Thursday, December 15, 2005

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.

Friday, September 30, 2005

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]

Sunday, March 20, 2005

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?

Sunday, January 30, 2005

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]

Sunday, January 16, 2005

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

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”

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