Delivered
as The Jung-Memorial Lecture to
the Washington Society for Jungian Psychology at the
Embassy of Switzerland on June 2, 2000
We have entered the 40th year since Jung's demise. On the afternoon
on which Jung died, a great thunder-storm raged over his house
in Künsnacht, as if nature itself were mobilized to acknowledge
the event. At just about the time of his death, lightning struck
his favorite tree in the garden (Laurens van der Post, Jung and
the Story of Our Time, p.273). Several years later Laurens van
der Post was making a film of the story of Jung's life. The final
sequence on the last day of all was to be filmed in Jung's house.
When the moment came for me to speak directly to the camera about
Jung's death, and I came to the description of how the lightning
demolished Jung's favorite tree, the lightning struck again in
the garden. The thunder crashed out so loudly that I winced, and
to this day the thunder, wince, and the impediment of speech it
caused are there in the film for all to see, just as the lightning
is visible on the screen over the storm-tossed lake and wind-whipped
trees (van der Post, p.275).
It seems as if nature wants us to pay attention to the man who
once lived among us. We need to pay heed and remember.
SMALL BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
On his father's side, Jung came from a family of German physicians
from Mannheim. His grandfather, Carl Gustav Jung senior, a promising
young doctor, became involved in some political persecutions,
and after spending 13 (or 19) month in prison, he left Germany.
In Paris, Alexander von Humboldt helped him obtain a position
at Basel University. He founded the Institute of Hope, a home
for retarded children, and had 13 children of his own from three
marriages. His last child was Paul, who became a pastor and Jung's
father. On his mother's side, his grandfather was a churchwarden,
a visionary who often had conversations with "ghosts."
He, too, had had 13 children, and his last child was Jung's mother.
Jung was born on July 26, 1875, in Kesswil on Lake Constance.
He was barely six months old when his family moved to Laufen,
almost at the edge of the great Falls of the Rhine. Some four
years later, they moved again to Klein-Hüningen, a small
hamlet just outside Basel, but still on the Rhine. Until the age
of nine, he was an only child, his sister being born when he was
that age. The speculations that Jung was really Johan Wolfgang
von Goethe's grandson seem to have been only rumors. His actress
great-grandmother had indeed known Goethe, but research into the
factual data has disclosed that Goethe had not been in Mannheim
at the time of Jung's grandfather's conception and birth.
Jung married his wife Emma in 1903 and in 1906 moved into the
house he had built at 228 Seestrasse in Küsnacht. Above the
entrance to the house one finds the words vocatus atque non vocatus
deus aderit (invoked or not invoked, god will be present), a Delphic
oracle and a quote from a book by Erasmus that he had bought in
the early days of his psychiatric residency in 1900 when he could
ill afford it. He cherished it to the end. As Jung saw it, the
quote contains the entire reality of the psyche. (William McGuire
and R.F.C. Hull, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 164).
In the reports of people who have met Jung (Victoria Ocampo,
1934; Kenneth Lambert, 1939 and 1950; Pierre Courthion, 1945;
Eleanor Bertine and Alberto Moravia, 1948; Charles Baudouin, 1949
and 1958; Mircea Eliade, 1952; Claire Myers Owens, 1954; Michael
Schabad, 1955; Margaret Tilly, 1956; Ester Harding, 1958; Miguel
Serrano, 1959 and 1961), he is invariably described as very tall,
vital, exuberant, friendly, putting one completely at ease, and
full of respect for the other person and concern for the individual
value in anyone. The force that emanated from him was amazing;
one feels that he had fully completed the cycle from the experience
of blind instinct through ego-consciousness and back through a
broad conscious relation to the powerful tides of the unconscious.
His penetrating, observant eyes seemed to focus beyond time (McGuire
and Hull, 1977).
The effect he had on people was described thus: One leaves Jung's
presence feeling enriched and appeased, as by contact with a pine
tree in the forest - a life as much below ground as above . .
. . He has, like his books, some magical incalculability, some
gift to probe a wound and assuage in the same breath, some power
to move us beyond the meaning of the abstract word. . . . I divined
from his books the same two Jungs that I now so clearly see. In
the forefront a dynamic, thinking, modern man, in whom life, with
all its diversity runs clear and strong like a spring; and in
the background a wise, redeeming figure, a very ancient and intuitive
man, a sort of gardener, who walks along conversing softly with
his dog, his hands full of new shoots to graft onto the tree or
life (Elizabeth Shepley Sergent [1931], in C.G. Jung Speaking,
p.56).
In Jung and the Story of Our Time (1977), Laurens van der Post
wrote:
What was of overwhelming consequence to me was that as we sat
there talking, something was communicated to me more out of what
Jung was in himself rather than out of his ideas; and in the process,
this feeling of isolation and loneliness in a vital area of myself,
which had haunted me all those years, vanished. I was no longer
alone; I had company, and company of a noble order (p.53).
He was a born, great, inspired neighbour. He had a genious for
propinquity. He was a neighbour to all sorts and conditions of
men and women, from the most despised and rejected forms of life,
ideas, and attitudes to those overcome with a kind of nausea and
vertigo of the worldly heights they have achieved. He is a neighbour
to millions that are yet to be born. His gift of propinquity brought
him near to all the most hopeless forms of being, locked out from
the norms of life and concern of his day, no matter whether it
was a deeply disturbed spirit shut away in some asylum, some cast
off and mentally deranged woman, or some despised and oppressed
and by all civilised standards, ignorant, primitive, humble .
. . barber in Chattanooga, the chief of an almost vanished American
Indian entity, or a Swiss lakeside wine merchant. They understood
and felt near to him when great minds of his own day, without
having read him, dismissed him as a woolly and treacherous mystic.
. . . However, he had so enriched the meaning of our time as to
provide perhaps a kind of Archimedean support in the contemporary
spirit from which it could be levered out of the dead weight of
itself (pp. 54 - 55).
This he did for Richard Wilhelm, the translator of the I Ching.
Wilhelm carried about with him an isolation due to his experience
of China and its ancient culture which he neither could share
with others nor knew how to integrate with his European self.
Deep as this was, his loneliness vanished when he met Jung, as
his experience could immediately be decoded and rendered into
an idiom that had meaning to Europe and to the world (p. 54).
I can find no better description of Jung's essence than his description
of Wilhelm in the eulogy he gave at Wilhelm's death. If we replace
Wilhelm's name with Jung's, we may see what Jung saw in the other,
but was in himself:
Wilhelm possessed the mastership which is won only by the man
who surmounts his specialty, and so his knowledge became a concern
touching all humanity. . . . It could only have been an all-embracing
humanness, a greatness of heart that divines the whole, which
enabled him to open himself without reservation to a profoundly
foreign spirit, and to put at the services of this influence,
the manifold gifts and capacities of his mind. . . . As a rule,
the specialist's is a purely masculine mind, an intellect to which
fecundity is an alien and unnatural process; therefore it is an
especially ill-adapted tool for receiving and bringing to birth
a foreign spirit. But a greater mind bears the stamp of the feminine;
to it is given a receptive and fruitful womb which can reshape
what is strange into a familiar form. Wilhelm possessed in the
highest degree the rare charisma of Spiritual Motherhood.
But all mediocre minds in contact with a foreign culture lose
themselves either in blind self-deracination or in an equally
uncomprehending, as well as presumptuous, passion for criticism.
Touching only the externals of the foreign culture, they never
eat its bread or drink its wine, and so never enter into the communio
spiritus, that most intimate transfusion and interpenetration
which prepares a new birth (Secret of the Golden Flower, p.138).
I cannot help but hear, in this last paragraph's description,
an almost perfect fit with the spirit that some neo-Jungians display.
The same parallel is evident to me in the story Jung told at the
Oxford Congress in 1938 (see C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 113) describing
a similar sort of incomprehension. Jung reports that a wise old
man of the Pueblo Indians told him, "Oh, it is very nice
what the priest is doing; he comes along every second month, and
when we bury our dead he does very interesting things with them,
but then we do the Indian medicine afterwards." They always
wrap up the dead twice, first according to the Christian rite
and afterwards according to the Indian rite. Such people understand
nothing of the Christian religion, what it really is. And it seems
to me that this matches the opinion of contemporary so-called
Jungian analysts who believe that in order to be well analyzed
you have to undergo a Freudian analysis after a Jungian analysis.
It has come to my attention that some Jungian training analysts,
during an examination of a candidate, have asked questions that
focused thoroughly on the analysis of the transference as the
only relevant subject. In addition, there were derogatory comments
suggesting a total irrelevancy of dream analysis. Having become
more Freudian than Jungian, they look upon the unconscious as
the dumping ground of the psyche, so the dreams expressing it
are as disreputable as any garbage dump.
I cannot help but speculate what a marvelously rich territory
might have been discovered if, at the time of his meeting with
Jung, Freud's theory had not become rigid and ossified. Had Freud
been able to allow Jung's insights to cross-fertilize his path-breaking
inroads into the richness of the psyche, he might have reconnected
within himself with the archetypal treasure of his Jewish heritage
from which, from all reports, he had kept himself away. Instead
we have Jungians, seemingly afraid of what they have not understood,
retreating defensively into their intellectual dongeons, barely
able to glimpse through the narrow slits of their keeps all the
avenues that Jung in his overabundance of ideas, his vastness
and immense wealth of empirical data, barely developed in his
work.
There is a story that one day J.S. Bach was approached by a young
admirer and asked, "Herr Bach, how do you manage to think
of all these new tunes?" "My dear fellow," Bach
is reported to have answered, "I have no need to think of
them. I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when
I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around in my
room" (van der Post., p. 123). It could have been Jung talking.
Sadly, this richness that has already brought so much to so many
is falling into oblivion. Jung would not have been at all surprised
at this total loss of connection with his message among some of
the present-day schools of thought within the Jungian community.
Van der Post quotes, "I remember Jung telling me that the
Institute would be lucky if it did not outlive its creative uses
within one generation" (p 4).
I can imagine the feeling of despair that may have overwhelmed
somebody living during Galileo's time. After the exhilarating
experience of sharing the ground-breaking discovery that the sun
and not the earth is at the center of our galaxy, within less
than half a century the obsolete patterns of the past are taking
over and we are back reasserting that the earth is the center
of the universe.
It is the same dismay that overwhelms me when I hear that the
analysis of the transference is taken again as the cornerstone
of a valid psychoanalysis, while dream analysis is not only ignored
but also demeaned and dismissed. Even if some of Jung's direct
followers may not have been trained to address the issue, Jung
himself developed his views on the transference dynamic in CW
18 , par. 310-356, and in The Psychology of the Transference,
CW 16. Of course, his statements that "We do not need transference,"
and "Transference or no transference, that has nothing to
do with cure" (CW 18, par. 351) may sound outrageous, as
well as the fact that he was looking at the transference more
as a hindrance to the work rather than a help. Understood from
a depth-psychology point of view, it starts to make sense.*
If a contractor were called to restore a house destabilized by
an earthquake and spent all his time analyzing the cracks in the
walls, the house would not be "cured." If, on the other
hand, he were to go into the basement and find out how he could
consolidate the flaw in the foundation that the earthquake brought
to light, then the house would be restored.
Jung discovered that much more was involved in the transference
than the projection upon the analyst of qualities possessed by
significant people of their pasts. Archetypes are stirred up by
the analytic relationship. When projected onto the person of the
analyst, these archetypes confer great therapeutic - or great
destructive - power. In Jung's experience, the archetypes most
often projected were the savior, shaman, healer, or wise old man/woman
(Anthony Stevens, The Two-Million-Year-Old Self, pp.105 - 106).
Jung illustrated this with the following case material (C.G.
Jung Speaking, p.346). In the dreams of one of his patients:
[S]he was a little infant, sitting on my knees, and I held her
in my arms. I was a very tender father to the little girl, and
more and more her dreams became emphatic in that respect. I was
a sort of a giant and she was a very little, frail human thing,
quite a little girl in the hands of an enormous being. The last
dream of that series was that I was out in the midst of nature,
standing in a field of wheat, an enormous field of wheat that
was ripe for harvesting. I was a giant and I held her in my arms
like a baby, and the wind was blowing over that field. Now you
know that when the wind is blowing it makes waves in the wheatfield
and with these waves I swayed, as if putting her to sleep. And
she felt as if she were in the arms of a god. I thought 'Now,
the harvest is ripe, and I must tell her.' And I told her, 'You
see, what you want and what you are projecting into me, because
you are not conscious of it, is the idea of a deity you don't
possess. Therefore you see it in me.' That clicked . . . she saw
what she really was missing, that missing value which she projected
onto me, making me indispensable. And then she saw that I was
not indispensable because as the dream says, she is in the arms
of an archetype. That is a numinous experience, an archetypal
experience that gives people an incorruptible value.
One could almost say that every dream, in its own manner, carries
a message. It not only tells us that something is amiss in the
depth of our being, it also brings a solution for getting out
of the crisis. For the collective unconscious, which sends these
dreams, already possesses the solution: nothing has been lost
from the whole immemorial experience of humanity; every imaginable
situation and every solution seem to have been foreseen by the
collective unconscious. You only have to carefully observe the
message sent by the unconscious (C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 231).
All dreams reveal spiritual experiences provided one does not
apply one's own point of view to their interpretation (C.G. Jung
Speaking, p 71). Analysis helps one to read these messages correctly.
Anthony Stevens, in his book, The Two-Million-Year-Old Self (p.
117), presents the following dream:
A very old and richly-ornamented sword was dug up from a tumulus
and presented to the dreamer, an unmarried woman who was in analysis
with Jung. When asked for her associations, she recalled an image
of her father holding a dagger, which flashed brilliantly in the
sunlight. Her father was an energetic, strong-willed man who had
had numerous love affairs and had died when the dreamer was still
very young. She had, nevertheless, formed a strong father complex,
though she tended to become involved with men who were weak and
neurotic and very much unlike him.
Now if Freud had been analyzing this woman, be would have seen
the sword as a phallic symbol and would have concluded that her
preference for weak men was due to the repression of her incestuous
desire for her father. Jung, however, went an important step further.
When she entered analysis, the patient herself had been weak and
neurotic . Through the image of the sword, her unconscious was
telling her that she could be strong and healthy like her father.
In other words, Jung's interpretation was offering her a way out
of her illness, a course for future action. The sword represented
her will to health. It was phallos, a sacred generative power
like Osiris's Djed, restored by Isis, the ultimate goddess figure,
representing the feminine soul. It was a symbol embodying the
transcendent function.
This dream illustrates how the endogenous powers of healing present
in the patient can activate the transcendent function. Jungian
therapy can be understood as one long process of mobilizing the
transcendent function using dreams and active imagination to grant
the ego access to the archetypal world within. The transcendent
function is, according to Jung (CW 18, par. 1554), a cooperation
between conscious reasoning and unconscious data. Besides, Jung
says, it is a natural and spontaneous phenomenon, part of the
process of individuation; it is a function that progressively
unites the opposites.
For Jung psychoanalysis is the searching back into the soul for
hidden psychological factors that have brought about a false adjustment
to life (C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 21).
One is reminded here of the belief of some West African people
in a prenatal contract made by each individual with a heavenly
double. According to them, before we enter this world, we draw
up a contract with our double as to what we will do in the course
of our life. Then, just before birth, we are led to the Tree of
Forgetfulness; we embrace it, and from that moment on we lose
conscious recollection of the contract. We must live up to our
contractual agreements, however. If we do not, we will become
ill and will need the help of a diviner, who will contact the
heavenly double and discover what articles of the contract we
are failing to fulfill (Stevens, p. 117 - 119).
Therapy restores the free flow from the unconscious, removing
the blocks that have been formed. This flow is essentially in
itself a natural process and it will force itself through. What
counts is that when people hear the inner voice, they do not go
against it but act on it (C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 210 - 211). Patients
dream of analysis as of a refreshing and purifying bath. Their
dreams and visions present symbols of rebirth, which show unmistakably
that knowledge of their unconscious and its meaningful integration
in their psychic lives gives them renewed vitality and appears
to them as a deliverance from otherwise unavoidable disaster or
from entanglement in the skeins of fate (Jung, CW 18, par. 1816).
In therapy, acknowledging and supporting symbolic processes and
working on transference and countertransference are not diametrically
opposed techniques; according to Kast (p. ix-x), they are mutually
interwoven. Attempts to assess the effectiveness of different
forms of psychotherapy seem to have reached a general agreement
that, contrary to the assertion of the Freudians, insight and
analysis of the transference are not indispensable to a favorable
outcome (Stevens, p. 118). The basic characteristics needed seem
to be prestige and genuineness of the therapist, a positive relationship,
and trust.
Healing is an act of enablement. The healer is one who perceives
what is needed and knows how to alter the circumstances to make
it possible for the organism to heal itself. Jung saw this self-correcting
process as achieving its highest manifestation in the workings
of the human psyche. Healing is thus the art of providing the
optimum circumstances in which the self-correcting powers of nature
can most efficiently achieve their purpose (Stevens, p.93).
A meaningful life is the third archetypal imperative after pleasure,
which I call joy, and power, which I call mastery; it is concerned
with the perception of what Jung called the spirit of the depth,
whereas the other two are in the realm of the spirit of the time.
Human beings cannot live a meaningless life.
No recovery of a sense of meaning seemed possible to Jung without
a recovery of personal religious experience. He saw as his task
to make religion once more credible to his patients. Through objective
experience of their dreams, fantasy, and imagination, they were
brought to an area of the spirit where the connection to the mystery
of the Divine was more likely than not to happen. For him the
future of humankind depended on the rediscovery of its capacity
for religious experience accessible, in a 20th-century idiom and
not in the archaic, dogmatic, doctrinal, conceptualized way in
which it has been imposed for centuries (van der Post, p. 213).
In the end, only the wounded healer heals and even he cannot heal
beyond the extent to which he has healed himself. Nothing is more
dangerous than expecting from the wounded patient qualities that
the healer has been incapable of realizing in himself (van der
Post, p.128). No one should become a therapist unless she or he
has gone through an analysis in what we now call analytical psychology
(van der Post, p.149). If the analyst does not keep in touch with
his unconscious objectively, there is no guarantee whatever that
the patient will not fall into the unconscious of the analyst
. . . a condition of personal contamination through mutual unconsciousness
(Jung, CW 18, par. 323), a participation mystique. Ultimately
Jung's advice to psychotherapists was to "learn the best,
know the best, and then forget everything when you face the patient"
(CW 10, par 882).
Jungian ideas such as archetypal world, transcendent function,
process of individuation have become almost as well known as introvert/extravert,
animus/anima, shadow, persona, complex, projection. We forget
that we owe both the words and what they depict to Jung, and at
times we use them without really knowing what he meant by them.
TYPOLOGY: THE ORIENTING FUNCTIONS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
1). Sensation. Sense perceptions tell us that something is. We
can see, hear, taste, smell the world around us, and so are conscious
of it. Sensation does not tell us what it is, only that it is.
Examples of its nonexistence at the conscious level:
Jung, as a boy, almost drowning because he did not see he was
stepping off a bridge; A person watching TV without being aware
that one of his dogs has had an "accident" until his
wife comes home and smells it, etc. An inferior function is a
bridge to the unconscious and all its richness: we have seen how
Jung used his carvings to access his inner world.
2). Thinking tells us what something is. It is a constant comparing
of sense perceptions with memory images, differentiating and identifying
and concluding with a recognition.
3). Feeling tells what value the observed thing has for us. One
needs to become conscious of the concomitant emotional phenomena
known as feeling tones, informing us if a thing is pleasant or
unpleasant, desirable or not, acceptable or not. Imagine, for
instance an introverted feeling type, by definition self-referential,
in partnership with an extraverted sensation or thinking type.
It is like having a submarine relating via its periscope with
a ship of the line, a fairly frustrating proposition for both.
So a feeling type is not necessarily a good partner, but an intuitive
is almost certainly in difficult partnerships.
4). Intuition is a very personal hunch about the possibilities
inherent in a situation (see Jung, CW 8, par. 288-292; also C.G.
Jung Speaking, p. 306).
Knowledge about the orienting functions is extremely important
as a guide to misunderstanding within relationships. Jung warns,
"One always has to answer people in their main function;
otherwise no contact is established (CW 18, par. 321).
Archetypes is another of these ubiquitous terms. For Jung they
are a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine
the individual's life in invisible ways (CW 5, par. 259; CW 8,
par. 339). The archetypes are not ideas, but possibilities of
ideas. They precondition all existence; they are a bridge to matter
in general, i.e., they have a "psychoid" aspect, thus
healing the body/mind split. The archetype provides a basis for
a common understanding of data derived from all sciences and all
human activities (Stevens, pp. l3 - 14). Whenever a phenomenon
is found to be a characteristic of all human communities, irrespective
of race or culture or historical epoch, then it is an expression
of an archetype of the collective unconscious. When a pattern
such as maternal bonding, dominance striving, or home building
is found to satisfy the criteria of universality, continuity,
and evolutionary stability, it is likely to be archetypally based.
The knowledge of the existence of the archetypes can be infinitely
reassuring, especially in times of crisis, when external guidelines
fail. The concept is rather difficult to conceive of, but Marie
Louise von Franz has found a very appropriate image to describe
it. Compare a glass filled with pure water to a glass containing
a concentrated solution of salt. The two glasses seem identical:
same color, same transparency When one evaporates the liquid,
however, there will be salt crystals on the bottom of only the
glass that contained the salt solution. These crystals are the
indication of the existence of the salt, the manifestation of
the archetypes in the archetypal image, whereas the transparent
solution is the archetype itself.
The Self and the mandala are among the most important archetypes
of the collective unconscious. Jung said, "The mandala is
a very important archetype. It is the archetype of inner order.
It expresses the fact that there is a center and a periphery,
and it tries to embrace a whole. It denotes a center which is
not coincident with the ego but with the wholeness which I call
the self. . . . We could easily say that it is the main archetype"
(C.G. Jung Speaking, pp. 327-328).
In his talks with Miguel Serrano (C.G, Jung Speaking, p. 394),
Jung states, "I have found no stable or definite center in
the unconscious, and I don't believe such a center exists. I believe
that the thing I call the self is an ideal center, equidistant
between the ego and the unconscious, and it is probably equivalent
to the maximum natural expression of individuality in a state
of fulfillment of totality." In his interviews (p. 327) he
states that he does not believe that God is the Self or that the
Self is God. He simply considers that the two terms are psychologically
related, that there is a psychological relationship between them.
I imagine the ego as the manager of a marvelous chamber orchestra
who is in charge of making the performances of the orchestra possible:
taking care of the bookings, the hotel reservations, the plane
or train tickets, etc. When, however, he believes he can direct
the orchestra and attempts to take over, disaster ensues. Only
the conductor of the orchestra knows the musicians and the music.
Only he is able to mediate between the manager and the musicians,
negotiating an understanding and delivering performances that
delight one's soul.
For Jung, the experience of the unconscious, whatever form it
may take, is an approach to wholeness, the one experience lacking
in our modern civilization. It is the via regia to the Unus Mundus.
He emphasized that the unconscious is the Mother of All (i.e.,
of all psychic life), being the matrix, background, and foundation
of all differentiated phenomena we call psychic (CW 18, par.789).
The archetypes exist in the unconscious as undifferentiated symbols
(C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 216). Every symbol is a condensation of
the personal and the collective, the individual and the universal.
According to Stevens (p. 29), the symbols of dream language are
the products of the archetypal assimilation of experience:
Archetype + Experience Þ Symbol
It seems a natural possibility to reverse the direction and to
access the archetypes by following the symbol. Indeed, for Kast
(p. 9) a symbol is, in the first place, a common object perceived
by the senses, although it also signifies something mysterious;
it refers to a meaning beyond, which cannot be fully grasped at
first, if ever. Whenever a symbol gains importance in our lives,
it reflects a current existential situation. This symbolic point
of view incorporates our every-day reality into a greater continuity,
whereby the hidden meaning influences the apparent and the apparent
influences the hidden meaning. It is this capacity to develop
an imaginative connection with the symbolic life that can open
the door to the wisdom with which we are endowed. "The kingdom
of Heaven is within you," and this realization heals the
suffering of the soul (C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 72).
I wonder how today's neo-Jungians would answer Jung's question,
"What has happened to the passion of the spirit, that it
should have declined into an arid exercise of intellect alone,
and what of the effect on consciousness, that it should be held
as the equivalent only of that which is capable of verbal articulation?"
Think of that and you will see how the spirit of the West has
been impoverished and become sick in a vital area of itself (van
der Post, p. 133).
To correct all that in his patients was as common a task as it
was difficult. Jung has shown us that we certainly need to mobilize
the energies of the conscious ego, but instead of fighting or
suppressing the illness or rationalizing the symptom and acting
it out, one goes down into the dark night of the soul to find
the meaning in the symptoms and the myth and symbol it points
to. The approach is then a dialogue between inner and outer, upper
and lower, contemporary and archetypal. And in the last resort,
healing is achieved only Deo concedente, by the grace of the divine
energy we are able to access.
In his Red Book, Jung carefully wrote all his fantasies and thoughts
during his own Night Sea Journey; in it he wrote the following
(Jaffé, p. 155-156):
I have returned, I am once again there -
I am with you - after long years of long wandering
I have come again to you.
Should I tell you everything I have seen, experienced, drunk
into myself?
Or don't you want to hear of all the noise of life
and the world?
But one thing you must know, one thing I have learnt,
that one must live this life.
This life is the way, the longest sought after, the way
to the incomprehensible, which we call divine.
There is no other way.
All other ways are false paths.
I found the right way, it led me to you, to
my soul.
I return, tempered and purified.
Then I was still utterly engrossed in the spirit of the time
and thought differently of the human soul.
I thought and spoke much about the soul; I knew many
learned words about the soul; I judged it and made a
scientific object of it.
I did not consider that the soul cannot be the object of my
judgement and knowledge. Much more are my judgement and
knowledge the object of my soul.
Therefore the spirit of the depths pressed me to speak to
my
soul, to call upon it as a living and independent being whose
re-discovery means good fortune for me. I had to become
aware that I had lost my soul, or rather that I had lost myself
from my soul, for many years.
Therefore the spirit of the depths sees the soul as an inde-
pendent, living being, and therewith contradicts the spirit
of
the times for whom the soul is something dependent on the
person, which lets itself be ordered and judged, that is,
a thing
whose range we can grasp.
Before the spirit of the depths, this thought is presumption
and arrogance. Therefore the joy of my re-discovery was a
humble one. . . . Without the soul there is no way out of
this time.
For those of us lucky enough to have found a home that Jung's
spiritual motherhood provided, the obligation to guide others
to the place of harmonious interaction with the world around is
paramount. In the process we need to remember that as Jung had
said, what we are doing for ourselves is not done for ourselves
alone, because we are, each of us, a grain of sand in the balance
of the universe and we may then be able to contribute to the decrease
of the chaos in the world around us. Stevens (p. 119) ends his
book by saying:
There is no knowing how any of this can be achieved, but if the
Self wills it, it must be possible. To gain access to the archetypal
world, to begin to know the unknowable is at least a beginning.
The natural world of our planet now depends for its whole future
survival on what can be achieved through its intra-psychic representative
- the Self - the primordial survivor in ourselves.
I want to end by taking you with me to an Eastern Orthodox church
to attend Easter services. You need to imagine a rather dimly
lit interior, the tall, very narrow windows do not provide very
much light. There are no pews, but only around the walls there
are old, ornately carved stalls on which the older members of
the congregation are allowed to sit. The rest stand or kneel.
The walls are covered with icons and so is the wall that separates
the altar from the area where the congregation gathers. In this
wall there are three doors, two small side doors and the center,
two-panel door, which opens at crucial moments during the Mass,
thus allowing the members of the congregation to see the priest
officiating. For Easter one gathers at 4:00 A.M. in total darkness.
Each person has an unlit candle in his or her hand and one waits,
in darkness and in silence. One hears only the murmur of the priest
at the altar behind the closed door. And then all of a sudden
the door opens, and in the darkness the priest appears holding
a lighted candle. He touches the candle of the nearest member
of the congregation saying, " Christ is resurrected,"
and the person whose own candle is now lit answers, "Indeed,
Christ is resurrected." He or she now turns to the closest
person, lights the candle with the same exchange of words, and
one by one all the candles are lit. And at the end of the Mass,
each person leaves the church with her or his lit candle, walking
home while carefully protecting it, so that it can reach home
alight. It is this light that Jung can bring to a lost soul, and
it is this light that can survive outside and inside the home.
LIST OF REFERENCES:
Jaffé., Aniela. Jung's Last Years and Other Essays. Dallas:
Spring Publications, 1984.
