It’s a well known fact that a hatred which consumes one’s time and energy is dangerous for the health and sanity of society, let alone the health and sanity of an individual.
Less well known is that this emotion reveals far more about the nature of the hater than it's object. To offset hatred's satisfying and treacherous comfort, thus can hatred often and always be a teacher.
What is the source of hatred? Do we transpose the emotion from something we were not supposed to hate while having every right to hate (eg, various forms of violence directed toward innocence), and thus become trapped by insular fears and dreads?
I believe that when emotional, physical, mental violence has deeply hurt a person, there is hope of eventually getting oneself beyond the flashing lash-out. Thus may hatred at least evolve beyond itself in acting out or transcending (by art, performance or therapy for example), on the part of those initial victims who need to regain a specious power by becoming perpetrators.
The notion of a Human Shadow and the recognition of ‘inferior’ levels of consciousness is anathema to the rational mind. Reason tries to control, it must clean and deodorise. Basically, if Reason Is Everything, there’s rather a lot to hate in an imperfect world.
I know this Land of Hatred. As an arrogant youngster, I tormented people close to me for being irrational.
Fortunately then came situations so inexplicable that I gave up on rigid interpretations and began to study beliefs. I remember with nostalgia the seeming security of a 'Rational World', but irrationally, I also craved miracles and was from time to time willing to accept seeming miracles.
In the meantime, my life path ground its way through what is sometimes considered to be the lower levels of various perceived relevancies, as I tried to sort problems which weren’t simply mine, but those of my ancestors and circumstances irrational beyond belief. Nothing new about all that which is the stuff of poetry, philosophy, music, literature, good cooking and even essays on such subjects.
Time doesn't stand still, and as to our ancestors both through blood and thought, their shadows are our shadows and in the light of that stony fact, and by the process of equilibration, there's a world of transcendence possible; or so the Sacred Books say, and so does Bob Dylan.
As such, I loathed the person who told me I should find out about the work of Carl Gustav Jung and resolved to treat things Jungian as if they didn’t exist, which was the way that I wished that the person in question had never entered my existence.
In the course of studying Psychology and Religion, a major assignment question was, ‘What Influence has Jung had on Modern Science?’ Years later, after trying to refute Jungian theory by writing out my own dreams, I decided that Jung is a shadow figure in relation to science and he is difficult to summarise because his methodology wasn’t logical. Could a methodology of categorizing symbols in relation to the indisputable fact that dreams have texts, subtexts and stories in themselves count as science?
At one point, I was so overwhelmed by my attempt to define archetypes, that I decided to exercise Active Imagination, the process of allowing oneself to fall, without directing the process, into the dream level of awareness while still awake. This was a foolish decision as I was already also remembering and recording as many sleeping dreams as possible.
It was probably the point where I began to forget that I was trying to disprove Jung. It was as if I'd found a strangely wise companion who would continue to advise no matter where my explorations took me.
It’s not sensible to work like this alone. One needs an analyst, or at least the kind advice of one experienced in the Land of Close and Distant Awareness such as the Jungian therapist Robert Johnson.
Johnson's advice for ordinary people intent on evolving through the exploration of their own confusions originated from advice from no less a person than Jung himself. I was lucky enough to speak with Robert Johnson once and his insights contribute to key points within this text.
Studying irrationality, no matter how cogently, is an act of fine engagement and I also lucky at the outset of these studies, to be grounded by routines around mothering, pets, pragmatic primary school teaching, community work and continual letters and visits by old friends from the big smoke.
The previous study of philosophy both natural and unnatural does enable the sorting of rational from the irrational in terms of the selection of categories. Robert Pirsig worked at this in Zen & the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance and even more so in Lila where he considered a most forlorn form of madness.
So following through Philosophy and a range of philosophies and multicultural logic systems and along with literature of those countries, filtering again through Wittgenstein's refutation of all he had once accepted concerning traditional notions of logic, I did at least begin to sense the importance of the basic (Post Freudian) substrata conceptions of the substrata of the mind.
On the other hand, after the episode of Active Imagination or letting oneself fall into a dream while wide awake, then recording it, while there was a deeper fishing for the sleeping dreams, and headaches set in…(coffee being my only drug back then)… As opposed to drowning in a curious play of symbols and a dream involving Ronnie Corbett reminding me of things, I had to decide that it was getting too obsessive, no matter how interesting.
After that, I permitted the dreams to arrive naturally.
However, Active Imagination showed me something I hadn’t understood previously, which is that we are dreaming on under the surface even when we are awake. This explains a lot about the nature of delusion, I suppose.
Anyway I reduced the intense phase and simply continued to write the ordinary dreams that people told me and those dreams of my own I happened to remember. I must say, that in terms of my recent dream journeys to Canada, London and Paris, my dream self has had a far more exciting life that has my waking self.
At one point I dreamed that I had a study full of books high on the roof and my daughter was calling for me to descend. She at that same time, dreamed that she was calling me down from the roof and in her dream also I was stuck above the ordinary world surrounded by my books.
Then the next semester introduced Jean Piaget as the next answer.
Piaget initially qualified as a Zoologist (he wrote his first scientific paper at the tender age of eleven). His mother was inclined to hysteria and the reflective lad developed a curiosity about cognition.
An early researcher on the Stanford-Binet intelligence testing and again looking for scientific approaches to psychology, Piaget reasoned that a child could only be studied in it’s own environment. He'd attended lectures by both Freud and Jung (separately by then of course) and categorised those fields as projections by ‘armchair philosophers’.
Piaget's early work was the study of molluscs and the development of lake snails both through innate stages and also in terms of the influence that the environment had upon their spiral growth.
Later, in terms of the direct observation of children as they begin to react with and interpret the world, the development of their apprehensions were found to proceed in developmental stages in the same way that all life develops through its stages, through it’s inherent patterning.
The question of religion was solved for him when, after reading Henri Bergson’s philosophical writings about science, he decided that God is Life itself, imperfect, perfect, dissonant and vibrant, seeking manifestation and establishing patterns of cooperation and…so on.
Piaget’s only work pertaining to Education was written in two essays for the early United Nations shortly after World War Two, and he said there that ‘all knowledge must be re-invented'.
Apart from those Essays, his books are a dense read, full of the minutiae of observation and rarely drawn conclusions. I liked his exposition of the stages of the acquisition of reason through ie, cognitive dissonance & the building of new schemata through accommodation (passive external influence) and assimilation (active internalisation).
I believe that too much learning theory in schools is based on an irrational expectation for the student to do nothing else but accommodate.
While this is obviously the subject of another essay, Piaget makes it clear that ‘magical’ thinking, as it were, is the foundation of our cognitive processes yet it’s obvious too that the acquisition of rational formal operations is unavailable for many people. Reverse an argument and connect all the links? Dream on.
Sane teachers know however, that there are many forms of intelligence requiring logic and reversibility than Three R type perspectives can allow.
As for the text of dreams, the images themselves, the underworlds of the actual stories and images and sensory experiences within dreams can’t be directly apprehended by Science as yet, although we are constantly accommodating images created by artists and so on.
Wim Wenders’ movie and ongoing saga of Until The End of the World suggests a world where science is able to record and transmit such surface and subterranean imagery as I consider here. The outcome is dire and involves addictions and disorientations.
From my limited experiences I'd agree that this may be an outcome of an overly obsessive involvement with dream study unless somewhere along the line, your dream world ticks you off about it.
The thesis of that movie is ‘images may corrupt, music may heal’. I’m not entirely convinced by the second part of this proposition after I worked on a couple of projects with musicians more difficult to manage than a mob of cats.
A recent tentative net search seemed to apply the study of dreams to witching rather than to science, which has led me to believe that except in parts of cyberspace/science fiction, the scientific view may be summarised by the suggestion that any methodology which claims to use symbols within dreams to interpret and understand certain events and tendencies is whimsical at best and dangerous at worst.
Yet the language of symbolism is constantly used mostly to the exclusion of any logical premise and much spoken by rhetoricians, admen, madmen, shock jocks, liars, thieves, politicians and critical columnists. Further more and increasingly, moral judgements are limited to the lurid, or has that always been the way?
Judgments regarding whimsy and fearsomeness were and are frequently applied to Jung who's now best known for the terms introverted and extroverted as applied to personalities.
I refute many of the recent criticisms of Jung because I believe that a truly valid criticism of a thinker should at least include an attempt to understand that thinker’s own basis of operation and what was done in the context of their own time and place. If the said thinker is discussed well after their own era, then history or myth is already under way, to be used selectively at best by any ideologically sound future commentator.
In recent works and reviews dealing with Jung, it’s alleged that he broke a great many of the rules which have been codified since his death. It’s also alleged that because his work doesn’t deal with ‘things’, he can't be called a scientist. This is ironic because science is the arena of discussion in which Jung himself presumed he participated.
The question of Science then and now is less relevant for a critic who looks at a thinker’s own time frame. After all, part of the scope of Jungian philosophy is that it survived Jung’s own numerous crises of confidence in the light of his increasing awareness that the creation of popular philosophy in an information age will inevitably arouse unpleasant scrutiny and wild projections and anyway, the ‘Natural Philosopher’ was the same thing as a scientist in those days.
Recalling stories of dreamers such as Joseph of the coat of many colours, it could also be said that dreams have historically belonged to the realm of mistrust. After all, a beggar might dream she is Pope as easily as Joseph, a younger sibling might dream of his brothers bowing down to him because he'd saved them.
Thus dreams may be no help at all in cases of illness and deep distress, particularly since more persons than the dreamer may become very annoyed by inappropriate dreams, let alone by the tendency to tell everyone about them.
This of course is another thing to consider when looking at the pioneers of modern psychology who innocently gave away their inmost secrets and complexes to be picked over in the righteous atmosphere of this new millennium.
We're only gradually realising that intellectual property is a difficult ethical question because we are so ‘thing’ orientated. What must be conceded however, is that dreams have been treated seriously by many different cultures over time. In Chinese Traditional Medicine for example, while the topic of the dream is treated respectfully, dreaming as a symptom is treated as a sign of liver disturbance and a cure relating to harmony and dispersion will apply in order that rest become more nourishing.
In the psychological and ritual work of shamans, brujo or clever people, dreams may give important information regarding those rituals which may cure community problems, a process also used by gifted artists.
In Jung’s life, there were some extraordinary dreams, some of which gave him material for later theses and whose impact in his life kept him to the life time habits of both recording dreams and attempting to decode them.
Since dreams are an objective phenomenon, there were many in Jung’s time who believed them to be a proper subject matter for research and held that they may well disclose issues of which the conscious mind is initially unaware.
Later, when Jung perceived that a multiplicity of myths and like vehicles of meaning had the function of disclosing symbols similar to those disclosed by dreams, he included the stories of such subjects in his methodology.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of Freud and Darwin, such viewpoints obviously landed on the side of science, even if they could not be held to do so a century later.
Science was younger then than it is now. It represented an ethos, a philosophy, a myth if you like, that here was a tool which would heal the world’s problems. At last, reason might be safe if proper disclosures could be made! Jung’s work began at the culmination of the nineteenth century.
The inclusion of dreams and visions into therapy stood out among the popular mythologies of the day, such as Spiritualism (the subject of a student paper), Table Tapping, Theosophy and other such folk or philosophic operatives.
If Jung’s area of work is to be defined as primitive science, then it also represents a zone which has been important to artists for millennia.
Artists can indeed comprehend the displacement of dogma in one’s experience, but the assertion that the individual in breakdown needs to discover their own spiritual process stands out as Jung’s major cross over from science into non-science.
The work with Freud and their mutual contacts were of a very short duration for the fame they achieved mutually and in despite of each other. It took only five years until the final break occurred.
For Freud, whose dream studies were the outcome of years of work in neurology, the theses concerned the use of dreams in a therapy which unites us (as he said) to ancient primal myths.
As such, this theory was an important culmination for a mature researcher.
For Jung, the work with dreams meant a rapid rise to the world’s intellectual arena at a relatively early age.
Like Darwin had done before him, Freud produced a sensation in his intellectual milieu. The veil before the temple of mystery in these cases, fell, to reveal new worlds of possibility.
Among the heroes of that latest brave advance of the intellect was Jung, bitterly called ‘Seigfried’ or ‘The Crown Prince’ by the Freud fellow followers.
(It’s interesting that Jung dreamed that it was he himself who killed Seigfried in one of the nightmares of World War 1 times.)
“Jung was a great loss,” Freud said in a BBC interview which was recorded not long before Freud too passed to the ancestors.
If Freud’s sexual and familial approach to dreams still looks closer to science than Jung’s studies of the intellectual property of individuals and cultures (as we would interpret such activity today), it may be because sexual behaviour is more observable after all than a Jungian spiritual resolution.
Freud’s importance for Jung could be interpreted as a Father romance, fated for scepticism, but not less of a loss for that.
Freud’s insistence on the entirely sexual nature of the libido was, said Jung, the point where theory made an unsavoury turn into dogma.
In terms of Freud’s popularity at that time, Jung by disagreeing, committed intellectual suicide and thus reached major breakdown country.
From the visionary phases of this breakdown, grew some of the methodologies for the treatment of madness for which he is now known.
In an age which refutes terms such as spiritual and impulse singly and mutually, it is natural that in many summaries of Jung’s work, the religious factor is ignored.
If the work did not bring him happiness, if he had involvements with women among his clients who were his equals, if a sense of failure and fears for the future of humanity frequently beset him, perhaps we should not altogether apply a blanket condemnation to the over all synthesis.
Jung had been exposed to the arguments of theology from early childhood including texts of philosophic classics in their ancient languages.
It was natural that he should turn to philosophy, more popular then than it is in these monetarist days.
Through Bergson and others, he could easily connect in his own time with the development of scientific ethics and scientific theory. Inevitably such theoretical work would be different from more recently developed studies.
In initially choosing his path, an interest in the natural world and an historical approach to human experience had suggested archaeology.
He felt precluded from Theology. Certain experiences had taken him beyond its scope and the plethora of theologians in his family had been off putting. In brief, he was the sceptical son of a preacher man all along.
From the outset, he included an acknowledgment of the place of religion in the intellectual as well as the everyday lives of human beings.
To work as a doctor integrated science with the spiritual reality of suffering. It was a happy mix for him.
Perhaps Jung’s perspective could be summed up by saying, whatever dreams are, we need to go on working out ways to pull our life forces back into functionalism.
We need myths, we act them out. They may rule us to terrible effect or they may give us information and verification to help us make sense of things and more than things. Myths indeed are the stuff of humanity.
As such, Jung conveys tolerance to various folk and symbolic codes of meaning such as astrology and so on. His understanding of certain subjects was not deep, but he wished to prove that the subjects themselves were eligible for study as kinds of irrational but meaningful signposts such as dreams and story telling provide.
He was insistent that he had no desire to create any more isms and even if at times he was susceptible to admiration, he advised that his work was appropriate for individual therapy and not for mass dogma.
And wherever he had been rash, he tried subsequently to advise caution.
It’s obvious that in a world where individuals like Elvis and Hendrix have not only been popularly sanctified, but deified, that Jung’s work should be raised by some to levels he never intended.
Jung is not for everyone, that is plain.
Those who benefit from this kind of work tend to be the many who need a map such as those found in philosophic or religious endeavour.
If one already has an operative system which can cope with the depths of human experience, Jung has no relevance.
His work contains many warnings about recklessly raising the power of the unconscious.
And his cures could also include a patient’s lack of need for a doctor!
Obviously in Jung, there is an element of subjectivity distasteful to modern science.
Jung was a deeply flawed human being.
Do we look at the flaws or the work?
Both are striking and riddled with affect.
The high handed instance where the dominating mother of a client was told that her son was unfit for work in order to make him strike out for himself is deservedly criticised and frequently, although the remarks Jung made when he described the instance, would classify this tactic as a definite exception. The apparent willingness of the mother to accede, even though the son was presumably performing quite adequately, indicated the initial flaw.
To be cold, perhaps the son needed to discover the true nature of the mother. Today at least, lawsuits would be flying.
Perhaps all those proposing to become Jungian therapists should be reminded of contemporary punishments for high handed therapy by being directed toward samples of Faye Weldon’s novel about the Jungian therapist who stole the heroine’s husband away.
The clearly drawn characters include rapacious Jungians able to persuade perfectly happy husbands to move into two dimensional worlds such as those of processed food.
Remember, Jungians, if you ramble too far into a soul sanctified by someone like Faye, you risk finding yourself in coldly satirized slices in witty sagas written for the delectation of generations!
It's both educational and terrifying as individuals to see what we recoil in most horror.
In Jungian terms, it's been our own shadows which have been touched then, the deepest fears or flaws of our own.
The Nazi question surely relates to deep horror, and was the Teutonic Jung involved?
The Nazis were interested in using any new German philosophy to their own ends and Jung’s knowledge of mythology would obviously have been a thirties public relations coup.
It isn’t pleasant to read radio transcripts of Jung’s snide remarks about ‘Jewish’ Psychology.
(You'd think he might have got over the 1909 break by the early thirties!)
Mostly, such lapses of good sense were rapidly overcome by Jung himself, whose opposition to totalitarianism intensified from the Nazi experience.
That collision set a new approach to working with mythology:
You want to change anything?
Start with yourself and your own back yard least you raise demons.
If they are your own demons, handle them, but if they are mass demons like Nazism or the deliberate alienation of any other kind of human being, then beware!
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