The Art of C.G. Jung

From the publisher: The release of The Red Book generated enormous interest in Jung’s visual works and allowed scholars to engage with the legacy of Jung’s creativity. The essays collected here present previously unpublished artistic work and address a remarkably broad spectrum of artistic accomplishment, both independently and within the context of The Red Book, itself widely represented. Tracing the evolution of Jung’s visual efforts from early childhood to adult life while illuminating the close relation of Jung’s lived experience to his scientific and creative endeavors, The Art of C.G. Jung offers a diverse exhibition of Jung’s engagement with visual art as maker, collector, and analyst. Contains 254 illustrations.

IMAGES FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS
An Introduction to the Visual Works of C.G. Jung

Carl Gustav Jung’s first publication, in 1902, was his dissertation in psychiatry for Zürich University’s medical school. It was the beginning of a lifetime of literary work that stretched beyond psychiatry and psychotherapy to religious studies and cultural history, encompassing more than two dozen widely translated books, with the release of further unpublished material still ongoing. Jung’s international reputation as a successful writer and skilled lecturer is irrefutable, yet, for decades, few suspected the vital role that visual art played in his oeuvre.

In 1929, together with the German theologian and Sinologist Richard Wilhelm, Jung published a book on a mysterious ancient Chinese text. Published in English in 1931 as The Secret of the Golden Flower, it contained Wilhelm’s translation of the treatise and a psychological commentary on it by Jung, ‘Examples of European Mandalas,’ which was intended to provide the Western reader access to Chinese thought. Jung explained that the linguistic images in the Chinese text were to be understood as symbols for psychic processes with which he was familiar from his practice. According to Jung, Europeans would spontaneously create similar images for psychic processes, especially in the form of circles, flowers, crosses or wheels, so-called mandalas. In his view, ‘by these analogies, an entrance is opened a way to the inner chambers of the Eastern mind.’

Examples of European mandalas illustrate the commentary, Jung noting: ‘I have made a choice of ten pictures from among an infinite variety of European mandalas, and they ought, as a whole, to illustrate clearly the parallelism between Eastern philosophy and the unconscious mental processes in the West.’ He described the characteristics of the individual mandalas in short captions, without naming their makers or identifying himself as the creator of three of them.

In 1947, Jung contracted with the Bollingen Foundation in New York to publish his writings in a collected edition: The New Edition, today known as The Collected Works. The agreement defined the contents of the edition as ‘works and writings […] written or made by the author,’ but the attached schedule did not mention visual works.

A volume of essays published in 1950 contained, under the title ‘Concerning Mandala Symbolism,’ an expanded version of the ‘Examples of European Mandalas’ with extended and more specific commentaries. Jung as the creator of four of the mandalas was still not acknowledged, the works being attributed to an anonymous ‘Middle-Aged Man.’

In 1955, to accompany Jung’s text ‘Mandalas’ and a picture of an ancient Tibetan mandala, the Swiss periodical Du published a ‘Mandala of a modern man’ entitled Systema Mundi Totius (Structure of the whole world). Again, the reader could only suspect that Jung was the creator of this mandala, as well as the author of the elaborate commentary. In Volume 9/I of the Collected Works, published in 1959, the Systema Mundi Totius appears as the frontispiece, again without revealing the identity of the mysterious ‘modern man’ credited as its maker.

Among Jung’s acquaintances, however, it was no secret that he sometimes produced visual works. In the garden of his home in Küsnacht stood a sculpture of a bearded man with many arms. Furthermore, Jung had given some of his close friends paintings or wooden figures. He even showed some of them The Red Book – a thick folio volume bound in red leather containing Jung’s own calligraphic texts and intensely colorful images – and in the 1950s, at his retreat at the upper end of Lake Zürich, the Tower at Bollingen, he could be seen carving stone. Yet Jung died in 1961 without having published any of his visual works under his own name.

One year later, Memories, Dreams, Reflections appeared, which for the first time allowed a view of Jung as a private person. Among other insights, he described in some detail the making of some of his mandalas, paintings, and sculptures, and – in the chapter ‘Confrontation with the Unconscious’ – the origins of The Red Book. However, with the exception of one page from The Red Book and the Stone at Bollingen (a stone cube Jung covered with symbols and inscriptions), no visual works were reproduced in Memories. Nonetheless, this open account of his creative engagement with the arts attracted great interest.

Ulrich Hoerni
Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung

From the preface to The Art of C.G. Jung. Edited by The Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung: Ulrich Hoerni (Jung’s grandson), Thomas Fischer, and Bettina Kaufmann. Translated from the German by Paul David Young and Christopher John Murray. Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

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Jung's Grandfather

Wolfgottesacker Cemetery, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Claudia N.

Wolfgottesacker Cemetery, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Claudia N.

A listener in Switzerland was kind enough to send me this photo of the gravesite of Jung’s paternal grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung {1794-1864} who, Word & Image says, is often jokingly called “C.G. Jung I.”

I’ve tweeted a lot about him over the years as he seemed an interesting fellow. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Born in Mannheim, Germany, and graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a doctorate in medicine

2. Rumored to be an illegitimate son of Goethe’s {this is even mentioned in the correspondence between Jung and Freud}

3. Arrested as a “demagogue” and spent 13 months in prison

4. Married 3 times and fathered 13 children

5. Went to Paris and met Alexander von Humboldt who secured him a chair at the University of Basel

6. Responsible for the creation of their psychiatric clinic and founded the Home of Good Hope for retarded children

7. Became rector of the University of Basel and a Grand Master of the Swiss Lodge of Freemasons

Jung’s paternal grandmother, Sophie Jung Frey {1812-1855} is also buried there. She was Carl I’s third wife and daughter of the mayor of Basel. Their second son was Jung’s father, Johann Paul Achilles Jung {1842-1896}.

Notice that the stone is inscribed “Dr. Karl Gustav Jung.” No where in the book, C.G. Jung: Word & Image, edited by someone who knew him well, Aniela Jaffé, is he referred to as “Karl.” But I found this…

“The child who became the world-renowned psychologist C.G. Jung was christened Karl Gustav II Jung, after his illustrious grandfather Carl Gustav I Jung, but with the spelling of his first name modernized. His parents did observe the old Swiss custom of indicating that he was the second to bear it by placing the Roman numeral between his given and family names.” ~Deirdre Bair, Jung: A Biography, p. 7

“Paul and Emilie gave their son the modern spelling of his name, Karl, but he changed it to the original family form when he was a university student. As far back as the Jung family’s history and genealogy can be traced, to approximately 1650, in Mainz, Germany, Carl was a popular name.” ~Deirdre Bair, ibid, p. 8

Below are two more photos from the cemetery, Friedhof Wolfgottesacker Basel, located at Münchensteinerstrasse 99, 4053 Basel, Switzerland. Thank you to Claudia N. for sharing them with us.

Wolfgottesacker Cemetery, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Claudia N.

Wolfgottesacker Cemetery, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Claudia N.

Wolfgottesacker Cemetery, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Claudia N.

Wolfgottesacker Cemetery, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Claudia N.

Footage from Uncompleted Documentary

C.G. Jung filmed carving the square stone at Bollingen. Click to watch documentary footage.

C.G. Jung filmed carving the square stone at Bollingen. Click to watch documentary footage.

I’ve uploaded to YouTube a never-completed documentary of C.G. Jung at Bollingen Tower, the retreat he built on the north shore of Lake Zürich in Switzerland.

INTRODUCTION

In 1951, Jung was filmed at his Bollingen retreat by two Americans, Jerome Hill, an artist and film-maker from Minnesota, and Maud Oakes, an author and researcher, whose book Where the Two Came to Their Father was the first major publication of the Bollingen Foundation. That book described a ritual and ceremonial sequence given to Maud by and old Navajo Medicine Man, along with its accompanying sand paintings. Maud had long been interested in Jung and his new psychology of the collective unconscious. She had met him in 1937 in New York, when she, along with her friends, Paul and Mary Mellon, attended a lecture he gave there.

Maud’s cousin, Jerome Hill, had the inspiration to do a film on Jung, who was celebrating his 75th birthday in 1950. At first Jung refused, but after some time he relented and agreed to begin in 1951. This film was never completed. Jerome Hill went on to make an award-winning documentary on Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

The following excerpts are taken from Jerome Hill’s original footage of Jung in his garden, telling the story of the large stone he had carved in honor of his 75th birthday. Jung reads and translates passages in Greek and Latin which refer to the ancient wisdom of the alchemists and of the Greek god of physicians, “Asclepius” and his familiar sprite figure, “Telesphoros.”

Narrated by Jungian analyst Suzanne Wagner, Ph.D.

Watch the full video on YouTube. And please “like” and subscribe to our channel.

LINKS

The Stone Speaks: The Memoir of a Personal Transformation by Maud Oakes

The Two Crosses of Todos Santos by Maud Oakes

The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death, Rebirth, & Resurrection by Joseph L. Henderson & Maud Oakes

Remembering Jung: A Conversation About C.G. Jung & His Work with Maud Oakes Video DVD

Marion

Marion Woodman and Daryl Sharp, 1978. Photo courtesy of the Sharp family.

Marion Woodman died peacefully on July 9, 2018, just five weeks short of her 90th birthday. You can read her obituaries in the New York Times, the Toronto Star, and on the C.G. Jung Foundation of Ontario website.

Inner City Books also has a tribute to her on their website – In Memoriam: Marion Woodman, 1928-2018.

She was the first Jungian analyst I ever read. Her book, Addiction to Perfection, changed everything for me. It answered so many questions, made everything make sense. It is why I embarked on a symbolic life.

Marion introduced me to the concept of the dark feminine. I, with my Roman Catholic upbringing, had never heard of such a thing. Marion showed me all of me. And when I shared that with my friend, the brilliant photographer Lenny Foster, he went out and photographed the Black Madonna carving given to him by Father William Hart McNichols. You can see the photo on his Instagram page.

I will always be grateful to Daryl Sharp and Inner City Books for publishing Marion’s books. You can find a list of them below.

I’ve uploaded a lecture she presented at the C.G. Jung Center Evanston on January 28, 2005 called “Revisioning the Feminine: A New Paradigm for Men & Women.” It’s one hour and 19 minutes long and around 64 MB. You can play it right here in your browser or download it directly to your computer.

Her husband, Ross

“Ross Woodman passed away in his sleep at home on March 20, 2014. He was 91 years old. Dr. Woodman earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. He was an avid collector of contemporary art and was a tireless champion of artists and the arts. For nearly forty years Ross was a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario where he taught Romantic literature until his retirement in 1989. In 1993 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. For many in the BodySoul family, Ross was a cherished teacher and spirited guide. It was a privilege to watch Marion and Ross teaching together in their home, for Seminars and onsite at BodySoul Intensives. As one MWF member shared, ‘Ross and Marion respected and listened to each other as if hearing each other’s words for the first time.’ Another shared ‘we were all Ross’s ‘lovelies.’ Why? Because. We were seen, heard, respected, valued, and cherished… And, because they were both great teachers, they naturally called everything by its proper name.’” ~Marion Woodman Foundation

Favorite Quotes

ADDICTION TO PERFECTION

“This book is about taking the head off an evil witch. Lady Macbeth, glued to the sticking-place of insatiable power, unable to countenance failure to the point of rejecting life, will serve as a symbol of the woman robbed of her femininity through her pursuit of masculine goals that are in themselves a parody of what masculinity really is.”

“And though in Shakespeare’s tragedy it is Macbeth who is beheaded, the head he loses is fatally infected by the witches’ evil curse. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are metaphors of the masculine and feminine principles functioning in one person or in a culture…”

“The deteriorating relationship between them clearly demonstrates the dynamics of evil when the masculine principle loses its standpoint in its own reality, and the feminine principle of love succumbs to calculating, intellectualized ambition.” 

“Shakespeare’s beheading of his hero-villain is, in the total context of the play, the healing of the country. This book is about a beheading. It has been hewn out of the hard rock of an addiction to perfection.” 

“A Greek version of the witch motif concerns Medusa, a beautiful woman until she offended the goddess Athena… In reprisal, Athena changed Medusa’s hair into snakes and made her face so hideous that all who looked on her were turned to stone.” 

“If we look at the modern Athenas sprung from their father’s foreheads, we do not necessarily see liberated women. Many of them have proven beyond question that they are equal to or better than men: excellent doctors, excellent mechanics, excellent business consultants. But they are also, in many cases unhappy women.”

“‘I have everything,’ they say. ‘Perfect job, perfect house, perfect clothes, so what? What does it all add up to? There’s got to be more than this. I was born, I died, I never lived.’ Often, behind the scenes, they are chained to some addiction: food, alcohol, constant cleaning, perfectionism, etc.”

“I am convinced that the same problem is at the root of all addictions. The problem manifests differently, of course, with the individual, but within everyone there are collective patterns and attitudes that unconsciously influence behavior.”

“One of these patterns is illustrated in Athena’s cruel revenge on the once beautiful Medusa, whose snaky locks twist and writhe in constant agitation, reaching, reaching, reaching, wanting more and more and more.”

“Is it possible that the modern Athena is not in contact with her Medusa because somewhere back in the dark patriarchal ages she was shut up in a cave? Our generation scarcely knows of her existence, but she is making her presence increasingly felt…”

“This book looks into the heart of the driven Athena, the anguish of the writhing Medusa, and suggest ways of releasing the maiden into her vibrant womanhood before she is sacrificed to the perfection of death.”

“Only by loving our own maiden, and allowing her to find the deep down passion within herself, can we dare to open ourselves to the raging goddess at the core of the addiction. Only through love can we transform her and allow her to transform us.” 

“The I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, recognizes the continual shifts that go on within the individual. The Yang power, the creative masculine, moves ahead with steadfast perseverance toward a goal until it becomes too strong, begins to break—and then the Yin, the receptive feminine, enters from below and gradually moves toward the top. Life is a continual attempt to balance these two forces.” 

“With growing maturity the individual is able to avoid the extreme of either polarity, so that the pendulum does not gain too much momentum by swinging too far to the right only to come crashing back to the left in a relentless cycle of action and reaction, inflation and depression.”

“Rather one recognizes that these poles are the domain of the gods, the extremes of black and white. To identify with one or the other can only lead to plunging into its opposite. The ratio is cruelly exact. The further I move into the white radiance on one side, the blacker the energy that is unconsciously constellating behind my back: the more I force myself to perfect my ideal image of myself, the more overflowing toilet bowls I’m going to have in my dreams.” 

“As human creatures, not gods, we must go for the grey, the steady solid line that makes its serpentine way only slightly to left and right down the middle course between the opposites.” 

“Essentially I am suggesting that many of us—men and women—are addicted in one way or another because our patriarchal culture emphasizes specialization and perfection.… Working so hard to create our own perfection we forget that we are human beings.”

Available from Inner City Books and from Amazon

THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER

“In essence I am suggesting that 20th-century women have been living for centuries in a male-oriented culture which has kept them unconscious of their own feminine principle.” 

“Now in their attempt to find their own place in a masculine world, they have unknowingly accepted male values—goal-oriented lives, compulsive drivenness, and concrete bread which fails to nourish their feminine mystery.”  

“Their unconscious femininity rebels and manifests in some somatic form. In this study, the Great Goddess either materializes in the obese, or devours the anorexic. Her victim must come to grips with her femininity by dealing with the symptom.” 

“Only by discovering and loving the goddess lost within her own rejected body can a woman hear her own authentic voice. This book suggests practical ways of listening, and explores the meaning of the feminine”

On complexes: Jung “pointed out that an outward situation may release a psychic process in which certain contents gather together and prepare for action. This he called a ‘constellation’; this is an automatic process which the individual cannot control. ‘The constellated contents are definite complexes possessing their own specific energy.’”

“An active complex puts us momentarily under a spell of compulsive thinking and acting.”  

“The more unconscious the individual is, the greater autonomy the complex has, even to the point where it may assimilate the ego, the result being a momentary alteration of personality” 

“In the Middle Ages, this was called possession or bewitchment. ‘The via regia to the unconscious, however,’ said Jung, ‘is not the dream, as [Freud] thought, but the complex, which is the architect of dreams and of symptoms.’”

Available from Inner City Books and from Amazon

THE PREGNANT VIRGIN

“All my life I had hated my body. It was not beautiful enough. It was not thin enough. I had driven it, starved it, stuffed it, cursed it, and even now kicked it, and there it still was, trying to breathe, convinced that I would come back and take it with me, too dumb to die. And I knew the choice was mine.” p. 178

“I stayed first in Delhi, attempting to orient myself in that totally foreign world. … People shouted ‘Good evening’ in the morning and I knew something was wrong when I shouted back ‘Good evening.’ As my exhaustion grew, my ego could no longer make decisions and strange situations began to develop. I realized my own terror was constellating death around me.” p. 176

“‘You’re in culture shock,’ she said. ‘I’ve lived here for ten years. I can recognize it. We’ll go to your hotel, gather your luggage and I’ll take you to your plane. You must go home. Now.” ~an American woman to Marion Woodman in India, p. 177

“‘I can’t do that,’ I said. ‘I can’t live with that defeat. I’d have to come back and try again and I can’t do that either.’ ‘You cannot stay,’ she said. ‘Peace Corps people go into culture shock and sometimes take knives to each other.’ But I did stay.” 

“India was my fire. Certainly it is not everyone’s. We each are thrown into our own fire and the room in the Ashoka Hotel was mine. There was no one to phone, no one to visit, nothing to do. All escapes were cut off. I had to move into my own silence and find out who was in there.”

"Integrating an initiation can become a lifetime task. And while most of it remains in the secret mysteries of the individual, some of it belongs to the universal soul that is striving to become conscious in each one of us." pp. 183-4

Available from Inner City Books and from Amazon

THE RAVAGED BRIDEGROOM

“Manic activity, the predominant rhythm in our society, denies soul. Driven by ambition, competition, perfectionist ideals or the sheer necessity of keeping a job that demands a frenetic pace, people hurtle into space. In their dreams, they leave their soul impounded with Nazi torturers and their body filled with vacant rooms. Because they are separated from their source, they want a 'high.' They want it fast, and they want it concrete—drugs, gambling, shopping, drinking, eating, sex. In other words, they want to transcend their ego, get out of a boring, humdrum existence. But we are human beings and transcending our humanness cannot come through a fast escape into an altered state of consciousness that cannot be integrated into daily living. Escape compounds the split between spirit and matter.” p. 30

“His shadow side may be the courageous daredevil who repeatedly lures the addict to the verge of the abyss. On one level, life is so absent that only flirtation with death brings a consciousness of the gift of life. On another level, the supreme effort to escape the dark cave of inertia evokes total awareness of life in the moment. Women with this kind of animus dream of bullfighters, trapeze artists, race car drivers, jet pilots, astronauts and deepsea divers. Their own gypsy shadow is a natural partner for these perfectionist males who care little for their own lives. Together they are in a love/death relationship; their passion is the anesthetic that makes them dare the magic that may destroy them. Their real investment is in the perfection of death together. They are the perpetual cliffhangers reaching for the peak." ~Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women, pp. 54-55

“[I]t is crucial to keep a creative outlet open during the analysis. If the analyst can encourage the artist to play with the imagery, allowing it to take whatever form it happens to come up with, the energy locked in the shadow will emerge, bringing with it the buried creative fire. In that new integration the Self brings healing for the soul and energy for the art. The soul blossoms in the mystery connecting it to the Self. This is the mystery analysis dare not touch.” pp. 100-101

Available from Inner City Books and from Amazon

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Sparks

Lighting the Torch by Peter Birkhäuser, in Light From the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser, p. 77

Lighting the Torch by Peter Birkhäuser, in Light From the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser, p. 77

QUOTES FROM EPISODE 35 WITH J. GARY SPARKS:

“Jung looked at how our inner work, when it goes to a depth sufficient to the demands that our soul is putting on us, when the work goes that deep, inevitably it brings the individual back out to the society to address the society with the lessons learned from the inner journey.”

“Toybee talks at length about things like what he calls ‘withdrawal and return.’ An individual who is going to make a difference has to withdraw from the world – that’s Jung’s Red Book, for example – and look at themselves and find out what is making them tick, rightly and wrongly. And then return back to the world and articulate it. … That’s an ordeal. This is not follow your bliss. This is follow your ordeal. That it is, and it can, push people to the absolute limits of their endurance.”

“I tell people look, you don’t fit in? Good! Don’t! But, you are now taking a terrific responsibility on your shoulders because you’ve got to find out what’s right within you that's seeking birth, and when that’s born you’ve got to articulate it. And get ready for a battle.”

“What helps me, I think, as an analyst here is people think if they have a problem – ‘Oh, there’s something wrong with me’ – rather than, ‘Maybe I’m being tapped with my version of what’s wrong with the the society. And actually this is not that there’s something wrong with me, there’s something right with me [that’s] trying to be born.”

“The creative person experiences the divine grace of being allowed to light his small torch at the fire of the Creator. [Peter Birkhäuser] once dreamed that he was given this grace. The animal face in the fire in the form of an eight-petalled flower signifies enlightenment and order in the chaos.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz, Light From the Darkness: The Paintings of Peter Birkhäuser, p. 76

“Toynbee’s critique is concerned with are there people working on the society’s problem in themselves? Is there a transfer of the ‘field of action’ from the outside to the inside where I begin to work on what’s wrong out there, inside myself? If that happens, there’s hope. If the problems are simply fixed, it’s a temporary solution and the solution that is enacted will itself be a future problem. Genuine change has to begin on the inside.”

Politicians need to ask themselves, ‘What’s the minority population in me? What’s the police brutality in me?’

Sparks mentions Zainab Salbi’s talk at the Healing Trauma Summit. She said rage against the perpetrator is a necessary step but it doesn’t heal. ‘The healing step for me was when I began to see there is a tyrant in myself.’ … “That second part of healing is when we can see we are doing to others what has been done to us. … Her point is, it won’t be healed until we also see we are the perpetrators as well as the victims. That’s a huge step. When we withdraw the projection.”

“This word ‘projection’ is very complicated because people think when you say ‘withdraw the projection’ that the person you’re projecting onto doesn’t have those qualities. They may very well have those qualities, but so do you.”

“Personally, I support the rage against a corrupt patriarchal power structure. Now the question is whether we can begin seeing that corruption lives in us as well.”

Gary on my disgust at the political outrage I’m seeing: “I think it’s important to allow those emotions their place. Then to stop and say, ‘Where am I in this? Where is the distorted power structure in my own life?’”

“Look at what Jungian psychology has become, a sort of a bourgeois pablum that is way far from what Jung ever envisioned.”

“People are simply not interested in solving problems.”

Toynbee looked at “how a disintegrating society works on our soul destructively.”

Jungian analyst Joseph Henderson said, ‘Jung was a man who in theory shouldn’t have existed, but he did.’

“I had an analysand come to me. Very likable guy who had moved here from another state. And his previous analyst said, ‘You’re over-identified with Jung.’ Well, I just started swearing. I couldn’t stop. … Jungian psychology is not about Jung. That’s my feeling. All Jung did was hold a mirror up to processes inside us, and identify processes nobody else in the modern age and in a modern framework has seen. Namely, that hearing is a mystery, that the ego has its responsibilities but there is a world way beyond that which either helps us or doesn’t help us. That there is a mystery to events that we don't understand, yet we have to take responsibility for them. That there’s a link between our inner work and the outer world. That’s exactly what he says at the beginning of The Red Book. That’s all Jung did was just saw what the <bleep> is going on inside us. And if I pay attention to that, that’s an indication of my health. I’m interested in what’s going on inside me and inside the world. And for that I get accused of being over-identified with Jung. It’s a sickness on the part of whoever said that to that analysand. All Jung did was articulate the nature of the collective unconscious. Yes, I am personally interested in Jung, as I am interested in Mozart, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Fitzgerald – I’m interested in creative people, because that’s a lot of what shows up in my practice. And they’re different. So in a way, yes, I am interested in Jung as a creative personality. But as far as Jungian psychology goes, it is not about Jung. Jung just saw what is going on inside us without any blinders on. And yes, I’m gonna devote myself to that because I see how that helps people.”

“You know, people come to me as a last resort. I’m usually the fifth or sixth therapist they’ve seen. And they say to me, ‘If this hadn’t worked, I would have killed myself.’ And the reason it works is because they are touched by this mystery that seizes them. I don’t tell them how to think, I don’t tell them what their parents did to them, I don’t tell them what they should do, we just listen to that world that Jung has described, and they fall in love with themselves because they see the beauty inside themselves that Jung has seen. And I sure as hell am not going to let anybody belittle that.”

“Jungian psychology is not about ideas, it’s about experiences.”

“It’s simple: Freud was an atheist and Jung was not.”

“The war was being played out inside himself.”

“If you endure the conflict, it resolves.”

“That’s why I think The Red Book is so important – it shows how he [Jung] came upon his psychology by noticing it happening in himself. And he spent the next forty years writing about it.”

“I fear people are only getting half an analysis. … If you only go in, you won’t come out. … The Self says, ‘No, you go back out there and do this.’ … Dreams [must be] taken seriously.”

To go back out into the world “not as a should but as an is. … That’s what we come to in a fully lived, mature analytic process.”

“How does disease and the body carry symbolic significance? How does the psyche relate to the outer world?” {See Anne Maguire’s work.}

“Jung had one very big problem that nobody wants to talk about.” {Listen to the episode to find out what that is!}

Listen to the full episode with J. Gary Sparks

228 Seestrasse

One of the things I desperately wanted to see during my trip to Zürich, Switzerland, in 2015 were the front doors of the Jung family home in Küsnacht.

While at a lecture by Jungian analyst Paul Kugler in 2003, I was completely moved, stunned, and taken aback by a photo in his slideshow presentation. It was of C.G. Jung with one hand on a doorknob and the other holding a set of keys. After the presentation, I asked Dr. Kugler about the photo. He told me I could find it in the book C.G. Jung: Word and Image, which has since become one of my greatest sources of inspiration. The photo's caption reads, "At the entrance to the house in Küsnacht, 1960". {Here is the scanned photo.}

Many have taken notice of the inscription above the doors, "VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT," {"Called or not called, God will be there"} but for me, the doors are the symbol, and Jung holds the key.

Jung lived in this house from 1908 until his death in 1961. He and his wife Emma raised their children there, and it's where he saw patients while in private practice.

I shot the video you see on the right with my iPhone on November 24, 2015. It was cold, there was lots of traffic on the busy two-way street, and I was very careful not to trespass. The video is awful and I'm embarrassed to post it. But it's all I have to show those of you who've not been there and are curious.

In 2008, Jung's grandson, Andreas, who currently resides in the home with his family, published the book The House of C.G. Jung: The History and Restoration of the Residence of Emma and Carl Gustav Jung-Rauschenbach.

From the book jacket:

“In 1908 Carl Gustav Jung and his wife, Emma Rauschenbach, built this house in a cheerful, tranquil place”



Chiseled in stone, these Latin words decorate the elaborately designed portal of the C.G. Jung House in Küsnacht and commemorate the completion of the building on the bank of Lake Zürich. The project began in 1906, with a letter from Carl Gustav Jung to his cousin Ernst Fiechter (1875-1948), an architect and lecturer on architectural history at the Technische Hochschule in Munich: “We have in mind to build a house someday, in the country near Zürich, on the lake.”

At the time, however, Jung was an impecunious assistant medical director at the Burghözli mental home in Zürich. What enabled him to build a manorial home was the fact that his wife, Emma Jung-Rauschenbach, had suddenly become wealthy after her father died young. —Andreas Jung

C.G. Jung, the important explorer of the human psyche and founder of Analytical Psychology, lived and worked in his home in Küsnacht on Lake Zürich from 1908 to 1961, along with his wife, Emma Jung-Rauschenbach, whose wisdom was the heart of the house where they raised their five children.

A hundred years after it was built and following the completion of renovation, this house is represented in this lavishly illustrated record, published to document the creation of the property on Lake Zürich and its transformation since then. The House of C.G. Jung captures its previous and present states in text and images.

This volume is an architectural portrait of a truly unique home, as well as a commemoration of its original builders and owners.

Includes 160 illustrations, many in color.”

In Episode #11 of this podcast, I recount my visit to Zürich with guest-host Shaun Lau. You can listen to it here.

Arrival

Reflections on the Film ‘Arrival’
by Monika Wikman, Ph.D.

As most of us know, our world and all of its species hangs by a thread with the threat of annihilation. Jung saw this, felt this, knew this and addresses the reality from the depths of the psyche throughout his writing. It is the seminal foundation of Jung’s work with alchemy, as he illuminates the depths of the transmutations needed and possible for new consciousness to emerge.  

Namely the film, as a collective dream, brilliantly portrays many levels of the alchemical transmutations our world direly needs for survival:

1. The sick context of our non-cohesive world today with each country’s defense structures (literally and psychologically) aimed at each other and ready to respond independently to the threat of “the other” with mass chaotic destruction and violence. 

2. This world reality is brought to a head as potential contact with “the great other,” with the numinous, emerges full of danger and  possibility. (In the film this is portrayed as contact with unknown “Heptapod” aliens, reminiscent of Jung’s deep psychological interest in UFO phenomenon.)

3. The film also portrays the stretch into the unknown, the grace we feel as danger transforms (in the hands of our heroine and the alien other) into discovery of a new mutual communion where human consciousness expands and transforms.

4. Between the bound in time and the eternal, the transcendent function transforms ordinary consciousness beyond time space coordinates (first depicted as the sentence structure in the linear conception of consciousness and transforms in the heroine’s hands into the circle of past-present-future in the now as perspectives mutually informing one another other).

5. A universal language of the heart emerges (no longer the Tower of Babel mythic problem) and unites all beings in this new potential that brings the ability to navigate the warring of opposites differently from these changes in consciousness at the INDIVIDUAL and COLLECTIVE levels. 

6. The stretch of the transcendent bridge between ordinary human consciousness and “the great other” creates a transmutation our world direly needs. 

The potential outcome living as a possibility in the field of the imagination is writ large across the screen and into our psyches as we take it in.

Importantly the “other” here is pictured as heptapod aliens/UFO phenomenon, yet is also relatedly known in various traditions that connect with the psychoidal mysteries as the primordial Divine Anthropos, the Ally,  Khidr, Atman Cadmus, and so on. 

In contact with this “other,” human consciousness grows the capacity to become more fully human and to transcend political cultural identifications and both psychological and literal war/weapon defense strategies.

What emerges is the gift of transcendent communion with resonant new unity intra-psychically and inter-subjectively among humans and the “other” in a subtle body permeating field whose language is love. 

As the genius of this film and our own dreams intimate, hands from “both worlds” are currently working on these possibilities.

✦ ✦ ✦

Monika Wikman holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology {the degree of a Jungian analyst} from the Research and Training Center for Depth Psychology According to C.G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz in Zürich, Switzerland. You can listen to her interview with Laura London in Episode 24.

The Wounded Healer

Quotes from Jungian analyst and future guest Andrew Samuels on the BBC Radio 4 show In Our Time from Dec. 2, 2004.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FREUD & JUNG

AS: Let’s imagine what you’d get if you went to see Jung. You'd certainly get somebody who knew he was a wounded healer. His ambitiousness, he knew about that. His crazy childhood, he knew about that. And I think he fashioned a really radical version of the therapy relationship out of these wounds. It was a much more equal relationship than the one that Freud established with his patients. It involved much more of a recognition that, in Jung's words, the doctor is in the treatment just as much as the patient is in the treatment. He said if anything positive happens in therapy it’s because of the personality of the therapist not the techniques and theories. And modern therapists resonate with that. You heal because of who you are more than what you know and what you've been taught.

Your whole psychological life would be treated by Jung, responded to by Jung, very differently from the way Freud did. There’s no on-high technical application of knowledge. There’s no reading of the unconscious as a kind of bag of dirty tricks. And I mean dirty as in sexual repression, nasty, aggressive, destructive stuff. The unconscious is those things for Jung but it’s also much more positive – a creative source that helps you live your life to its fullest extent possible. Your dreams are not attempts by your unconscious to deceive you. You can read your dreams much more easily in the Jungian vein than in the Freudian vein. If you dream about a king Freud might say, who is this king? If you dream about a king, for Jung he’s going to say, which are the ruling or governing parts of your personality, where does your kingship reside? There’s not an attempt to turn the images and symbols of the dream into something else.

ON INDIVIDUATION

AS: The idea of individuation is completely different from the idea of mental health or maturity. It is simply becoming yourself – different from other people, but never out of relationship with them. People often read Jung on individuation as saying you just have to become yourself. He doesn’t say that. He says you have to become yourself in order to enter fully into relationships with other people. ...

There’s a certain ‘intelligence’ in the unconscious from a Jungian perspective. You know what you need to do in life. The problem is there’s a metaphorical wall or curtain between you and your knowledge of what you need to do in life. Therapy attempts to lift that. So, the solution is not found in the interpretations – based on knowledge – of the therapist or analyst. The solution is found within the subject, within the individual, who knew it all along, didn’t know that they knew it, and can be helped to see that they do know it.

Q: And that is individuation?

AS: I think so, yes.

Q: How is it different from Freud’s view of maturity then?

AS: Well, Freud said maturity, like normality, were ideal fictions. And in a sense individuation is also an ideal fiction. We don’t really talk about individuation anymore. We talk about individuating or the individuation processes or something like that. You can be quite mad and quite outside the social norms – quite a disreputable or idiosyncratic person – and be said to be individuating. It is very different from a kind of normative moralistic approach which I think is implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis – there’s a right way to do sex, there’s a right way to be aggressive, there’s a right way to relate to people, and so on. That is missing in Jung’s notion of individuation.

You can listen to the full interview here.

Transcribed by Laura London

Lara Newton

Lara Newton at the front door of the Psychology Club Zürich.

FOLLOW-UP NOTES BY LARA NEWTON REGARDING HER INTERVIEW IN EPISODE #19:
 

1.  Remember when I said something about candidates working with a tutor on a paper, and the tutor helps the candidate to recognize their own complexes in relating to the material, etc.? Actually this kind of learning is huge in Jungian training. The candidates are often being shown by the analyst(s) how their complexes might get between themselves and their understanding of or recognition of the "other" (which will eventually be the analysand).

Over and over again in Jungian training, the analysts are helping the candidates to look at their own psychological experience of the "academic" material, of each other, and of the training analysts. We as candidates basically work out our complexes and complexed reactions to psychological circumstances and psychological material for years, during our training, so that once we have graduated as Jungian analysts we are able to recognize our own complexes at the very early stages of their activation. We also are able to recognize the alchemical gold or treasure within the complex, and thus use that recognition in our work as analysts. The complexes of our analysands and their transformation are the focus, and our own complexes need to not get in the way.

There is no academic program anywhere that offers what Jungian training offers. It would be impossible.

2.  In CW vol. 14, Mysterium Coniunctionis, paragraph 359 is where Jung actually remarks that water "kills and vivifies." My bad, I said "drowns."

3.  When speaking of the brother-sister relationship, I referred to a quote from Jung that I said I was paraphrasing (or at least I said that I knew I wasn't quoting it verbatim). Here it is, from CW vol. 12, Psychology and Alchemy: in paragraph 436, Jung says, "The brother-sister pair stands allegorically for the whole conception of opposites."

4.   In Deirdre of the Sorrows, Lara writes: "the story is also a tragic romance. Such romances always carry a deep significance for the people who hear them. Love that is fated to occur, no matter what obstacles stand in its way, and that is equally fated to end tragically, speaks to us of a psychological necessity. We must look closely at the nature of the lovers, what brings them together, and what tears them apart, in order to understand that necessity." ~L.L.

5.  Toni Wolff's essay, Structural Forms of the Feminine Psyche, discusses four feminine "types":  mother, hetaira, amazon, and the medial woman. I would say that Deirdre embodies the hetaira and the medial woman.

6.  Maria Prophetissa is sometimes referred to as the Mother of Alchemy because she is the first known female alchemist, and she is referred to with deep reverence by such alchemical greats as Zosimos of Panopolis. He also called her the Sister of Moses. These are considered to be metaphorical names, placing her in a position of profound authority where the Great Work is concerned. We don't know when she lived, but it is considered to have been one or two generations prior to the time when Zosimos lived (he was the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 4th century A.D.). Some of this information can be found in The Jewish Alchemists by Raphael Patai.

UPDATE: JUNE 25, 2016
 

7.  You had asked me if people could have a brother or sister complex even if they didn't have a brother or sister. I answered with information about this experience being archetypal, but there is another more experiential answer I'd like to add. Often girls or boys during early adolescence will experience a different kind of relationship with someone of the opposite sex. They may call it "platonic," or they may say they "can talk to him/her about anything." Sometimes they even say, "he's like a brother – the brother I never had." The brother-sister archetype has been awakened and a complex will form. The energy is waiting in the unconscious to be activated, as all archetypal energy is. 

8.  When talking about Deirdre, I spoke of one part of the myth but didn't remember it fully. It is the scene when Deirdre has not yet met Noise (her true love), and she sees her foster father slaughter an animal. Here is the correct sequence: she sees the animal's blood on the snow, and a Raven flies down to drink the blood. She says, "I could love a man with skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood and hair as black as the Raven." Her foster mother then says, "the warrior Noise is such a one." And Deirdre said she would not rest until she saw him.

Listen to Lara's interview in Episode #19

An Opportunistic Infection

“Donald Trump as an Opportunistic Infection” by Robert Magrisso, M.D.

The Republican Party has been a sick, dysfunctional body for a long time. Denying reality and living within a narrative of its own creation, it cannot really participate in national governance and it cannot recognize its own illness. Donald Trump is the opportunistic infection that comes in the terminal phase. A weak bacterium that normally lives innocuously in the colon suddenly becomes a pathogen when the body is so weakened. It is political sepsis we are witnessing. I hope we have the strength as a nation to resist but it will require some painful soul searching on the parts of many who seem to have lost their souls.

Every physician knows that when the body is weakened by disease, very often the final, terminal illness is an opportunistic infection. The immune system, which protects against the myriad of bacteria, viruses and fungi to which we are routinely exposed, but can easily fight off, is so weak, that otherwise innocuous bacteria becomes potentially lethal.  In the 1970s when I was doing my internal medicine residency, one rotation was at a VA Hospital.  The veterans who had started smoking during World War II had so much lung cancer that there was one ward just for lung cancer patients.  It was always full and there would be deaths daily. As trainees, we routinely did so called “fever work ups” on patients with a fever.  This included blood cultures, which were looking for bacteria in the blood stream.  Almost everyone who died of lung cancer, had positive blood cultures terminally.  They technically died of sepsis due to pneumonia rather than the lung cancer itself.

I bring this up because Donald Trump has seemed to me to be an opportunistic infection, infecting the Republican Party and, by extension, our entire body politic.  The Republican Party has been ill for a long time.  One could date the nomination of Sarah Palin for Vice President of the United States as one clearly visible sign.  Her incredible unqualifiedness, born out by subsequent history, was like seeing visible skin rash reflecting deeper pathology.  President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney may go down as the worst executive pairing in modern history.  The Tea Party wing of the party is reactionary in the extreme, having no ideas to meet the challenges of the 21st century, interconnected world in which we live but simply reacts against anything the Democrats support.  Ungrounded in basic facts, lost in narrative of their own creation, they have nothing constructive to offer any thinking person.  The business wing seems only interested in preserving and extending its power and using that power to keep intact or extend its share of the pie.  The disconnect between what the party says, its rhetoric and its actions is so great as to make one seriously wonder if mental illness diagnoses apply.  At some point, the people who voted Republican were going to realize this and they weren’t going to move to the Democratic Party. 

So we have a weakened party.  We have a dysfunctional government due to this weakened party.  There is no sound leadership in the party.  The nominees for President did not, in my opinion, include a single qualified person.  This is the weakened political body, a body susceptible to an opportunistic pathogen.  Donald Trump is someone who never in the past would be taken seriously as a presidential nominee.  He is like the bacteria in your colon.  They have a place, a necessary place in the scheme of things but not in government.  He is a self promoting businessman of questionable success, an entertainer, an insult artist, a narcissistic joke actually.  But now, he is dangerous to the weakened political body and he can’t be stopped.  Taking his script from the demagogue playbook, he has preyed upon the fears, distrust, betrayals of people.  When I read how the Republican leaders have tried and failed to stop him, I can’t help but think that they have been the disease that has weakened the body.  Even if one is a “liberal” or Democrat, one needs a strong, relevant Republican Party.  A party who has serious ideas, who really cares about the people of this country, who is aware that the world has changed and is not trying to turn back time with different ideas than the Democrats would be great. 

Hopefully, the American people as a whole are a healthy enough “body” that can destroy this pathogen and new health can be restored.  However, how many other nations have had demagogues take power when their political body was sick?  Just as having an opportunist terminal infection is the oldest way to die (think of the time before antibiotics), getting a demagogue to take over is the oldest political solution of a diseased body politic.

Robert Magrisso, M.D.

This paper was referenced by Dr. Tom Lavin in Episode #17. Special thanks to Dr. Magrisso for allowing publication of his paper on this website.