Monday, October 11, 2004

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.

Sunday, April 18, 2004

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
Edinger, Edward F. (1994). A Seminar on C.G. Jung’s Symbols of Transformation. Los
Angeles, CA: The C.G. Jung Bookstore.

Grimm Brothers. (1977). Grimms’ Tales for Young and Old (Ralph Manheim, trans.).
New York: Anchor Press.

Homer. (1996). The Odyssey. (Robert Fagles, trans.). New York: Viking.

Jaffe, Aniela. (1979). C.G. Jung: Word and Image. Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1961). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books.

Jung, C.G. (1969). Psychology and Religion: West and East. Collected Works. (Vol.
11). Bollingen Series XX
. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1989). Analytical Psychology: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1925.
Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Jung, C.G. (1991). Psychology of the Unconscious (Beatrice Hinkle, trans.). Princeton,
N.J: Princeton University Press.

New American Bible. (1968). New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co.

Teilhard de Chardin. (19


Friday, December 26, 2003

There is a new biography of C.G. Jung just recently published. It is JUNG, A BIOGRAPHY by Deirdre Bair, published by Little, Brown in November, 2003. I recommend the book highly. It is available from the Chicago Jung Institute Bookstore with a nice discount for members. Click the link to the left of this page for the Chicago Institute web site.

Tuesday, December 23, 2003

Following is the syllabus for the next "Readings in Jung's Psychology" Course. For information about registration, click onto the link to the St. Louis Jung Society on the left side of this page.



SYLLABUS
READINGS IN JUNG'S PSYCHOLOGY

Winter 2004

Presenter: Rose F. Holt


Class Meeting Time and Dates: Eight Thursdays, 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm. January 8, 22; February 5, 19; March 4, 25; April 15, 29. 2004.

Location: St. Louis Office of Rose F. Holt

Text: Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, C.G. Jung. Edited by William McGuire, Princeton University Press, 1989.


Schedule of Readings

Week 1: "Introduction," pp. vii-xvi. "Lecture 1, 23 March 1925," pp. 3-8.

Week 2: Lectures 2, 3, 4, pp. 9-34.

Week 3: Lectures 5, 6, 7, pp. 35-57.

Week 4: Lectures 8, 9, 10, pp. 58-71.

Week 5: Lectures 11, 12, 13, pp. 82-100.

Week 6: Lectures 13, 14, 15, pp. 101-133.

Week 7: pp. 134-160.

Week 8: Discussion and Summary


Rose F. Holt 12/23/03
phone: (314) 726-2032

Sunday, November 09, 2003

A Review of Rapture Encaged
by Rose F. Holt

Rapture Encaged: The Suppression of the Feminine in Western Culture by Ruth Anthony El Saffar, Routledge, 1994.

I read Rapture Encaged, The Suppression of the Feminine in Western Culture when it was first published in the spring of 1994. Impressed with the author's ability to articulate questions that had lived wordlessly in me for some time, I reread the book at that time more carefully. My third reading, done for this review, reinforced my initial opinion that this is an important work, a work that synthesizes psychological theories about women, modern feminist theory, and historical perspective on the place of women in Western culture. Rapture Encaged is one of those rare and wonderful finds--a "living" text that engages the reader in such a way that both text and reader are changed and in-formed in the engagement.

In this slender volume, Ruth Anthony El Saffar explores key questions about women's psychology: (1) Is there "an authentic female vision that patriarchal cultures, from the Greeks to the present day, have systematically sought to deny and expunge?" (2) "Can we say that there is a feminine essence that is not the result of cultural conditions, or conversely, can we say that cultural conditioning is not an expression of essential human nature?" (3) Are there "available models for living out a full feminine identity" in patriarchal culture? In everyday parlance men might echo Freud's oft-asked question, "What do women want?" Or women, "Why can't I have the kind of relationship I have with my women friends with my husband, lover, co-worker, etc.?" And all of us must ask why, in a country overflowing with bounty, we cannot access the nurturing capacities of mother and father for care of children who live in poverty. Clearly we have much to gain from a deeper understanding of the role of cultural conditioning in defining who we are, how we live, and how we relate.

El Saffar asks and explores her questions in a scholarly, intellectual fashion. Her use of the autobiography of an illiterate seventeen-century Spanish nun, Isabel de la Cruz (coupled with the historical context she provides) as a highly-polished mirror to reflect twentieth-century life, is nothing short of brilliant. She gives us an Archimedean Point sufficiently grounded in historical perspective and distant enough that we can use it for an exploration of "the feminine" and "the masculine" today. Most clearly she explains how power imbalances continue to cripple men and women as we seek to live in life frames defined too narrowly by our patriarchal culture.

The author shows us the inadequacies of psychological theories that stress autonomy and independence when she states: "It is not enough for women simply to be in 'right relations' with the masculine. For the masculine, as it has been layered into the psyche over generations of patriarchal power, has a deadening effect on the expression of feminine power that allows neither men nor women to cultivate soul, or connection with the female aspects of the godhead."

She also shows us the ways in which women, if they adopt men's theories about human development, find themselves in a double bind. "The woman who functions in culture is inevitably one separated from the mother, and therefore split off from her source of power. What power she does acquire comes from her role as relational to a man, on whom she depends for her name, her success, her money, her well-being?"

Indeed, a woman's experiential reality may be quite different from that of a a man, but as long as she submits to a man's frame of reference for her experience, she will never trust her own process. Her understanding of self, her very being, then depends upon reflection from a man. His is "solar" consciousness; hers "lunar" consciousness. His life is defined by activity; hers by passivity. Anyone who has reflected sufficiently upon his/her own reality, recognizes how narrow and limiting, how patently untrue, such notions are. Yet they persist. My conjecture is that a lot of women's perceived passivity is simply a defensive maneuver to avoid pejorative and inadequate labels.

If language is the house of being, the language of a man's experience, if essentially different from a woman's, can never touch her where she lives, let alone help her come home to herself. To be labeled "animus-possessed" or "fused with the mother" for disagreeing with a frame that doesn't fit is a further negation of her selfhood. These terms may express something of a man's experience of woman, but what do they tell a woman about herself?

How different, for example, are the experiences of Isabel and Jung. ". . . unlike the Jung of the confrontation with the unconscious, Isabel did not experience God's power as terrifying, because her encounter with the unconscious was not precipitated by the sudden irruption of loss into an otherwise extraordinarily successful life . . . Rather she sought in the unconscious a place of refuge from her unremitting experience of failure in the world."

One way I have found for engaging this book (the way that convinced me it is a living text) is to select one of the author's finely-tuned sentences and reflect on it. For example, "It took me many years to realize that Jung's 'feminine' was yet another captivated and diminished expression of women, one that is nothing more than a reflection of the male psyche."

I don't believe it is helpful to women's cause to blame Jung for what he was unable to do precisely because of his male psyche. Rather it is time that we women expxress for ourselves out of the female psyche the essence of the feminine. Further, we must do so with the intellectual rigor that El Saffar demonstrates. A Jungian analyst herself, she obviously values Jung's work highly but is unabashedly frank in challenging his ideas when she finds him wide of the mark, misogynistic, or simply out-dated.

What better definition of a Jungian analysis can we find than the words this author uses to describe the process of Isabel's telling her life story: ". . . Isabel, who through the dictating of her autobiography had an opportunity to experience herself mirrored, for the first time ever, in the outer world. Through the process of co-creating her autobiography, Isabel was able to see herself take shape as a whole being, with a history, a purpose, and value."

El Saffar's book is brilliantly written, quietly but firmly persuasive, and enormously engaging. However, it ends abruptly. She does not adequately answer the questions she raises. The reader is left with a feeling of incompleteness. The book needs a final concluding chapter. I feel frustration at what is left unsaid, unasked, unanswered. I found myself asking questions like: And so, where to from here? What is the current state of theorizing about women's psychology? Who is doing it? Why, as women, do we shrink from the task? Do we women use the power imbalance, real and crippling as it is, partially as an excuse for not accepting full responsibility for the development of our own uniquely feminine psychology? Why can't we more fully reflect goddess energy and values in our culture?

The book is cut too short. Tragically, so was the life of the author. Ruth Anthony El Saffar died of cancer at age 52 on March 28, 1994, one week before Rapture Encaged was released.


[This review was first published in The Round Table Review, September/October 1998, V. 6, No. 1.]

Saturday, July 05, 2003

C.G. JUNG READINGS CLASS – FALL 2003
Rose F. Holt, Presenter


To enroll in this class, contact the St. Louis Jung Society by e-mail @ www.cgjungstl@aol.com, by phone at (314) 533-6809, or through the St. Louis Society website link on the left of this page. Enrollment will be limited to ten.

Class Meeting Time and Dates: Seven Thursdays, 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm. September 11, 25; October 9, 23; November 6, 20; December 4

Location: St. Louis Office of Rose F. Holt

Text: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology by C.G. Jung, Second Edition, Princeton University Press, 1966. [Vol. 7 of Jung’s Collected Works]



Course Syllabus

We will divide this important work of Jung’s into four parts: I. Introduction (Week 1); II. Psychoanalysis (Weeks 2-4); III. The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious (Weeks 5-6); IV. Summary (Week 7)

Schedule of Readings

Week 1: “Prefaces,” pp. 3-8. “Appendix II, The Structure of the Unconscious,” pp. 269-304.

Week 2: “Psychoanalysis,” pp. 9-18. “The Eros Theory,” pp. 19-29. “The Other Point of View,” pp. 30-40. “The Problem of the Attitude-Type,” pp. 41-63.

Week 3: “The Personal and the Collective (or Transpersonal) Unconscious,” pp. 64-79. “The Synthetic or Constructive Method,” pp. 80-89. “The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” pp. 90-113.

Week 4: “General Remarks on the Therapeutic Approach to the Unconscious,” pp. 114-118. “Conclusion,” p. 119.

Week 5: “Preface,” pp. 123-125. “The Effects of the Unconscious Upon Consciousness,” pp. 127-171.

Week 6: “Individuation,” pp. 173-241.

Week 7: Review and Summary Discussion

Sunday, May 25, 2003

A Review of The New God-Image by Rose F. Holt

The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image by Edward F. Edinger. Chiron Publications, 1996.

Jung once remarked that his life’s work has been to encircle the “central fire” with a series of mirrors but that necessarily there were gaps where the mirrors met. In The New God-Image, Edward F. Edinger provides a great deal of fill-in for one of Jung’s gaps. The book is from audio tapes of a series of lectures Edinger gave in the Fall of 1991 as part of the Analysts’ Training Program at the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. In the lecture series Edinger drew on letters Jung wrote about the on-going transformation of the god-image and in so doing wove together a coherent understanding of Jung’s thinking about this vital topic.


The opening sentence of the book is startling: “The history of Western man can be viewed as a history of its God-images, the primary formulations of how mankind orients itself to the basic questions of life, its mysteries.” My reaction as I read those words was, “Well, yes, of course!” I remembered a similarly startling statement from an old theology professor: “We all have a theology, whether we know what it is or not.” Edinger helps make conscious some of the theological underpinnings of Jung’s depth psychology. Those underpinnings inform a good deal of the theology of modern peoples—whether we understand them or not.


In the Introduction, Edinger gives us a survey of the six major stages in the evolution of the Western God-image, stages through which each individual passes in the development of consciousness. The sixth of these stages, Edinger tells us, is individuation, the discovery of the psyche. Jung discussed religious imagery as the phenomenology of the objective psyche in two of his late works, Answer to Job and Aion. Edinger, however, believes Jung’s clearest statements about the God-image and its transformation are to be found in letters he wrote during his last ten years, from 1951 to 1961. As material for the lectures, Edinger selects fourteen of the letters, dividing them into three major subject areas: (1) Jung’s epistemological premises, (2) the paradoxical God, and (3) continuing incarnation.


Edinger tells us that there are three steps involved in understanding Jung’s material concerning the new God-image. One must be able to perceive the new God-image and that requires mastering certain epistemological premises. One must actually perceive for one’s self this living reality and the impact it has on one’s own psychology as well on the psychology of the collective. Jung (and analytical psychology) can teach the how, but it is not something taken as an article of faith. It is something one must do for one’s self, a kind of God-has-no-grandchildren concept. And the third step requires a developing awareness of one’s own role in the transformation of the God-image, one’s part in the process of continuing incarnation.


Part I, the first four chapters of The New God-Image, is devoted to the necessary epistemological premises. In these chapters Edinger presents a rather fine crash-course on Kantian philosophy. Jung was very much influenced by his early studies of Kant and never wavered about the import of Kant’s contribution to the theory of knowledge. Jung wrote in 1957: “. . . here that threshold which separates two epochs plays the principal role. I mean by that threshold the theory of knowledge whose starting-poing is Kant. On that threshold minds go their separate ways: those that have understood Kant, and the others that cannot follow him”


Edinger ends Part I by talking about the redemptive power of Jung’s work and the impact it had on his own personal redemption. Edinger explains the Marcion Heresy, an early Church split in which Marcion argued for a complete departure from the Old Testament Yahweh in favor of a new all-loving God. Had Marcion won the day, there would have been no continuity with the past. It is a split suffered frequently by moderns—the idea that one need not be concerned with history, that one can supersede and disregard all the old gods. There is a warning in the I Ching about such an attitude—it is dangerous to cling to the tops of the trees without regard for the roots. A consciousness split off from the levels or stages of evolutionary collective development is in a vicarious and unredeemed state. Jung’s work, according to Edinger, has a great value not only for redemption of the individual but also for redemption of collective human endeavors—alchemy, mythology, philosophy, and more primitive aspects of existence—by demonstrating how each is a manifestation of the eternal, ever-living psyche.


In Part II Edinger explores the topic of the paradoxical God, the God who needs humankind, who incarnates in the human to bring Himself to consciousness. This view of incarnation assigns enormous dignity to the meaning of human suffering as well as huge responsibility for how one handles suffering. The psyche has as one of its functions, the assignment of meaning, and meaning lends significance. Edinger quotes Jung in this regard: “Buddha’s insight and the Incarnation in Christ break the chain (i.e., the Nidhana-chain of suffering) through the intervention of the enlightened human consciousness, which thereby acquires a metaphysical and cosmic significance.”


Lastly, Edinger covers Jung’s ideas of the continuing incarnation. Key questions arise if we accept Jung’s notion that the ego, as exponent for the Self, has a role in incarnation, that psychological maturity means “the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us.” Such questions include: “What is that? How can we do that? How can we even know the divine will? . . . It is the problem of distinguishing between the ego and the Self.” Edinger gives us some fine examples from Jung’s letters, from Melville’s novel White Jacket, and from clinical case histories to illustrate how the paradoxical Self manifests itself in human experience and the care a conscious ego must exercise in relating to it.


In a particularly poignant passage Edinger explains that, “In Jung’s view one is not entitled to pray for anything at all, except one thing: remind the Self to go easy on the ego, that it is expecting too much. One must remind the Self how things are up here in the material world, and thus not break the fragile bonds of the ego by demanding too much. Take it easy, let up a bit.”


One can approach this book in several ways. As an aid for understanding Jung’s formulations about the Self, it is superb. For a quick survey of historical ideas about religion and philosophy, it is a solid primer. It is fine explanation of the thinking of Jung in his later years. Edinger was a man who studied and worked in the area of analytical psychology for more than forty-five years. In the Preface to his book, The Aion Lectures, he offers some advice on reading Jung: “. . . you should realize that Jung’s consciousness vastly surpasses your own . . . If you make the assumption that you know better than he does and start out with a critical attitude—don’t bother, the book (Aion) isn’t for you . . . To read Jung successfully we must begin by accepting our own littleness; then we become teachable” (p. 11). Not bad advice for approaching The New God-Image.


This review was first published in The Round Table Review, January/February 1999, V. 6, No. 3.]

Readings Class
May 22, 2003

Our class met for its eighth and final session on Thursday, May 22. We devoted the two hours to a review and summation of the material we read and discussed. Our general conclusions were:

1. Reading Jung is difficult, rewarding, and satisfying; and we could reread everything from the eight weeks with interest and enthusiasm.

2. We have entertained and discussed difficult and interesting concepts that create many more questions than answers. [One member of the group pointed out that seriously reflecting on questions is a good deal more productive and leads to deeper insight than does focussing on knowledge and theory alone. We certainly did that!]

3. Although we developed general understanding of concepts like individuation. complex, archetype, collective unconscious, persona, shadow, anima/animus, self, our understanding has brought us to the need for further reading and study to help flesh out and bring the ideas even more to life.

Having one member bring and share her notes from the previous meeting has been most helpful and appreciated.

In the Fall, I will offer another "Jung Readings Course" under the auspices of the St. Louis Jung Society. For information, see the St. Louis Jung Society Website by clicking on the link on the left of this page.




Sunday, April 06, 2003

A key concept of Jungian Psychology is that of the "Self." Jung writes: "The self, in its efforts at self-realization, reaches out beyond the ego-personality on all sides; because of its all-emcompassing nature it is brighter and darker than the ego, and accordingly confronts it with problems which it would like to avoid. Either one's moral courage fails, or one's insight, or both, until in the end fate decides. The ego never lacks moral and rational counter-arguments, which one cannot and should not set aside so long as it is possible to hold on to them. For you only feel yourself on the right road when the conflicts of duty seem to have resolved themselves, and you have become the victim of a decision made over your head or in defiance of the heart. From this we can see the numinous power of the self, which can hardly be experienced in any other way. For this reason the experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego." [C.W., Vol. 14, Para. 778]

In our "Jung Readings" class this week, we talked about the reasons it is so difficult for the ego to fully apprehend and consider the demands of the Self, let alone respond to them. A full apprehension and consideration would require decisions and responsibilities that the individual is rarely fully prepared for. I found this quote which, I think, helps us understand why our ego development often lags behind the demands of the Self. Jung seems to imply that it is often, if not always the case, that the ego simply cannot keep up, that necessarily the ego must suffer defeat in order to have an experience of the Self. Another way of saying the same thing is that it is impossible to will oneself not to will, which is a precondition to experiencing a greater will.

Jung stresses the need for an ethical, moral responsibility toward the demands of the Self and the images of the unconscious that appear to us in Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

"It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to gain some understanding the the images and that knowledge can here make a halt. Insight into them must be converted into an ethical obligation. Not to do so is to fall prey to the power principle, and this produces dangerous effects which are destructive not only to others but even to the knower. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man (sic). Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life." [P. 192-3]
Jung writes of two kinds of thinking. The first kind is linear, learned, goal-oriented, directed and the kind of thinking we strive for in our consciousness. The second kind of thinking is circular; often disorienting and confusing to consciousness, not directed by consciousness; more given over to play and fantasy, and is the very basis of creativity. This second kind of thinking relies on symbol and image a good deal while the first kind finds itself more at home with words and thought.

Symbolic thinking, however, can be acquired and can greatly enrich our normal, more linear, word-based consciousness. Following are some helpful ideas about symbols from C.G. Jung and Paul Tillich:


Jung, in Man and His Symbols, pp. 20-27, writes:

A symbol “implies something vague, unknown or hidden from us.” . . . “Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason.”

“Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend.”

“Thus every experience contains an indefinite number of unknown factors, not to speak of the fact that every concrete object is always unknown in certain respects, because we cannot know the ultimate nature of matter itself.”

“As a general rule, the unconscious aspect of any event is revealed to us in dreams, where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image.”


Tillich, in Dynamics of Faith, pp. 41-43, writes:

“Symbols . . . point beyond themselves to something else.” Symbols “participate in the reality of that to which they point.” Symbols cannot “be replaced for reasons of expediency or convention . . .”

A symbol “opens up levels of reality which are otherwise closed to us.” And a symbol “also unlocks dimensions and elements of our soul which correspond to the dimensions and elements of reality.”

“Symbols cannot be produced intentionally . . .” Symbols “cannot function without being accepted by the unconscious dimensions of our being.” Symbols grow and they die.

Saturday, February 22, 2003

Notes for February 20 Class - "Readings in Jung's Analytical Psychology"

In considering the relationship between the conscious mind and the unconscious, we might well begin with this quote from Jung:

"The conscious mind moreover is characterized by a certain narrowness. It can hold only a few simultaneous contents at a given moment. All the rest is unconscious at the time, and we only get a sort of continuation or a general understanding or awareness of a conscious world through the succession of conscious moments. We can never hold an image of totality because our consciousness is too narrow; we can only see flashes of existence. It is always as if we were observing through a slit so that we only see a particular moment; all the rest is dark and we are not aware of it at that moment. The area of the unconscious is enormous and always continuous, while the area of consciousness is a restricted field of momentary visions." [Jung's Collected Works, Vol. 18, Para. 13]

If we accept Jung's view, our level of certainty of knowledge is immediately diminished. Whatever we think we know is always and necessarily only a partial knowledge. What we can see is limited and, as we shall see, highly conditioned by the living context that we are. Our responsibility then is to work to increase our consciousness to the degree possible through education, dialogue, self-reflection, and a careful consideration of the ways in which we make decisions, hold values, influence others; indeed, by the ways we live our lives.

Some key ideas from our reading of de Laszlo's Text:

Jung, especially in his later works, focused on the symbolic expressions of the human spiritual experience. He observed, described and collated spiritual experiences in (a) imaginative activities of the individual and in (b) the formation of mythologies and religious symbolism in various cultures.

Archetypal symbols, that is to say, archaic imprints emerge from the deeper recesses of the psyche and are carriers of the process of individuation. Individuation is the inner experience of psychic growth of the human person and is frequently reflected in a series of symbolic images seen in dreams. Jung has given us a fairly complete exposition of such a dream series in his book, Psychology and Alchemy. Generally speaking the process of psychic growth we call individuation is characterized by an individual's movement from a state of conflict to a state in which he/she experiences greater freedom and unity of personality. Conflicts and problems are not left behind or resolved and solved. Rather, the individual learns to grapple more creatively and to engage fully in the issues and both his/her personal and collective lives.

Symbols are extremely important in the unfolding of the psychic process because through symbols the individual accesses new energy and new life. Symbols arise spontaneously and cannot be conjured up or manufactured. Archetypal symbols emerge from from the collective unconscious, the source of energy and insight in the depths of the human psyche which has been operatingfor aslong as records are available. The activity of the collective unconscious in the human psyche always has and still does aid, encourage, enable, even force spiritual development in the individual. (By spiritual, Jung does not mean the religious devotion to a dogma or creed. Rather, he is pointing to a certain vitality and self-reliance that develops in the person when he/she discovers the source of treasure that lies within the psyce. For a keener understanding of the differentiation Jung makes between religion and a personal religious attitude, see pp. 506-20. As long as the individual seeks answers or meaning or absolute authority outside him/herself, those goals remain elusive. Individuation is the seeking and the partial discovery of the treasure within, partial because individuation is lifelong process that has no clear conclusion or completion other than death.)

"Archetypes, so far as we can observe and experience them at all, manifest themselves only through their ability to organize images and ideas, and this is always an unconscious process which cannot be detected until afterwards." [de Laszlo, p.103]  When archetypal images appear to the individual, they have a numinous character.  Almost everyone has had such experiences, but they are extremely difficult to talk about or to communicate to another.  The experience of an archetypal image brings with it an unshakable, even if uncommunicable certainty because it is the image itself that conveys meaning.

Like instincts, archetypes influence consciousness by regulating, modifying and motivating conscious contents.  Consciousness develops and resides somewhere between the instinctual world of nature and the archetypal world of the spirit.

Jung has demonstrated that the individuation process follows a general unfolding that is characteristic and somewhat universal.   There is a chaotic assortment of images that slowly changes into well-defined elements and themes: (1) chaotic multiplicity and order (2) duality (3) opposition of light and dark, upper and lower, right and left (4) union of the opposites in a third thing (5) quaternity (square, cross), rotation (circle, sphere) and (6) finally the centering process and a radial arrangement that usually follows some quaternary system. The centering process is the climax of the process and is therapeutic. Examples of dreams that illustrate this final process can be found in the "great clock" dream of Wolfgang Pauli's (Jung's Collected Works, Vol. 12) and in a dream of Jung's, his "Liverpool" dream which he recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Wednesday, January 15, 2003

C.G. JUNG SOCIETY OF SAINT LOUIS Program:
Readings in Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Presented by Rose Holt

This group will read and discuss the following selections from C. G. Jung’s works: “On the Nature of the Psyche,” “Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” and “On the Nature of Dreams.” These readings provide a conceptual foundation that is fruitful for someone working to understand Jung more deeply as well as for someone seeking a solid introduction to Jung’s thinking.

TEXT: The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, Ed. Violet S. de Laszlo. Princeton/Bollengen, 1990.

CEU’s are available for this course through the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago by individual arrangement with the analyst for an additional fee of $10.00.

Rose Holt, a Jungian analyst who divides her private practice between St. Louis and Chicago, is a diplomate of the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago.

Details:
8 Thursdays (1/30; 2/20; 3/6,20; 4/3,24; 5/8,22 in 2003)
Home in Central West End, St. Louis, Missouri

READINGS IN JUNG’S ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Course Syllabus
[for those enrolled in the course]

Dates: Thursdays - January 30; February 20; March 6, 20; April 3, 24; May 8, 22 in 2003.

Time: 7:30 – 9:30 P.M.

Text: The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, Ed. Violet S. de Laszlo, Princeton University Press, 1990


Schedule of Readings and Discussion

January 30: Introductions, Syllabus, “On Reading Jung,” “Jung’s Two Kinds of Thinking,” Definitions

January 30: Writings pp. 39 – 71:
“The Significance of the Unconscious in Psychology”
“The Dissociability of the Psyche”
“Instinct and Will”
“Conscious and Unconscious”
"The Unconscious as a Multiple Consciousness”

February 20: Writings pp. 72 – 106
“Patterns of Behaviour and Archetypes”
“General Considerations and Prospects”
“Supplement”

March 6�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������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Monday, December 09, 2002

Jung, writing on the mechanism of projection:

"As events in wartime have clearly shown, our mentality is distinguished by the shameless naivete' with which we judge our enemy, and in the judgment we pronounce upon him we unwittingly reveal our own defects; we simply accuse our enemy of our own unadmitted faults. We see everything in the other, we criticize and condemn the other, we even want to improve and educate the other. There is no need for me to adduce case material to prove this proposition; the most convincing proof can be found in every newspaper. . . . . But as everyone knows, our self-awareness is still a long way behind our actual knowledge. When we allow ourselves to be irritated out of our wits by something, let us not assume that the cause of our irritation lies simply and solely outside us, in the irritating thing or person. In that way we endow them with the power to put us into the state of irritation, and possibly even one of insomnia or indigestion. We then turn round and unhestatingly condemn the object of offence, while all the time we are raging against an unconscious part of ourselves which is projected into the exasperating object." [C.G. Jung, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHIC, Vol. 8, Para 516]

Sunday, December 08, 2002

C.G. JUNG SOCIETY OF SAINT LOUIS Program:

Readings in Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Presented by Rose Holt

This group will read and discuss the following selections from C. G. Jung’s works: “On the Nature of the Psyche,” “Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious,” “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” and “On the Nature of Dreams.” These readings provide a conceptual foundation that is fruitful for someone working to understand Jung more deeply as well as for someone seeking a solid introduction to Jung’s thinking.

TEXT: The Basic Writings of C. G. Jung, Ed. Violet S. de Laszlo. Available locally or from the Chicago Jung Institute, (847) 476-4848 or (800) 697-7679, for $19.95.

CEU’s are available for this course through the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago by individual arrangement with the analyst for an additional fee of $10.00.

Rose Holt, a Jungian analyst who divides her private practice between St. Louis and Chicago, is a diplomate of the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago.

Details:
8 Thursdays (1/16,30; 2/20; 3/6,20; 4/3,24; 5/8)
Home in Central West End, St. Louis, Missouri
Address will be given to registrants
7:30 – 9:30 P.M.
Friends, $85
All others, $95
Limited to 10 registrants

To register, Call (314) 533-6809, or e-mail: cgjungstl@aol.com

For information about the C.G. Jung Society of Saint Louis, visit their website at http://members.aol.com/cgjungstl

Sunday, October 13, 2002

EGO, SELF, MEANING, AND VALUE

Recently on National Public Radio I heard a writer talking about the importance of St. Augustine’s CONFESSIONS. He said this book represents the first time anyone took himself so seriously, looked so deeply into his own thoughts and experiences, and attempted to share what he found. The CONFESSIONS marked a new dimension in the human project, a new way of human understanding of the project of being human. If the New Testament represents a shift in and a redefinition of the covenant between God and the human person, Augustine’s work is a refinement of and an elaboration of the human side of the covenant. August discovered a new way of reflecting on himself.

Why is self-reflection so critically important to our development, not just important to understand who we are now but also to understand something of that person we are on the way to becoming? I think the answer lies in the role of self-reflection in our ability to assign meaning. Developing a capacity for finding/assigning meaning is crucial:

“. . . this means that the process of interpretation is not complete until the student has produced an interpretive text of his or her own. This is perhaps the place where psychoanalysis has the most to teach literary pedagogy. Both Freud and Lacan stress the importance of the patient’s ‘putting into words of the event’ (Jacques Lacan, THE LANGUAGE OF THE SELF, [Baltimore, 1968] p. 16) in order for any therapeutic effect to be obtained. It is never enough simply to tell the patient what must have happened, to raise his consciousness, so to speak. The patient must verbalize for himself. … . I am not suggesting that psychoanalysis and literary interpretation are the same thing, or even that they are highly analogous processes—only that psychoanalysis has demonstrated consistently for over three-quarters of a century that there is a significant difference between the states of consciousness involved in receiving a text and producing one. Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from outside. When we read we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create.” (Robert Scholes, Semiotics and interpretation, [New Haven, 1982] p. 4).

All of us assign meaning to ideas, events, and experiences. Most of us are, more or less, in the dark, i.e., unconscious of the process by which we arrive at meaning. Since the fundamental purpose of Jungian Psychology is to render somewhat conscious that which is largely unconscious in our lives, an exploration of the process itself is in order. There are several possibilities for the ways in which we add an outside content to our consciousness and assign meaning to it:

1. We can adapt something from an outside source and accept it at face value. We do this when we accept dogma as our truth or when we follow the laws of the land because we hold an assumption that our doing so is for the common good. A good deal of early childhood education holds with this way as a methodology even though there is ample evidence that children learn not what they are taught but rather what they see modeled in the behavior of significant others. Rejection or acceptance of dogma or law can be flip sides of the same coin. In either case, it is the dogma or the law that determines the individual’s behavior because the dogma or the law has taken up residence in consciousness.

2. We can achieve a modicum of distance from an idea, an event, or an experience, put it through some kind of consciousness-sorting process and accept/reject some or all, more or less thoughtfully. In this process, our own consciousness is the final arbiter of meaning and value. A potential problem with this process is that whatever is put through a particular state of consciousness is, at least to some degree, shaped and determined by that state, so that meaning and value can arise more from the consciousness than from the content itself. If the content is odious or contrary to the state of consciousness, considerable refraction of the content may take place so that the content loses its value for adding something new/different to the existing consciousness. One way of picturing this process is to consider two extremes of consciousness for approaching a written text:

Author is Authority------------------------------------Reader is Authority

Law---------------------------------------------------------------------Anarchy

Meaning/value determined by author---Meaning/value determined by reader



All of us approach any text somewhere along this continuum, and our approach is by no means a trivial choice. For the fundamentalist Christian, a Biblical text is understood literally, and its meaning and value is determined by the author whom they believe to be God. For a reader on the other end of the continuum who finds meaning and value in translating Biblical story and understanding patterns of behavior described in the Bible as having application to the patterns of his/her life, the reader determines for him/herself meaning and value. At least for these two extremes, the text is held in common. Think how much more extreme the positions can become when even the texts dictated by God are different and are understood as law, as in the Bible and the Koran.

Another example of the importance of method of interpretation is the U.S. Constitution. Is the Constitution a static document whose meaning was fixed by the framers and is to be understood that way? Or is the Constitution a living document that needs new interpretation and adaptation to changed circumstances, and that is the meaning intended by the framers? People fight wars over the meaning and value they assign to ideas without an ounce of understanding of the process by which they came to hold that meaning and value.

3. We can seek a larger context in the outer world for both our consciousness and an idea/event/experience so that our consciousness is not alone or is not the final arbiter for judgment of meaning and value. This is, of course, a tricky business because it demands a great deal of trust and faith. We are willing to yield to a higher authority (i.e., someone who can author) because we believe the higher authority has information, experience, or judgment that we lack. Sometimes the issue (idea/event/experience) is so troubling that we are relieved, even happy, to give it over to someone else. People may come into therapy with the happy expectation that the therapist will tell him/her what to do. Personal responsibility for the state of one’s own consciousness can be a heavy burden. I think we are seeing some abdication of personal responsibility and authority among the general population as we collectively try to deal with this phenomenon of terrorism. The public, even the Congress, is piling more and more authority upon Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft. There are, of course, collective issues that must be dealt with by collective decision and action, and this too is a matter for important discernment.

4. We can seek a larger context in the inner world for both our consciousness and an idea/event/experience. If you accept one of the basic tenets of Jungian Theory, i.e., that the ego and ego consciousness are one part in a larger entity, the Self, there is existent in the inner world a context that can be extremely helpful in the discernment of meaning and value. Whether the Self is a help or a hindrance depends entirely upon the relationship between the ego and the Self—as is the case in any other interdependent relationship. If the ego is at odds with the Self and is pursuing meaning and value contrary to the intentionality of the Self, it may happen that the Self will hasten the destruction of an unhealthy facet of ego consciousness. [Assigning intentionality to the Self may be an anthropomorphism. A more accurate way of stating the situation might be to say, "It is as ifthe intention of the Self is counter to that of the ego." We are probably on firm ground in our statement since frequently the Self personifies itself in dreams.]

Let’s take a specific example to illustrate the possibility outlined in No. 4 above. This example also shows one of the archetypal patterns of human behavior portrayed in the Bible that we have seen lived out in recent events. In the Spring of 2001 a Pakistani official traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan, on a mission to save the two 1,700 year-old statues of Buddha that the Taliban were threatening to destroy in their religious fervor. Mullah Omar, “Commander of the Faithful” and head of the Taliban, told the official a dream: A mountain was falling down on him (Omar). Before it hit him, Allah appeared and asked Omar why he had done nothing to get rid of false idols.” (Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor, csmonitor.com, October 10, 2001) Omar, a person who took guidance from his dreams, proceeded with the destruction of the ancient Buddha carvings.

There is a close parallel between Omar’s dream and that of King Nebuchadnezzar as told in the fourth chapter of the Book of Daniel. At the peak of his power, Nebuchadnezzar, full of his own might and glory, had a warning dream: “I saw a tree of great height at the center of the world. It was large and strong, with its top touching the heavens, and it could be seen to the ends of the earth. Its leaves were beautiful and its fruit abundant, providing food for all. Under it the wild beasts found shade, in its branches the birds of the air nested; all men ate of it. In the vision I saw while in bed, a holy sentinel came down from heaven, and cried out: ‘Cut down the tree and lop off its branches. But leave in the earth its stump and roots, fettered with iron and bronze, in the grass of the field. Let him be bathed with the dew of heaven; his lot be to eat, among beasts, the grass of the earth. Let his mind be changed from the human; let him be given the sense of a beast, till seven years pass over him.” (New American Bible, Daniel 4:7-14) A year passes. Nebuchadnezzar has gone on in his arrogant way as before and then “was cast out from among men, he ate grass like an ox, and his body was bathed with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle, and his nails like the claws of a bird.” (NAB, Daniel 4: 30)

Had Mullah Omar been willing to look inward at the “false idols” within his own consciousness, he might have changed his behaviors, and events of the past year and one-half would have unfolded very differently. Had he known the archetypal story of Nebuchadnezzar, Omar might have interpreted his dream as an invitation to self-reflection and self-correction. It could have helped him with his mental hygiene. However, he interpreted the dream as a confirmation of his plan, and thus you could say the Self acted to destroy an unyielding and contrary ego structure. As he was warned in the dream, so it came to pass—a mountain fell on him.

If we accept the premise that the ego is the exponent for the Self in the world, a solid working alliance between them is essential, for the only way the Self can manifest or incarnate is through the conduit of a more or less willing ego consciousness. In the cases of Nebuchadnezzar and Mullah Omar, we could say that the ego became so inflated with its own view and importance that it could no longer accept critical input from the Self.




Saturday, October 12, 2002

When you work with your dreams, "it's amazing the information you get that is different from your everyday perception, information that gives you a different way of walking through life. You don't have to go on in 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 cann go over them, process them those feelings don't hang around for days. I am unstuck then. It's that old thing--the truth will set you free. So my perception is not always the truth of me or of my situation. I don't have to be stuck in my perception." [Cheryl]



"It is always as if we were observing through a slit so that we only see a particular moment; all the rest is dark and we are not aware of it at that moment. The area of the unconscious is enormous and always continuous, while the area of consciousness is a restricted field of momentary vision." [C.G. Jung, ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY: ITS THEORY AND PRACTICE, p. 8]



ON DREAMS

Almost everyone has, at one time in his/her life, had an impressive dream that stays in the memory. Whether you declare the dream meaningless or not, the memory lingers and is evoked by particular peoples, places, and experiences. The mere fact that the dream continues to occupy psychic space is an indicator that it has some kind of effect and that the effect is a lasting one even if it is limited to an occasional thought or emotion.

A dream of this nature brings up an important question: Do dreams, in and of themselves, have meaning, or does the dreamer, by reflecting upon the dream and its images assign meaning to it? If the answer to the first part of the question is yes, the discovery of a dream's meaning could be important in that the dreamer will add a valuable content to his/her conscious understanding. Depending upon the impact and weight of the dream, the added value could be considerable. If, on the other hand, the answer to the second part of the question is yes, the dreamer may assume a certain responsibility to create or assign meaning, in which case the result will be the same--a more or less important content is created in the conscious life of the dreamer.

It seems to me that the mystery of the dream presents us with a peculiar and important decision. We can ignore the dream(s) and explain it away as caused by something we ate, saw, heard--a fragment not related to anything important about us or our lives. Or we can take a more empirical approach in which we consider the hypothesis that dreams have, or could have, important meaning, then set out to test our hypothesis by looking deeply into our own experience of dreaming. By adopting the second approach, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose--even if our decision proves to be wrong--for the simple reason that any reflection on experience can provide for enrichment of our consciousness.

The Jungian approach is, of course, the latter. There is no doubt that dreams have been an important factor in the development of peoples throughout history. Until more recent times, dreams have generally been understood to bring messages, warn, enrich, frighten, correct, and enoble the human person. The Bible assigns considerable importance to dreams and their function in the developing relationships of God with God's people. It may even be the case that in the developing/growing covenant between God and the individual, the dream is one of the tools of communication and negotiation.

In working with dreams over the years, I have developed a set of working hypotheses/assumptions for approaching the dream. Fundamentally, I believe every single dream has two purposes: to heal in some way and/or to cast light on the personal situation of the dreamer.

Following are some additional assumptions about dreams that might prove helpful in exploring the dream as helpful counsellor for waking reality and for increasing consciousness because finding/making meaning is one of the primary needs of the human person:

1. Through patient attention to your dreams, you can make contact with and enter into a meaningful dialogue with the unconscious. [By unconscious, I simply mean the source of those factors that influence and impact our lives in unknown ways.]

2. The unconscious is Janus-faced; i.e., it turns to us the face we turn to it.

3. Every dream is given to us for the purpose of healing past hurts, enlarging our perspective, or integrating portions of our personality.

4. The dreams brings new information to compensate or complement our waking attitudes.

5. Our life energy, or ibido is personified in dreams as if the psyche, or the unconscious, wants to draw us into a living relationship.

6. Relationships with inner figures can be as important, enriching, and rewarding as relationships with people in our outer lives.

7. Our inner and outer lives are in some way mirrors of each other. Work with dreams can provide for a more harmonious balance between the two.

8. The psyche has a teleological aspect, i.e., is working toward a goal or purpose. Further, it seeks our participation and cooperation.

Monday, September 23, 2002

". . . the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life. Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts, of civilization and of its destroyer, war." [C.G. Jung COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 9i., Para 206]

Never in modern life has an understanding of psyche and of one's relationship to psyche been more important. It is a hubris of ego-consciousness that it believes it is self-made. All evidence indicates that ego-consciousness arises from psyche to which it owes its existence and on-going life. An ego that ignores the fact of its psychic roots is in peril. Like the individual, a world too unconsciously under the sway of psychic processes can easily succumb to barbaric behaviors, untempered by conscious understanding and correction.

Saturday, September 21, 2002

One of C.G. Jung's fundamental contributions to the fields of psychology and epistemology is his concept of archetypes. For Jung, an archetype is a pattern of behavior. You can liken this concept to that of the structure of a crystal. While the crystalline structure predetermines the architecture of the actual crystal, until the crystal is given real form in matter, the pattern exists only as a concept. The archetype, then, is an abstract concept that has real lived meaning only when filled in with actual human experience. Like Kant's categories, an archetype is an a priori structure of cognition.



Sunday, September 15, 2002

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability
And that it may take a very long time.
[PierreTeilhard de Chardin]



Jung believed that the individual has to adapt to some degree to external realities, but he also believed that adaptation to the realities of one's own inner life is just as essential. About his therapeutic goals, he says: "My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature--a state of fluidity, change, and growth where nothing is eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified." [COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 7, P. 46]

Paraphrasing Ignatius Loyola, Jung describes the role and function of consciousness: "Man's (sic) consciousness was created to the end that it may (1) recognize (laudet its descent from 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 animan suam). [COLLECTED WORKS, Vol. 9ii, p. 165]



THE EFFECT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS UPON CONSCIOUSNESS

Unconscious contents, especially those that belong to the personal unconscious, make themselves felt through symptoms, actions, affects, opinions, fantasies, and dreams. The general relationship that exists between ego consciousness and the unconscious is compensatory. When the relationship works, i.e., when there is a balance and harmony between them, there is self-regulation of the psyche. When the relationship goes awry, when there is too great a deviation between the ego attitude and an unconscious process, then an imbalance sets in.

An example of this compensatory mechanism occurs when, for example, we hold a low opinion of someone--too low and not reality based. We might have a dream of that person in an exalted position. Or perhaps we work too hard, are too ego-driven, overly-ambitious and too goal-oriented. The unconscious may compensate such an ego state by withdrawing psychic libido. Depression or lethargy sets in. We might dream our car is stalled, or we are trying to run and our legs won't move, we can't get to the airport on time, etc. The unconscious has withdrawn its cooperation.

A solid working alliance with the unconscious is of great importance to the well-being and functioning of an individual. Complexes interfere with our everydfay functioning, a clear sign that unconscious material is pressing for admission to ego consciousness. When unconscious material is placing pressure on our ego consciousness, we may have dreams of unwelcome intruders or upsetting and troublesome visitors.