Jung Again

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This video of an interview with Jung in his old age kept me up late last night:

I come back to reading Jung every year or two and have just finished reading the second edition of his Symbols of Transformation.  Freud is very much in the background of this book, first written in 1912, which precipitated their estrangement. I appreciate and identify with Jung's warmth, humor, enthusiasm and personal character, that are so evident in the film, much more than with Freud.

Sigmund Freud

Auden's ode, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” written at the time of Freud's death in exile in London in 1939, humanizes Freud's “autocratic pose” and “paternal strictness” as being “a protective coloration for one who'd lived among enemies so long” and acknowledges that “often he was wrong and, at times, absurd.”

Carl Gustav Jung

But there is something about Jung, so evident in that video, that rings my bell, whereas, when I think of Freud, the first thing that comes to my mind is his statement in The Interpretation of Dreams that the tunnel-to-light-and-loved-ones vision in near-death experiences “is nothing but” (sic) a memory of coming down the uterine canal at the time of birth. That statement is not just protective coloring or absurdity. It's mean, in my opinion.

Anyway, what struck me most during this reading of Symbols of Transformation was that both Freud and Jung accepted, at least at that time, what is basically a hydraulic imagery of the mind! Freud used the word “libido” for the fluid, and Jung preferred the phrase “psychic energy,” giving it a broader and less sexual connotation, but still frequently used the word “libido.” They speak of this fluid as becoming “blocked,” “dammed,” “canaled,” “reverting,” “flowing to other outlets,” and such, just the way you would speak of a system of pipes or canals or some other hydraulic system.

This may seem like a little cavil, not worthy of notice given the great matters involved, but once you have studied any subject really deeply you find that it is just such a metaphor or analogy that destroys what is most crucially important in the subject for you or brings a lifetime's work to nought!

Here are just a few quotes from Symbols of Transformation that tell the story:

p. 132. “the libido appears subject to displacement, and in the form of 'libidinal affluxes' can communicate itself to various other functions and regions of the body which in themselves have nothing to do with sex. This fact led Freud to compare the libido with a stream, which is divisible, can be dammed up, overflows into collaterals, and so on.”

p. 169 “The blocking of the libido leads to an accumulation of instinctuality and, in consequence, to excesses and aberrations of all kinds.”

p. 135. “An interpretation in terms of energy seemed to me better suited to the facts than the doctrine set forth in Freud's Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. It allowed me to identify 'psychic energy' with 'libido.'”

p. 139. “This brings us back to our hypothesis that it is not the sexual instinct, but a kind of neutral energy, which is responsible for the formation of such symbols as light, fire, sun, and the like.”

Now, this sort of hydraulic imagery has its usefulness, its real-world practicality. It could be argued, and has been argued, that just about everything we know about dreams today is footnoting to Freud and Jung. I myself can't imagine my own life without having read Jung on dreams. But a true understanding of symbols involves what I believe to be missing in almost all current theory, namely the fact that the mutuality of a true symbol requires that that both parties to the sharing of it have to be able to put themselves in the place of the other in order to see what that other holds the significance of the symbol to be. That “putting oneself in the place of the other” is not hydraulics. It's love!

My Friends' Magnificence

My dreams always surprise me but one of last night's dreams asked me to go to a website where people discuss what they would do if they had only one hour left to live! So I did Google up the idea this morning and was further surprised to see how much more has been written on it than I had imagined.

The most common reading reference was to a book with the title “An Hour to Live, an Hour to Love,” by Richard Carlson, the author of the “Don't Sweat the Small Stuff” series, with his wife.

And the most common among the fifty to seventy-five answers that I read was communicating with loved ones. Most respondents would spend that last hour with loved ones.

My own personal thought about what I would do in my last hour is to do what I do almost every single waking moment now, which is to try to write down something for my loved ones, something that would enable them to share my perception of their magnificence.

A Daring Adventure with Beloved Friends in Your Heart

This video of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan catches the essence of what it means to be human. You can just feel it, know it, regardless of the "latest" scientific research on the brain or what computer enthusiasts might say.

My own first knowledge of Helen Keller (1880-1968) was “The Miracle Worker“ film of 1962, starring Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. That entire film, although it seems a little dated to me now, is available on YouTube along with many other clips of her.

There is some sense in which my own life has been primarily an attempt at a working out, an elaboration, of what you see in the above clip. Every thing correctly named, every word, every true symbol, is a sharing of life with loved ones, even if those loved ones are old beloved friends in my heart and I may have lost the sight of their faces and the warmth of their hands. The academic field in which I studied, researched and taught for many years, “Symbolic Interactionism,” is basically an elaboration of what you seen in that short clip.

Here are two good Helen Keller quotations from among many at brainyquote:

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or it is nothing.

 

Usurpations

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One of my favorite places to go during those seven years that I was an independent owner-operator was onto the great plains and prairies of northwestern North America. They stretch from the Mexico border far up into Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.

North Dakota

I just loved the prairies, the great sweep of the land and the unspeakable skies. But I was also very much aware while I was out there that these lands and skies were taken by exterminating the people who previously lived there.

Jung was particularly aware that the past is much more in our minds than we realize. I have often heard here in the US several variations on the phrase that goes “Let's put all that behind us and move forward.” Perhaps that attitude has its temporary place, its virtues, and is understandable in a nation of immigrants. But I think it is ultimately impossible. Here is Jung writing again about “America,” meaning, as I wrote in a previous post, the USA:

...the American...shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil. Certain Australian primitives assert that one cannot conquer foreign soil, because in it there dwell strange ancestor-spirits who reincarnate themselves in the newborn. There is a great psychological truth in this. The foreign land assimilates its conqueror...Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of the indigenous inhabitants.

I not long ago saw a film documentary in which some Finns visited their ancestral lands and homes in Karelia that were usurped by the Soviet Union during World War Two. I actually felt sorry for those Russians who had moved into the expropriated Finnish homes – you could just see their agony as they were being interviewed. I'm sure the usurpation of others' lands and homes has occurred all over the earth.

My guess that the reason the highest-income 1% are feeling like victims, even like “battered wives,” is that their usurpation of our homes and wealth are giving them agony in the unconscious parts of their minds.

Sometimes the Smallest Clue

Someone recently mocked my liberal tilt in politics by repeating the misquotation of Winston Churchill that goes: "If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain."

Churchill has always seemed to me to be far more experienced and perceptive than to say something so obviously shallow.

Truth can come from any source, any party, right or left, often from the most unlikely places. I constantly try to be receptive for that often-faint hint, that smallest indication, sign, symbol, thought, clue, dream, suggestion, awareness, that will enable me to resolve difficult problems or to keep me safe from catastrophe. Sometimes it is even a child who points out to us not just that an emperor does not have clothes, but leads us to where the true significance of a flower lies.*

Raphael, 1506

Our good old myths and fairy tales contain the idea that it is the stone that was rejected that has become the headstone of the corner. It's often the unlikely, simple son, who wins the treasure hard to obtain. The hero who slays the dragon often comes from some unheard of place in the countryside after all the known knights have failed, and he finds just the right place to sink his sword so that he can kill the previously invincible, loud-roaring, fire-breathing monster and can retrieve the dragon's ill-gotten treasure hoard from the cave and wed the princess, enabling the trees and flowers and animals to come back to life and the laborers in the kitchen to regain their liveliness and joy.

* "I suspect that the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains."                                                                                                  -Thoreau, Journal, February 5, 1852 

Awfully Funny

There is a memorable Wonkette piece that appeared today about Josh Romney's glaring during the presidential election debate #2, entitled “Don't Turn Off the Lights: the Most Frightening Moment of the Obama-Romney Rumble.” The video clip and Wonkette's snark are not especially funny, but what really had me laughing were the readers' comments. Some of the comments were just absolutely hilarious, maybe the funniest stuff I've ever read in my life.

    Is he the Master?

    "Do you like Huey Lewis and The News?"

    That dude is definitely looking at me......
    I swear ima beat the shit out of him if he doesn't stop staring at me.  

    so scared. mormon will eat me. 

They brought to mind Sandburg's poem “The People Yes.” There is just so much talent, so much intelligence and power and ability out there that if we could succeed in enlisting it properly, there's is no problem we couldn't solve.

Ode to Joy "Flash Mob"

This brought my friends together in my mind this perfect autumn afternoon:

Everybody Knows

One of the things about studying hypnosis is that you come to realize that people pick up everything. They don't miss a thing. It's all in there. You hypnotize a few subjects and you can be absolutely astonished at how much people know, how much they have in their heads, from even back into their childhood.
 

I remember being with my father once in his old age when he came out with one of his startling and memorable observations on life. Those were such golden moments. This time he said: “People pick up on everything, more even than animals.”

This is currently on my mind because of my recently having read a book on how “dumb” “Americans” are. There are a lot of these books around now. You are probably familiar with Jay Leno's “Jay Walking” segments where he goes out on the streets and interviews people who can't identify the name of the U.S. President or Vice President. They can't locate New York on an unlabelled map, never mind locate Canada. Stuff like that. People who voted for Bush the second time. People who watch TV an average of more than eight hours per day.

But you find when you get to know such people that they know far more and are way more intelligent than meets the eye of anyone who likes to feel superior to them. I think it's never fair to say that people are stupid, much less the whole United States.

The book I just read, Why America Failed, by Morris Berman, says things like this:

What possibly can be done to save a culture that thinks iPads represent 'progress,' while everything humanly valuable is going down the drain?

(Quoting de Tocqueville): '...the least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting of truth turns it fierce; one must praise everything, from the turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues...Hence the majority lives in a state of self-adoration....'

No. I think the same kind of arrogance is behind the “banality of evil” explanations of Eichmann et al. The traditional view of evil, that it was clever in the extreme, is surely true. People are sharp, clever, knowing – even more than animals.

The Jerry Falwell Biography

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I finished reading last night the new, “long-awaited” biography of Jerry Falwell, Michael Sean Winters' God's Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right.

Falwell was an important figure in recent U.S. History, particularly with his TV preaching and appearances, his “Moral Majority” organization, his Liberty University and his role in electing U.S. Presidents. Winters' book seems to me to be comprehensive, truthful, objective, balanced – a good book, although perhaps a little dry at times to my own taste. It's an important portrait of an important person in U.S. History.

I remember when Falwell's “Old-Time Gospel Hour” from Thomas Road Baptist Church first appeared on TV. He said some good stuff, no doubt about it. But then something crept into it that increasingly alienated me.

One of my first doubts about Falwell arose from seeing him in a debate at Oxford in the UK, when a young British twit spoke disparagingly of Falwell's “redneck followers.” Falwell, who was a skillful debater, as are his Liberty University debate teams, just destroyed the British twit. He said, for example that he and his followers had given these large amounts of food to starving people in central Europe – Falwell and his followers did a lot of “good works.” And then he says: “And what have you done?”

Yes, yes, Falwell “won” the debate with the British twit, but did he lose the central message of Christ and thereby undercut what was good in himself? Satan tempts Christ during His forty days in the desert with talk about turning stones to bread, which Christ rejects. I know it's a complicated issue, and one that is quite at the center of US historical and cultural life.

But I myself feel Christ more in the following words to Pontius Pilate than I do in winning a debate or eating or surviving:

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

And then there was that time when I heard Falwell say, perhaps on Fox News where he frequently appeared, that if it helped George W. Bush win the election, he, Falwell, would say that he was against Bush. It was clever, personable, self-effacing in that it acknowledged that many people disliked him, and effective – but it was also a minister of Christ promoting deception for political purposes.

Winters writes of this problem, moderately, in several places in the book and notes the paradoxical effects, such as an increase in the US of people rejecting organized “Christianity” and even in political degeneration. Winters quotes impeccable conservative Barry Goldwater as saying that “Every good American ought to kick Jerry Falwell in the ass” and that he was “sick and tired of political preachers...telling me...that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, or C.”

The Grimms' Snow White

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I bought a copy of the Grosset & Dunlap Grimms' Fairy Tales last week. It's definitely my favorite book in all the world. I've owned copies of it before but have given them away to various people who I thought would love it as much as I do.

So last night, as the winter is coming on and the days are getting shorter and the nights colder, I opened up this treasury and read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs before going to bed. It was all new to me once again despite my having read it so many times over the course of my life.

Thomas Kinkade, Snow White Discovers the Cottage

This time I was more aware than ever that she represents the pure heart, the pure-in-heart, perhaps from having written about it recently, as well as more experience since I last read this story.

The seven small protectors, who work in a gold mine, try to protect her from her stepmother, the widower King's second, vain, wife. This woman's mirror has been telling her that she is the most beautiful woman in the world until one day it tells her that, no, Snow White is actually more beautiful, “a thousand times more fair.” Oh, geez. Now's there's hell to pay. The old baggage tells the huntsman to take Snow White into the woods and kill her. That doesn't work out. So she tries three deceptive ploys in the disguise of an old woman offering good things – tightened laces, a poison comb, and the poisoned half of an apple. Lots of other exciting stuff happens and at the end the wicked stepmother goes to the wedding feast and “was beside herself with disappointment and anger” that Snow White was a thousand times more fair, and then gets served her just deserts: “For they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead.”

The Grimms don't fool around. They tell it.

True Trucking Story: Meat Animals

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There was this “feedlot” cattle-raising business just west of Amarillo, Texas, that turned me off from eating meat. You could smell the place from about three miles away. Thousands of cattle standing in the muck in these pens, muck on their legs and sides, not blade of grass or dry ground. I imagine there were antibiotics and other chemicals and unknown animal byproducts in the “feed.”

I used to see these feedlot places a lot when I trucked around Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and Texas. They were so thoroughly revolting to me that I don't buy meat anymore.

There were a couple other things that put me off meat that may seem small, but had a strong effect. There were nights when I slept in the truck out there under the stars, at truck stops, and there would be cattle trucks parked during the night right near my truck. I could hear the cattle clomping around all night, bleating, and there was that stench, that stink. I remember one morning I got out of my truck and there was this steer looking at me through a hole in the side of the cattle trailer next to me. There was a big round hole in the side of the cattle trailer and there framed in the middle of this hole was a big, black, terrified eye, looking right at me.

Oh, and the pigs. I remember one morning at a truck stop when some drivers were transferring a load of pigs from one truck to another truck. Man, those pigs were shrieking terror itself.

I've never even been through a slaughter house or read Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle, but I have seen film clips of some of the stuff that happens in the meat-packing industry. They are easily available on YouTube.

I used to love a hot dog every now and then, with a good mustard and relish, or a thick, juicy steak with maybe some onion, sauce or something, but no more. Seeing what little I saw out there trucking around the feedlots has just taken the delight out of it.

Finally, one of my students, a mature, level-headed, perceptive woman told me that her husband is a professional chef and he has seen such things in restaurant kitchens that he refuses to eat at restaurants anymore.

So last night I saw this video from Jenny Brown's Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in Woodstock, NY, where she saves mistreated animals, and I feel more appreciation for what she represents and is doing. This video is of some ducks she rescued from a “hoarder” who kept them in awful conditions. These ducks had never been in water and it just is thrilling to see them get into it for the first time.

Dealing with It

I mentioned in yesterday's posting the difficulties I had, among other things, of finding professional truck mechanics who knew what they were doing. And my dreams during the night told me that I was being bitter about it, which is an immature, inadequate response.

It isn't that the complaint is not true about the widespread incompetence of the professionals, the experts, the people whom we have believed to know what they are doing. I speak often with mechanics even today and almost all of them say that they themselves would never let another mechanic work on their own vehicles. No, the problem is real.

I was thinking this morning of some incidents of professionals' incompetence that cost me thousands of dollars and countless hours of wasted time. There is such a long list!

One example: I had the Western Star serviced in Wisconsin and the mechanics installed the air filters upside down, which cause the ducting system to collapse and hundreds of hours worth of dirty air to be drawn into the engine, and about a week of expensive downtime, as well as the aggravation.

Another example: The fan belt on the Mack wore out very quickly, and broke often. A good mechanic – they do exist – ultimately found the problem to be that the alternator bearings were seizing, making it extremely difficult to turn and thus wearing out the belts. This particular problem cost me untold hours of downtime, a roadside breakdown in Oklahoma, countless hours of sitting in dingy waiting rooms, car rentals to get me home, hotel overnights, enormous outlays of cash for incompetent mechanics who failed to find the problem.

I've written about the incompetence of the medical profession in a previous post about Lyme Disease. A recent book by Joe and Teresa Graedon, “Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them,” says that there are at least 500,000 US deaths per year caused by medical doctors themselves, “iatrogenic errors.” Those are just the fatal errors, not including the errors from which patients are lucky enough to survive. The cost of all this, especially to people who are most vulnerable, is just incalculable. I myself believe that my chances are greater that I will be harmed by going to a doctor than are my chances of being helped.

Then there are the bankers and financial speculators, who, on top of all the other damage they do, support the soul-destroying meme that somehow the amount of money you have indicates your “worth.” And so many more.

So what's to be done? Being bitter about it obviously is destructive, and particularly self-destructive.

My own thought is that the first step has to be awareness of the problem and not to try to pretend that it doesn't exist, not to hide from it, and not just to “go along with it.” Perhaps the next step is to speak out about it, as possible, without being bitter. I also think that it is possible to achieve a sufficiently deep and wide perspective to be able to see humor in the situation.

The Mack and Western Star

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These two trucks were a great adventure. They allowed me, among other things, to visit the highways and byways, the cities and the remote rural places, all over the USA and Canada.

The first one was that single stack Mack with no window in the back. Just an astonishing truck. I had more fun with that. Funniest of all, almost everyone told me when I bought it, for $5,000 on a credit card, that it was going to fail - not only the truck would fail, but the whole venture of getting my own DOT authority, the expensive insurances, the fuel tax registrations and accounting, the customers, etc., would fail. I had all these people telling me that I was going to fail, people who had worked their whole lives in trucking, whereas I had been a driver for only a couple years.

I went everywhere with that old Mack. I just loved it. It had certain problems that required me to learn a lot about it as well as about the widespread ignorance and incompetence of the professionals, the experts, the people whom we suppose to know what they are talking about because they have been in the business their whole lives and make their living supposedly knowing about their field.

I traded the Mack in at about half way through the seven year adventure and bought the second truck you see here, a big, long-wheelbase, Western Star, a “premium truck.” The Western Star advertisements call it a “Serious Truck.” That thing had all the features, all the comforts, all the bells and whistles, whereas the Mack was just a plain old basic functional machine that did the job, pulled the load down the road.

I often look back on those years when I had my own trucks and wonder which of the two trucks I liked best. I learned a lot with both of them, made money with both of them, liked them both. But I think that, knowing what I know now, if I had it to do over again I would say that having that plain basic Mack fit better with who I am and what I see as important in life.

Observations on Ohio

I have met some of the most open-hearted, mature, decent people I've ever met in my seventy years since I moved here to Ohio eighteen months ago: my neighbors, a few friends whom I see regularly, and some souls I've met simply for a fleeting moment. I feel awe just in thinking of them.

On the other hand, my first impressions were primarily from the people with whom I was necessarily involved at first: real estate agents, banking officers, painters, plumbers, inspectors, utility company phone answerers, police, paint store and home center store personnel, pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves. They seemed to me then as they still do, almost without exception, to be corrupt to the core and incredibly incompetent.

A plumber who did some work for me said these exact words: “I can see right away that you are one of the good guys, but this isn't New Hampshire.” He obviously knew nothing about New Hampshire.

An exemplary problem I had to solve was to repair a water leak at the valve where the water pipe to my house joins the street main. The water department told me that the leak was on my side and that I had the responsibility to fix it. The fix cost me $2,600 and took three months, but in the process we discovered that the leak was on the city's side and so was actually the city's responsibility. The city inspector came by and said, yes, but “If you try to fight this you will lose.”

I happened last night to be reading in Jung's Children's Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1940, which came out in 2008, and I was struck by a passage in which he asserts his explanation of “America,” meaning the U.S.A:

In America, a fusion of the lower part with the virginal earth – where primitive man lives – takes place. As a consequence, consciousness stays above, removed from the primitive functions: ideals on the one hand, primitiveness on the other. This explains much of what is absurd in America. The ground of the basement has sunk a few meters. There is no access: the door to the basement is walled up, the stairs leading down are missing, so the American is living in a world of reasonableness and idealism. It was an American who invented the League of Nations! If an American wants to go into his lower regions, he will have to make a leap into the dark. That is why often those “perverse” stories can happen...A person with warmth and blood is below, unconscious; above everything happens “correctly,” respectably. The person above does not see the person below.

That seems to capture a lot of what I see here and to fit in with what Hawthorne - “that blue-eyed Nathaniel,” D. H. Lawrence called him - says in The Scarlet Letter about that absurdity.

I often ask people when I visit a new place what the book is, especially a novel, that best describes the people who live there. The one suggestion I have received here was JamesThurber. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio seems to be highly regarded in literary circles but seems a bit damaged by the Freudianism of the times it was written. There is a poet named Paul Lawrence Dunbar, who lived  here in Dayton, who was very perceptive and articulate. Erma Bombeck, who lived just down the street from where I live, is funny, humorous, but she does capture something I see and feel here.

A word about “America” and “New Hampshire” before I go. It's very common in Europe to refer to the United States of America as “America,” as Jung did above, and I sometimes still hear that expression in the U.S. However, I became aware many years ago that people in Central and South America resent this usage, considering themselves to be “Americans,” too. The meaning that now comes to many minds by the phrase “the Americans” is “the indigenous peoples who have lived here since before Columbus.”

And New Hampshire, dear old New Hampshire. No one I've met here has ever visited it and I find they often confuse it with New Jersey.