The Red Book
ReMo...
The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
By SARA CORBETT
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather,
which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in
Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold
letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.”
Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with
paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods
and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse
it for a lost medieval tome.
And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It
goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes
looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure —
taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that
everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of
what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is
the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914
in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen
people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman
who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held
infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it
from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote
— while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly
after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was
the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it
is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers,
the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins
of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Which is why one rainy November night in 2007, I boarded a flight in
Boston and rode the clouds until I woke up in Zurich, pulling up to the
airport gate at about the same hour that the main branch of the United
Bank of Switzerland, located on the city’s swanky Bahnhofstrasse,
across from Tommy Hilfiger and close to Cartier, was opening its doors
for the day. A change was under way: the book, which had spent the past 23
years locked inside a safe deposit box in one of the bank’s underground
vaults, was just then being wrapped in black cloth and loaded into a
discreet-looking padded suitcase on wheels. It was then rolled past the
guards, out into the sunlight and clear, cold air, where it was loaded
into a waiting car and whisked away.
THIS COULD SOUND, I realize, like the start of a spy novel or a Hollywood
bank caper, but it is rather a story about genius and madness, as well as
possession and obsession, with one object — this old, unusual book —
skating among those things. Also, there are a lot of Jungians involved,
a species of thinkers who subscribe to the theories of Carl Jung, the
Swiss psychiatrist and author of the big red leather book. And Jungians,
almost by definition, tend to get enthused anytime something previously
hidden reveals itself, when whatever’s been underground finally makes
it to the surface.
Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology and, along with
Sigmund Freud, was responsible for popularizing the idea that a person’s
interior life merited not just attention but dedicated exploration
— a notion that has since propelled tens of millions of people into
psychotherapy. Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his
rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed
desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung,
over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and
fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
Whether or not he would have wanted it this way, Jung — who regarded
himself as a scientist — is today remembered more as a countercultural
icon, a proponent of spirituality outside religion and the ultimate
champion of dreamers and seekers everywhere, which has earned him
both posthumous respect and posthumous ridicule. Jung’s ideas laid
the foundation for the widely used Myers-Briggs personality test and
influenced the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. His central tenets —
the existence of a collective unconscious and the power of archetypes —
have seeped into the larger domain of New Age thinking while remaining
more at the fringes of mainstream psychology.
A big man with wire-rimmed glasses, a booming laugh and a penchant for
the experimental, Jung was interested in the psychological aspects
of séances, of astrology, of witchcraft. He could be jocular and
also impatient. He was a dynamic speaker, an empathic listener. He
had a famously magnetic appeal with women. Working at Zurich’s
Burghölzli psychiatric hospital, Jung listened intently to the
ravings of schizophrenics, believing they held clues to both personal
and universal truths. At home, in his spare time, he pored over Dante,
Goethe, Swedenborg and Nietzsche. He began to study mythology and world
cultures, applying what he learned to the live feed from the unconscious
— claiming that dreams offered a rich and symbolic narrative coming
from the depths of the psyche. Somewhere along the way, he started to
view the human soul — not just the mind and the body — as requiring
specific care and development, an idea that pushed him into a province
long occupied by poets and priests but not so much by medical doctors
and empirical scientists.
Jung soon found himself in opposition not just to Freud but also to most
of his field, the psychiatrists who constituted the dominant culture
at the time, speaking the clinical language of symptom and diagnosis
behind the deadbolts of asylum wards. Separation was not easy. As
his convictions began to crystallize, Jung, who was at that point an
outwardly successful and ambitious man with a young family, a thriving
private practice and a big, elegant house on the shores of Lake Zurich,
felt his own psyche starting to teeter and slide, until finally he was
dumped into what would become a life-altering crisis.
What happened next to Carl Jung has become, among Jungians and other
scholars, the topic of enduring legend and controversy. It has been
characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the
underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a
transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring
the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who
was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by
troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of
some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words,
“menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation
with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He
described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened
them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I
often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall
apart.”
Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had
a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his
head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak,
he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his
psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind
from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between
appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children,
whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on
the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what
he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies
which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his
book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let
myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place,
as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it
to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.
Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small,
black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies,
writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The
book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind,
a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking
place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled
205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued,
staggeringly detailed paintings.
What he wrote did not belong to his previous canon of dispassionate,
academic essays on psychiatry. Nor was it a straightforward diary. It
did not mention his wife, or his children, or his colleagues, nor for
that matter did it use any psychiatric language at all. Instead, the book
was a kind of phantasmagoric morality play, driven by Jung’s own wish
not just to chart a course out of the mangrove swamp of his inner world
but also to take some of its riches with him. It was this last part —
the idea that a person might move beneficially between the poles of the
rational and irrational, the light and the dark, the conscious and the
unconscious — that provided the germ for his later work and for what
analytical psychology would become.
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as
they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes
unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a
woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent
and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I
swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and
once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even
the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
He worked on his red book — and he called it just that, the Red Book
— on and off for about 16 years, long after his personal crisis had
passed, but he never managed to finish it. He actively fretted over
it, wondering whether to have it published and face ridicule from
his scientifically oriented peers or to put it in a drawer and forget
it. Regarding the significance of what the book contained, however, Jung
was unequivocal. “All my works, all my creative activity,” he would
recall later, “has come from those initial fantasies and dreams.”
Jung evidently kept the Red Book locked in a cupboard in his house in
the Zurich suburb of Küsnacht. e book and the addition of a scholarly
apparatus — a lengthy introduction and vast network of footnotes —
written by a London-based historian named Sonu Shamdasani, who serves
as the foundation’s general editor and who spent about three years
persuading the family to endorse the publication of the book and to
allow him access to it.
Given the Philemon Foundation’s aim to excavate and make public
C. G. Jung’s old papers — lectures he delivered at Zurich’s
Psychological Club or unpublished letters, for example — both Martin
and Shamdasani, who started the foundation in 2003, have worked to
develop a relationship with the Jung family, the owners and notoriously
protective gatekeepers of Jung’s works. Martin echoed what nearly
everybody I met subsequently would tell me about working with Jung’s
descendants. “It’s sometimes delicate,” he said, adding by way of
explanation, “They are very Swiss.”
What he likely meant by this was that the members of the Jung
family who work most actively on maintaining Jung’s estate tend
to do things carefully and with an emphasis on privacy and decorum
and are on occasion taken aback by the relatively brazen and totally
informal way that American Jungians — who it is safe to say are the
most ardent of all Jungians — inject themselves into the family’s
business. There are Americans knocking unannounced on the door of the
family home in Küsnacht; Americans scaling the fence at Bollingen,
the stone tower Jung built as a summer residence farther south on
the shore of Lake Zurich. Americans pepper Ulrich Hoerni, one of
Jung’s grandsons who manages Jung’s editorial and archival matters
through a family foundation, almost weekly with requests for various
permissions. The relationship between the Jungs and the people who are
inspired by Jung is, almost by necessity, a complex symbiosis. The Red
Book — which on one hand described Jung’s self-analysis and became
the genesis for the Jungian method and on the other was just strange
enough to possibly embarrass the family — held a certain electrical
charge. Martin recognized the descendants’ quandary. “They own it, but
they haven’t lived it,” he said, describing Jung’s legacy. “It’s
very consternating for them because we all feel like we own it.” Even
the old psychiatrist himself seemed to recognize the tension. “Thank God
I am Jung,” he is rumored once to have said, “and not a Jungian.”
“This guy, he was a bodhisattva,” Martin said to me that day. “This
is the greatest psychic explorer of the 20th century, and this book tells
the story of his inner life.” He added, “It gives me goose bumps just
thinking about it.” He had at that point yet to lay eyes on the book,
but for him that made it all the more taRSTAND and decode the Red Book
— a process he says required more than five years of concentrated work
— Sonu Shamdasani took long, rambling walks on London’s Hampstead
Heath. He would translate the book in the morning, then walk miles in
the park in the afternoon, his mind trying to follow the rabbit’s path
Jung had forged through his own mind.
Shamdasani is 46. He has thick black hair, a punctilious eye for detail
and an understated, even somnolent, way of speaking. He is friendly
but not particularly given to small talk. If Stephen Martin is — in
Jungian terms — a “feeling type,” then Shamdasani, who teaches at
the University College London’s Wellcome Trust Center for the History
of Medicine and keeps a book by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus
by his sofa for light reading, is a “thinking type.” He has studied
Jungian psychology for more than 15 years and is particularly drawn to
the breadth of Jung’s psychology and his knowledge of Eastern thought,
as well as the historical richness of his era, a period when visionary
writing was more common, when science and art were more entwined and
when Europe was slipping into the psychic upheaval of war. He tends
to be suspicious of interpretive thinking that’s not anchored by
hard fact — and has, in fact, made a habit of attacking anybody he
deems guilty of sloppy scholarship — and also maintains a generally
unsentimental attitude toward Jung. Both of these qualities make him,
at times, awkward company among both Jungians and Jungs.
The relationship between historians and the families of history’s
luminaries is, almost by nature, one of mutual disenchantment. One side
works to extract; the other to protect. One pushes; one pulls. Stephen
Joyce, James Joyce’s literary executor and last living heir, has
compared scholars and biographers to “rats and lice.” Vladimir
Nabokov’s son Dmitri recently told an interviewer that he considered
destroying his father’s last known novel in order to rescue it from the
“monstrous nincompoops” who had already picked over his father’s
life and works. T. S. Eliot’s widow, Valerie Fletcher, has actively
kept his papers out of the hands of biographers, and Anna Freud was,
during her lifetime, notoriously selective about who was allowed to read
and quote from her father’s archives.
Even against this backdrop, the Jungs, led by Ulrich Hoerni, the chief
literary administrator, have distinguished themselves with their custodial
vigor. Over the years, they have tried to interfere with the publication
of books perceived to be negative or inaccurate (including one by the
award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair), engaged in legal standoffs with
Jungians and other academics over rights to Jung’s work and maintained
a state of high agd recently died, and the family was reeling from
the publication of two controversial and widely discussed books by an
American psychologist named Richard Noll, who proposed that Jung was a
philandering, self-appointed prophet of a sun-worshiping Aryan cult and
that several of his central ideas were either plagiarized or based upon
falsified research.
While the attacks by Noll might have normally propelled the family to
more vociferously guard the Red Book, Shamdasani showed up with the
right bargaining chips — two partial typed draft manuscripts (without
illustrations) of the Red Book he had dug up elsewhere. One was sitting
on a bookshelf in a house in southern Switzerland, at the home of the
elderly daughter of a woman who once worked as a transcriptionist and
translator for Jung. The second he found at Yale University’s Beinecke
Library, in an uncataloged box of papers belonging to a well-known
German publisher. The fact that there were partial copies of the Red Book
signified two things — one, that Jung had distributed it to at least
a few friends, presumably soliciting feedback for publication; and two,
that the book, so long considered private and inaccessible, was in fact
findable. The specter of Richard Noll and anybody else who, they feared,
might want to taint Jung by quoting selectively from the book loomed
large. With or without the family’s blessing, the Red Book — or at
least parts of it — would likely become public at some point soon,
“probably,” Shamdasani wrote ominously in a report to the family,
“in sensationalistic form.”
For about two years, Shamdasani flew back and forth to Zurich, making
his case to Jung’s heirs. He had lunches and coffees and delivered a
lecture. Finally, after what were by all accounts tense deliberations
inside the family, Shamdasani was given a small salary and a color copy
of the original book and was granted permission to proceed in preparing
it for publication, though he was bound by a strict confidentiality
agreement. When money ran short in 2003, the Philemon Foundation was
created to finance Shamdasani’s research.
Having lived more or less alone with the book for almost a decade,
Shamdasani — who is a lover of fine wine and the intricacies of jazz
— these days has the slightly stunned aspect of someone who has only
very recently found his way out of an enormous maze. When I visited him
this summer in the book-stuffed duplex overlooking the heath, he was
just adding his 1,051st footnote to the Red Book.
The footnotes map both Shamdasani’s journey and Jung’s. They include
references to Faust, Keats, Ovid, the Norse gods Odin and Thor, the
Egyptian deities Isis and Osiris, the Greek goddess Hecate, ancient
Gnostic texts, Greek Hyperboreans, King Herod, the Old Testament,
the New Testament, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, astrology, the artist
Giacometti and the alchemical formulation of gold. And that’s just
naming a few. The central premise of the book, Shamdasani told me,
was that Jung had become disillusioned with scientific rationalism —
what he called “the spirit of the times” — and over the course of
many quixotic encounters with his own soul and with other inner figures,
he comes to know and appreciate “the spirit of the depths,” a field
that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors
delivered by dreams.
“It is the nuclear reactor for all his works,” Shamdasani said, noting
that Jung’s more well-known concepts — including his belief that
humanity shares a pool of ancient wisdom that he called the collective
unconscious and the thought that personalities have both male and
female components (animus and anima) — have their roots in the Red
Book. Creating the book also led Jung to reformulate how he worked with
clients, as evidenced by an entry Shamdasani found in a self-published
book written by a former client, in which she recalls Jung’s advice
for processing what went on in the deeper and sometimes frightening
parts of her mind.
“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully in some
beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you
were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then
you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are
in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages &
for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places
of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it
is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your
soul — for in that book is your soul.”
ZURICH IS, IF NOTHING ELSE, one of Europe’s more purposeful cities. Its
church bells clang precisely; its trains glide in and out on a flawless
schedule. There are crowded fondue restaurants and chocolatiers and
rosy-cheeked natives breezily pedaling their bicycles over the stone
bridges that span the Limmat River. In summer, white-sailed yachts puff
around Lake Zurich; in winter, the Alps glitter on the horizon. And
during the lunch hour year-round, squads of young bankers stride the
Bahnhofstrasse in their power suits and high-end watches, appearing
eternally mindful of the fact that beneath everyone’s feet lie
labyrinthine vaults stuffed with a dazzling and disproportionate amount
of the world’s wealth.
But there, too, ventilating the city’s material splendor with their
devotion to dreams, are the Jungians. Some 100 Jungian analysts practice
in and around Zurich, examining their clients’ dreams in sessions held
in small offices tucked inside buildings around the city. Another few
hundred analysts in training can be found studying at one of the two
Jungian institutes in the area. More than once, I have been told that,
in addition to being a fantastic tourist destination and a good place
to hide money, Zurich is an excellent city for dreaming.
Jungians are accustomed to being in the minority pretty much everywhere
they go, but here, inside a city of 370,000, they have found a certain
quiet purchase. Zurich, for Jungians, is spiritually loaded. It’s a kind
of Jerusalem, the place where C. G. Jung began his career, held seminars,
cultivated an inner circle of disciples, developed his theories of the
psyche and eventually grew old. Many of the people who enroll in the
institutes are Swiss, American, British or German, but some are from
places like Japan and South Africa and Brazil. Though there are other
Jungian institutes in other cities around the world offering diploma
programs, learning the techniques of dream analysis in Zurich is a little
bit like learning to hit a baseball in Yankee Stadium. For a believer,
the place alone conveys a talismanic grace.
Just as I had, Stephen Martin flew to Zurich the week the Red Book was
taken from its bank-vault home and moved to a small photo studio near
the opera house to be scanned, page by page, for publication. (A separate
English translation along with Shamdasani’s introduction and footnotes
will be included at the back of the book.) Martin already made a habit of
visiting Zurich a few times a year for “bratwurst and renewal” and to
attend to Philemon Foundation business. My first morning there, we walked
around the older parts of Zurich, before going to see the book. Zurich
made Martin nostalgic. It was here that he met his wife, Charlotte, and
here that he developed the almost equally important relationship with
his analyst, Frey-Rohn, carrying himself and his dreams to her office
two or three times weekly for several years.
Undergoing analysis is a central, learn-by-doing part of Jungian training,
which usually takes about five years and also involves taking courses
in folklore, mythology, comparative religion and psychopathology, among
others. It is, Martin says, very much a “mentor-based discipline.”
He is fond of pointing out his own conferred pedigree, because Frey-Rohn
was herself analyzed by C. G. Jung. Most analysts seem to know their
bloodlines. That morning, Martin and I were passing a cafe when he
spotted another American analyst, someone he knew in school and who has
since settled in Switzerland.’s Bob,” Martin said merrily, making his
way toward the man. “Bob trained with Liliane,” he explained to me,
“and that makes us kind of like brothers.”
Jungian analysis revolves largely around writing down your dreams
(or drawing them) and bringing them to the analyst — someone who
is patently good with both symbols and people — to be scoured for
personal and archetypal meaning. Borrowing from Jung’s own experiences,
analysts often encourage clients to experiment on their own with
active imagination, to summon a waking dreamscape and to interact
with whatever, or whoever, surfaces there. Analysis is considered
to be a form of psychotherapy, and many analysts are in fact trained
also as psychotherapists, but in its purist form, a Jungian analyst
eschews clinical talk of diagnoses and recovery in favor of broader
(and some might say fuzzier) goals of self-discovery and wholeness —
a maturation process Jung himself referred to as “individuation.”
Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people
in midlife. “The purpose of analysis is not treatment,” Martin
explained to me. “That’s the purpose of psychotherapy. The purpose
of analysis,” he added, a touch grandly, “is to give life back to
someone who’s lost it.”
Later that day, we went to the photo studio where the work on the book
was already under way. The room was a charmless space with concrete
floors and black walls. Its hushed atmosphere and glaring lights
added a slightly surgical aspect. There was the editor from Norton in
a tweedy sport coat. There was an art director hired by Norton and two
technicians from a company called DigitalFusion, who had flown to Zurich
from Southern California with what looked to be a half-ton of computer
and camera equipment.
Shamdasani arrived ahead of us. And so did Ulrich Hoerni, who, along with
his cousin Peter Jung, had become a cautious supporter of Shamdasani,
working to build consensus inside the family to allow the book out into
the world. Hoerni was the one to fetch the book from the bank and was now
standing by, his brow furrowed, appearing somewhat tortured. To talk to
Jung’s heirs is to understand that nearly four decades after his death,
they continue to reel inside the psychic tornado Jung created during his
lifetime, caught between the opposing forces of his admirers and critics
and between their own filial loyalties and history’s pressing tendency
to judge and rejudge its own playmakers. Hoerni would later tell me that
Shamdasani’s discovery of the stray copies of the Red Book surprised
him, that even today he’s not entirely clear about whether Carl Jung
ever intended for the Red Book to be published. “He left it an open
question,” he said. “One might think he would have taken some of
his children aside and said, ‘This is what it is and what I want done
with it,’ but he didn’t.” It was a burden Hoerni seemed to wear
heavily. He had shown up at the photo studio not just with the Red Book
in its special padded suitcase but also with a bedroll and a toothbrush,
since after the day’s work was wrapped, he would be spending the
night curled up near the book — “a necessary insurance measure,”
he would explain.
And finally, there sunbathing under the lights, sat Carl Jung’s
Red Book, splayed open to Page 37. One side of the open page showed
an intricate mosaic painting of a giant holding an ax, surrounded by
winged serpents and crocodiles. The other side was filled with a cramped
German calligraphy that seemed at once controlled and also, just given
the number of words on the page, created the impression of something
written feverishly, cathartically. Above the book a 10,200-pixel scanner
suspended on a dolly clicked and whirred, capturing the book one-tenth
of a millimeter at a time and uploading the images into a computer.
The Red Book had an undeniable beauty. Its colors seemed almost to pulse,
its writing almost to crawl. Shamdasani’s relief was palpable, as was
Hoerni’s anxiety. Everyone in the room seemed fnd of awe, especially
Stephen Martin, who stood about eight feet away from the book but then
finally, after a few minutes, began to inch closer to it. When the
art director called for a break, Martin leaned in, tilting his head to
read some of the German on the page. Whether he understood it or not,
he didn’t say. He only looked up and smiled.
ONE AFTERNOON I took a break from the scanning and visited Andreas Jung,
who lives with his wife, Vreni, in C. G. Jung’s old house at 228
Seestrasse in the town of Küsnacht. The house — a 5,000-square-foot,
1908 baroque-style home, designed by the psychiatrist and financed largely
with his wife, Emma’s, inheritance — sits on an expanse between the
road and the lake. Two rows of trimmed, towering topiary trees create a
narrow passage to the entrance. The house faces the white-capped lake,
a set of manicured gardens and, in one corner, an anomalous, unruly
patch of bamboo.
Andreas is a tall man with a quiet demeanor and a gentlemanly way
of dressing. At 64, he resembles a thinner, milder version of his
famous grandfather, whom he refers to as “C. G.” Among Jung’s
five children (all but one are dead) and 19 grandchildren (all but
five are still living), he is one of the youngest and also known as
the most accommodating to curious outsiders. It is an uneasy kind of
celebrity. He and Vreni make tea and politely serve cookies and dispense
little anecdotes about Jung to those courteous enough to make an advance
appointment. “People want to talk to me and sometimes even touch me,”
Andreas told me, seeming both amused and a little sheepish. “But it is
not at all because of me, of course. It is because of my grandfather.”
He mentioned that the gardeners who trim the trees are often perplexed
when they encounter strangers — usually foreigners — snapping
pictures of the house. “In Switzerland, C. G. Jung is not thought to
be so important,” he said. “They don’t see the point of it.”
Jung, who was born in the mountain village of Kesswil, was a lifelong
outsider in Zurich, even as in his adult years he seeded the city with
his followers and became — along with Paul Klee and Karl Barth —
one of the best-known Swissmen of his era. Perhaps his marginalization
stemmed in part from the offbeat nature of his ideas. (He was mocked,
for example, for publishing a book in the late 1950s that examined
the psychological phenomenon of flying saucers.) Maybe it was his
well-documented abrasiveness toward people he found uninteresting. Or
maybe it was connected to the fact that he broke with the established
ranks of his profession. (During the troubled period when he began
writing the Red Book, Jung resigned from his position at Burghölzli,
never to return.) Most likely, too, it had something to do with the
unconventional, unhidden, 40-something-year affair he conducted with a
shy but intellectually forbidding woman named Toni Wolff, one of Jung’s
former analysands who went on to become an analyst as well as Jung’s
close professional collaboratoent, if not fully welcome, fixture at the
Jung family dinner table.
“The life of C. G. Jung was not easy,” Andreas said. “For the
family, it was not easy at all.” As a young man, Andreas had sometimes
gone and found his grandfather’s Red Book in the cupboard and paged
through it, just for fun. Knowing its author personally, he said, “It
was not strange to me at all.”
For the family, C. G. Jung became more of a puzzle after his death,
having left behind a large amount of unpublished work and an audience
eager to get its hands on it. “There were big fights,” Andreas told
me when I visited him again this summer. Andreas, who was 19 when his
grandfather died, recalled family debates over whether or not to allow
some of Jung’s private letters to be published. When the extended family
gathered for the annual Christmas party in Küsnacht, Jung’s children
would disappear into a room and have heated discussions about what to do
with what he had left behind while his grandchildren played in another
room. “My cousins and brothers and I, we thought they were silly to
argue over these things,” Andreas said, with a light laugh. “But later
when our parents died, we found ourselves having those same arguments.”
Even Jung’s great-grandchildren felt his presence. “He was
omnipresent,” Daniel Baumann, whose grandmother was Jung’s
daughter Gret, would tell me when I met him later. He described his
own childhood with a mix of bitterness and sympathy directed at the
older generations. “It was, ‘Jung said this,’ and ‘Jung did
that,’ and ‘Jung thought that.’ When you did something, he was
always present somehow. He just continued to live on. He was with us. He
is still with us,” Baumann said. Baumann is an architect and also the
president of the board of the C. G. Jung Institute in Küsnacht. He deals
with Jungians all the time, and for them, he said, it was the same. Jung
was both there and not there. “It’s sort of like a hologram,” he
said. “Everyone projects something in the space, and Jung begins to
be a real person again.”
ONE NIGHT DURING the week of the scanning in Zurich, I had a big
dream. A big dream, the Jungians tell me, is a departure from all your
regular dreams, which in my case meant this dream was not about falling
off a cliff or missing an exam. This dream was about an elephant —
a dead elephant with its head cut off. The head was on a grill at a
suburban-style barbecue, and I was holding the spatula. Everybody milled
around with cocktails; the head sizzled over the flames. I was angry
at my daughter’s kindergarten teacher because she was supposed to be
grilling the elephant head at the barbecue, but she hadn’t bothered
to show up. And so the job fell to me. Then I woke up.
At the hotel breakfast buffet, I bumped into Stephen Martin and a
Californian analyst named Nancy Furlotti, who is the vice president on
the board of the Philemon Foundation and was at that moment having tea
and muesli.
“How are you?” Martin said.
“Did you dream?” Furlotti asked
“What do elephants mean to you?” Martin asked after I relayed
my dream.
“I like elephants,” I said. “I admire elephants.”
“There’s Ganesha,” Furlotti said, more to Martin than to
me. “Ganesha is an Indian god of wisdom.”
“Elephants are maternal,” Martin offered, “very caring.”
They spent a few minutes puzzling over the archetypal role of the
kindergarten teacher. “How do you feel about her?” “Would you say
she is more like a mother figure or more like a witch?”
Giving a dream to a Jungian analyst is a little bit like feeding a
complex quadratic equation to someone who really enjoys math. It takes
time. The process itself is to be savored. The solution is not always
immediately evident. In the following months, I told my dream to several
more analysts, and each one circled around similar symbolic concepts
about femininity and wisdom. One day I was in the office of Murray Stein,
an American analyst who lives in Switzerland and serves as the president
of the International School of Analytical Psychology, talking about the
Red Book. Stein was telling me about how some Jungian analysts he knew
were worried about the publication — worried specifically that it
was a private document and would be apprehended as the work of a crazy
person, which then reminded me of my crazy dream. I related it to him,
saying that the very thought of eating an elephant’s head struck me
as grotesque and embarrassing and possibly a sign there was something
deeply wrong with my psyche. Stein assured me that eating is a symbol
for integration. “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “It’s
horrifying on a naturalistic level, but symbolically it is good.”
It turned out that nearly everybody around the Red Book was dreaming
that week. Nancy Furlotti dreamed that we were all sitting at a table
drinking amber liquid from glass globes and talking about death. (Was the
scanning of the book a death? Wasn’t death followed by rebirth?) Sonu
Shamdasani dreamed that he came upon Hoerni sleeping in the garden of
a museum. Stephen Martin was sure that he had felt some invisible hand
patting him on the back while he slept. And Hugh Milstein, one of the
digital techs scanning the book, passed a tormented night watching
a ghostly, white-faced child flash on a computer screen. (Furlotti
and Martin debated: could that be Mercurius? The god of travelers at
a crossroads?)
Early one morning we were standing around the photo studio discussing
our various dreams when Ulrich Hoerni trudged through the door, having
deputized his nephew Felix to spend the previous night next to the Red
Book. Felix had done his job; the Red Book lay sleeping with its cover
closed on the table. But Hoerni, appearing weary, seemed to be taking
an extra hard look at the book. The Jungians greeted him. “How are
you? Did you dream last night?”
“Yes,” Hoerni said quietly, not moving his gaze from the table. “I
dreamed the book was on fire.”
ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH the Red Book — after he has traversed a dled up
mountains, carried God on his back, committed murder, visited hell; and
after he has had long and inconclusive talks with his guru, Philemon,
a man with bullhorns and a long beard who flaps around on kingfisher
wings — Jung is feeling understandably tired and insane. This is when
his soul, a female figure who surfaces periodically throughout the book,
shows up again. She tells him not to fear madness but to accept it, even
to tap into it as a source of creativity. “If you want to find paths,
you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part
of your nature.”
The Red Book is not an easy journey — it wasn’t for Jung, it
wasn’t for his family, nor for Shamdasani, and neither will it be
for readers. The book is bombastic, baroque and like so much else about
Carl Jung, a willful oddity, synched with an antediluvian and mystical
reality. The text is dense, often poetic, always strange. The art is
arresting and also strange. Even today, its publication feels risky,
like an exposure. But then again, it is possible Jung intended it as
such. In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for 30 or
so years, he penned a brief epilogue, acknowledging the central dilemma
in considering the book’s fate. “To the superficial observer,” he
wrote, “it will appear like madness.” Yet the very fact he wrote an
epilogue seems to indicate that he trusted his words would someday find
the right audience.
Shamdasani figures that the Red Book’s contents will ignite both
Jung’s fans and his critics. Already there are Jungians planning
conferences and lectures devoted to the Red Book, something that
Shamdasani finds amusing. Recalling that it took him years to feel as
if he understood anything about the book, he’s curious to know what
people will be saying about it just months after it is published. As
far as he is concerned, once the book sees daylight, it will become a
major and unignorable piece of Jung’s history, the gateway into Carl
Jung’s most inner of inner experiences. “Once it’s published,
there will be a ‘before’ and ‘after’ in Jungian scholarship,”
he told me, adding, “it will wipe out all the biographies, just for
starters.” What about the rest of us, the people who aren’t Jungians,
I wondered. Was there something in the Red Book for us? “Absolutely,
there is a human story here,” Shamdasani said. “The basic message
he’s sending is ‘Value your inner life.’ ”
After it was scanned, the book went back to its bank-vault home, but it
will move again — this time to New York, accompanied by a number of
Jung’s descendents. For the next few months it will be on display at the
Rubin Museum of Art. Ulrich Hoerni told me this summer that he assumed the
book would generate “criticism and gossip,” but by bringing it out
they were potentially rescuing future generations of Jungs from some of
the struggles of the past. If another generation inherited the Red Book,
he said, “the question would again have to be asked, ‘Whith it?’ ”
Stephen Martin too will be on hand for the book’s arrival in New
York. He is already sensing that it will shed positive light on Jung
— this thanks to a dream he had recently about an “inexpressively
sublime” dawn breaking over the Swiss Alps — even as others are not
so certain.
In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness,
Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul
turns into “a fat, little professor,” who expresses a kind of paternal
concern for Jung.
Jung says: “I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I
really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.”
The professor responds: “Have patience, everything will work
out. Anyway, sleep well.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 20, 2009
An article on Page 34 this weekend about Carl Jung and a book he wrote
about struggling with his own demons misspells the name of a street in
Zurich where, before it was published, the book was held for years in
a bank safe-deposit box, and a correction in this space on Saturday
also misspelled the name. It is Bahnhofstrasse, not Banhofstrasse or
Banhoffstrasse. The article also misstates the location of Bollingen,
the town where Jung built a stone tower as a summer residence. While
it is on the north shore of Lake Zurich, it is south of the Jung family
home in Küsnacht.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
ReMo...
Donna Lee
Thank you for this offering! I didn't read the title and author at the
beginning, stupidly, and I thought it was by you! I found it
fascinating. I was about to congratulate you on this writing!
Anyway, I'd heard about the Philemon Society publishing Jung's Red Book,
and I believe some other of his unpublished works from
www.cgjungpage.org. I found it interesting what Ms. Corbett wrote about
many Jungians feeling like outsiders and being on the fringes of
mainstream psychoanalytical circles. One reason for this, I believe, is
that Freud was successful in doing what he asked Jung to help him do and
what Szasz accused Freud of doing with his school of thought, and that
is practically making it into a religion by, as Freud asked Jung to do
before they broke, "making [the psychosexual theory] into a bulwark
against the black tide [mud?] of occultism." As Jung also said about
Freud's psychosexual theories, if you can't find the gods above, then
seek them below, as Freud did. Just because Freud claims that his
theory is scientific, he seems to have seen it as a dogma, not to be
questioned or refuted, but revealed and to be accepted on faith, and
seems to have been in the grip of this daimon/dogma, this numinousness
surrounding sex..
If most Jungians are on the fringes, then I am doubly so! I contacted
Sean Fitzpatrick, the webmaster for the www.cgjungpage.org in 2008 when
my book entitled, Nowheresville, Everywhere, Earth, was first published,
to get him to place one or two of the essays from it, the title one, or
one called, "Dissecting Black and White Psychologically," onto the
site, which he does for many interested parties (none black!), which he
must not have liked the tenor of, as they both talk about my quest (of
over 30 years) in delving into Jung's work as an autodidact and as a
black woman, very few of whom make such quests into Jung's work (black
Freudians abound, especially because most American black people follow
their African [primitive-primal-first] heritage of being extremely
conservative and tend to follow the status quo in whatever they do, be
it good or evil, constructive or destructive, beneficial or not, i.e.,
Barack Obama, the only new thing he has done being head some
organizations, including the U.S.A. that have never been headed by a
black man before; other than that, he's all status quo! In other words,
black people don't tend to innovate, but to follow, as in, "Me too!") I
suppose Sean found my take offensive, and I'm sure off the beaten-track,
even for Jungians, because, he has ignored all my calls and e-mails,
which contained protests that people should get to hear my voice as
well. "Not on the www.cgjungpage.org!" I suppose he said to himself.
Further, when I wanted to paraphrase some of Jung's thought, which I'd
then been studying for over 15 years as an autodidact, more than many
who have earned credentials doing so, for recordings on my metaphysical
900 number, the Bollingen Foundation flatly denied me. However, the C.
G. Jung Foundation in Zurich, immediately granted me permission, one of
my proudest achievements. I still keep this permission letter and have
made many copies of it, although the 900 number is no longer extant. (I
won't try that again! With the level of literacy in this country, the
people who called and would call such a number are seeking to learn, but
through simplified pabulum, which my line was not. I'm sure most of
them said, "What on earth does this MEAN?" and decided never to call
again.) So, I don't know who's most guarded about the dissemination of
Jung's legacy. In any case, as a mean-spirited librarian (also a black
woman) pointed out to me when I showed her that same permission letter,
I offered the Jung Foundation 1% of the monetary proceeds of the
hotline, and she said that that's why they granted the permission; not
because my understanding of Jung's work was excellent, but for mercenary
reasons only.
Whatever the case was, they got nothing, because it would have amounted
to $2.00! (If I made $200.00 in the 6 months the line was extant, after
having gotten a grant of $8,000.00 from VESID to set it up and to
advertise it, I made a lot!) I also doubt whether Jung's estate, if
they are as close with his legacy as Ms. Corbett's article suggests,
would have let a charlatan or someone they thought didn't have a good
grasp of Jung's thought, at least in that basic way, mangle it for a
mere pittance. Ms. Corbett's article on that point reassures me that
the estate of Carl Jung gave me that permission because they thought I
"got" Jung's thought even in my simplified version.
Finally, about insanity, people have been saying I'm insane for years.
As I have stated elsewhere, including here, I believe this is a massive
conspiracy (see www.multistalkervictims.org www.catchcanada.org and
www.raven1.net in that order to see what I believe is really happening
to me and millions of others, both in America and elsewhere. Another
famous black writer, Gloria Naylor, of "Women of Brewster Place" fame
did something to the wrong person (a family member of an NSA agent; Ms.
Naylor poisoned this woman's cat!) to bring these persecution phenomena
on herself and wrote a book about them called, 1996, patterned, I
believe after George Orwell's, 1984). This has driven me largely insane
because at it's root is the massive insanity of the masses. How it will
end, no one knows, but I don't believe it will be pretty for me or my
persecutors. And I don't believe this "end" will be that far off!
Donna Lee
published in? Thanks, ReMo!
ReMo...
> P.S.--What part of the Sunday New York Times was Sara Corbett's article
> published in? Thanks, ReMo!
>
The link I started with is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html
I imagine "Health", but it's not obvious to my eye from the NYT site,
and I suspect it isn't even necessarily in the print edition. Whether it
is or not would be interesting to know, actually.
Confess I haven't yet read it super-thoroughly, but my eye is attuned
to false notes, and in multiple semi-thorough scans it detected exactly
zero such: hence worthwhile to read, perhaps leisurely.
Shamdasani is only 46? Hmm. Anyhoo, one Sara Corbett seems to have
kinda nailed the essentials.
There is of course a little backstory around Dr.Shamdasani and his
relationship with the Jung family, the recent American interest in Jung,
and women writers: specifically, Dierdre Bair. And the discourse has
moved on bit since last I knew (about five years ago), so I'll leave it
at that, presently.
Donna Lee
From the link you give, it seems that it was in the magazine, which
would make it pretty easy to find, especially if it was in print. I was
just curious; I don't need to check exactly. I thought also that it
might have been in the Book Review. I haven't read the NYTimes for a
couple of years now. I go back and forth with it, being a subscriber,
then when I don't like the changed format or whatever, mainly the newer
formats, I stop subscribing.
But I agree with you on the main seeming substantiality of the article,
even though I didn't read every word, either. I read most of it and
enjoyed it and, of course, was glad that it validated some of what I
thought. Thanks again for posting this, what I consider a, gem!
What's your general take on Jung? I'm pretty much hooked. After all,
I've been fascinated by and studied (and practiced [!] mainly on myself,
but also with some friends and family members) this stuff for over 30
years on my own without the help of an analyst (Jung didn't have one; at
least I had his work as a guide), since I first read Jung's memoire,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Whatever his detractors may say, he was
(and still is!) certainly a "mana personality!" (What he himself would
call a good "hook" for projections; which I find to my chagrin most
times, and also with some satisfaction sometimes, that I am, as well)
Ciao! Donna Lee!
*Hemidactylus*
is in the typical New York Times Magazine portion, not the Book Review.
Not sure if newsstands still carry the Sunday edition far into the week.
It was definitely in the paper format, but I didn't have enough time to
give it more than a quick glance. Relay this to Donna since she doesn't
read my posts :-)
Morpheus (if he were talking about books and not pills): "You read the
red book - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the
rabbit-hole goes."
ReMo...
MDR was pretty heavily edited, according to Bair. (A writer of one of the
biographies that Dr.Shamdasani so ingenuously comments will be "wiped
out"--in someone's dreams, perhaps.) "My take" on Jung? An
extraordinary worker, no doubt. The Freudian framework for his work tends
to be obscured by his circular prose style and obsession with
distinguishing his ideas from Freud's, to all appearances, climaxing
with his later-life concern with elucidating alchemical writings. Which
is fine: it was a fruitful obsession. But relationships with siblings
and parents has been useful to consider against the unadorned and
perhaps somewhat shocking insights that SF first propounded as part of
an analytical system. In that light, Jung's work represents a
system of metaphorical roundabout, built-in to culture (according to his
theories, and it really seems to be), for allowing exactly the same
material to bubble up.
Um. I laughed out loud at the writer's "big dream"? First of all, a
"big dream" is one that affects one's group or a larger group, so it was
a little shocking on that basis. But then! In her dream, she was
roasting an elephant's head on a barbeque grill, wondering a bit that
her daughter's kindergarten teacher wasn't doing it.
Well, there's always a collective and a personal component to dreams.
Two or three years ago I read a book about "happiness psychology," and
in it, an imaginary division between "body" and "mind" is likened to a
human rider of an elephant. It's a fairly widespread metaphor for
carrying forward that foolish European delusion, actually.
So, the dream shows a unification of body and mind, and then an immediate
parting, or severing. It's a very primal image, really, grilling a big
animal's head. But the kairos (time and place) of the Scanning of the
Red Book, tied up with baggage of "analytical psychology" as well as
one family's history, was probably pretty raw and primal itself, however
subduedly. What made me laugh was that it would be a kindergarten teacher
who should be the Griller of the Divine Mind-Head, messily searing its
Sacred Mind Juice and otherwise preparing it for the benefit of those
who have an appetite for such tasty delicacies. True, that!
Donna Lee
You quoted my post, but it didn't seem like you were responding to it.
Especially about your interest/standpoint about Jung's school of
thought. I'm still not clear from your post what that is, if that's
what you were trying to tell me. Have you studied Jung's theories (or
Freud's, for that matter, whom you mention) in any depth or over any
length of time? If not, on what do you base your opinions?
Early childhood experiences do seem to (if I may be so wishy washy)
deeply affect people's lives, all their lives, which was Freud's and
Adler's and Reich's view of how the psyche works, as was Jung's,
although each came up with a different set of theories on how to address
these issues and what they mean on a deeper level. I don't know if
you're saying that all Jung's work (that you know of, including other
Jungians' work) was to distinguish his ideas from Freud's, but if you
are, I have to disagree based on my extensive study and knowledge of a
lot of the former. Perhaps you're talking about MDR only. You're
writing style is a bit unclear to me, much less lucid than Jung's
translators' is, IMO, in that I am not clearly understanding the meaning
of what you're trying to convey.
About big dreams as opposed to personal dreams, big dreams don't
necessarily affect one's larger cultural context, but, as more personal
dreams often presage (in Jung's view, dreams relate mostly to the future
even when giving representations of the past or present) what is about
to happen in a very general context with the dreamer in the next 2 to 3
days, big dreams treat of what developments are emerging in the
collective unconscious over decades or centuries. As to Ms. Corbett's
dream, I understand your hilarity, as dreams just as often make jokes or
are ironic as they do anything else, however, I wouldn't know how to
interpret her dream, even after a lifetime (I have been paying attention
to and noticing my own dreams since I was a very young child and
remember some of the first dreams of my life still!) of relating to my
dreams and trying to literally decipher them!
May I say, that you seem to be a relative dilettante in this sphere and
have nothing much that is unique or innovative to add to it, regretfully
like most here. Whatever my shortcomings in this field, they are not
those. You also seem to be a bit lacking in confidence overall, which
is not in itself a shortcoming, unless one is trying to make a strong
impression, but it also seems that you're trying to pretend to a
confidence you don't have, which IS a shortcoming, I believe, also known
as "bluster." I make these statements tentatively and I allow that I
may be mistaken, my apologies in advance if I am, however that's the
impression I'm getting from your postings here, right from the first
one.
Donna Lee
the NYTimes on Wednesday, September 16, 2009, and in the print version
of the Sunday NYTimes Magazine on Sunday, September 20, 2009, which the
link you gave us here stated. I just mention this because you said you
were curious to know whether it only appeared on line or if it was also
in print.
ReMo...
>
> You quoted my post, but it didn't seem like you were responding to it.
> Especially about your interest/standpoint about Jung's school of
> thought. I'm still not clear from your post what that is, if that's
> what you were trying to tell me. Have you studied Jung's theories (or
> Freud's, for that matter, whom you mention) in any depth or over any
> length of time? If not, on what do you base your opinions?
So I quoted your post in order to give some context to my reply. Tell
you what: I'll leave it to you to judge whether my "studies" of Jung
or others is superficial or casual. You do seem to enjoy it!
> Early childhood experiences do seem to (if I may be so wishy washy)
> deeply affect people's lives, all their lives, which was Freud's and
> Adler's and Reich's view of how the psyche works, as was Jung's,
> although each came up with a different set of theories on how to address
> these issues and what they mean on a deeper level. I don't know if
> you're saying that all Jung's work (that you know of, including other
> Jungians' work) was to distinguish his ideas from Freud's, but if you
> are, I have to disagree based on my extensive study and knowledge of a
> lot of the former. Perhaps you're talking about MDR only. You're
> writing style is a bit unclear to me, much less lucid than Jung's
> translators' is, IMO, in that I am not clearly understanding the meaning
> of what you're trying to convey.
Jung wasn't a Jungian, though. At least he indicated that to MLVF, which
became epitomized in a way I've never seen it before, in the NYT
article.
Anyhoo, I found a bit in _Two Essays_ (par.218), that indicates what I
mean:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
II. Relations between the ego and the unconscious,
Part One. Effects of the unconscious upon consciousness
I. The personal and the collective unconscious
par.218
These primordial ideas, of which I have given a great many examples in my
_Sumbols of Transformation_, oblige one to make, in regard to unconscious
material, a distinction of quite a different character from that between
"preconscious" and "unconscious" or "subconscious" and "unconscious."
The justification for these distinctions need not be discussed here.
They have their specific value and are worth elaborating further as
points of view. The fundamental distinction which experience has forced
upon me claims to be no more than that. It should be evident from the
foregoing that we have to distinguish in the unconscious a layer which
we may call the _personal unconscious_. ...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A "fundamental distinction" was "forced upon" him, according to this
account. So, showing what might "be behind" this is so easy that I'm
not sure how to go about it. And it's a rather trivial point, actually.
> About big dreams as opposed to personal dreams, big dreams don't
> necessarily affect one's larger cultural context, but, as more personal
> dreams often presage (in Jung's view, dreams relate mostly to the future
> even when giving representations of the past or present) what is about
> to happen in a very general context with the dreamer in the next 2 to 3
> days, big dreams treat of what developments are emerging in the
> collective unconscious over decades or centuries. As to Ms. Corbett's
> dream, I understand your hilarity, as dreams just as often make jokes or
> are ironic as they do anything else, however, I wouldn't know how to
> interpret her dream, even after a lifetime (I have been paying attention
> to and noticing my own dreams since I was a very young child and
> remember some of the first dreams of my life still!) of relating to my
> dreams and trying to literally decipher them!
Publication of _The Red Book_ as well as eventually the other of CeeGee's
unpublished papers that are supposed to be coming, will be keeping
scholars busy for another century: *that's* for sure. I'm waiting to
see the new and more comprehensive MDR.
> May I say, that you seem to be a relative dilettante in this sphere and
> have nothing much that is unique or innovative to add to it, regretfully
> like most here. Whatever my shortcomings in this field, they are not
> those. You also seem to be a bit lacking in confidence overall, which
> is not in itself a shortcoming, unless one is trying to make a strong
> impression, but it also seems that you're trying to pretend to a
> confidence you don't have, which IS a shortcoming, I believe, also known
> as "bluster." I make these statements tentatively and I allow that I
> may be mistaken, my apologies in advance if I am, however that's the
> impression I'm getting from your postings here, right from the first
> one.
Uh huh. Here's something to think about, perhaps: I'm rubber, and you're
glue, and what you say bounces off me, and sticks on you. Seriously.
I'm "here" to read, and perhaps to respond, around things Jungian.
And although I find comments like the above interesting in a weird way,
they're really difficult to respond to, because I'm not really interested
in responding to opinions about me here. And I can't really imagine
that they're particularly interesting to other people in the first place,
especially with their slight bases of actually knowledge. (And I'll say
nothing about rather annoying *demands* for information which in the
end may be quite personal. Oh, wait...:)
Donna Lee
It seems I was mistaken about you and/or offended you. For that I all
ready apologized. I do not post here entirely to be interesting to
people and my opinions about you were not meant for others to find
interesting but to express the truth as I see it. The two are not
always the same. That's something that most here do not do, again IMO,
which is all I can give only being me, and although I try to base my
opinions on something more than the proverbial "hot air." From what I
understand about Jung's work, it has to do with the living psyche as
expressed through individuals, which bullshit, if I may use such an
earthy expression, or fronting, or pretending, or affectation, as well
are parts of. They're known in Jungian parlance as "the persona."
However, in my defense, may I say that I try to, as the kids (especially
the black ones) say, "keep it real." Unfortunately, in my experience
here as in most of the rest of my life, I find most people not doing
that, once again, in my humble opinion. Perhaps this is at least partly
a manifestation of my shadow which wants to live and express itself as
well as my conscious personality.
For, when I was younger, I tended to have the phoney social veneer that
most have now and I was therefore much more acceptable to my peers.
There came a point, however, when this became distinctly uncomfortable
for me and I started a deep introversion which has lasted to this day
and taught me in a deep way to distinguish the real from the unreal,
though not totally, well, even though we are surrouded by
extraordinarily, sometimes overwhelmingly powerful illusions about same,
both inner and outer. I also became much more real about who and what I
am, the good, the bad, and the ugly, with, if not an expectation, a hope
of the same from my compatriots. The latter has not been forthcoming,
as a general rule.
About me judging your expertise, I have not at all done that. I have
ASKED YOU what your expertise is, which you still have not revealed. If
you have none, and just an interest, I see nothing wrong with that, but
I do see something wrong with pretending to an expertise, or implying
through portraying your opinions authoritatively, which it seemed to me
you did, that you don't have, which I also originally said. I DO, in
fact, have the expertise I purport, no more, no less, which I will be
glad to prove to anyone. Hence my statements to you, "Mr. rubber!"
Sincerely, Donna Lee!
ReMo...
> Hi, Remo,
>
> It seems I was mistaken about you and/or offended you. For that I all
> ready apologized. I do not post here entirely to be interesting to
> people and my opinions about you were not meant for others to find
> interesting but to express the truth as I see it. The two are not
> always the same. That's something that most here do not do, again IMO,
> which is all I can give only being me, and although I try to base my
> opinions on something more than the proverbial "hot air." From what I
> understand about Jung's work, it has to do with the living psyche as
> expressed through individuals, which bullshit, if I may use such an
> earthy expression, or fronting, or pretending, or affectation, as well
> are parts of. They're known in Jungian parlance as "the persona."
>
> However, in my defense, may I say that I try to, as the kids (especially
> the black ones) say, "keep it real." Unfortunately, in my experience
> here as in most of the rest of my life, I find most people not doing
> that, once again, in my humble opinion. Perhaps this is at least partly
> a manifestation of my shadow which wants to live and express itself as
> well as my conscious personality.
So, I suppose I'm asking: "how exactly is going to some lengths to be
'keepin it real' a shadow manifestation?" I think that shadow by
definition is in part "the unacceptable," so, then...
> For, when I was younger, I tended to have the phoney social veneer that
> most have now and I was therefore much more acceptable to my peers.
> There came a point, however, when this became distinctly uncomfortable
> for me and I started a deep introversion which has lasted to this day
> and taught me in a deep way to distinguish the real from the unreal,
> though not totally, well, even though we are surrouded by
> extraordinarily, sometimes overwhelmingly powerful illusions about same,
> both inner and outer. I also became much more real about who and what I
> am, the good, the bad, and the ugly, with, if not an expectation, a hope
> of the same from my compatriots. The latter has not been forthcoming,
> as a general rule.
... possibly, 'keepin it real' represents a shadow ("golden shadow") of
times past for you. Not sure though, because it almost sounds as if you're
referring to collective rather than personal shadow somehow--or at the
same time? I'm a little puzzled. Anyway, that sort of change comes on
everyone I think, but it's maybe not quite as common that an individual
participates in it, as you obviously do, rather than just being subject to it.
> About me judging your expertise, I have not at all done that. I have
> ASKED YOU what your expertise is, which you still have not revealed. If
> you have none, and just an interest, I see nothing wrong with that, but
> I do see something wrong with pretending to an expertise, or implying
> through portraying your opinions authoritatively, which it seemed to me
> you did, that you don't have, which I also originally said. I DO, in
> fact, have the expertise I purport, no more, no less, which I will be
> glad to prove to anyone. Hence my statements to you, "Mr. rubber!"
> Sincerely, Donna Lee!
So, in reality, I'm actually not pretending to any expertise at all.
(And by the way, the phrase "pretending to an expertise" denotes
pretension hence imputes deception, consequently constituting a judgement.
I just mention this in order to refresh the hook for your own feelings
of professional inadequacy.:)