Long-Eared Owl by Brad Wilson, at an exhibit I saw in Santa Fe in September 2014.
Notes from my talk with Jungian analyst Russ Lockhart:
1. The caption on the Zarathustra Seminar photo reads, “Front row, left to right: William Sanford, Janet Dallett, Suzanne Wagner, Deborah Wesley, Rose Emily Rothenberg, Hilde Kirsch; back row, left to right, Russell Lockhart, Max Zeller, Charles Zussman, James Silber, Weyler Greene.”
2. Hilde Kirsch was his personal analyst. The Kirsches {James & Hilde} and the Zellers {Max & Lore} started the Psychology Club in LA in 1944, which later became the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles.
3. His video shoots with Suzanne Wagner were how Matter of Heart came to be.
4. He was introduced to Jung when he was 13 years old, by a man who was trying to turn him into a Communist. Among the man’s propaganda was a copy of Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
5. Hal Stone was his wife’s first analyst. My former analyst is currently writing a book about him. {Update: You can listen to an interview with my former analyst, Dianne Braden, discussing her book, The Path of Relationship, in Ep. 70.}
6. What/who told him to become a Jungian analyst ... and who told him not to?
7. “What I knew was best for me was coming up in my dreams.”
8. “The purpose of Jungian analysis is to connect you with your unconscious and the collective unconscious underneath that.”
9. Regarding world affairs: “A lot of our conscious efforts are not really solving the problems – not even taking into account what the problems are.”
10. It is important to see, to recognize, the continuity between synchronicities.
11. Jung’s principle of the coming guest. ... ‘Coming’ points to eros as the major factor that we’re missing, and it needs to be developed. ... The great work that lies before us in the future as humans is to develop eros.
12. Experiencing it {what?} primarily through our dreams and through art and the artist. The artist in each of us. Relating to every aspect of our life in an artistic way.
13. Dreaming is crucial to proper functioning – of the immune system, physiologically, in our capacity to relate.
14. Why people don’t remember their dreams. ... The memory cannot consolidate what you’re experiencing in the dream. ... Stress and cortisol. ... The neurological basis of imagination.
15. In Psyche Speaks, he wrote about how we’re losing our connection to animals. He then relates to us a story about how an owl saved his life.
16. Gilles Quispel – what he said about mystery: “Shhh...”
17. “Eros always gives birth to something that is different than what logos generates.”
18. Keats, the poet, in a letter to his brother, wrote about ‘negative capability.’
19. “It begins by attending to your dreams.”
20. “Dreams are one of the few things that have not been subjected to commodification.”
21. Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, was the inventor of modern public relations and propaganda. A way for the elites to manipulate the public.
22. “Our desires are manipulated into monetizing for the elite. That’s what’s happening ... at every level of society ... basically all over the world.”
23. “The dream is not yet commodified. We don’t have to pay for dreams. ... You don’t have to pay any money to have your dream. That’s one of the last areas in human experience that’s not being commodified. So, to me, that’s the antidote: paying attention to your dreams. Spend time with them.”
24. So what can we do with our dreams? He explains.
25. “It became clear to me that all dreams are about the future. ... Use the dream as the impetus for writing an new story.”
26. Alice O. Howell was an astrologer and a poet and a storyteller. She was not an analyst. But she was on the faculty of the C.G. Jung Institutes of Los Angeles and Chicago.
27. He gave Alice a kick in the ass. “She just needed a push. A kick in the pants, as it were.”
28. “One of the things I point out in Psyche Speaks is how important in eros acting is. Acting on the eros impulse. That kick in the pants was an erotic act between Alice and I. ... An eros act. It generated. It generated.”
29. “I called it erotic because I want erotic to be much larger than its usual conception.”
30. “Power has so usurped eros. Logos has so usurped eros.”
31. “I like Graham Jackson’s ‘war on eros’ idea because that’s the one thing that can really counter so much of what’s wrong with the world today.”
32. “Eros does not recognize boundaries.”
33. Dreams are the source. The resource.
34. “Here’s a little story about Edward Edinger. And pardon me if I bring along James Hillman into this.” ... The story ends with, “Such is the real back and forth between analysts.” Hilarious.
35. M. Esther Harding: He once asked her Freud’s question, “What do women want?” Her answer prompted him to write Psyche Speaks.
36. My favorite Esther Harding quote is on the Laura page of this website.
37. Harding’s answer relates to power and how consumed most men are with power.
38. Eros is “the general principle of relatedness.”
39. What are men looking for in their pursuit of power? “The solution, or the cure, for inadequacy.” {That’s it right there, ladies and gentlemen.}
40. “I have to say, rejecting power is not the same as eros. Not having power is not the same as eros.”
41. “The opposite of power is not eros; the opposite of power is powerlessness.”
42. “Power is vertical; eros is horizontal.”
43. Hollywood people, sports people, the rich and famous, when he worked with them at his practice in LA, it became boring. Partly because the narcissism is so extreme. You could be in the room with a person and essentially not be able to breathe. ... “The people were so far away from being themselves that it started to have more of a tragic quality.”
44. Why does he use the word ‘boring’ to describe working with celebrities? Because “the progress toward becoming real was really slow.”
45. On his book, Words as Eggs, what generated both the most flack and the most comments?
46. “One of the qualities of a good relationship is when each partner can fully reveal themselves to the other. No secrets.”
47. What did he say this about? “Obviously that’s an ego solution to a problem that goes much deeper and so it’s not a solution at all.”
48. “A great deal of relationship problems come back to this one issue of not telling.”
49. I kept saying, “You said...” when I should have been saying, “You wrote...”
50. Below is a quote from Dr. Lockhart’s April 4, 2016, blog post, Ragnarök & the Coming Guest.
“In his 1960 letter to Herbert Read, Jung called what was needed, was a ‘great dream.’ Jung said that such a great dream has always spoken through the artist as ‘mouthpiece’ proclaiming the arrival of the coming guest. It is the artist’s love and passion (the human eros) that needs to be listened to in order to proclaim and welcome the coming guest (the heavenly Eros). In my view, it was the artist in each of us that would be the source of what was necessary to welcome the coming guest. But we seem far from such a realization and manifestation.
The earlier Freud expects the arrival of the heavenly Eros. The later Jung expects the arrival of the coming guest. I think both great men are talking about the same thing.
Thus, in the face of the final Ragnarök, which seems ever more certain, one may either give up in despair, entertain oneself to death, or manifest ever more fully the human Eros that is love and passion and generative creativity. One must perhaps, celebrate both the final Ragnarök and welcome Eros, the coming guest.”