Carl
Jung was an early voice in the modern investigation of consciousness and an
important one. I read him first in 1967
and his voice led me to the stream of nineteenth century musings on the Moon
Goddess traditions and esoteric thought all of which powerfully informed
twentieth century fantasy literature.
Traditions
change and are also simply set aside and forgotten and when I encountered them,
they were already a half century forgotten.
Today we rely on tenth hand copy too often.
Regardless
he powerfully influenced the aesthetic of his times and must himself be read to
understand the writings of his times. In
Freud you found the empirical and in Jung you found cogent theory.
“The Red Book” by Carl Jung: A Primer For Healing Madness In A Mad World
October 8, 2013
Laura K. Kerr
Through his meticulous design of The
Red Book, Carl G. Jung interwove his experience of madness with the
collective suffering of his era. Such syntheses are rare — and just what the
current mental health field desperately needs. In what follows, I look at
how The
Red Book became Jung’s journey out of madness as well as the
foundation for his analytical psychology. Even today, over 50 years after his
death, Jung’s analytical psychology is a relevant, non-pathologizing method for
transcending madness, while also relating individual suffering to the larger
collective.
The Ways of Jung’s World
In the early twentieth century, when Jung was “flooded” with “an
enigmatic stream” that threatened to break him, the field of psychology was
just beginning to make a science of the study of madness. Practitioners still
acknowledged the wisdom of artists, novelists, and poets with regards to the
nature of the human psyche. The soul was still in need of cure, and hearts were
broken as much as brains. There were perhaps five diagnoses in use — neuroses,
hysteria, melancholy, dementia praecox, and mania. Mental illness was also a
more fluid concept, often existing on a continuum with sanity (Shamdasani,
2009). It was in this Zeitgeist that the Red Book challenged
distinctions between reason and insanity on which modern conceptions of mental
illness largely continue to rest.
In the winter of 1913, Jung began writing down the fantasies and
dreams that would later be the focus of The Red Book (Shamdasani, 2009). This
was a very difficult period in Jung’s life. World events, misalignment between
professional expectations and personal desires, failed relationships (including
with Sigmund
Freud), and old emotional wounds all conspired to make madness not
just something the distinguished psychiatrist would treat, but also something
he would have to address in himself. And isn’t that the nature of madness?
Inopportune, a perfect storm, a test of resilience, and sometimes a trial
beyond measure, but also an opportunity to transform oneself, if not the world?
To confront madness as a potentially transformative experience
takes courage, and Jung’s life was scarred by tragedy he often endured on his
own, perhaps making him more courageous than he ever wanted to be. Early on, he
survived loneliness, betrayal, and alienation. His mother was
institutionalized for depression when he was still a toddler. He was bullied
as a boy for his preternatural intelligence. He had a difficult relationship
with his father, a minister whose dogmatic religiosity contrasted with his
son’s imaginative spirituality. And an older man he deeply admired
sexually abused Jung as a teen (Kerr, 1994).
Despite these tragedies, Jung was able to perceive his mind as
both the source of suffering and its panacea. To help him cope, as a child Jung
developed two personalities, Personality No. 1 and Personality No. 2. In his
biography, Memory,
Dreams, and Reflections (1963/1989), Jung described the two
personalities this way:
Naturally I compensated my inner insecurity by an outward
show of security, or — to put it better — the defect compensated itself
without the intervention of my will. That is, I found myself being guilty and
at the same time wishing to be innocent. Somewhere deep in the background I
always knew that I was two persons. One was the son of my parents who went to
school and was less intelligent, attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean
than many other boys. The other was grown up — old, in fact — skeptical, mistrustful,
remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the
moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to
dreams, and to whatever “God” worked directly in him. (p. 44)
Personality No. 1, who grew out of the schoolboy, performed for
the world according to its rules, while Personality No. 2 became Jung’s private
self, preferred peace and solitude, and was enchanted by the spiritual and
mythical. Jung denied that these two personalities reflected a dissociated
split typically associated with mental illness. He wrote in Memories,
Dreams, and Reflections:
On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my
life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room
for anything that wanted to come from within. He is a typical figure, but he is
perceived only by the very few. Most people’s conscious understanding is not
sufficient to realize that he is also what they are. (p. 45)
For Jung, reviving Personality No. 2, and its fascination with
the mystical aspects of experience, marked the beginning of both madness and
transformation. Furthermore, Jung’s efforts to validate No. 2’s worldview
became his window into a larger cultural split that he addressed through
The Red Book and many scholarly writings.
I believe the fortitude required for writing The Red Book, which
grappled with overwhelming imagery and dreams, scholarship from many
disciplines, as well as being a formidable artistic endeavor, actually started
early in life, when Jung first strove to balance the pull of the two parts of
himself, each with different desires, drives, and needs. The child’s natural
sense of wonder and limited need for judgment seemed to have kept Jung open to
both parts, seeing their inherent worth as well as their limitations, and
accepting their contradictions. He brought this capacity for holding
contradiction to the fledgling science of psychology, and saw both the value
and the meaning within so-called ‘symptoms’ of mental illness while also
acknowledging the great suffering they often caused. Jung wrote, “If we feel
our way into the human secrets of the sick person, the madness also reveals its
system, and we recognize in the mental illness merely an exceptional reaction
to emotional problems which are not strange to us” (Quoted by Shamsasani, 2009,
p. 196).
For Jung, his “exceptional reactions” included two visions he
had in 1913 while traveling on a train both to and from a conference. In these
visions, Jung saw Europe being destroyed by a magnificent flood. Around that
time, he was also feeling emotionally flooded, and thought these visual
representations of disaster were psychological signs of the “debris of his
former relationships,” including his relationship with Freud and a patient he
had become romantically close to, Sabrina Spielrein. About these visions he
wrote, “I thought to myself, ‘If this means anything, it means I am hopelessly
off’” (Quoted by Shamdasani, 200, p. 198).
The outbreak of World War I confirmed
Jung’s visions were of an apocalyptic future. Similar visions and imagery were
also often found in the arts and literature leading up to the war. What perhaps
made Jung’s experience exceptional was his maintenance of dual vision —
awareness of the larger cultural currents as well as the personal stream of
experience — and his continual efforts to weave both into a synthesized
understanding of psyche and the times in which he lived. But it was a tenuous
balancing act.
Pulling Away From the Fold
Eventually, Jung would pull away from the outer world created
through Personality No. 1. He would leave Freud’s inner circle, along with the
Burghölzli hospital where he worked in Zürich and had a distinguished career.
He would buy a house in the suburb of Küsnacht and start a private practice
there, but he would also spend time studying mythology, folklore, and religion
— the preoccupations of Personality No. 2. Here he began to inhabit both
Personality No. 1 and Personality No. 2, listening to both unconscious and
conscious aspects of his psyche, exploring his inner imaginal world while also
staying socially engaged and achieving worldly success.
Jung was looking for balance as well as integration of these
different aspects of himself. He saw too much of either perspective leads to
madness. In The Red Book he gave a description of the “spirit of the
times” that seemed much like the world of Personality No. 1 — the modern world
of science and achievement — which Jung believed had its own madness, and that
he escaped through the “spirit of the depths.” He wrote in The Red Book:
If you do not know what divine madness is, suspend judgment and
wait for the fruits. But know that there is a divine madness, which is nothing
other than the overpowering of the spirit of this time through the spirit of
the depths. Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer
stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and
makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak
of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces
him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take
himself for the spirit of the times. (“Decent Into Hell in the Future,” Cap. V)
In his home in Küsnacht Jung actively immersed himself in the
fantasies and dreams he once suppressed. When caught in the spirit of the
times, he had perceived such thoughts as childish, describing them as
“incestuous intercourse” unworthy of attention, if not degrading of the
capacity for pure thought. Initially, the practice of exploring his fantasies
and dreams was deeply unsettling to his psychic balance. Jung described the
early time at Küsnacht this way:
It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own
making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs,
satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing
them. (Quoted by Shamdasani, 2009, p. 197)
Eventually, Jung began to make a method of his madness, and
started to search for the myth he was living. He wrote:
I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: ‘What is the myth
you are living? ‘I found no answer to the question, and had to admit that I was
not living a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of
theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing
distrust…. So in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know
‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks — for — so I told myself —
how could I when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal
factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of
the other person if I was unconscious of it. (Quoted by Shamdasani, 2009, p.
197)
The Birth of Jung’s Analytical Psychology
Two robust theoretical ideas came from his experiment of
‘listening’ to madness. First, Jung identified two distinct yet intertwined
ways of knowing, imaginal and thought, which he called “direct” and “indirect”
thinking. He wrote, “We have…two kinds of thinking: direct thinking, and
dreaming or fantasy-thinking…. The one produces innovations and adaptation,
copies reality, and tries to act upon it; the other turns away from reality,
sets free subjective tendencies, and, as regards adaptation, is unproductive”
(1956, pp. 17-18). While fantasy-thinking is unproductive, it is nevertheless a
central and necessary part of human experience: it is the psychic space where
we can retreat from the spirit of the times — an imaginal experience that is
potentially self-soothing, but also where we can confront unarticulated, often
terrifying ideas, images, fantasies, and memories and find creative ways to
make meaning of suffering and transcend it.
Second, Jung identified the compensatory, dialectic nature of
the psyche in which the unconscious and conscious are not only complementary,
but need one another and naturally strive toward integration and wholeness.
With Jung’s model of the psyche, madness occurs when the conscious and
unconscious become too separate, too distinct, such as when a person lived
either from the “spirit of the times” or the “spirit of the depths,” not
heeding and integrating the wisdom of both.
In a paper titled “The Importance of the Unconscious in
Psychopathology” (1914) Jung described how madness is a response to living too
one-sided, either too much from consciousness, or rational awareness and
directed thinking, or too much from the unconscious, or fantasy thinking
(Shamdasani, 2009, p. 201). Yet in the modern West, the greatest fear was of
fantasy thinking and the power of the unconscious to override reason. Attitudes
towards the unconscious have been much like medicine’s attitude towards the
appendix: a part of human anatomy that no longer serves a purpose yet
nevertheless could prove hazardous, if not deathly, when infected. For Jung,
however, listening to the unconscious, even madness, was imperative to
intimating the natural direction of growth.
Along with rejecting Western attitudes about the origins of
madness, Jung found himself developing ideas antithetical to Freud and his
followers, who looked reductively to childhood and repressed sexual desires as
the origin of psychopathology. With Freud’s psychoanalysis, unconscious
material was brought into conscious awareness for the purpose of analytical
reflection and resolution. Yet from his self-analysis, Jung identified the
value of living through fantasies — a process described as “active imagination”
— as a method for anticipating the psyche’s desired direction of growth.
According to Jung, the unconscious “only lives when we experience it in and
through ourselves.” From Jung’s perspective, the question to ask was, ‘how out
of this present psyche, a bridge can be built into its own future?’” (Quoted by
Shamdasani, 2009, p. 209).
Like Freud, Jung knew events in childhood were significant
contributors to later psychological problems, but rather than remembering
the story of what happened, Jung believed it was more important to recover
“the emotional tone of childhood,” the part comfortable with the symbolic
play of the imaginal material of the psyche (Quoted by Shamdasani, 2009, p.
198). For Jung, unconscious fantasies and dreams became a bridge to reconnect
him to lost parts of himself, particularly Personality No. 2, who for Jung
became central to the process of individuation and growth in the second half of
life.
A Cultural Connection
Jung believed constraints on his psychological integration and
individuation had much to do with the cultural fascination with Logos, or
reason, and the neglect of Eros, or love. In The Red Book he
wrote:
The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of
divine reason. So much unreason was in man that he needed reason to be saved.
If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and
underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it
poisons us all…. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to
educate all the world around us into reason. (Liber Secundus, First Day, Cap.
Viii)
Jung saw the loss of love, as the outcome of a world overrun by
reason. He associated Eros with the unconscious, which was personified
in The Red Book (Solomé). For Jung, Eros and the unconscious represented
feminine aspects of psyche.
In another book, Answer to Job, Jung connected Eros with
Sophia, Yahweh’s partner in the creation of Earth. Sophia was originally
recognized as the fountainhead of wisdom. Her name is part of the etymology of
the word philosophy. Philo-sophia translates to “the love of wisdom.”
In Answer to Job (1958/2011), Jung challenged the idea
of God as perfect and all good. He wanted to show the goal of perfection, which
is witnessed in Yahweh’s desire for perfect faith from Job, not only lacked
insight, but also was cruel. He stated:
The lack of Eros, or relationship to values, is painfully
apparent in the Book of Job…. Yahweh has no Eros, no relationship to man, but
only a purpose man must help him fulfill…. The faithfulness of his people
becomes more important to him the more he forgets Wisdom [Sophia]…. Against his
own convictions Yahweh agrees without any hesitation to inflict the worst
tortures on him [Job]. One misses Sophia’s “love of mankind” more than ever.
Even Job longs for the Wisdom which is nowhere to be found. (pp. 33-34)
According to Sonu Shamdasani, The Red
Book and Answer to Job emerged from the same realization: the
madness of the world has to do with the eradication of Eros, love, and the
soul. The truth is a simple one — sanity is found in joining our hearts and
minds — and yet complex, because even the simplest of human experiences can
become contorted by social worlds that both sustain and hamper us with their
limits and expectations. This is a maxim Jung discovered in his journey into
madness, and one he beautifully gave to the world through The Red Book.
About the Author
Laura K. Kerr is a mental health scholar,
blogger and trauma-focused psychotherapist. My focus is on healing, with
special attention to trauma, modernity, and mental health systems of care.
Please visit her website at: www.laurakkerr.com, where this
article was originally
featured.
references:
Jung, CG. 1956/1990. Symbols
of Transformation. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. 1958/2011. Answer
to Job. Translated by R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen
Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jung, Carl. 1963/1989. Memories,
Dreams, Reflections. Translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston.
Edited by Aniela Jaffé. New York: Vintage Books.
Jung, Carl G. 2009. The
Red Book. Translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
Kerr, John. 1994. A Most Dangerous Method: The
Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. New York: Vintage Books.
Shamdasani, Sonu. 2009. “Introduction.” In CG
Jung’s The Red Book. Translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu
Shamdasani. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton
& Co.
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