02/11/2025
Carl Jung with Laura Wittman
A conversation about Carl Jung, the Red Book, and Jung’s descent into the unconscious with Laura Wittman, Associate Professor of French and Italian at Stanford University. Songs in this episode: “Into the Night” by Julee Cruise, and “End of the Night” by The Doors.
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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In one of the very first episodes of entitled opinions, back in 2005, I talked about the
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difference between knowledge and self-knowledge, between an objective understanding of nature
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and a subjective understanding of the human psyche.
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It dismates me as much today as it did back then that governments and corporations
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invest billions upon billions of dollars in scientific research every year,
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yet commit only a tiny and diminishing fraction of that to advance the cause of self-knowledge.
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In today's show, we're going to discuss the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.
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So let's hear what he had to say on this topic back in the 40s and 50s.
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I quote Jung, "Everything possible had been done for the outside world.
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Science has been refined to an almost unimaginable extent.
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Technical achievement has reached an almost uncanny degree of perfection."
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But what of man who is expected to administer all these blessings in a reasonable way?
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No one has stopped to consider that neither morally nor psychologically is he in any way
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adapted to such changes.
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Man has come to be man's worst enemy.
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It is a clash between man and God in which man's luciferian genius
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has produced the power to destroy more effectively than any ancient God could.
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We must begin to learn more about man until every Jekyll can see his hide.
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Another quote, "Nowadays the world hangs by a thin thread and that thin thread is the psyche of man.
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We are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. But we know nothing about the psyche.
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Nothing. Man himself is the greatest threat to man.
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For the simple reason that there is no adequate protection against psychic epidemics,
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which are infinitely more devastating than the worst natural catastrophes."
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What has become ever more clear since Jung wrote that is that our failure to know ourselves
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impacts our knowledge of as well as our relation to the natural world.
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The more we unlock its secrets, the more we detach ourselves from nature,
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and the more we detach ourselves from nature, the more ominous becomes the threat of human self-destruction.
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Our runaway scientific and technological progress has eradicated what Jung called our bush soul.
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That is a soul in us that once connected us to the creaturely world
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and that once spoke to stones, springs, plants, and animals alike.
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According Jung again, our immediate communication with nature is gone forever
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and the emotional energy it generated has sunk into the unconscious.
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This enormous loss is compensated by the symbols of our dreams.
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Jung believed that only by delving into the depths of our unconscious and interpreting the symbols
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that have sedimented there can become to know and hence come to terms with the psychic forces
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that haunt us, that agitate deep within us, and that when excessively repressed can provoke
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the world destroying psychic epidemics behind the two world wars, the holocaust, the adamant hydrogen
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bombs, and any number of collective catastrophes to come.
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On today's show, my colleague Laura Whitman is going to help us think about how and why Carl Jung
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felt that it was necessary to undertake a catabassus that is to say a descent into the
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underworld of the unconscious in order to confront the buried, darker, and even pre-historical
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psychic forces that have accumulated there over long durations.
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What is the unconscious? What are its primary symbols and archetypes?
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Are dreams the main portals into the self's underworld?
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These are questions I will be putting to Laura Whitman, who is a professor of literature in the
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Department of French and Italian here at Stanford. Laura is a widely published author whose recent
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work has led her into the fields of psychology, mysticism, and the medical humanities.
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She has not only been a frequent guest on this show, she is the one who joined me in the very first
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episode of entitled opinions back in September 2005. It's a pleasure to welcome her back.
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Laura, thanks for joining us again here in the catacombs of KZSU.
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Well, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here again.
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I mentioned that Jung really believed in the need for a catabassus or descent.
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However, that kind of descent into the unconscious can only be undertaken by the single individual.
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I think he believed with the guidance perhaps of the psychotherapist.
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I think it's crucial to keep in mind that although Jung is famous for his idea of the collective
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unconscious, he was firmly committed to the centrality of the individual in psychotherapy.
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There is no such thing as collective therapy for him. Again, if I get him right,
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Jung also felt that he could not help his patients get in touch with their own unconscious selves unless
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he himself first went to the deepest levels of his own psyche, which he in fact did between the years
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1914 and 1930. He really did go all the way down, recording the extended journey and what came to be
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known as his the Red Book. The Red Book only got published half a century after his death in 2009.
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You and I both think that it occupies a central place in Jung's development. So why don't we
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start by putting it in some sort of context? What was going on in Jung's life and career
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before 1914 that led him to resolve upon this voluntary descent into what some people view as a
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form of madness in fact? Yeah, that's a great question and I think it's important to realize
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Jung had been working as a psychotherapist for quite some time and he was working with
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mainly schizophrenic patients and he had come to collaborate with a number of people, Jeane and of course
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most famously Freud, but in this moment around 1912 or 13, he really became convinced that his
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patients ran as it were, contained this powerful symbolic message and that there was a whole
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world that was being revealed in what they were saying and that's really what led him to start
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thinking about the collective unconscious and how he himself might experience it more directly and I
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want to say I think very important is to go back and realize that this was a very transgressive
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idea to try to derive meaning from what these patients were saying and at the time what we know
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as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy was still very much in the air and it was very dangerous for
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Jung to undertake this exploration of what indeed could be considered psychotic material so yeah.
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So in other words the assumption that it was all nonsensical gibberish and not in any way
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revelatory of some deeper pattern underneath or even the assumption you know I think Freud was
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working his way or discussing the whole idea of certain very clear patterns that might be revealed
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patterns of repression and repressed material returning and I think Jung felt that this was both
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two systematic that everyone would have the same patterns be revealed and to authoritative for
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materials that for Jung came from much deeper than where Freud was looking so he was thinking about
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prehistoric genetic anthropological elements and so he looked at world religions to
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find connections to what his patients were saying so much broader sort of reservoir.
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Yeah well we can discuss later I don't want to get into the polemics of my kind of views on whether
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this assumption of his that there was something that lent itself to a hermeneusus in this
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psychotic discourse of his patients actually bore fruit in terms of legibility of neurosis.
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Now as I understand it around this time his relationship to Freud he started getting slowly
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disenchanted I don't know if it was a sudden thing or a gradual thing but Freud was also developing
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his theory of the unconscious very reductive in some ways to the nuclear family you know mommy and
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daddy sexual edible complexes and so forth and I I gather that Jung felt that that was limiting
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the very concept of the unconscious and was putting it a little bit of a straight jacket, right?
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Absolutely and I think he felt that the it hit we was almost becoming a requirement to fit
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dream material for instance into this kind of scenario the sort of early family scenario and
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Jung was much more curious about what was going on both with his patients and very quickly in his own
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self right this idea that your first approach to the unconscious should really be one of extreme
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curiosity as well as caution but an awareness that you truly don't know right that we we have
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as you said in your intro gotten in a sense so far away from the instinctive and the irrational
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that we have very few tools to approach it except perhaps for this kind of radical openness
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you know and then we should talk about how he started to invent techniques for getting more in touch
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yes we should talk about that let's go to you know 1912-1914 does he break with Freud before he
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decides that he must confront the unconscious I think he has a chapter in memories dreams reflections
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and it is about what he did for for those years in which he was taking all these notes for
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the red book yeah it's um I would say that that's a hard question to answer because it's all
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happening at the same time and you know traditionally people talk about the book symbols and
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transformations of the libido that came out in 1913 as this place where he breaks with Freud by
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bringing up the importance of religious imagination but in fact a lot of that was added in a later
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addition and so it's I think it's gradual and I think it involves Jung not planning to break with
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Freud but truly feeling that Freudian theory was not enough and he describes feelings suspended
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which I think is this feeling of there's all of this unconscious material he's confronted with
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and he doesn't know what to do with it right and so it's it's sort of and Freud isn't
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is no longer providing me with the answer of what to do and now I have to figure it out on my own
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so it's a moment of personal crisis for himself and I think that's what leads to what we know as
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the red book yeah and speaking of religion you mentioned it you know Freud had a very
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psychoanalytic interpretation of religion in the future of an illusion it was just kind of
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reducing it to kind of glorified father figure in God and Jung I think believed that religions
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contained a lot of clues to what you call the unknown or perhaps even unknowable contents of the
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unconscious absolutely and he ended up after he had his own experiences sort of searching world
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religions and mystical traditions in order to find parallels with his own discoveries so some
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of his key encounters that he experienced directly in these visionary states he had he then found
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confirmation or corroboration parallelisms in world religions and I think the most basic
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one would be that in so many traditions we have a descent into the darkness or into the night
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a shamanic journey you could call it but it's very common right that there's this descent
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often through death that you have to pass through so it is a for him it was in a recurrent
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view of how you go into the darkness of the unconscious and you truly risk your sanity your rational
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self your consciousness and hopefully you come out on the other side and that other side I'm
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curious whether the other side was a restoration of what we ordinarily understand a sanity
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namely that we overcome what could be the the more deleterious potential of the contents of the
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deep unconscious and the irrationality and that is coming out on the other side restoration of
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rationality in any way or is it some sort of truce between the rational and the irrational
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forces of the self I think of it more as a dance than a truce but I don't think it was a
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re-establishment of what you had before I think the goal was to find a way to work with the fact that
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you are also a very irrational being and that many of your decisions desires life choices ways
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to resolve crises have these very deep what we would consider irrational impulses behind them and if
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you can learn to work with that instead of against it then I think he felt that you you have a
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better you know yourself better to go back to the sense of self knowledge but this self knowledge
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can also help you in your dealings with others. So in the red book we have really extraordinary
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document I as soon as it came out in 2019 I bought you know the big huge totality because it was
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actually being sold at an extreme discount on Amazon for some reason you could get it there for
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$80 so I still have this big thing that's heavy enough that I can't even bring it on and off campus
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and it's not just textual it's also a lot of artwork full of symbols and recounting of dreams
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and I take it that he was actually putting into this ledger his visions his dreams and it's hard
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for me to believe that anyone dreams in these kind of traditional or traditional say archaic religious
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symbols and I mean I've never dreamt about Dionysus or you know some sort of um you'll hire
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Joe yes but he seemed to be a very highly literate erudite dreamer let's put it that way yes no I mean
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I think first I want to back up just a little bit and say that before he started having these
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visions that we know as the red book which is this beautiful object his first reaction to being in
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crisis was to start building something like rock and sandcastles so sort of a thing that he had
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done as a child and I think it's important because the the building is very physical and it's very
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close to it's finding a reconnection with the earth that you brought up at the beginning
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and he described the red book itself as a cathedral so we're progressing in building but it's
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still sort of the same image and so the book itself records this long period of time when he would
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you know see patients and have regular family life during the day and then descend into this
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visionary state at night and he would record the visionary state and then later in transcribing it
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added all of these it looks like an illuminated manuscript for people who haven't seen it's very
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beautiful it has all of these illustrations but I think a fundamental thing here is that
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the visionary state that he entered it wasn't dreaming in the sense that dreaming is relatively
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involuntary but it was active imagination so he would seek it out these states and he talks at
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various points not as much as I think therapists wishes he did but he does talk about how to achieve
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this state and how various religious traditions have techniques for getting there so in particular
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there's the visual technique of if you see something that comes sort of unbidden into your mind
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instead of sort of ignoring it or pushing it away you try to examine it and focus on it
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in this very open-minded kind of way you know what more do you have to tell me and gradually
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enter the world of that image right and then the image can expand and talk to you now that said
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many therapists have pointed out that there are actually very few people who can who are good at
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getting into this particular state yeah it's a kind of lucid dreaming state now a little bit yes
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and Jung talks about in a I think an essay that deserves to be read more the transcendent function
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so an old essay written I believe as early as 1916 but then reworked in the 50s he talks about how
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there are other techniques and he includes things like automatic writing but also making sculptures
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or even dancing or physical movement and all these things have since then become tools for various
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types of psychotherapy work with the unconscious so he was clearly a very visual you know richly
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visual person and then also he was extraordinarily iridite on I think when he read the texts of
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religious traditions he was clearly pulled into them in an extraordinary way but what about
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patients of his who did not have his erudition and were relatively ignorant about these traditions
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symbolic religious and shamanic and so how would you help a patient who dreams in a completely
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different manner than the one that seems to promise an entry into the mysteries or the
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mysterious of the unconscious well I think that's where there is some system atization to Jung's
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thinking so let's just take an example that is more present day where often people go to psychotherapy
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when they have a crisis and they have a decision that is very cannot be made rationally right this is
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often how it's described so divorce isn't often the example but also things like having a child
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where you know you're going to become a different person how can you make a decision in a rational way
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and I think Jung in therapy tends to work with whatever medium can work for the patient so it might
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be images that appear in dreams it might be try to work on automatic writing which I think works
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better for some people than the visualization but the material doesn't have to be biblical you know
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it doesn't have to be salome that you encounter but I think Jung uses the categories that he derived
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both from his own experience and the tradition so categories like Anima, Shadow and in that sense he
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does use those archetype categories to connect to the material that comes from patients
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into those yeah and as I mentioned in the intro it's all based on the individual psyche
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how can we think the primacy of the individual in Jung's not only a theory of the psyche but also
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his social critique that he engages in quite a bit later in life especially in you know the late
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40s early 50s very critical and disdainful of mass society and of forms of government that
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treat individuals just as part of what today we would call big data and larger patterns and so
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forth so very focused on the centrality the individual and yet his most famous concept I think is
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out of the collective unconscious so does the individual psyche merely participate in the
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collective unconscious is why is it impossible to do a kind of collective therapy and try to get
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the society as a whole to understand its own pathologies at the institutional and political levels
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and so forth yeah I mean I think we would love the answer to that one but I think Jung's view is that
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the unconscious can be collective precisely because it is unconscious and what comes into consciousness
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is the realm of the individual right so we as individuals are that fulcrum where the unconscious material
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comes into contact with consciousness and I almost think of it as a contact point between
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consciousness and the unconscious material and each of us is a different contact point so we will
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have different a different experience of what that looks like so in Troy do you have the
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the ego is the individual and ego for you no I think the ego is part of the individual he talks about
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the self as being much broader much broader has to be much broader than an ego no right the ego is
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in a sense the the rational controlling self if you like I think he would just simply say the self
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that believes that all it is is the conscious mind right and but you are much more than your
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conscious mind and so yourself is broader and a lot of that self is created when unconscious materials
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connect with you and you in a sense have this decision point of what you do with those materials
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do you reject them or do you learn to work with them and I think the rejection it often comes from
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fear yes right and I just wanted to maybe read one of the passages where Jung talks about how this
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felt to him when when he first encountered it yeah so at the early in the red book he talks about
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meeting the spirit of the depths and this is how he describes it the spirit of the depths have
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subjugated all pride and arrogance to the power of judgment he took away my belief in science he robbed
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me of the joy of explaining and ordering things and he let devotion to the ideas of this time
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die out in me he forced me down to the last and simplest things the spirit of the depths
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took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable
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and paradoxical melting together sense and nonsense which produces the supreme meaning
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but the supreme meaning is the path the way and the bridge of what is to come so you can feel
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Jung truly not wanting to let go of his rational self and discovering that he needs to make this
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bridge between what we might call the ego and the broader self yeah so a few months back we did a
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show on Peter Kingsley and the dark places of wisdom and that was more about for many days but
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for many days is an archetype of someone who undertakes his journey into the night to meet forces
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that are much deeper than that of rationality or logos and Peter Kingsley has a book called the
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Catafel which is some people think is like his real masterpiece in which he claims that the red
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book of Carl Jung is like one of the most important books of the 20th century because it was a true
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descent into irrationality and into madness without any banisters if you want to use that metaphor
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and that he has this notion of the insanity of reason and that the only way to do a proper
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sort of therapy for the insanity of reason is to go deep into the irrationality of these elements
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deep down that is a rather hard sell for me and so far as I think yes on the one hand
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rationality does have this tendency to translate itself into completely irrational behaviors
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and decisions I mean I'm thinking the World War I as a kind of collective suicide of Europe that
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was on the one hand perfectly rational but on the other hand I think it's not by chance that in 1914
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he really begins this descent because that's the kind of madness pathological symptoms in political
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social reality that an unmastered relationship to the unconscious can bring about
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and that wasn't enough and when we got World War II we have all sorts of other things and we're
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| 00:26:49.520 |
living in the moment of where you know we have all sorts of forces from the id that are
|
| 00:26:56.160 |
uninhibitedly taking charge of what was what's supposed to be the controlling rational forces of
|
| 00:27:02.880 |
the let's say the institutional ego which keeps these forces kind of in containment so
|
| 00:27:08.080 |
how do you understand that relationship between the rational and the irrational again I'm going
|
| 00:27:14.000 |
back to the question I asked earlier you called it a dance yeah I said it's a true so yeah I think it's
|
| 00:27:19.520 |
crucial it is a threshold as you see yeah it's it's really fundamental and I think one part of the
|
| 00:27:25.760 |
answer is that for you own our situation back at the time of World War I and probably even more
|
| 00:27:34.000 |
today if you were around to see it is one where we have suppressed the irrational so much that
|
| 00:27:41.760 |
to get it back we have to take extreme measures right and otherwise its danger has become magnified so
|
| 00:27:48.960 |
you know this is you know maybe a bit of an aside but to some extent he felt that Christianity
|
| 00:27:54.480 |
was responsible for developing a religion that was so fixated on only the good and in a sense
|
| 00:28:03.840 |
eclipsing evil as a category and we can think about how by the 20th century even the existence
|
| 00:28:10.640 |
of hell even Christians don't believe in hell right this is the sort of thing that Jung would vastly
|
| 00:28:16.240 |
object to and sort of say we've pretended that evil is a non-existent force and this is how it
|
| 00:28:22.080 |
becomes empowered is precisely through this pretense so we've kind of backed ourselves into a
|
| 00:28:28.000 |
corner where the sort of dissent that we see in the red book is necessary now I don't quite agree
|
| 00:28:36.160 |
with Kingsley that it's a complete abandoning yourself to irrational forces because Jung himself talks
|
| 00:28:43.440 |
about how you know he had the diurnal life and the nocturnal life and he talked about how the
|
| 00:28:48.800 |
diurnal life of seeing patients and having a family was his anchor so that he could undertake this
|
| 00:28:55.280 |
journey and I think it's really important to remember that when we when we think about undergoing
|
| 00:29:01.920 |
such journeys ourselves right what will our anchor be and I think this then it speaks to this question
|
| 00:29:09.520 |
of how does this very solitary thing Jung is doing and and suggests that we should all do
|
| 00:29:16.480 |
how does it connect us to other people I think it it is where we are more honest about our own
|
| 00:29:24.720 |
nighttime journey and we undertake it with I dare call it something like sincerity truthfulness
|
| 00:29:32.000 |
we come out and are able to relate to others without projecting so much of our need for rationality
|
| 00:29:39.200 |
and goodness and control and all these other things on to other people so the two worlds balance
|
| 00:29:44.720 |
each other out so Laura about the archetypes which is another major kind of milestone in Jungian
|
| 00:29:52.960 |
psychology is there also the enjoinder to get in touch with the archetypes I mean do the archetypes
|
| 00:30:03.280 |
in hair in our unconscious or are they merely the sort of condensation of many different figures
|
| 00:30:12.560 |
in folklore legend mythology religion how do you understand Jung's concept of the archetype well I
|
| 00:30:21.440 |
think they are this conglomeration in some case so first thing I think we can say that for Jung
|
| 00:30:27.840 |
they could be potentially and we could always add more archetypes discover more so there's no
|
| 00:30:33.040 |
limit to what you can find but I think some of them say the anima that we can talk about a little bit
|
| 00:30:39.120 |
more the shadow the old white the wise old man the magician these are figures that indeed
|
| 00:30:45.760 |
conglomerate across many traditions and times and places and psychies and so they acquire a kind of
|
| 00:30:52.480 |
almost a kind of weight and visibility and usefulness in that they seem to be figures that we all
|
| 00:30:59.440 |
have to encounter at some point right so the anima is often connected with the vulnerable the
|
| 00:31:07.600 |
irrational the instinctive and the part of oneself that is in a sense shameful especially in a patriarchal
|
| 00:31:19.040 |
culture where it's important to be strong and associated with the feminine is right right
|
| 00:31:25.680 |
you know and I think the the magician is an interesting one I think for us to think about today
|
| 00:31:31.600 |
the magician is sort of a passage that you go through you think that you have mastered the
|
| 00:31:36.960 |
unconscious you have you've done your work and suddenly you find yourself feeling that you have
|
| 00:31:43.040 |
more power and that's always a dangerous moment in shamanic journeys or mystical experiences
|
| 00:31:49.120 |
when you think that you've you know now I now I've got it I'm under control so the magician is
|
| 00:31:54.080 |
self-deceived well the magician you have to go through that phase of being the magician
|
| 00:31:59.360 |
but yes to some extent the magician also has to realize that the unconscious still retains its
|
| 00:32:05.280 |
autonomy its power you you don't control it you you can be in conversation with it but you can't just wave
|
| 00:32:11.600 |
your hand and have it do what you want right what are some of the other major ones well I think the
|
| 00:32:17.360 |
concept of shadow is a big one I'm not sure we could it's a very interesting archetype in the
|
| 00:32:24.160 |
sense that the shadow is what our conscious mind is most loathe to recognize as part of ourselves
|
| 00:32:34.000 |
so it can be lots of things depending on what aspects of yourself you find most disturbing
|
| 00:32:41.440 |
so that's another one that's really important just union psychoanalysis involve a lot of
|
| 00:32:49.120 |
invocation of archetypes I mean I'm curious you know in Italy for example which I know Italian
|
| 00:32:57.040 |
Roman sighted a lot of people are into union psychoanalysis I have no idea what goes on
|
| 00:33:03.680 |
in those sessions but I have a feeling that they're not probing you know these archetypes
|
| 00:33:10.720 |
and connecting you know a particular patient with with his or her you know the archetypes in
|
| 00:33:16.960 |
the unkind I think it's more a lot of self introspection and a lot of sort of discourse so I'm just
|
| 00:33:23.040 |
curious what role it's supposed to play in therapy if any yeah I mean I think it's it's the role of
|
| 00:33:30.720 |
catalyst so you might read the red book and find it inspiring or disturbing or find some of the
|
| 00:33:38.400 |
figures intriguing and that could catalyze your own imagination but I think Jung was you know a firm
|
| 00:33:44.480 |
believer in not providing specific figures that you should hope to encounter in your own therapy right so
|
| 00:33:54.640 |
in a sense the idea is that all of us would develop our own personal mythology so you might encounter
|
| 00:34:01.680 |
some figures that recur in the mythologies of various traditions but I think he felt that it was
|
| 00:34:11.760 |
much more valuable if people could develop their own right so I think that's part of what goes on in
|
| 00:34:18.000 |
analysis so in Freudian psychoanalysis there's a kind of end point there's there's this kind of
|
| 00:34:24.720 |
promise that if you follows the right trajectory you will end up you know transferring a great
|
| 00:34:31.920 |
deal onto this and that you will finally cure whatever sort of neurosis comes from the
|
| 00:34:38.400 |
relation traumatic relations you had with your parents and early childhood or infancy what is the end
|
| 00:34:44.080 |
point for you I mean he believed in an integrated psyche I think right and that integrated psyche also
|
| 00:34:50.480 |
had I suppose maintain some kind of opposition you know the coincidence of opposites and so forth
|
| 00:35:01.040 |
yeah yeah I think that the end point was the point where you yourself would be able to undertake
|
| 00:35:08.000 |
on a regular basis this reconnection with the unconscious you could do it yourself
|
| 00:35:13.200 |
I think that was really the end point and we can think about Jung himself after he stopped writing
|
| 00:35:18.720 |
in the red book or in his black books and then the red book he a few years later started building
|
| 00:35:24.880 |
what became his home the tower that was a stone initially one stone tower that he built you know with
|
| 00:35:32.000 |
his own hands which is quite an undertaking and there were four different buildings and then a fifth
|
| 00:35:38.160 |
one that was a second floor and he described this work as another version of creating the red book
|
| 00:35:45.280 |
right a trace of his own going into the depths and I think that really speaks to what you were
|
| 00:35:50.720 |
saying at the beginning about coming into this very visceral contact with the earth yes you know he
|
| 00:35:58.320 |
he dug stones out of the ground and out of the lake nearby and this was very significant for
|
| 00:36:05.840 |
his construction and for the way he wanted to live his day to day life yeah you see that aspect of
|
| 00:36:11.440 |
his thought appeals to me a lot more because I can imagine the problem I have with the unconscious
|
| 00:36:18.480 |
is that it's something within a human psyche and that it's not the earth it's not in the actual
|
| 00:36:25.680 |
humus where the dead have been buried where our relation to animals and natural elements it can be
|
| 00:36:34.560 |
fire water all these things which never become archetypes are in because his archetypes are I think
|
| 00:36:40.560 |
mostly human personifications but this idea that you could actually rediscover your kinship with the
|
| 00:36:51.680 |
the creatures of the natural world animate and inanimate that promises a kind of larger
|
| 00:37:01.840 |
integration of the human and the natural that would maybe indicate a deeper understanding of what
|
| 00:37:11.920 |
sanity actually consists in. Yeah I agree I mean I think your direction is a very Jungian one in
|
| 00:37:21.360 |
the sense that he saw the connection we could make by accepting our unconscious selves as a deeper and
|
| 00:37:30.080 |
deeper connection to the earth to who we are in an embedded in a world right and I think that he talks
|
| 00:37:39.680 |
about the Anima that we described as you know that if you like your vulnerable self the young woman
|
| 00:37:46.800 |
the image that we encounter often in Jungian text but he connects it to the Anima Mundi which is I
|
| 00:37:52.160 |
know something you've thought about a lot and maybe I can read a quote from the very end of his
|
| 00:37:58.400 |
memories dreams and reflections where I think it comes across the sort of expansiveness
|
| 00:38:03.120 |
and ultimately optimism about how you know what we will find if we delve into the unconscious
|
| 00:38:10.320 |
so this is what he writes whatever the learned interpretation may be of the sentence God is love
|
| 00:38:16.640 |
the words affirm the complexio positorum of the Godhead so the opposition the
|
| 00:38:22.400 |
Bunion of opposites of the Godhead in my medical experience as well as in my own life I have again and
|
| 00:38:28.320 |
again been faced with the mystery of love and have never been able to explain what it is
|
| 00:38:33.040 |
here is the greatest and the smallest the remotest and the nearest the highest and the lowest
|
| 00:38:39.680 |
and we cannot discuss one side of it without also discussing the other for we are in the deepest
|
| 00:38:45.200 |
sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic love being a part man cannot grasp the whole
|
| 00:38:51.680 |
he is at its mercy man can try to name love showering upon it all the names at his command and he
|
| 00:38:58.800 |
still will involve himself in endless self-deceptions if he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay
|
| 00:39:05.200 |
down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown in yotum pet in yotus that is by the name
|
| 00:39:12.240 |
of God that is a confession of his subjection his imperfection and his dependence but at the same
|
| 00:39:18.400 |
time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error okay he mentions their God sometimes
|
| 00:39:25.920 |
it sounds like you was trying to resurrect a traditional notion of God at other times he seems to
|
| 00:39:35.600 |
suggest that certainly the Judeo Christian notion of a God is not doing justice to all the
|
| 00:39:40.400 |
different divinities which are kind of multiplied and diversified in and to kind of pantheon of
|
| 00:39:47.440 |
you know different figures so was he a believer in the traditional religious sense I think he was
|
| 00:39:55.920 |
a believer in not of in any one specific religion but in the pursuit of as he puts it in the
|
| 00:40:05.200 |
red book right the the birth of the new god and I think he considered the task of modern humanity
|
| 00:40:14.000 |
to be to overcome the way institutionalized religions tend to objectify the divine reify it turn
|
| 00:40:24.240 |
it into an object and he I think wanted the sort of religion that is about you know he uses the
|
| 00:40:31.920 |
word the way I think I quoted it earlier right so it's about this constant re bridging of the gap
|
| 00:40:38.240 |
with the Animamundi with the world with others with one's own unconscious with the collective unconscious
|
| 00:40:44.880 |
so it's a process rather than an object and so the process is going to be different for each person
|
| 00:40:52.080 |
I'm also very curious about his importance for the counterculture of the 60s and the and he
|
| 00:41:01.200 |
really is the guru of the psychedelic age and people you know belonging to those traditions
|
| 00:41:10.800 |
found in him their major spokesperson no what was this connect is it one that is substantial enough
|
| 00:41:21.040 |
to say that it was like Herbert Marchecoose era of uncivilization he's had a Jungian
|
| 00:41:26.560 |
Texan spirit and his relation to the psychedelic I mean there's nothing more psychedelic to me than
|
| 00:41:31.600 |
the red book when you look at that and it's completely psychedelic yeah agreed agreed and I think
|
| 00:41:36.240 |
even though the red book of course wasn't out and they didn't have access to it they read
|
| 00:41:40.000 |
memories dreams and reflections which I think you know coming out in 57 was you know perfectly
|
| 00:41:45.680 |
poised to be ready for the psychedelic movement and it contains a lot of things people have described
|
| 00:41:53.360 |
the red book as a psychoactive substance right so you take you absorb it and it catalyzes a journey
|
| 00:41:59.040 |
that is your own journey and I think people found Jung's willingness to use a symbolic language
|
| 00:42:07.200 |
to describe what was happening to him that is borrowed his eclecticism right his mix of west and east
|
| 00:42:15.040 |
was very resonant I think with the 60s thinking and so there are certain even images from his work
|
| 00:42:23.200 |
that have remained fundamental like this dream where he he feels that he is being dreamed by a yogi
|
| 00:42:28.800 |
who is asleep you know this is a very famous one that has stayed with the psychedelic movement
|
| 00:42:34.320 |
and I think there are some deep truths in it in the sense that the psychedelic movement itself was
|
| 00:42:40.320 |
doing something very Jungian in terms of questioning the excesses of rationality that we started off
|
| 00:42:47.280 |
with right so they were right right this was an era when a lot of the environmental crisis that
|
| 00:42:52.400 |
we have now for instance was already quite visible and on the radar and no one wanted to see it right
|
| 00:42:59.040 |
and they were really trying to point the finger so I think that was very much in the spirit of Jung
|
| 00:43:05.840 |
then of course like any anything that becomes very popular I think some Jungian concept have become
|
| 00:43:12.480 |
very watered down like you know like the shadow I think is it's hard to say even what that means
|
| 00:43:18.080 |
anymore at some point but but it's beautiful what they did with Jung I think in general okay so
|
| 00:43:24.640 |
last question Laura so our show and you don't have to answer it but I am curious would you call
|
| 00:43:31.280 |
yourself a Jungian if so why yes would I call myself a Jungian well you know he didn't want
|
| 00:43:38.160 |
disciples but yes I think I would call myself a Jungian and I think I would because I believe we
|
| 00:43:46.720 |
well because I grew up learning about world religions all of them and watching people
|
| 00:43:50.800 |
invent their faith it's hard not to when you travel the world and you see how people actually
|
| 00:43:57.120 |
live out different religions they stop being these systems on paper and they start being
|
| 00:44:02.960 |
far more irrational but also very effective and I found that I found that absolutely fascinating
|
| 00:44:09.360 |
and profoundly real I feel like it says something about my own life and how you know I'm always
|
| 00:44:14.720 |
cobbling together reasons to believe whatever I believe in that are made up of my own
|
| 00:44:20.000 |
you know my own background my what what I've experienced so I think in that sense I am very much
|
| 00:44:25.760 |
a Jungian well that's very reassuring because if you're the outcome of a Jungian spirit then
|
| 00:44:32.800 |
then it's all for the good well I'm honored thank you on a reminder our listeners we've been
|
| 00:44:39.600 |
speaking with Professor Laura Whitman from my own department of French and Italian here at Stanford
|
| 00:44:44.640 |
and the very first guest in the very first episode back in 2005 so always a pleasure Laura thanks
|
| 00:44:52.240 |
for coming on thank you I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions thanks for listening
|
| 00:45:14.640 |
take the highway to the end of the night you ain't got trying to go right midnight the night and of the night
|
| 00:45:43.440 |
realms of lives some of them just we did
|
| 00:45:54.480 |
some of them just we did like some of them to the end of the night
|
| 00:46:13.440 |
one of them the one of them the one of them the one.
|
| 00:46:43.440 |
[Music]
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| 00:47:13.440 |
[Music]
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| 00:47:43.440 |
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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