.

Explaining that complexes touch on very sensitive areas of the patient’s psyche, areas he/she is hiding even from him/herself, Jung states: “In many cases the aroused complex is by no means approved by the patient, who even tries in every way to deny, or at least to weaken, the existence of the complex. Since it is therapeutically important to induce the patient to self-recognition, i.e., to a recognition of his ‘repressed’ complexes, one must take this fact into careful consideration, and proceed with corresponding care and tact.” [Para. 1351]

And later on, “. . . . the complex and its association material having a remarkable independence in the hierarchy of the psyche, so that one may compare the complex to revolting vassals in an empire.” [Para. 1352] Jung ascribes a great deal of autonomy to the complex, so much so that the complex is, “at any moment liable to bend or cross the intentions of the individual.” [Para. 1352]

Even at this early point in his work, Jung describes the ego itself as a complex, one that “may well be set parallel with and compared to the secondary autonomous complex.” {Para. 1352] A secondary autonomous complex can thrust the ego aside and take a central role in the functioning of the individual without the ego’s awareness that it has been displaced, however temporarily. “…. A strong complex possesses all the characteristics of a separate personality. We are, therefore, justified in regarding a complex as somewhat like a small secondary mind, which deliberately (though unknown to consciousness) drives at certain intentions which are contrary to the conscious intentions of the individual.” [Para. 1352]

The statements above raise some interesting questions:

(1) What might be the intention of any given complex? To protect the individual from anxiety? To checkmate behaviors that could be injurious to the overall well-being of the individual? To force the individual to change and grow?

(2) From whence does the complex derive its motive force, its energy for action?

(3) Is a particular complex of a benevolent or malevolent nature? Can we know?

(4) What are the triggers that set the complex in motion?

(5) What is the intention of the central complex of the psyche, the ego-complex?

It is this last question, I will address in what follows. We all know about ego intentionality. We work, we play, we earn money, we relate with others. We expend our ego energies in numberless ways. Is there, however, an overriding, perhaps central intentionality that takes priority—or should take priority—in our lives?

Jung writes about this question in AION when he discusses the relationship between the ego and the Self: The ego is dependent upon the Self, or “belongs to” the Self, but is also directed towards the self “as to a goal.” [Para. 252] He goes on to translate Ignatius Loyola’s opening sentence to “Foundation” from theological language into psychological language:

Loyola: “Man was created to praise, do reverence to, and serve God our Lord, and thereby to save his soul.” [Para. 252]

Jung’s reformulation of Loyola’s opening sentence: “Man’s consciousness was created to the end that it may (1) recognize (laudet) its descent from salvet animam a higher unity (Deum); (2) pay due and careful regard to this source (reverentiam exhibeat); (3) execute its commands intelligently and responsibly (serviat); and (4) thereby afford the psyche as a whole the optimum degree of life and development (salvet animam suam).” [Para. 253]

In this portion of AION, Jung is arguing for the importance of self-knowledge, for a fuller understanding of the ego’s utter dependence upon the Self. His words have an uncanny and frightening applicability to events that have opened this new millennium:

“Only an infantile person can pretend that evil is not at work everywhere, and the more unconscious he is, the more the devil drives him. It is just because of this inner connection with the black side of things that is so incredibly easy for the mass man to commit the most appalling crimes without thinking. Only ruthless self-knowledge on the widest scale, which sees good and evil in correct perspective and can weigh up the motives of human action, offers some guarantee that the end-result will not turn out too badly.” [Para. 256]

Reflections on Jung's "Answer to Job"

There is an account in fiction that might help us understand what Jung is getting at in his "Answer to Job." In considering this topic, we would do well to remember that when we talk about "God" that we are really talking about our images and ideas about God. GOD is precisely what we do not know because whatever the entity God is, that entity is far beyond our human understanding.

In our course [St. Louis Jung Society "Jung Readings"], we are grappling with our images of God, trying to make them conscious and, in doing so, trying to see if they fit our reality. Most of us received our personal God-image while we were very young. And for most of us, that God-image is like our eyeglasses, that is to say, simply something which we see the world through but of which we are usually unaware. That said, let me return to the fictional account that will serve as an example.

The example comes from Robertson Davies’ THE MANTICORE, the second book in his DEPTFORD TRILOGY. David Staunton, a successful but very neurotic barrister from Toronto has suffered a mid-life crisis. His symptoms are so severe that he takes himself to Zurich where he enters analysis with Dr. Johanna von Haller. David suffers from a father-complex. He has been shaped, formed, and dominated by his father; and in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, can only see his father in a positive light.

After about a year of analysis, working with dreams and gathering together the threads of his life story, David has developed a fuller and more complete picture of his father. He has a dream, biblical in style, which he reports to Dr. Von Haller.

"‘I dreamed I was standing on a plain, talking with my father. I was aware it was Father, though his face was turned away. He was very affectionate and simple in his manner, as I don’t think I ever knew him to be in his life. The odd thing was that I couldn’t really see his face. He wore an ordinary business suit. Then suddenly he turned from me and flew up into the air, and the astonishing thing was that as he rose, his trousers came down, and I saw his naked backside.’

‘And what are your associations?’

‘Well, obviously it’s the passage in Exodus where God promises Moses that he shall see Him, but must not see His face; and what Moses sees is God’s back parts. As a child I always thought it funny for God to show his rump. Funny, but also terribly real and true. Like those extraordinary people in the Bible who swore a solemn oath clutching one another’s testicles. But does it mean that I have seen the weakness, the shameful part of my father’s nature because . . . . .? I’ve done what I can with it, but nothing rings true.’

‘Of course not, because you have neglected one of the chief principles of what I have been able to tell you about the significance of dreams. That again is understandable, for when the dream is important and has something new to tell us, we often forget temporarily what we know to be true. But we have always agreed, haven’t we, that figures in dreams, whoever or whatever they may look like, are aspects of the dreamer? So who is this father with the obscured face and the naked buttocks?’

‘I suppose he is my idea of a father–of my own father?’

‘He is something we would have to talk about if you decided to go on to a deeper stage in the investigation of yourself. Because your real father, your historical father, the man whom you last saw lying so pitiably on the dock with his face obscured in filth, and then so dishevelled in his coffin with his face destroyed by your stepmother’s ambitious meddling, is by no means the same thing as the archetype of fatherhood you carry in the depths of your being, and which comes from–well, for the present we won’t attempt to say where.’"

In this dialogue, Davies may have had in mind an interesting and controversial statement Jung makes:

"I look upon the receiving of the Holy Spirit as a highly revolutionary fact which cannot take place until the ambivalent nature of the Father is recognized." [COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 18, Para. 1551]

All of Davies’ DEPTFORD TRILOGY is an interesting read and in many ways a fine introduction to some basic concepts of Jungian Psychology. I selected this particular passage to help illuminate Jung’s "Answer." The character David is not a religious man but he has an unconscious and very masculine God-image that has been mediated to him through his personal father and through other significant men in his life. The same is true also of his feminine God-image which was mediated to him through his personal mother and through other significant women, including his stepmother. For "God" in both these instances, you could simply substitute "Power" because it is these masculine and feminine power-images that have formed and shaped David’s worldview, that is to say, shaped how he sees the world and how he seems himself and his role in that world.

As long as his vision is truncated by a one-sided development, David necessarily holds a narrow and rather naive conscious view of himself and his world. His complexes around mother and father make him sensitive and prone to black moods and fits of anger. What he has repressed about both figures, the good and the bad, lies unconscious in his psyche and rises up to bite him in ways that eventually are debilitating. He cannot deal with his father’s cruel and controlling ways because he literally cannot see them. He cannot deal with his birth mother’s influence and power over him because he simply does not recognize them.

In his analysis, he is able to uncover aspects of his unconscious personality (also mediated to him through mother and father) that have bedeviled him for decades and to gain a certain degree of freedom from behaviors and compulsions that previously controlled him.

Of course, each of us is in some ways a "David Staunton." We each have had our worldview and our personality shaped and influenced by significant people in our history. We each are blind to certain influences and forces that are very real but fall outside our field of vision. The more completely we think we see, the more vast our blind spots.

The prevailing and unquestioned image of God that has been mediated for us is that of a loving, kind, benevolent, omniscient, all-powerful deity. No matter our personal experiences to the contrary, most of us cling to the prevailing God-image. Jung, in the essay we are studying, calls all these God-image assumptions into question. He does so in a way that was upsetting when he published this work in 1952 and is upsetting when we read this work still. We might do well to reflect on the question of WHY calling these God-images into question and examining them are so disturbing. After all, if Jung’s notions about the God-image are only ideas and theories, why do they upset?

INTRODUCTION TO READINGS COURSE

JUNG’S ANSWER TO JOB
February 3, 2005

In this course, we are going to take up one of Jung’s most controversial works, his Answer to Job. First, some background. Jung wrote Answer in 1951. On May 29, 1951, Jung wrote to Aniela Jaffe’: "So it goes all the time: memories rise up and disappear again, as it suits them. In this way I have landed the great whale; I mean "Answer to Job." I can’t say I have fully digested this tour de force of the unconscious. It still goes on rumbling a bit, rather like an earthquake. I notice it when I am chiselling away at my inscription (which has made good progress). Then thoughts come to me, as for instance that consciousness is only an organ for perceiving the fourth dimension, i.e., the all-pervasive meaning, and itself produces no real ideas." [Letters, Vol. 2, pp 17-18.]

Again, on July 18, 1951, he wrote to Aniela Jaffe’: "I am especially pleased that you could get into such close relationship with the second part of my book (Answer). So far most people have remained stuck in the first. I personally have the second more at heart because it is bound up with the present and future. If there is anything like the spirit seizing one by the scruff of the neck, it was the way this book came into being." [Letters, Vol. 2, p. 20]

Clearly, Jung felt more that his "Answer to Job" wrote him not vice versa. And he valued the second part of the work more than the first part. Let’s keep that in mind as we read and discuss the book. Which parts hold meaning for us?

In a letter to "Dr. H," dated August 30, 1951, Jung wrote: "You must pardon my long silence. In the spring I was plagued by my liver and had often to stay in bed and in the midst of this misere wrote a little essay (c.a. 100 typed pages) whose publication is causing me some trouble." [Letters, Vol. 2, p. 21]

Even before his "Answer" was published (in 1952), it provoked a firestorm of controversy, criticism, and rebuke. What was the firestorm all about? Jung’s biographer, Vincent Brome, writes:

"If one understands Jung’s thesis correctly, Job reveals a hubris which involves a higher form of justice than God himself and the challenge is met by the incarnation of Christ. In this interpretation Christ appears as a deliberate attempt to set right the balance between good and evil, to redeem the injustice God has committed toward Man. This perfection of God is achieved by union with Divine Wisdom or Sophia, the feminine counterpart of the Holy Spirit which reappears under the image of the Virgin Mary." [Jung, Man and Myth, p. 254]

Only two years earlier, the Catholic Church had issued a papal pronouncement on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, an event Jung saw as an expression of the collective unconscious that was a sorely-need feminine compensation for the patriarchal one-sidedness of Christianity. As we shall see, Jung thought it was God’s estrangement with, or ‘forgetting’ of, Sophia that allowed him to treat Job so harshly.

Again, I quote from Brome’s biography:

"There were those who felt that Answer to Job simultaneously committed the sins of blasphemy and arrogance: blasphemy that he should attempt to unravel the metamorphoses of the Holy Spirit in the manner of a neo-Gnostic and arrogance in making it conform to his own theories. Fierce controversy followed, with one school reading the book simply as a psychological explanation of Man’s conception of God, while others recoiled from the notion that any imperfection had ever appeared in the Holy Spirit. Ellenberger believed that the book could also be understood ‘as a cry of existential anguish from a man desperately seeking for a solution of the greatest of all philosophical riddles, the problem of evil’

"There remained a hostile handful who claimed that Jung had now appointed himself psychiatrist to God, diagnosed a divine sickness and successfully cured the Patient by applying his own theories. Eric Neumann, his old friend in Israel, wrote on 5 December 1951, "[Answer to Job] is a book that grips me profoundly. I find it the most beautiful and deepest of your books. In a certain sense it is a dispute with God similar to Abraham’s when he pleaded with God on account of the destruction of Sodom. In particular it is for me–for me personally–also a book against God who let 6 million of his people be killed, for Job is really Israel too.’" [Brome, p 254]

Jung’s reply to Neumann (January 5, 1952) clearly shows that he recognizes just what his "little essay" displays: ". . . the arrogance I had to summon up in order to be able to insult God? This gave me a bigger bellyache than if I had the whole world against me." [Letters, p. 32]

There were many reactions to Jung’s Answer. Victor White, a Dominican priest and close collaborator/friend of Jung’s, wrote a scathing review of the book. His views were so counter to Jung’s that the difference eventually ended their relationship. "As one critic put it succinctly if inelegantly, the two scholars (Jung and White) were able to maintain a respectful and cordial tone to their disagreement until Jung ‘cornered God the Father, pinned him to the nearest couch and promptly set about psychoanalysing him.’ Jung found God ‘guilty of being unconscious, having projected his shadow upon humanity, and of perpetuating a considerable amount of injustice and evil.’ When Jung concluded that Christian theology deprived God of the possibility of having a shadow, White was bound by the tenets of his faith to declare him wrong." [Bair, Jung, A Biography, p. 546]

For anyone interested in God, or in the nature of God, or in one’s relations with God, Jung’s ‘little essay’ raises disturbing questions. How does one reconcile the sometimes warring, vengeful, dangerous God/Yahweh of the Old Testament with the loving, compassionate, merciful Son of God of the New Testament? How is it that God could forget the covenant he made with God’s People and turn against them with such wrath at times?

In our readings course we will be revisiting one of the early issues of Christianity, the Marcion heresy. Marcion lived in the second century CE and held beliefs that were counter to those prevailing in Christian circles at the time. He believed there was no way to reconcile the Gods of the Old and New Testaments; their differences were just too great. He also believed that Jesus had revealed certain ‘truths’ that were available only to a select few (Gnosticism). And he believed that Christ’s nature was divine without the human element that the early church insisted upon. All three of these beliefs were eventually declared heretical.

As we study Jung’s Answer, we will be revisiting these ancient heresies and examining them for ourselves. Did the early Church Fathers settle these issues once and for all? Why are they important today? What do they have to do with us? Why should we care? What is the true nature of this entity we call God, the nature of the Christ/Man? Can we know?
I think exploring these kinds of questions and considering possible answers for ourselves is important because such exploration can be of help in our uncovering, i.e., making conscious, and possibly reformulating a living myth for our own lives.

If our myth is of a kind, loving, compassionate Father God, how do we reconcile a world in which evil runs rampant? If we are made in the image and likeness of this God, from whence evil? What about this God who allowed six million of his chosen people to die in the Holocaust? Elie Weisel has said the holocaust should make us revisit everything we ever thought about God. And what of the recent Tsunami?

If, as Jung suggests, the role of the conscious human being is to stand with God against God, what does that mean for us? Of course, a kind, loving, compassionate, all-knowing, all-powerful God had no need for such a posture on our part.

One way of looking at our Judeo-Christian scriptures is to see them as the ‘story’ of an individual and collective and unfolding/development of consciousness. It begins with the evictions from the idyllic garden of Eden, that state of not-knowing and innocence of childhood. There is the Moses kind of consciousness that unifies the personality/culture with law and order, leads it out of bondage, through difficult and dangerous passages. What about the God that strikes Moses down for a simple act of disobedience after decades of faithful service? That Moses consciousness cannot enter the ‘promised land.’

We will be examining the Job-type consciousness that keeps insisting God remember his better nature and the covenant God has made. Job does indeed stand with God against God. But what kind of God is it that needs a human reflection to remember his nature? What is the level of consciousness of the human person who does not question, does not reflect, does not accept any mirroring that would crack his/her belief system? Such a one is in dire need of a ‘Job’ to expand the controlling myth of his/her life.

And there is the Jesus-type consciousness that stands all prior understanding of the nature of God on its head. Where Yahweh would flatten the enemy, destroy it totally, this new God-Man shows and lives out a totally different kind of victory. As Jack Miles’ explains, ". . . Christians who have bound themselves to Christ sacramentally in his death will find themselves bound to him as well in his glorious resurrection. Their victory and God’s will be over death itself rather than over any one death-dealing human enemy. God will have achieved this victory for them not by defeating his human enemies but by allowing himself to be defeated by them and then triumphing impersonally over the defeat itself rather than personally over he enemies who inflicted the defeat." [Miles, "The Disarmament of God," p. 3, http://www.jackmiles.com/default.asp?id=28 ]

Or, put more succinctly by Anthony de Mello in his little story, "The Coconut":

"A monkey on a tree hurled a coconut
at the head of a Sufi.
The man picked it up, drank the milk,
ate the flesh, and made a bowl from the shell.

Thank you for your criticism of me." [The Song of the Bird, p. 163]

If we view our actions, both personally and collectively, in the light of a scriptural mythology of developing consciousness, those actions tell us a great deal about the state of our consciousness. Do we focus on defeating our enemy and raining fire and shame on their heads or do we focus on defeating the defeat our enemy has visited upon us?

I started this introduction with background and will return to background here. Jung wrote Answer in 1951 when he was 76 years old. He spent three months of intense effort revising it. Deidre Bair in her recent biography writes about the last two decades of Jung’s life. (He died in 1961.)

"In the last two decades of Jung’s life, coinciding with the isolation and introspection imposed by the war, those who were close to him noticed changes in his attitude toward the world at large. In one of her succinct pronouncements, Jolande Jacobi described the major one: ‘He really wasn’t interested in anyone’s private life anymore. He was only interested in the ‘Big Dreams,’ in the collective archetypal world.’ Using his two infarcts as his excuse, he curtailed public appearances and refused to meet most new people. He . . . cut his analytic calendar drastically, seldom seeing more than four persons in any given day and then mostly for fifteen-minute conversations . . ."

His behavior created concerns for those around him. Jacobi put it this way: "‘When journalists came we were trembling and hoping that Muller the gardener gives the interviews because he is closer to reality. Jung lived now in another world.’

There were more visible extremes in his behavior as well. During the three months he took to revise the original text of Answer to Job, he closeted himself away for long hours each day, writing to the point of exhaustion. Jacobi described him as ‘moody in a rude and crude way, like a peasant . . . furious all the time.’ The usually fastidious Jung sometimes went several days without shaving or (as some of his intimates inferred) bathing, but Emma was always there to see that he wore clean clothing." [Jung, A Biography, p. 528]

SYLLABUS - JUNG READINGS COURSE
"Answer to Job"
Winter- Spring, 2005


Text: C.G. Jung, "Answer to Job," in Vol. 11, Psychology and Religion, of The Collected Works, pp. 357-470, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. ["Answer to Job" is also available as a single publication and in The Portable Jung, Edited by Joseph Campbell.]
Class 1 - February 3 Introduction to Course
Reading: "Prefatory Note," pp. 357-58
"Lectori Benevolo," pp. 359-63
Class 2 - February 17 Reading: "Answer to Job," pp. 365-66
"Parts I, II, III," pp. 367-97
Class 3 - 7 Reading: "Parts XI, XII, XIII," pp. 419-44
Class 6 March 3 Reading: "Parts, IV, V, VI, VII," pp. 397-409
Class 4 - March 24 Reading: "Parts VIII, IX, X," pp. 409-18
Class 5 - April - April 21 Reading: "Parts XIV, XV, XVI, XVII" pp. 444-59
Class 7 - May 5 Reading: "Parts XVIII, XIX, XX," pp. 459-70
Class 8 - May 19 Summary Discussion

For additional information about this course, please click on the link to the St. Louis Jung Society on this page, or you may phone Rose at (314) 740-6207 or e-mail her at roseholt@aol.com


Rose F. Holt
January 16, 2005

INTRODUCTION TO COURSE: EXPLORING JUNG’S MYSTERIUM CONIUNCTIONIS

St. Louis Jung Society, Fall 2004 September 23, 2004


WHY STUDY THIS DIFFICULT WORK?

First, you must accept some underlying assumptions—or at least entertain certain hypotheses.

1. The Unconscious is real. It exists. It influences and affects everyone's everyday life. It is a living phenomenon—the teeming, ever-creative source of life.

2. The ego does not create or give rise to the Unconscious. Rather, the Unconscious gives rise to and supports the ego.

3. Establishing a relationship with the Unconscious is worthwhile and beneficial to everyday life.

4. Just as in other relationships, the more we know, understand, and accept the other, the richer, deeper, and more satisfying the relationship.

5. The unconscious wants to be seen and understood.

6. Ego consciousness plays a vital role in the process of relationship. It seems that nothing changes or emerges from the Unconscious without an ego to serve as its agency. The ego serves—wittingly or not.

7. The Unconscious is capricious in nature.

In our work together we will make a sort of Pascal’s Wager. Remember his wager? "It makes more sense to believe in God than to not believe. If you believe, and God exists, you will be rewarded in the afterlife. If you do not believe, and He exists, you will be punished for your disbelief. If He does not exist, you have lost nothing either way. "

Substitute our word, “Unconscious”, for “God” in this paragraph, and you will better understand the approach we will take for our time together. I’m certainly not advocating anything of a religious nature with this approach. Rather, to me, the whole matter comes down to practicality and a simple question: What approach will benefit us the most?

With that behind us, let’s return to our question: Why study this difficult work? Edinger tells us that Jung’s Mysterium is like the Unconscious itself. It is oceanic. Just like work with our own psyche or unconscious, it is difficult to get a foothold, to understand, to sort out the myriad of images and storylines. Understanding and relating to our own psyche or Unconscious is a daunting task. However, for those of you who make the effort, you already know the effort is well worthwhile.

And just what does this effort consist of? Paying attention to dreams and dream images; observing synchronicities that occur in our life; watching for repeating patterns in our own behavior; being mindful of the unintentional effects we have on others and on events; mapping our own psyche for the complexes (which act like mine fields) that exist in our unconsciousness and that explode or erupt occasionally; being more or less aware of the triggers that set off our complexes; paying attention to our emotional state and its many variations and swings; entertaining fantasies that can provide information to our ego state; and above all, having an awareness that ego consciousness is embedded in something larger than itself that exerts pressures, that influences attitudes and behaviors, and that has real affects.

In this course, we are making an additional effort. By relating to Jung’s ideas and the images he explores, by developing a relationship with them, we are in effect establishing a better relationship with the Unconscious. The psyche, or the Unconscious, consists of images and patterns that picture vital activities which are full of meaning and purpose. These images and patterns are not random. They are uniform and recurring patterns or archetypes. Our western way of explaining physical phenomenon is largely by the mechanism of cause and effect. I am uptight and anxious because my early formation occurred during the great second World War is an example of cause and effect thinking. An equally valid way of ‘explaining’ physical phenomenon is to ask, “To what end or goal is this event, behavior, occurrence aimed?” A third way of explanation is to explore the possible patterns that make the event, behavior, occurrence necessary for the pattern to complete itself. It is this third way that Jung explores in his great work.

The value of knowing and recognizing these archetypal patterns is that when they manifest themselves in our personal experiences, we can see them. Why is that important? It is the case that healing in analysis occurs when the individual recognizes the connection between the personal and the archetypal. It is as if a connection gets made from one’s small personal existence and experience to some underlying source of all existence and experience, and the individual has an ‘ah-ha’ realization that is satisfying and helpful. And, it would seem to be case, the Unconscious also gets something of an ‘ah-ha’ when those moments occur.

Let’s take some examples. The word psyche is a Greek word that also means “butterfly” so that in the word itself is an understanding of the experience of transformation or metamorphosis. If the ego is an epiphenomenona of the psyche, that is to say, the ego is formed on the substratum of the psyche and takes on its patterning, then the ego, too, will be subject to psychic transformations. However, without an awareness of the underlying nature of the psyche and its pattern of regular, somewhat predictable transformations, the ego will simply be dragged through the transformations and will experience primarily the suffering. Or the ego may simply try to numb itself to all experience, in which case the baby has definitely been thrown out with the bath water. With memory, knowledge, imagination, patience, and perserverence, the ego can better weather the suffering and storms that are part and parcel of transformation. Simply remembering one’s own adolescence and knowing that it is a major transformation in everyone’s life can be of enormous help to any parent with teen-age offspring.

Knowing, too, that parenting itself is one of those universal, archetypal human experiences can help adults to understand and, if desired, modify their own personal ways of expressing this pattern in a very important and personal way. In other words, we don’t necessarily have to live out a particular pattern we discover in ourselves. But if we don’t know about the pattern, we will live it out unconsciously—often with effects that we would avoid if we knew how to avoid them. Imagine that you are a bulb plant about to give rise to a spring bloom. Whether you identify with the bulb or with the bloom can make a considerable difference in how you experience that period of painful splitting and pushing upward to the light. Better still if we can realize we are both bulb and bloom!


OUR APPROACH TO THIS TEXT

I have chosen Edinger’s lectures on Jung’s book, Mysterium Coniunctionis, (Volume 14 in Jung’s Collected Works) because Edinger is able to make Jung’s work more accessible. Even though we will be using Edinger as our portal, we will run into much that we do not understand, and we will be frustrated. It is as if we enter a mental state like the California goldminers of old. We will stand patiently in the stream, sifting through a lot of silt and ore, looking for that occasional flash that will make our effort worthwhile. Keep in mind that Jung and Edinger have already done a huge presort so that what we are presented with is mostly gold—although we won’t often recognize it. Edinger argues that the content of Jung’s Mysterium is the content of the collective unconscious, the objective psyche, transmitted through Jung’s highly-developed consciousness.

Jung’s great work is also his last. He spent his 70’s working on it and considered it the culmination and synthesis of all his earlier researches. As with all the important issues and directions in his life, Jung’s move into alchemy was presaged by a dream. This is his statement about the dream, one in a series he discusses at greater length in Memories, Dreams and Reflections:

"Before I discovered alchemy, I had a series of dreams which repeatedly dealt with the same theme. Beside my house stood another, that is to say, another wing or annex, which was strange to me. Each time I would wonder in my dream why I did not know this house, although it had apparently always been there. Finally came a dream in which I reached the other wing. I discovered there a wonderful library, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Large, fat folio volumes, bound in pigskin, stood along the walls. Among them were a number of books embellished with copper engravings of a strange character, and illustrations containing curious symbols such as I had never seen before. At the time I did not know to what they referred; only much later did I recognize them as alchemical symbols. In the dream I was conscious only of the fascination exerted by them and by the entire library. It was a collection of medieval incunabula and sixteenth-century prints. The unknown wing of the house was a part of my personality, an aspect of myself; it represented something that belonged to me but of which I was not yet conscious. It, and especially the library, referred to alchemy, of which I was ignorant, but which I was soon to study. Some fifteen years later I had assembled a library very like the one in the dream." [MDR, p. 202]

In alchemical texts, Jung found processes described which paralleled the processes he observed in the dreams of his modern patients. The alchemist observed and practiced his art in his his/her laboratory, an art that consisted of “separation and analysis on the one hand and synthesis and consolidation on the other. For him there was first of all an initial state in which opposite tendencies or forces were in conflict; secondly there was the great question of a procedure which would be capable of bringing the hostile elements and qualities, once they were separated, back to unity again. " [Vol. 14, p. xiv] The beginning of the work was not self-evident, and the end-state even less self-evident. Generally, the alchemists found common elements or ideas in the end-state: “. . . the ideas of its permanence (prolongation of life, immortality, incorruptibility), its androgyny, its spirituality and corporeality, its human qualities and resemblance to man (homunculus), and its divinity.” [Vol. 14, p. xiv]

From his researches, Jung concluded that there is in the Unconscious, or the psyche, an ancient and ongoing process that tends toward an endgoal—wholeness or realization of the Self. He called this development “individuation,” the process in which opposing tendencies in the personality can be separated, analyzed, understood to some degree, and synthesized in such a way that a lasting connection and dialogue between ego and Self is established. The alchemists term for the process of separation and analysis was solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate. Their term for the endstate was lapis Philosophorum, or the “Philosopher’s Stone,” which they equated with Christ. (In his work, Jung considers Christ as one symbol for the Self.)

Using Edinger’s lectures as an aid to understanding alchemical language, we will explore the images and processes of alchemy which, as Jung so carefully and methodically demonstrates, are parallel to those that take place in our own psyches if we but can recognize them. Recognition is critically important for the reason I cited earlier: It is the case that healing in analysis occurs when the individual recognizes the connection between the personal and the archetypal.

Edinger gave these lectures at the Jung Institute in Los Angeles in 1986-87. The lectures were audiotaped, and the book we are using is one compiled and edited by Joan Dexter Blackmer. This is the first paragraph of her “Foreword:”

“Mysterium Coniunctionis has been an object of fascination for me from the very start of my acquaintance with Jung’s work almost twenty-five years ago. For many years I read at it and struggled unsuccessfully to grasp its heavily veiled meaning. Its images and phrases kept coming back to me as apt symbols of my experience, but always clothed in the riddles that symbols present—riddles that defied solution.” [p. 14]

Add to that quote, this one from Edinger: “This book can’t be read the way one reads an ordinary book—it has to be worked on the way one works on a dream. Initially, almost every sentence will present you with something that is more or less unfamiliar, and that adds up to a whole series of defeats for the ego. But if you can disidentify from the ego sufficiently, then that may enable you to keep going.” [p. 18]

What to Expect

The student of this work will:

1. discover fresh insights into the development of his/her own consciousness,

2. develop an understanding of the structures of the ego and the Self, as well an understanding of the relationship between the ego and the Self,

3. probe the mechanisms of projection,

4. learn to appreciate the role of fantasy and active imagination in personality development.

Analytical Meaning of Sacrifice

If, as Jung tells us, we worship as divine the life energies that flow through us, (1991, 83) then the release or the harnessing of new energies will be experienced as an incarnational event. For the individual who has been gripped by his/her own inner, autonomous energies, the one whose ego has entered into a cooperative relationship with those energies, incarnation becomes a matter of life and death. The relationship is also a great paradox because the refusal of the energies is a refusal of life while the embrace of the new energy can be felt as the death of some vital part of one’s identity. In other words, incarnation requires sacrifice, and sacrifice entails suffering. Sacrifice (making sacred), Incarnation (giving flesh to) and consciousness (a knowing with) are closely related terms. All three imply the presence of an Other. In this way of understanding the psychological nature of the human person, ego consciousness is the repository for incarnating energies.

Early in his life Jung wrote, “the whole art of life shrinks to the one problem of how the libido may be freed in the most harmless way possible” (318). Later in discussing his “Joining with the Primitive to Kill Siegfried” dream, Jung describes the process by which he was able to free the libido he had invested in his heroic attitude (1965, 180-81). At the time of the dream, December of 1913, he felt great loss and sorrow as he realized that part of his own personality was dying. Some years after the dream, Jung notes that in sacrificing his heroic ideal (symbolized by the murder of Siegfried), he gave up his superior function, thereby allowing the released libido to work toward a new adaptation to life (1989, 48-49).

In his old age, Jung wrote, “My raison d’etre consists in coming to terms with that indefinable Being we call God” (Jaffe, 1979, 207). Jung was cautious about using the word “God,” but I don’t believe he ever strayed far from equating God or the God-image with life force or libido.

In the journey toward a wider consciousness, many levels of sacrifice are necessary. Ultimately a fairly conscious ego can learn to participate in the sacrifice of itself when it is able to give up closely held attitudes, let go of relationships that no longer fit the life situation, or, paradoxically enough, sacrifice life situations that no longer fit an essential relationship. The ego begins to understand that the Self as the organizing principle of the psyche is unfolding itself in a slow and often painful process in one’s life that tends to some end or goals obscure to ego understanding. The Self serves mystery and it serves the divine. “But everything divine is an end-in-itself, perhaps the only legitimate end-in-itself we know” (Jung, 1969, 250). The Self makes the ego its object. The ego in turn learns to offer up in service to the Self, i.e., to sacrifice to the Self, “the fruit of attention, patience, industry, devotion, and laborious toil” (253). The Self demands the maximum sacrifice from the ego, and the conscious ego seeks to make that sacrifice.

Sacrifice is more than a way of expressing our relationship with the divine; it is also an avenue by which the divine enters into the human realm and the human person partakes of the divine. “We must overcome death by finding God in it. And by the same token, we shall find the divine established in our innermost hearts, in the last stronghold which might have seemed able to escape his reach (Teilhard, 82).

Probably at a very deep level of our being we recognize the necessity of sacrifice. We know that every living thing feeds off other living things. We know that the sun must set for the sun to rise. We bring new human life into the world only through labor pain. Though we anxiously work to avoid suffering, to make ourselves secure, we cannot hide from the fact that we are by nature suffering animals. The foundational myth of our culture tells us that our separation from God, our fateful decision to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, set us up for toil and suffering and death. Knowledge, or consciousness, a knowing with, is bought only with suffering and sacrifice and death, both on real and symbolic levels.


Religious Significance of Sacrifice

Abraham’s willingness to kill his only son at the behest of God is a religious working of the theme of sacrifice. Abraham has kept faith with his God, had faithfully executed his commands, and had been rewarded richly in his old age with the birth of his son Isaac and the promise that God would maintain his covenant with Isaac and his descendants. Then an enormous sacrifice was demanded of Abraham—his beloved son and with him the promise of the future—and Abraham was compliant to this highly irrational demand (New American Bible, 1986, Genesis 22: 1-18).

The increase of consciousness, i.e., the deeper understanding of God brought about by the indwelling of the divine in Abraham, and the fuller participation of God in human nature, afforded by Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice, signaled a change in the relationship between God and humankind. Perhaps in the Abraham-Isaac enactment there was too little presence of God in human nature for Abraham to find God in Isaac’s death. Did Abraham, with of course God’s help, intuit this fact, and was that the reason the sacrifice was halted?

Another replay of our theme in the Judeo-Christian tradition has God sacrificing his only son. Here God more fully partakes of the event; he no longer watches from a distance removed. It is God’s son, in whom he is well pleased, who is sacrificed. The indwelling of the divine in the human plus the sacrifice the divine carried out on itself seems to have been sufficient to make God more conscious of the human condition and to make humankind more conscious of God. In this sacrifice the incarnation of the divine allowed a human being to share in immortality. Hence, the resurrection represents the incarnation itself, and the appearance of the risen Christ to ordinary people represents the possibility of its realization in human consciousness.


Sacrifice in Fairy Tale

In “the Girl Without Hands” (Grimm, 1977, 113-18) the miller has been forced to chop off his daughter’s hands after he made a deal with the devil that would bring his family worldly riches. The daughter suffers her loss passively. Eventually she is faced with a choice—stay with the father and accept his loving care (the same father who chopped off her hands!) or give up this questionable security and venture into the world on her own. She leaves the confines of the family and courageously strikes out on her own. This is the moment she begins a conscious sacrifice.

A fruitful way to explore this tale is to consider the daughter as the developing feminine ego and her relationship with the other characters and the situations in the story as the unfolding and growth of the ego within the encompassing psyche. When looked at in this way, sacrifice becomes a major theme.

We follow our heroine through a series of adventures in which she submits to the insecurities of the unknown. Eventually she is able to grow new hands. Like Odysseus and Telemachus, our male heroes discussed below, she reaches a new and higher level of relationship with transpersonal powers that is reflected in her everyday existence. She is empowered by forces she meets in her own psyche when she has the courage to engage them.

The tale could be the story of a modern woman caught up in patriarchal values. Her introjected parents (the miller who made the bad deal and the mother who realizes it but is powerless to change it) would have her stay infantile and in their care, crippled but safe. Our modern woman may be faced with the choice of staying safely in the confines of a traditional marriage, in the role of “mother” long after her children need her, or in a good job in a corporation. If she stays or if she goes, the cost is high. The price for staying is the sacrifice of manifesting herself in that world (her hands). The price for going is the sacrifice of her life as it is, perhaps uncomfortable but known, perhaps unfulfilling but safe. Either choice she makes involves sacrifice. If she can forego safety and win through to new hands, she may become a mature and nurturing woman to herself and to others, someone who power to effect change, to put a stop to deals with the devil.


Sacrifice in Myth

In the Odyssey Odysseus and Telemachus, father and son, undergo a number of sacrificial experiences, Odysseus on his journey home and Telemachus in the search for his father. In some ways their experiences are similar and parallel. Odysseus in trial after trial is stripped of everything—his family, his ships, his crew, until finally, having given up his heroic identity, he reaches home, his beloved Ithaca. The reader understands that the hands of the gods are at work in every experience the father and son have. Odysseus and Telemachus, however, simply experience suffering, hardship, sacrifice, as well as ease without conscious understanding that they are at the mercy of and in service to warring divinities.

There comes a moment though when Odysseus stands his ground with Circe, a goddess who lives on the island of Aeaea. He relates cooperatively with her so that, with her help, he begins to learn to actively participate in sacrifice. Circe cautions Odysseus and counsels him about the dangers of the Sirens. He listens carefully, abandons any heroic attempt to deal with them, and strategizes with his crew about avoiding them. He uses beeswax to seal the ears of his comrades, and he commands them to lash him fast to the mast so that they can sail beyond the spellbinding song of the Sirens. No heroic engagement here; a wise avoidance with the help of a deity.

What does Odysseus sacrifice in this courageous act? The Sirens promise to make him and his comrades wise, to tell them about “the pains that Achaeans and Trojans once endured on the spreading plain of Troy when the gods willed it so—all that comes to pass on the fertile earth, we know it all!” (Homer, 1996, 277). Circe has told Odysseus the dangers of listening, of the danger of their being drawn into the realm of the Sirens. There will be no sailing home, no greeting from wife and children. Instead Odysseus and his comrades will be drawn into a kind of death for the Sirens have “round them heaps of corpses, rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones . . .” (273) Odysseus has to forego the temptation of succumbing to intellectual understanding devoid of life.


Sacrifice in Clinical Material

Diane, a woman in her middle forties who had spent her career working up the corporate ladder, came into analysis suffering from meaninglessness and depression. She had divorced some years earlier and more recently had quit her job when the corporation where she worked offered a generous separation package to a number of middle managers. Although she had agonized over leaving the job, she felt the need for time off, having worked except for brief vacations since she was a teen. She quickly established a new lifestyle, considerable reduced from before, and entered analysis.

The decision to quit work had certainly felt like a huge sacrifice, but Diane was buffered from it by the notion that she would eventually return to the corporate world. Like the Handless Maiden, she had had to give up a lot of herself to fit into her former life situation. Slowly she began to explore areas of her personhood that she had truncated in the interests of rather one-sided relationships, economic independence, career advancement, and success in a male-dominated environment.

About one year into her analysis she had the following dream: I am in a church. On the altar Mark is nailed to a huge cross. The service is about his sacrifice. It is horrible, and I am amazed to see that he is looking about with great interest at what is going on in spite of his suffering.

Diane felt the pain of this dream so strongly that after she told it, she sat weeping through the remainder of the session. When I tried probing into her feelings, she screamed at me to be silent. She was unable to engage other than to stay in the room.

From our previous work I knew Mark was a man Diane greatly admired and respected, someone upon whom she projected heroic qualities of intellect, power, and ability. This part of Diane, perhaps her identity with her first function, thinking, was being sacrificed. She could only witness passively in the dream. She certainly suffered great pain in her waking reality as she began to realize she could not return to her former way of life, but she had little consciousness of what was happening to her.

Some two years later, Diane entered into a relationship that held great promise. Over time, however, she realized that she was back in a situation that cost her too much of her essential self. Painfully and slowly she reached the decision to withdraw from the relationship. This sacrifice was made on a conscious level, although she entered into the process with considerable hesitation. After some months of intense loneliness and pain, she had this dream: I am on a journey with an unknown man. We arrive at a junction that requires much effort to cross. On the other side there are many trees that have been turned into timber. The man says to me, “Now we must go to church.” I am surprised and ask, “Why?” He says, “Because we share the Paschal Mystery.”

The dream seemed to contain precisely the confirmation Diane needed about her decision, and it gave her great comfort. She associated the Paschal Mystery with the death and resurrection mysteries of the Catholic faith, the willing sacrifice of the son and his later transformation. The dream caused her to revisit her earlier crucifixion dream and to glean considerable understanding about it and what it had effected in her life at the time.

I noted to myself the motif of the trees-to-timber, something Edinger writes about, “The general symbolism of falling trees in dreams indicates that some major quantity of libido is in the process of transit from one level of awareness to another. . . . Whenever you encounter a dream like that, be on the lookout for what is going on in the life of the patient. Very often it is the conclusion of some type of unconscious relationship” (1994, 76-77). Jung also tells us that a sacrifice often occurs at an important point of crossing (1991, 347) which is a motif in this dream.

Eventually Diane entered into a new relationship, one that can encompass the whole of her personality and one in which she and her husband meet on equal ground. Her attitude today allows her to enter consciously and meaningfully into sacrifice—although not without pain—and to see sacrifice as a necessary cooperative enterprise. Often she feels her life as a slow, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful, working out of issues with which she cooperates but which is tending towards aims of which she is but dimly aware. Not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, she has said she occasionally feels a “sort of joyful hope like a really spiritual person might feel” in her day-to-day lived experience. She has a job that she enjoys. Although it lacks the “glitz and the fast pace” of her former work, it allows her to earn a living and to employ her skills in a fuller expression of who she is.



References
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