Crippled beautiful world

Giving laws, bettering, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way...

Power stands against power, contempt against contempt, love against love. Give humanity dignity, and trust that life will find the better way.

The one eye of the Godhead is blind, the one ear of the Godhead is deaf, the order of its being is crossed by chaos. So be patient with the crippledness of the world and do not overvalue its consummate beauty.

- Jung, The Red Book, p. 126

May each go his own way

Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.

The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you?

Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?

There is only one way and that is your way.

You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.

May each go his own way.

- Jung, The Red Book, p. 125

Logos is conscious and eros is unconscious?

“Logos” in Jung’s Theories: Jung also used the term logos in his philosophical theories. Logos, according to Jung, represented fact or reason. Jung often referred to the contrast between conscious versus unconscious as logos versus mythos. Additionally, Jung believed that logos was the male version for rationality, where the female counterpart, eros, represented psychic availability or emotion.

"Jungian Psychotherapy" from goodtherapy.org

Ugh, I haven't been able to get anything done for this blog for so long (but I am working on stuff, really!). I had an insanely busy assignment for the most of the last year then, right after that ended, some family issues for the last few months. And now I'm going back to school (yay on that, though!) and will probably still be busy but I saw the above quote and something fell into place that had been sitting on the back burner of my brain for a while: "Logos" vs. "Eros".

One of the things that annoys feminists about Jung's writings (and quite honestly makes me uncomfortable as well) is Jung's ideas about what is masculine and what is feminine. I've personally veered back and forth between agreeing and disagreeing with him on this issue, not just to be PC but because it seemed at odds with my own personal experience as a very logical and unemotional woman.

When I'd read Jung's stories about dealing with women I saw in my mind an introverted, thinking-type Jung struggling to deal with extroverted, feeling-type women. Many women are feeling types, it's true, but many men are as well (think about those Poseidon-types with their still waters running deep, who can erupt into hurricanes of emotions when aroused.) I tend to be attracted to these warm, emotional type of men and my theory was that whatever your ego was, your unconscious, and hence your shadow as well as what you were attracted to, would be it's opposite; if your ego was more intellectual then your shadow and your anima/animus would be emotional and vice versa, regardless of your sex.

This is very different from being more concerned with personal or interpersonal success, which I do feel is very sex-dependent: men, regardless of whether they're emotional or intellectual, are more concerned with and oriented to their success in competition with others, whereas women, again regardless of their primary function, are more interested in their relationships with significant others. At any rate, this has been my observation.

The above quote rung a bell in my mind because it revealed what has always bothered me about Jung's theories in relation to the sexes. For a thinking type like Jung, then yes, Eros would be in the unconscious, because whatever is the opposite of the primary function is pushed down into the unconscious by the very act of developing one's strongest function. But what if a man's primary function is feeling? Then the opposite would be the case here, and thinking would be his "royal road to the unconscious."

Both Logos and Eros can be developed by the Ego, in which case the higher differentiated function would be the Ego's way of functioning in the "outer world" in the most efficient way possible. In either case, the opposite function would be the one most connected with the unconscious, the most childish and undeveloped, the weak spot in the personality that allows the unconscious to come through. And both men and women can be either emotional or intellectual.

At the same time, one thing I've noticed, again purely through personal observation, is that the anima of men is more primitively emotional and the animus of women more primitively intellectual, regardless of the person's primary function. When I get possessed, it's definitely with animus thoughts, and I can tell when my feeling-type boyfriend is possessed when he starts getting sulky and annoying (and I'm sure I annoy him as well when I get animus possessed.) But, at the same time, it seems to me that my animus possessed thoughts have an emotional rage that a feeling type woman might not get, and G's anima feelings are mixed up with really silly ways of thinking that keep dragging him down and keeping him from working toward his dreams (ideas like "Don't try that because you might fail!")

I guess I still have some thinking to do about this. Not that it'll ever be completely figured out, of course. There are too many mysteries surrounding the sexes.



The transformative fire

An interesting confluence of dreams, readings and experiences has just happened. I woke up this morning and was pondering these recent events when I had an epiphany and came up with the following words:

The trick to using the fire of anger is not to turn it outwards but to turn it inward. Fire always burns itself out. That is its nature. When you turn it outwards at others or the world sooner or later you end up exhausted and defeated, the burden of the world on your shoulders. But when you contain the fire of desire and ego inside, it burns out all that is impure in you; what is sick, dying, weak, fearful and ungenerous. Everything that must die. With every encounter you have that enrages the ego... keep hold of that fire. Don't let it dissipate into fantasies of revenge or, even worse, into actual outward directed action. Keep that fire for yourself. Use it to burn another tiny bit of ego out; to fuel the long, slow transformation of your Self from mud into Diamond.

So... I've been dealing with issues of anger, of self-defense and protecting oneself from all the slings and arrows of living in a cold, hard city like New York. Every day brings endless (ENDLESS!) encounters with the millions of other New Yorkers all doing their best to annoy the shit out of you: the idiots who block the doorway of subway cars, not letting people get off or get on. The people who cut you off to save a couple nanoseconds... that you catch up to at the next red light. People constantly trying to get one over on someone else, or being angry when they can't. Biking in the city in particular has become an exercise in maintaining my zen despite almost unbelievable idiocy and rudeness.

I've always been one of those people who'd rather avoid confrontation and just let things go but recently I've felt the urge to "defend my space". And I have. And MY GOD IS IT EXHAUSTING!!! When people get onto a train with plenty of extra space but feel the need to crowd into you and lean on the pole you're trying to hold onto, and you try to bump them out of the way, but they decide they're not going to let you be the boss of them and bump you back, and then shake their umbrella on your leg like a dog peeing on his territory. Countless incidents like this.

At one point I realized that, although this was something I was glad to have done to prove to myself that I could, it was absolutely exhausting! And totally not worth it. But it got me to thinking about certain types, like Heras and Zeuses (like my grandfather), people for whom this kind of jockeying is a way of life, and I thought no wonder they're angry all the time!! I'm not sure about Zeuses but I've noticed that Heras' sense of hurmor tends to be on the bitter, angry side. And they're always, always so angry! Like, all the time. Well, I know why now; being constantly obsessed with not letting others "get one up on you" makes you angry!

This realization didn't happen until I gave up trying to defend myself, and getting all angry about it. But I still had to figure out what to do with all the anger being generated by living in a city filled with rude assholes, so I went back to being zen but this time with just observing the emotion and not trying to make it go away; just letting it be and burn itself out. And I found myself feeling stronger and calmer each time I did it. Then I had the dreams, and did the reading. And this morning, as I was thinking yet again about the issues of anger, and Heras, it occurred to me that that's what anger is for; anger is the purifying fire that burns out whatever needs to be destroyed. In one of my dreams was this part:

A huge enemy army is outside our walls, attacking us. Many of the walls are broken. I get a weapon and start shooting them. Then I realize heat is coming from my hands. I aim my palms at them and concentrate. They become hot. I go out of the defense and among them. I set them on fire, but its with compassion. I hold them and tell them they can rest now. As I’m doing this all, these sad people are being burned to charcoal. My people are safe, though. I had given them a message to take the group far away, to a certain location, and I’d meet them there. I take the burning hot fire and blow it back over the rest of the army, completely destroying them.

I realized that the "sad people" in the dream were these parts of myself that needed to be burned out, that were tired and exhausted and needed to rest.

I'm not sure where all of this is going but the following part of my dream reminds me of the final outcome card in my reading:

We try to leave, but a woman (commander?) catches us. She sees the girl’s “knife” and takes it. I say it belongs to the girl. I’m very strong, powerful and relaxed. I’m also angry and I want to hurt the woman commander. I take her by the wrist (her arm is very thin – she herself is pretty thin as well) and life her whole body up, levering it at her wrist. I won’t let go. Finally, I feel it start to crack. Then I put her down. She says I’m really strong, that I must work out a lot. I tell her I don’t (implying that I’m just naturally strong.) 

When I interpreted the reading, this part reminded me of the above:

His decisions are almost always the right ones, because he sees the big picture and never lets his heart sway his judgement. Though they might not benefit the King directly, his decisions are always in everyone's best interests. When this part of you starts to manifest you'll know it right away. The King of Swords' arrival in your life is an event that almost never goes unnoticed simply because he commands attention from everyone around him. He does not linger waiting for something to do; he appears only when he is needed to drive raging emotions from you, or when his impartiality and cold judgement will help you solve a problem.

The dream seems to imply that I'm dealing with the masculine female and the feminine male. The masculine female I think is what I used to be - to try to use the sword of my will to defend myself. But something was wrong with that. The tarot reading also indicates it has something to do with masculinity and will. It appears that all that time I spent in the last year or so trying to develop a relationship with my animus is finally strarting to come to fruition.

Eros vs. the will to power

Or Freud vs. Adler.

I just had a brainwave: I've been reading Jung's "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology," from the Bollingen series - I'm determined to get through the whole series - and I'm up to the two sections where he describes Freud's and Adler's theories. They both seem to make sense, and he writes:

I fear the reader must feel like the cadi who, having heard the counsel for the one party, said "Thou has well spoken. I perceive that thou art right. Then came the other party, and when he had finished, the cadi scratched himself behind the ear and said, "Thou has well spoken. I perceive that thou also art right." (para. 54)

At that moment, I remembered reading something in June Singer's "Boundaries of the Soul," her introduction to Jungianism, about Freud and Jung.

Emerging differences in approach to dream material became explicit in 1909, during a lecture trip to the United States which Jung and Freud made together. They saw each other daily on board ship and spent a good deal of time analyzing one another's dreams. In that very uncomfortable process, each must have withdrawn from the other in terms of revealing his own inner life. Jung described the whole affair in his autobiography. From his point of view this encounter foreshadowed the dissolution of the relationship. Freud had presented a dream of his own, and Jung had indicated that he could do much better in interpreting it if he knew some more details about Freud's private life. Freud regarded him in that moment with a look of "utmost suspicious" and replied, "But I cannot risk my authority!" (p. 245)

Freud's neurotic fear of "losing authority" - and his unforgiving fury when anyone disagreed with him - is his shadow! Freud's conscious is obsessed with eros, with the force that unites us. And he was apparently a warm, subtle analyst with his patients. But his unconscious shadow, which was as obsessed with the will to power as his conscious was with sex, combined with what I think was his personality type as a thinking type, was the root of what compelled him to ruin relationships with anyone who disagreed with him.



One more thing - I've really slowed down my posting. I took a bit of a hiatus - nothing planned, it just happened that way. I ended up focusing on lots of other things in my life, but now my libido seems to be moving back towards inner work so I'm going to try to post things on a more regular basis.

The Albedo

Being deep in nigredo, a white light appears. We have arrived at the second stage of the Great Work: albedo, or whiteness. The alchemist has discovered within himself the source from which his life comes forth. The fountain of life from which the water of life flows forth giving eternal youth.

(Dirk Gillabel)

Aargh! I really wanted to write on snake and child symbolism but more stuff came up in my dreams recently! Most of my dreams are pretty humdrum - probably having more to do with Fruedian, personal issues - but lately I've been getting more archetypal/collective dreams. Which is cool! And make me feel like I'm making some significant breakthroughs, especially this last one.

The dream focused on images of looking for a partner. I take that to be the search for the coniunctio; the union of the male and female halves, usually internally, i.e. with our animus/anima but occasionally externally with an actual partner or even both at the same time (i.e. sex! and romance!). I've obviously been doing a lot of animus work lately, both internally and externally, and something appears to have changed. While I'm "looking for a partner" suddenly I'm in a giant tree, like the World Tree and all of these images of nature come up.

I go up into the trees. It's precarious. I have to cling on a large bundle or rope of vines, many of which pull off as I pull myself up, but I trust the tree. I know the tree is helping me. All the land is one organism; the large tree, the water, and the rock below it. There is white (in the water). The white gathers. It's connected to the rock (the rock is a solidified whiteness?) I chop out a small slab of the rock and bring it back to the others...

While I was thinking about the dream the first thought in my head was that this was the "albedo" stage referred to in alchemy. Jung realized that alchemy was really a psychological/spiritual compensation for the excessively spiritual emphasis of the dominant Christian religion. In other words alchemy is a description of the path of individuation in symbolic language.

The Great Work (Latin: "Magnum Opus") is an alchemical term for the process of creating the philosopher's stone. It has been used to describe personal and spiritual transmutation in the Hermetic tradition... It originally had four stages:

Nigredo, a blackening or melanosis
Albedo, a whitening or leucosis
Citrinitas, a yellowing or xanthosis
Rubedo, a reddening, purpling, or iosis 

...Other color stages are sometimes mentioned, most notably the cauda pavonis (peacock's tail) in which an array of colors appear. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnum_opus_%28alchemy)

The colors symbolize the various stages a person goes through in the individuation process. And there are four of them - shocker! - or not, as 4 is the number Jung found to represent wholeness in dreams, myths, etc. The four colors are associated with the four Jungian archetypes that characterize these stages; "In the Jungian archetypal schema, nigredo is the Shadow; albedo refers to the anima and animus (contrasexual soul images); citrinitas is the wise old man (or woman) archetype; and rubedo is the Self archetype which has achieved wholeness." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrinitas)

Nigredo ("Blackening")

Nigredo, or blackness, in alchemy means putrefaction or decomposition... In analytical psychology, the term became a metaphor 'for the dark night of the soul, when an individual confronts the shadow within'. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigredo

Albedo ("Whitening")

...Following the chaos or massa confusa of the nigredo stage, the alchemist undertakes a purification in albedo, which is literally referred to as ablutio – the washing away of impurities. In this process, the subject is divided into two opposing principles to be later coagulated to form a unity of opposites or coincidentia oppositorum during rubedo. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo_%28alchemy)

Citrinitas ("Yellowing")

[It is the] "transmutation of silver into gold" or "yellowing of the lunar consciousness." In alchemical philosophy, citrinitas stood for the dawning of the "solar light" inherent in one's being, and that the reflective "lunar or soul light" was no longer necessary. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrinitas

Rubedo ("Reddening")

Rubedo is a Latin word meaning "redness" that was adopted by alchemists to define the fourth and final major stage in the Magnum Opus. Both gold, and the philosopher's stone were associated with the color red, as rubedo signalled alchemical success, and the end of the great work. Rubedo can be interpreted as achieving enlightened consciousness and the total fusion of spirit and matter... In the framework of psychological development (especially followers of Jungian psychology) these four alchemical steps are to be taken as analogous to the process of attaining individuation: In an archetypal schema, rubedo would represent the Self archetype, and would be the culmination of the four stages. The Self manifests itself in "wholeness," a point in which a person discovers his or her true nature. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubedo



Midnight Sun

There are many other symbols in alchemy for the second phase, or albedo: the white swan, the rose, the white queen, and so on. As lead is the metal of nigredo, silver is the metal of albedo, transmuted from lead. As silver is the metal of the moon, the moon was also a symbol for albedo. Alchemists also talk about the white stone or white tincture. They all means basically the same thing, although one has to understand them in the context in which they were written. 

So... It looks like the (*mumble mumble curse*) nigredo phase I've been going through is letting up. And it certainly feels that way; even when thinking about work, or G, I don't feel torn and angsty anymore, just peaceful. Jung said that we don't get rid of our problems, we outgrow them, and this certainly seems to be happening (yay!) Also, the bit about the albedo in the white stone or the tincture reminds me of the white in the water, and how it was in the stone. Will need to do more thinking (and living) on this as all this albedo stuff is really new for me - I'm sure lots more stuff will come up in the future!

At any rate, now that the albedo phase appears to be coming up I did a bit of searching around on it. This is what Dirk Gillabel of House of the Sun has to say about it (the quotes in the rest of this post come from him, too):

Albedo happens when the Sun rises at midnight. It is a symbolic expression for the rising of the light at the depth of darkness. It is the birth of Christ in the middle of the winter. In the depth of a psychological crises, a positive change happens. 

This reminds me of The Star and The Moon cards in the Tarot: The Star for obvious reasons (the light shining in the dark) but The Moon, too. The next stage, Citrinitas, talks about changing the white to yellow, the lunar consciousness to the sun. And both of these cards comes right before the Sun in the Tarot. This makes me think that this lunar awareness, which is what light is, comes before the solar; i.e., we become aware of things internally and then we live them in the world (?)



The Fountain

The source is one: male and female are united. In alchemical images we see a fountain from which two streams of water flow into one basin.

This brings me to the second apparent aspect of the albedo stage. I don't have as good a feel for this as I do for the "midnight sun," which I definitely feel in my own life and consciousness, but this is something that frequently comes up, that of the splitting into two, i.e., animus/anima work.

I feel like I was going through a bunch of animus work along with my nigredo/shadow phase... although that may have been because it was so much a part of my shadow. I think the concept is that once you deal with depression and darkness, then you're ready for working through issues of union. This makes a lot of sense to me even though I don't feel like I really know what this is talking about; until we deal with our shadow, all of our animus/anima work, whether internally or with others, will really be working on shadow issues. We'll either project our bright shadow onto our partner and be infatuated, or our dark shadow onto them and hate them. It's only after integrating our shadow that we can work on separating out the male/female.

The union of Hermes and Aphrodite. The moon is above the retort, indicating this is the stage of Albedo. The sun above is the next stage of Rubedo. At the same time sun and moon are again the opposites to be united. Aphrodite has two torches. One pointing down, representing the lower passions to be transmuted. The upside down torch is the purified energies. Aphrodite is standing on a tetrahedron, the perfect three dimensional body, as all corners are equally distant from each other, resulting in a lack of tension.

As we mentioned above, Aphrodite/Venus as the morning star is a central image for the albedo phase of the Great Work. Aphrodite was born from the foam that arose when the genitals of Uranus (cut of by Chronos, out of hate and jealousy) fell into the sea. The cutting of the genitals represents repressed and tormented love. The sea, symbol of the soul, however will bring forth the love goddess. Liberation will happen when we become conscious again of the contents of the soul. As Aphrodite is born from the sea, she is the guide through the fearful world of the unconscious (the sea, or the underworld). The alchemist descends into these depths to find the ‘prima materia’, also called the ‘green lion’. The color green refers to the primal life forces. Venus also has the green color. An important characteristic of Aphrodite is that she helps us in our human shortcomings. She gives ideals and dreams to fulfill. But she also gives frightening images in order to make man aware of his lower nature. "By her beauty Venus attracts the imperfect metals and gives rise to desire, and pushes them to perfection and ripeness." (Basilius Valentinus, 1679) Liberation can only happen by becoming conscious of the lower nature and how we transmute it.

In Jungian psychology Venus/Aphrodite is the archetype of the anima (in alchemy also the ‘soror’ or ‘wife’ of the alchemist). The anima is the collective image of the woman in a man. It is an image especially tainted by his first contact with his mother. The anima represents all the female tendencies in the psyche of a man, such as feelings, emotions, moods, intuition, receptivity for the irrational, personal love and a feeling for nature. She is the bearer for the spiritual. Depending on the development of the man she can also be the seductress who lures him away to love, hopelessness, demise, and even destruction.

Other alchemical images for albedo are baptism and the white dove, both derived from Christianity. Baptism symbolizes the purification of both body and soul by ‘living water’. ‘Living water’ was regarded as the creative force of the divine. It allowed the soul to be received into the community of the holy spirit. Thus baptism allows the purified soul to bring forth the resurrection of Christ in oneself. This is the ‘hieros gamos’, the ‘sacred marriage’ between the soul and Christ. Christ here represent our own inner divine essence. 

http://www.soul-guidance.com/houseofthesun/alchemy%202.htm

This union seems to be about many things; one's relationship with one's internal contrasexual partner, one's relationship with one's external partner, but also about body and spirit and other pairs in one's life. My dream specifically talked about "looking for a partner" so I assume this is going to continue to be an important part of my growth.

Not sure what else I have to say about this topic - this post is just a preliminary exploration of the Albedo. I'll write more as more comes up.


Edit

Something that occurred to me on re-reading this post; the coniunctio doesn't have to do with sex, even with the internal, contrasexual part of us (i.e., the animus, or anima.) It could be anything which is complex and split in our lives which we need to heal and bring into a higher union (very dialectical materialism-esqe.) For example, a couple oppositions/tensions in my life right now are:

• the internal world and the external
• play/rest and work
• youth and age

I think that the male/female opposition, while it can be about our relationship with the other sex, whether internal or external, is also a powerful symbol of all the oppositions in our lives. This albedo stage is where we're separating out the confused mass of the nigredo, like Psyche with the seeds. Then, during the rubedo stage, we can see where there is an underlying and higher unity.

Race and ethnicity in dreams

A lot of my dreams have included people of different ethnic groups and I've puzzled over what these mean. Asia, particularly Japan, frequently shows up, both as people and as objects, and I'm starting to think that, being an American of Japanese ancestry, it means the unconscious realm; the mysterious, foreign land but also something vaguely familiar. It's as if it's calling me home, back to that far-away land. It's of the "foreign" spirit realm but it's also my true home. This would be different, of course, for people who have no relationship to Japan; probably for them, it's just a foreign country as India or China are for me. In my own dreams, India is more foreign as in pure foreign; exotic, and with no feeling of "home." China, which has also occasionally shown up in my dreams, is halfway in between India and Japan; foreign but with a tinge of the familiar.

The other group that shows up a lot in my dream, almost as much as Japan, is black people (they seem to be African American black people, not black African people) and I've often puzzled over what they mean in my unconscious. Being progressive, black people carry the following conscious meanings for me: maybe rough around the edges but honest; real; although often pushed down, never give up. But our unconscious ideas about things often differ from our conscious. Last night, as I was re-listening to Marie-Louise von Franz's The Way of the Dream, this caught my attention:

It was a hot summer's day, and I was walking with a gorgeous black woman through rolling green country along the side of a jungle. We'd known each other for a long time, and I called her my goddess. It was my pet name for her.

Suddenly she stopped and said, "I have a problem." I didn't understand what she meant, but instead of telling me with words she pulled down the strap of her dress and bared her shoulder. Her black skin on the top of her shoulder was peeling where it had been exposed to the sun, and under the top skin, underneath the black, her skin was golden-white. She looked at me and said, "If I keep seeing you, it's going to happen all over my body. I've got to talk to my mother and get some advice from her about what to do..."

In the alchemical tradition, the transformation of the Shulamite, or the Queen of Sheba plays a tremendous role. One of the recurring fantasies of the alchemists was that the matter which they wanted to transform into gold was initially black. They compared it to a black woman who then takes off her skin or black garment and is transformed into pure gold. Notice that in this dream the woman's skin is golden white under the black.

The black garment represents a typical feature of the undeveloped inner anima figure. Just as we shall see that the animus in women is sometimes destructive and negative, the black anima is relatively negative in a man. The black anima indicates that his whole capacity to love is mostly autoerotic. When a man has not developed his anima, his feminine side, he is generally very narcissistic. That's what a woman painfully feels when a man is meowing under her window like a tomcat. He really loves his own fantasy. He loves his own being in love, but that's a long way from learning to love her and not merely enjoying his own being in love. And often in literature, a young man, when he first discovers the experience of love, is completely autoerotic. It is a fantasy out of which, through a painful development, he has to learn to love the woman, not as the object of his romantic fantasies, but as a human partner.

Just as in a man his anima is originally narcissistic and autoerotic, in women our feelings of "love" are also initially narcissistic and ultimately autoerotic: the partner is basically just a living, breathing blow up doll, a convenient hook for our projection. An example is when women "fall in love" with a famous figure, as many girls and women have done with the characters in Twilight. While projection can be a useful way seducing one into the hard work of building an actual relationship with the actual person it is by it's nature itself only a relationship with yourself: you project a part of yourself onto the recipient and then proceed to fall in love with that part of yourself. And just like men, we also project our bright shadow and/or our animus and/or our Self onto our "beloved" instead of having a human relationship with the human right in front of us.

All the same, I do feel as if some amount of projection is a necessary part of falling in love. I'm not sure but it seems to be the reason why we fall in love with some people but not others. Some questions to think about are how thick and obscuring the projection is, and whether or not there's a significant part of the beloved that matches our projection or if it's just pure fantasy, but in any case, the ultimate goal is to relate to the human being underneath all the projections.

There are also some further questions: occasionally, while interpreting fairy tales or dreams, von Franz talks about the animus of the anima, or vice versa; i.e. the evil troll who has bewitched the princess into murdering all of her husbands. Who is this animus? Or, in the case of women's psychology, who is this primitive anima of a woman's animus? Is it even the anima of the animus? If it is, is it actually an aspect of the Self? I've had some indications that suggest that that's exactly who this figure is; the black women appearing in my dream, and at the same time I dream of a mutilated female figure who must be confronted and saved. The readings referring to the coming of a Queen when I ask about love and romance. It's as if through our travails with love, we heal the anima behind our animus, which is really the part of the Goddess who needs healing and wholeness. Once She is made whole we ourselves become whole. It also suggests that the way to heal the part of our Self that is mutilated is by working through love issues, and also that it's only when we heal this wound that we can truly love another person; it's only when the Goddess is whole that her servant, the animus, becomes healthy and strong.

There's still more to explore in this subject, but this is a good start.

Too little earth

The trouble is not that the elephants are too big, but that the earth is not strong enough to carry them. The elephants are okay, but there is not enough space for them.

(von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus, pages 50-52.)


Another thing came up as I was reading Puer Aeternus was the need for psychological "earth" or the substance and strength to do the difficult work of psychology.

Some people have a lot [of earth] but are not in touch with it, while others have no earth, or not enough, even if they are in touch with it - which would mean that there is not enough vitality. It is naturally an irrational concept, an intuitive concept. You could call earth psychological substance. You see that again and again. One of the great problems in psychotherapy is: how much substance does that person have? How much can he or she carry?...

While the person with too little earth may be able to assimilate everything psychologically, he will have great difficulty realizing things in reality. Such people take everything in analysis with honesty and strength, but when you press them to do something about it in their outer reality, a terrific panic comes up. At the moment when the inner realization has to be put into life, strength collapses, and you are confronted with a trembling child, who exclaims, "Oh, no! That I cannot do!" This is an exaggerated illustration of the introvert's attitude in which there is great strength in accepting the inner turths but very little when it comes to real life. Then the trembling child appears.

The reason it stood out was because of a recent I-ching hexagram I threw which spoke of the earth, hexagram 7, "The Army". This is just a very preliminary musing but I wonder if the two have something to do with each other...

Water under earth; the ground water stored up in the earth. In the same way military strength is stored up in the mass of the people - invisible in times of peace but always ready for use as a source of power - water is stored in the earth. 

The army needs perseverance And a strong man. Good fortune without blame.

An army is a mass that needs organization in order to become a fighting force. Without strict discipline nothing can be accomplished, but this discipline must not be achieved by force. It requires a strong man who captures the hearts of the people and awakens their enthusiasm. In order that he may develop his abilities he needs the complete confidence of his ruler, who must entrust him with full responsibility as long as the war lasts. But war is always a dangerous thing and brings with it destruction and devastation. Therefore it should not be resorted to rashly but, like a poisonous drug, should be used as a last recourse.

In the middle of the earth is water: the image of The Army. The superior person increases her masses by generosity toward the people.

Ground water is invisibly present within the earth; in the same way the military power of a people is invisibly present in the masses. When danger threatens, every peasant becomes a soldier; when the war ends, they goes back to their plow. She who is generous toward the people wins their love, and a people living under a mild rule becomes strong and powerful. Only a people economically strong can be important in military power. Such power must therefore be cultivated by improving the economic condition of the people and by humane government. Only when there is this invisible bond between government and people, so that the people are sheltered by their government as ground water is sheltered by the earth, is it possible to wage a victorious war.

A few thoughts - I think that, although this topic isn't as strong in it's impact as the other recent work, it's still important, particularly in that it supports that work:

First off, here in "The Army" the earth is what contains and shelters power - the more earth you have, the more power you can hold. If you only have a tiny little asteroid, it is impossible to contain a lot of power, or groundwater.

The hexagram also speaks of how one makes use of power - through discipline tempered with generosity and the bonds of trust and love. But both discipline and generosity take strength, so here again, those with a small amount of earth have difficulty. But we must do our best.

One part of this section that I didn't include spoke about how many people are mixed types - some parts of them are strong, vibrant and full of power, and others are weak, and must be nurtured slowly and patiently. The trick is to figure out what kind of person you are and, if you have weak spots, be careful of them and patiently nurture them until they are strengthened. Even if you have a weak spot, or are overall a weak person, there is always something you can do - push on through where you're strong, and gently nurture where you're not.

Freud vs. Jung

Or, perhaps more accurately, Freudians vs. Jungians.

About a week ago I stumbled on a post about the the general unsexiness of Jungian women compared to the sexiness of Freudians and it's been rolling and rolling around my head ever since. I mean, I consider myself relatively sexy and I'm a Jungian. Well, not "sexy" per se but certainly not a "hippy-dippy-granola-town-goat’s-milk" AARP escapee. If I had to describe myself I'd say I was funky and playful with a dash of sexy. Too much "va-va-voom" and I feel uncomfortable and fake, like I'm dressed up in a Halloween costume. Personally, I feel the most comfortable when sexy is used as condiment - and with a fairly light hand - rather than drowning myself with the hot sauce. But then that's just me.

So, I know that I'm not particularly unsexy, and I never felt like sexiness of lack thereof had anything to do with being a Jungian, but this seems to have been an issue for the writer:

When I was working on my graduate thesis “The genesis of shame: The fig leaf of fashion and its place in psychotherapy” and I would tell women analysts in the Jungian community in which I trained that I was writing on the topic of clothing I received some pretty harsh judgements.  Clothing was looked at as immaterial to the field of psychology and judged as a surface interest and not one that should be given serious academic consideration. It’s interesting to note that five years after completing my thesis that the very same institute offered the course, “Clothes in the Analytic Relationship: Not For Women Only”. It was bittersweet to see that the topic was finally being considered. I attended the nearly sold out event and was somewhat pleased to see that the women who did the presentation had not approached the topic with the depth of analysis that I had. I was also amused and somewhat irritated by the participants cooing question to the presenters, “This is such a rich therapeutic topic. Why hasn’t anyone written on it before?” Grrr!!!!

Are Jungians less sexy? Are less sexy people drawn to Jungianism or does Jung make you unsexy (and vice versa with Freudianism)? Or is it just the issue of this particular writer? From the little I read of her blog it seems that she's very concerned with sexiness, and of expressing her sexiness - is there a general attitude in Jungian circles that focusing on such "earthy" topics is shallow and unworthy?

I've been reading a lot about Freud lately. I had prematurely dismissed him because his theories seemed so silly (and patently wrong - "penis envy"?? give me a break *rollseyes*), and because of his many well-known failures but had the feeling that there was something there that I was missing. So far, I have learned that I have to give him credit for basically laying the foundations for the entire field of depth psychology. It seems that his fault wasn't so much in coming up with the wrong ideas as stubbornly clinging to them, even in the face of all kinds of evidence to the contrary, but that doesn't negate what he did manage to accomplish.

But is Freud (or are Freudians) sexier? Mmmmmmaybe. My tentative conclusion is that it's very possible that they are. If I had to put the difference between Freud and Jung in a nutshell, I'd have to say that where for Freud everything, including religion, has to do with sex, for Jung everything, including sex, has to do with religion. So maybe Freudians are sexier than Jungians. Certainly it's likely that they're more interested in sex. And it's indisputible that anyone uncomfortable in their sexuality would have a hard time remaining a Freudian for very long!


Edit 4/4/12:

I just had another brainwave as I was re-reading this post - maybe Freudian's are "sexier" because they're more focused on "first half of life" issues, i.e. on building up the ego, making it stronger. First half of life stuff includes success in the social realm of which sexual attractiveness is an important part, obviously. Jungianism, on the other hand, is more focused on "second half of life" issues and often calls for a breaking down - or, at the very least, a dethronement - of the ego.

I always felt that Jungianism could be profitably applied to first half of life problems despite the fact the Jung himself would often refer his patients to others when he felt that their issues fell outside his purview. I still do (although who knows, that may change) but there is no denying the fact that there is an "other worldly" aspect to Jungianism, and this doubtless contributes to people feeling that earthly matters don't fit with what we're doing. I can't think of anything further from the truth - anyone who's followed this blog for any length of time will know that I deal with the most earthy, embodied problems we can encounter; love in particular but also family and work.

The way I see it, Jung just went deeper than Freud. Freud focused on what Jung called the "personal unconscious" (all of the things of our personal lives that have dropped into the unconscious) but Jung felt there was something of vital importance that lay beyond the personal unconscious. We need to work on and pass through the Freudian problems of childhood, not just for their own sake but in order to contact this thing "beyond," and from which exerience we come back to humanity with the understanding of our special mission in this life.

Jungianism encompasses Freudianism. If the thing you need to work on right now is being sexy and wearing high heels, then you're doing exactly what you need to be doing. And if that's not what you need to be doing, then do whatever it is that you should be doing. The hardest thing about Jung - and the thing that keeps it so honest and true - is that there are no rules. There is only you, and your god or daimon, and whether or not you are living the life you should be living.

The son of chaos

In a primeval forest. An elephant looms up menacingly. Then a large ape-man, bear, or cave-man threatens to attack the dreamer with a club. Suddenly the "man with the pointed beard" appears and stares at the aggressor so that he is spellbound. But the dreamer is terrified. The voice says, "Everything must be ruled by the light."


This is another post about the role of "satan" in the psyche. Earlier, I'd explored his role as the instigator; the problem that breaks the false peace and opens the door to further growth. Here he shows another face, that of the double natured intellect which can both possess us and cut us off from living, but can also be the most powerful weapon we have in facing and illuminating the chaotic contents of the unconscious.

In an earlier dream we meet the "man with a pointed beard," the demonic Mephistopheles who guided Faust in his journeys. As long as we identify the conscious intellect as the supreme, or even the only, aspect worth anything we are possessed. In the following dream (which occurred before the dream about the ape man), the Mercurian intellect is separated out as an independent identity, which allows us to begin to understand it.

The dreamer is in America looking for an employee with a pointed beard. They say that everybody has such an employee.

America is the land of practical, straightforward thinking, uncontaminated by our European sophistication. The intellect would there be kept, quite sensibly, as an employee. This naturally sounds like lese majeste and might therefore be a serious matter. So it is consoling to know that everyone (as is always the case in America) does the same. The "man with a pointed beard" is our time-honored Mephisto whom Faust "employed" and who was not permitted to triumph over him in the end, despite the fact that Faust had dared to descend into the dark chaos of the historical psyche and steep himself in the ever-changing, seamy side of life that rose up out of that bubbling cauldron.

From subsequent questions it was discovered that the dreamer himself had recognized the figure of Mephistopheles in the "man with the pointed beard." Versatility of mind as well as the inventive gift and scientific leanings are attributes of the astrological Mercurius. Hence the man with the pointed beard represents the intellect, which is introduced by the dream as a real familiaris, an obliging if somewhat dangerous spirit. The intellect is thus degraded from the supreme position it once occupied and is put in the second rank, and at the same time is branded as daemonic. Not that it had ever been anything but daemonic - only the dreamer had not noticed before how possessed he was by the intellect as the tacitly recognized supreme power. Now he has a chance to view this function, which till then had been the uncontested dominant of his psychic life, at somewhat closer quarters. Well might he exclaim with Faust: "So that's what was inside the poodle!" Mephistopheles is the diabolical aspect of every psychic function that has broken loose from the hierarchy of the total psyche and now enjoys independence and absolute power. But this aspect can be perceived only when the function becomes a separate entity and is objectivated or personified, as in this dream.

(p. 141)


As with all the different parts of the psyche, Mephisto/Mercurius/the intellect has a helpful side as well as a dangerous one. After we realize that he's just one of many parts of us, he can help us to understand the parts of us that are in the darkness.

At the last moment, friend "Pointed Beard" appears on the scene as an obliging deus ex machina and exorcises the annihilation threatened by the formidable ape-man. Who knows how much Faust owed his imperturable curiosity, as he gazed on the spooks and bogeys of the classical Walpurgisnacht, to the helpful presence of Mephisto and his matter-of-fact point of view! Would that more people could remember the scientific or philosophical reflections of the much-abused intellect at the right moment! Those who abuse it lay themselves open to the suspicion of never having experienced anything that might have taught them its value and shown them why mankind has forged this weapon with such unprecedented effort. One has to be singularly out of touch with life not to notice such things. The intellect may be the devil, but the devil is the "strange son of chaos" who can most readily be trusted to deal effectively with his mother...

The voice finally declares, "Everything must be ruled by the light," which presumably means the light of the discerning conscious mind, a genuine illuminatio honestly acquired. The dark depths of the unconscious are no longer to be denied by ignorance and sophistry - at best a poor disguise for common fear - nor are they to be explained away with pseudo-scientific rationalizations. On the contrary it must now be admitted that things exist in the psyche about which we know little or nothing at all, but which nevertheless affect our bodies in the most obstinate way, and that they possess at least as much reality as the things of the physical world which ultimately we do not understand either. No line of research which asserts that its subject was unreal or a "nothing but" has ever made any contribution to knowledge.

(p. 165)


The helpful Mephisto is thus necessary for an honest exploration of the depths - in fact, without his help, we would be overwhelmed. The differentiated conscious is a powerful tool in the individuation process - just as the Self needs the ego for the process, the unconscious needs consciousness. We may have gone too far as a society (and individually) in an unbalanced direction but a strong, healthy intellect is one of the best tools we have in our toolkit for furthering the process.

1. Jung, Carl G., Dreams.