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: