The Henri
Ellenberger book, “The
Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry,”
has been very useful to me in my attempt as an adult to
understand the oldest, deepest, largest, strongest part of our minds.
I can not remember where I heard about the book but I know it wasn't
until my seventy-fifth year on this planet.
Ellenberger's
history of hypnosis is deeper and more comprehensive than anything
else I've read, relating it's central place and context in the search
for understanding the subconscious. I mention hypnosis particularly
because my own study and practice of it created the path through
dreams and fairy tales that enabled me to slay dragons and discover
their hoarded gold in their caves and bring the inhabitants of the
castle and town back to life, and the leaves to come back out on the trees.
Here (p. 207) he
quotes Carl Gustave Carus (1789-1869):
The key to the knowledge of the nature of the soul's conscious
life lies in the realm of the unconscious. This explains the
difficulty, if not the impossibility, of getting a real comprehension
of the soul's secret. If it were an absolute impossibility to find
the unconscious in the conscious, then Man should despair of ever
getting knowledge of his soul, that is a knowledge of himself. But if
this impossibility is only apparent, then the first task of a science
of the soul is to state how the spirit of Man is able to descend into
those depths.
One of our most
important struggles in life is surely to “know thyself,” to
achieve a realistic, universalistic selfhood that enables us to
coordinate our actions with others and to construct courses of action
that work for everyone. And yet, I invariably reflect upon reading
something like Ellenberger's history of how rare it is that we even
hear once about such a book. All those years of school, university,
graduate school, continuing education, self-education but finding the
really good stuff like this is pretty much a matter of sheer luck. I
suppose, yes, that a whole lot of intense labor, searching,
criticism, preparation, failure and experience is absolutely
necessary to get anything out of Ellenberger as well as his
protagonists like Charcot, Janet, Freud, Jung and the others. It's
probably a miracle that as many of us do get the minuscule bit we do
get, given that most of us have all we can do just to survive, never
mind to raise children, to work, and to get some sleep.
It feels like an
infinite luxury to have the circumstances to be able to work on a
book like this. But it also feels like a complete sacrifice of one's
life! It's like that corn of wheat that must fall into the ground and
die.
No comments:
Post a Comment