People like to talk. There’s some tidbit that we get from ‘helping someone see the light’, or ‘busting someone’s balloon’. In my own personal work I have discovered how I do this and hope to avoid it in myself. This is part of my ‘therapy’, but only a sideshow, really, The healing work that I have experienced is much as you have described, Suzanne.

However, I would not say that I am seeking to ‘master myself’. It is more about learning what it is to truly be in relationship: open, vulnerable, trusting, uncertain. With other humans this is tricky. You also have to be very discerning. With the Divine it is rediscovering unconditional love and realizing who we truly are and are meant to be. Again, from my experience, I cannot understate how much stands in the way of this, how arduous and long the process of return is, and how useless it is to merely talk about it.

But since talking is part of what we do for good or ill, it seems impossible to me to avoid talking about God and spirituality in referring to the meaning and purpose of dreams. Maybe for Jung it was always about the frightening and self-obliterating experience of facing God and not about gaining personal power by learning better how to adjust to ‘the world’.

Those who seek therapy should be encouraged to question the end point and purpose of that therapy.

Machiel

http://philemonfoundation.org/philemon

Today I’m told that an interestd reader in our community has already completed a request form online to petition our regional library purchase a copy of The Red Book – for general circulation or for reference.

I believe it would be very appropriate for the Philemon Foundation to make the full text available online, as you suggest, once they have recovered their costs to edit it.

Ginger McCarthy
Charlottesville

I wonder if some of you who dismiss Jung’s record of his dreams and visions as meaningless blather could explain the popularity and persistence of stories throughout all cultures and time. As Jung himself observed, and it’s undeniably true, there is remarkable cohesion in the myths and stories from culture to culture, including the many Christian images and stories borrowed from pagan antecedents.

The function of these stories is to teach us about the common experiences of humanity. They make meaning out of existence.

So it is with dreams. It really doesn’t matter whether you regard dreams as some kind of biochemical neurological effect or as messages from the gods. What is important is that in narrativizing the dream images, you make a very clear statement about what’s going on with you psychologically. Sometimes your retelling of the dream will include suggested ways of resolving a conflict.

It’s the telling, not the dream itself that is important, and that’s why it’s important not to get too lost in symbolic interpretation. Tending a dream is an aesthetic undertaking and can be as revelatory as writing or painting or any other aesthetic pursuit. It is also very satisfying in the way writing a poem or sketching a picture are satisfying.

Those who have actually studied Jung and post-Jungian psychology know that it is not nearly as reductive as many of its critics here are presenting it.

In an earlier post I mentioned Malcolm Lowry and his autobiographical novel, “Under the Volcano,” in which he converts his desperate plunges through the depths of alcohol-induced toxicity into what some scholars recognize as “towering literary achievements.

In his essay on this subject, entitled “The Paradox of Darkness,” Julius Neelley writes: “These powerful inexplicable forces led Lowry down a path of exotic sea voyages, lost manuscripts, a Mexican prison and the burning of his house. Through his fundamental strength and ability to create Lowry surpassed a mere survival of such catastrophes and achieved a pinnacle of success. Thus he has been called Jung’s visionary artist and Freud’s undeveloped personality.”

As I noted, the end game through the heart of darkness is usually more destructive than creative in nature. There are exceptions to the rule. Apparently Dr. Jung is one of those and you may be as well.

I still have concerns about those adventurers who may or may not be fit for the trek and who may or may not have the wherewithall to prevail over the darkness as Malcolm Lowry did — as a “magician gone astray” — and I would caution those who would rush too far and too fast over the deepest of crevices at very excessive elevations with insufficient gear, blinded by the dazzle of the sun glinting off the snow-capped peaks, yet with no essential grounding and no one there to hold the rope at the other end.

That’s the rough part about one’s going ‘over the edge,’ and for the majority of us, it’s not the kind of journey one ought to set out on as a solo effort, with insufficient preparation and without an experienced guide.

Ginger McCarthy
Charlottesville

Thanks for responding to my comment. Your point about dark imagery and the wielding of individual power is interesting (especially applied to the determination of value in the art market as a whole). However, consider the item that really initiated this discussion: a book full of crazy pictures that you can buy on Amazon! I’m not trying to say that Carl Jung’s lifework is the same as some banal “dark lifestyle” product, and such products do proliferate. But irrational narratives are now socially permissible to a certain extent, and a considerable portion of the material separated by a few clicks in the browser, is produced with intentions akin to Jung’s. Many people, like Jung in his time of crisis, are using resources available to them to reconcile the laughably, unspeakably, contrary extremes of good and bad that are present in every life. And many people have developed negative, fetishistic behaviors while on a ‘perilous path’ that they never really realized they were walking (lamentably, the documentary-film about Metallica undergoing group therapy is a really good example).

It’s worth examining the role played by representations of evil, madness and violence in the inner lives of their creators and devotees. I personally have always felt a need to go outside the circles of the socially prescribed in order to hold real, viscerally opposed truths in relation to each other within the same instance of understanding. I don’t really know a thing about psychoanalysis, but I am in a sort of dialogue with incredible dreams, some of them incredibly horrific, meanwhile enjoying a life enriched by family and friends and pounding metal. I’m far from alone in this. Everything Ellen Dibble said about the rites of passage is relevant here.

What really interests me is the fact that the “content of the dark” in Pop-darkness has been changing constantly ever since dark and irrational art became Popular and commercially viable. I wonder, when you chart the iconography, the types of props wielded by a generation’s “active imaginations,” the kinds of things the devil is saying these days in middle-America, whether the patient is showing signs of progress…

M. Alighieri
Salem, MA

http://tinyurl.com/nxhw5z

Cheers,
Producers at On Point

Here’s the bottom line on all of this, from my perspective. It’s an extract from the Wikipedia article on Jung:

“Jung’s work on himself and his patients convinced him that life has a spiritual purpose beyond material goals.

Our main task, he believed, is to discover and fulfill our deep innate potential, much as the acorn contains the potential to become the oak, or the caterpillar to become the butterfly.

Based on his study of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Taoism, and other traditions, Jung perceived that this journey of transformation, which he called individuation, is at the mystical heart of all religions.

It is a journey to meet the self and at the same time to meet the Divine. Unlike Sigmund Freud, Jung thought spiritual experience was essential to our well-being. …”

It’s interesting to see the possible connection between the production, distribution or celebration of excessively dark imagery on the street or in the marketplace as an expression of the power of a single individual to shock or repel — to create a strong emotion — in others. Like violent films, sex as a spectacle sport, and weapons, dark imagery sells — and probably for this reason. It’s a short cut to the effective weilding of personal power. Unfortunately for us all, though, it’s end game is usually more destructive than creative in nature.

I think the best hope for an interesting, well-balanced life full of joy and humor and meaning, is to practice the kind of compassion with ourselves – first – and with one another.

I do wish that the Red Book, as it’s called, could have been released simply as an addition to Dr. Jung’s other academic papers, rather than to have been brought out this way. In any event, I can’t help but think of something Th:Jefferson had to say:

“We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Ginger McCarthy
Charlottesville, VA

You would think, especially in a time when people are discussing the outrageous costs of health care from unnecessary procedures, that they would have had some rational discussion about the similar scam that is psychoanalysis. If you want to dress up and play make believe go ahead, but at least admit that’s what your doing.

I wish I was exaggerating, but the show was that bad. And, when the Jungian analyst started extolling the insights of alchemy (with no objections) I thought maybe I was listening to “Coast to Coast AM.” Art Bell would have loved this show.

Matthew M. Altieri
Salem, Massachusetts