“The subject of the Hermetic art is Man, and the object of the art is the perfection of man.” From Isis Unveiled, Vol. 1, pp.308 & 309, by H. P. Blavatsky
References to Jung and
his teachings from past issues of New Perspectives: A Journal of Conscious Living
To read more on C. G. Jung subscribe for just $19.95; and
order back issues that contain Jung and related articles. If the back issue is not available then request a copy of the article or review.
C. G. Jung’s Romantic Arrangement: The thirty year love triangle revealed by John Maxwell, British author/actor
from New Perspectives of March/April 1996
Jung: AJourney of Transformation: Exploring His Life and Experiencing His Ideas by Dr. Vivianne Crowley/ reviewed by Christopher Rubel. This is a coffee table book sampler of Jung from New Perspectives of Spring 2001
Gnosticism : A New Look at an Old Tradition by Helene Vachet. Helene discusses the renaissance of the Gnostic Church due to Stephen Hoeller. Hoeller’s latest book Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing is highlighted. From New Perspectives of Spring 2003
Jungian Reflections on Film Classics: Analysis of American Beauty and Legends of the Fall by Richard Chachere and reviewed by Nancy Poitou. Author uses anima/animus and the shadow for understanding of American Beauty and analysis of Tristan from Tristan and Isolde for Legends of the Fall.
From New Perspectives of Fall 2005
The Spiritual Quest and the Archetypes Personified in Criminalized Male Addicts by John Smethers, Ph.D. He quotes from Marie-Louise Franz’s book The Problem of the Puer Aeternus that “the man who is identified with the archetype of the puer aeternus remains too long in adolescent psychology.” From New Perspectives of Fall 2005
The Fountain of the Love of Wisdom: An Homage to Marie-Louise von Franz edited by Emmanuel Kennedy-Xypolitas and reviewed by Christopher Rubel. Chris says, “This work is a must for anyone wishing to be well read in analytic circles and, especially in Jungian thought. From New Perspectives of Summer 2007
|
By Allan Hartley
Jung’s Much Anticipated “Red Book”
Stephan Hoeller tells Jung Club of Orange in California
how the book came about and what to expect from it.
His presentation was made the summer before its publication.
Stephan Hoeller
C.G. Jung
Jung’s Red Book has now been published by W. W. Norton, distributed to bookstores and bought immediately by many who have thought about what would be in it for years. What Stephan Hoeller told us in his talk on the coming Red Book last summer (2009) for the Jung Club of Orange at Chapman College, in Orange, California still has much validity. He shared about what led up to Jung’s “dark night of the soul” journey, conditions in Jung’s life at the time and gave some interpretations and projections about The Red Book itself.
Why wasn’t The Red Book published before? He said that implicit in this question is, why is it published now? He said, that one reason might be that those of the Jung family felt that they could trust the translators, that the times have changed — that their father, their patriarch, their father and grandfather — was not going to be misunderstood. He is appreciated now by vast numbers of people.
What creates the foundation for an amazing life and his creative teaching, is the social conditioning of the man—his family and religion. What is important is location, where he lived, and when. It occurred to me that Jung lived in a place and time (Born in Switzerland in 1875 the year H.P. Blavatsky started the Theosophical Society in New York) where history was all around him—hundreds and hundreds of years of it. He studied historical anthropology with a zest to know himself and his culture. He became interested in the then current Nature Philosophie.
Jung grew up in a very religious environment. His uncles were ministers. His father was a Zwinglian pastor. The reformer, Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531) was more protestant than Luther. Zwingli believed the Euchrist was merely symbolic.
After medical school at the University of Basel and a doctoral thesis in psychiatry on the psychology and pathology of occult phenomena, in 1902, he practiced psychiatry at the Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich as assistant to Eugen Bleuler.
Hoeller makes a point of discussing Jung’s thesis. He says, “Many of you are undoubtedly aware that Jung did something that very few medical doctors ever did since or before. He wrote his dissertation as a doctor for medicine on the psychology and pathology of the occult phenomena. So he wrote his dissertation on what might subsequently been called parapsychology. For that time he must have had a very kindly and more accepting faculty and dissertation advisors at that university. It was, in a large measure, based on his participation in a sort of séance activity with his cousin, a woman, on his mother’s side who had the ability to go into altered states of consciousness and pour forth all kinds of strange and fascinating material in those conditions. But Jung was so profoundly impressed with what was going on in these sessions with his cousin that he actually used the notes that he had taken over many of those sessions for his doctor’s dissertation.”
He discovered the early theories of Freud and became one of his closest disciples from 1907 until 1913. Freud introduced the unconscious, ideas on sexuality, and the bad paternal authority. “The Yahweh of the Freudian myth became a daemon who ‘created a world of disappointments, illusions, and suffering.’”(DGWE)
“ Sigmund Feud initially in partnership with another doctor named Breuer began to investigate what today we would call the unconscious, of his patients, and did so initially with the aid of hypnotism.
“This was the beginning of depth psychology. And that something became to be called the unconscious. And the great depth psychology movement was on its way.
“There was one big problem with this, and that was that Freud couldn’t duplicate what Charcot was doing in Paris. He couldn’t even duplicate what his partner Dr. Breuer was doing in Vienna. When he and Dr. Breuer broke their partnership he didn’t know what to do. How was he to get to that mysterious something inside people when he can’t hypnotize them? And then he developed the technique for the analysis of dreams. Why? Well for a lot of good reasons. First, he was a very good dreamer himself, as was Jung.
“It is in more ways than one—the issue of the altered state of the consciousness shifting gears, so to speak, from its ordinary day time operating into another mode that was crucial in the origins and subsequent development of depth psychology.
“Jungians have developed an elaborate vocabulary, nomenclature, a dictionary of terms and some elaborate theories of the unconscious, and on and on. But somehow behind all this there is something that is not verbal, that is not rational, that is not logical as far as our logic is concerned, but that comes from a different realm of reality — an alternative reality which is reached by being able in some manner or other to shift gears of the consciousness to have access to that other order of consciousness.”
Hoeller says that the book Memories, Dreams, Reflections is the most intimate, and the most personal window on the psyche, into the soul, perhaps even the spirit.When you look into Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by Annielle Jaffe you find that from the time Jung was a small boy he was spontaneously a partaker of unusual states of consciousness, of unusual and for the most part highly symbolic visionary states, whether dreaming or not and that therefore was one of these people who had a natural connection with what might be called the alternative reality or the alternative realities.
At exactly the same time Jung told Freud that he could not accept the exclusively sexual theory. He published a paper on “Symbols of the Libido,” which led to a complete break with the founder of psychoanalysis in 1913. Whatever the personal motives in this conflict, there is no neglecting the ostensible cause. The facts were that the intellectual traditions to which Jung and Freud belonged were completely alien to each other — it is neither denigrating nor generalizing to call Freud a “classic” and Jung “romantic” figure — and to assert that what Jung took from Freud was in essence a method of interpreting the unconscious while the interpretations themselves came from the occult sources. Reading from one of the notes of this section in The Occult Establishment: “Freud’s affection for Rome, his classical references, his insistence on clarity, and a (sometimes deceptively) precise presentation are almost directly opposed to Jung’s knowledge of occult philosophy — at the root of the ‘Romantic’ world-view — his Gnostic sources, denial of reason, and often diffuse style.”
An example of Freud’s disgust for Jung’s experiences with the paranormal is a conversation that was recorded by Jung (The Occult Establishment), which took place in Vienna in 1910: I can still vividly remember what Freud said to me, “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.” He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, “And promise me this one thing, my dear son, that you will go to church every Sunday.” In some astonishment I asked him, “Bulwark — against what?” To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud” — and here he hesitated for a moment, then added — “of occultism.” . . . I knew that I would never be able to accept such an attitude. What Freud seemed to mean by “occultism” was virtually everything that philosophy and religion, including the rising contemporary science of parapsychology, had learned about the psyche. To me the sexual theory was just as occult, that is to say, just as unproven an hypothesis, as many other speculative views.
Hoeller tells about Jung leaving Freud a little differently. He says, “It was a great friendship for a long time. Both men had a really high regard for each other, but then something happened soon after by about 1912, 1913, during that time. What happened was Jung’s perception about that other reality — let’s say the presence and operations of that other alternative reality within the soul, with the psyche — came to be recognized by Jung as being a more elaborate, a more profound, of a more complex nature than Sigmund Freud had experienced and therefore was willing to admit. Jung experienced these dimensions. Freud on the other hand didn’t. You can very well see one was for this sort of thing and the other one was against it. And at the same time Freud was unable to admit these profound insights into his new science as he liked to call it. He would not admit that dimension.
“ So already in 1913 Jung knew certain things about the psyche. He encountered certain realities. He was beginning to encounter a certain substratum so to speak of psychic reality. What he discovered there did not meet with the approval—even guarded acceptance by Freud. And so they had to part, which was traumatic for both men, but probably more traumatic for Jung because he was the younger and he undoubtedly looked upon Freud as a father figure.”
There is another Jungian from Southern California that knew Carl Jung and is worth repeating some of his view points and comments because they pertain to the period of the Red Book. He is a founding member of the C. G. Jung Institute (1944) of Los Angeles, James Kirsch. He knew C. G. Jung for the last 33 years of his life and in his words, “observed the amazing development of the man and to follow the increasing influence of this physician on the thought and self-understanding of modern man.” He wrote further on Jung, in his article “Remembering C. G. Jung” in the Spring issue of Psychological Perspectives: “It was he (Jung) who in our modern times saw the compartmentalization of man in our civilization and proclaimed the necessity for man to become a whole being again. It became his goal and he achieved it to an amazing degree in his life. What he wrote about it was not only something he was telling others, but a continuous inner experience resulting from unlimited honesty with himself and an incredible amount of work. He succeeded in a way never achieved before, in integrating unconscious material, in ordering it, and in making his own accessible to many others. His ability to accept the unconscious, to let it speak to him and present his viewpoint (strangely irrational and incomprehensible as it appeared to him at first), became a model for those who recognized its validity.”
Hoeller told in his talk to us on Jung’s 48 year anniversary of his death that up till The Red Book is published that what Kirsch had to say about it is the most that anyone has ever mentioned. Here is what is in the article he wrote for Psychological Perspectives in the Spring of 1975: In the fateful year of 1914 Jung was in the midst of his great experiment, which he had started on December 12, 1913. He knew that he could not expect anything from his patients which he himself had not dared to do. So he had begun a descent into his own unconscious. It was his Nekyia, as he himself called it, following Homer in his description of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld. He had had great resistances to this undertaking. His reason, his common sense, his knowledge of the fate of Holderlin, who became a schizophrenic, and of Nietzche, whose soul died in fatal silence, all warned him against exposing himself to such immense danger. It was a path, as Mephisto warned Faust, “into the untrodden, into that which should not be entered, a path into the unbidden, never to be bidden!” Nevertheless he submitted to all the fantasies which he encountered in the underworld of the unconscious and confronted them with his conscious ego.
In spite of his large practice, Jung found the time to write all his fantasies down in a very careful way, finding himself compelled to use a different type of handwriting from his usual one, a handwriting which he discovered later on was the type used in the fourteenth century.
He also painted a great many pictures of images he had seen in his fantasies. He bought the pigments and made the paint himself. Of all of those paintings he put the most impressive ones into a special book made with especially good paper and bound in red leather. He called it The Red Book and at the end of his life there were four volumes of it. Some of the paintings, like the one of Philemon, he repeated on the walls of his house in Bollingen; that painting is also reproduced in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
The first confrontation with the unconscious went on for three and a half years. It ended sometime in 1917. During that time he was utterly unable to read any books. He was living with himself and the violently active unconscious. His fantasies filled 1,330 hand written pages. He knew that these images and inner discussions, which had poured into him from the collective unconscious, contained new ideas in symbolic form. He knew that the “leaf-bearing tree, whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices,” was his tree of life and that he had to give the “grapes” to all mankind. After the flow of unconscious material slowed down he was confronted with the problem of how to transmit his new insights to the world. Had he taken his fantasies literally he might have concluded that he was a savior. He might have become the founder of a religious sect. Had he published them in the form they came to him he would probably have been declared insane. Jung, however, was a psychologist and a psychiatrist and he knew his material was eminently psychological and had to be translated into psychological language. To make it understandable he felt it necessary to amplify with research into historically important formulations of the collective unconscious from other ages and other cultures. In all his writings we find many quotations from Gnostic, and especially alchemical, texts which clarified his own experiences of the living unconscious.
It is only natural that Jung maintained a constant contact with the unconscious throughout his life. After the explosive events between 1912 and 1916, there was a continual and remarkable development of the whole man, punctuated by several more such invasions of the unconscious as he grew older. Each time it was as if his individuality, while strong and firm, had to be dissolved once more and recomposed again as an even more fulfilled totality. But it is not enough to speak of the invasions from the unconscious which Jung endured in his lifetime. In those quieter times, when he was not so exposed to the Erlebnisse, he did an amazing amount of research in order to give greater validity to the hypothesis of the collective unconscious and of its dominants, which he called “archetypes.”
Jung was, himself, the best example for a successful process of individuation, a process which means becoming whole as a human being, a person who is no longer divided into conscious and unconscious or split up in different complexes, but an individual who by integration of the dominant contents of the unconscious into consciousness has become something unique. It is someone who no longer lives only in the realm. It is someone who no longer lives only in the realm of external events or only in the realm of inner events, but someone who lives in a realm in which inner and outer events belong together and where everything is meaningful. Figures like “Philemon,” or the “quality of crab-sauce,” assume a new meaning and are the expression of a transcendental whole which is very much in the here and now.
Subscribe to read more. |
|
