Friday, September 29, 2017

"Jung's struggle with Freud"

Of course their relationship was very famous, it’s also very poorly understood. You'll hear this expression sometimes: “Jung was Freud’s disciple, Jung was Freud’s student.” Analyst and historian John Kerr - who wrote the book A Most Dangerous Method, which was of course turned into a somewhat unfortunate movie – John Kerr remarks that at the beginning of their relationship Freud needed Jung more than Jung needed Freud. In the course of looking at the material it became fairly clear I identified several aspects of the two systems that were very important in terms of why and how they were at loggerheads with one another eventually. They didn’t really realize it at the beginning that many of the issues that eventually lead to the break between them were actually there from the beginning. Both of them, each for their own reason, put an awful lot of effort into not recognizing the differences between them.

The main ones that I identified at the time and I subsequently wanted to add a fourth primary distinction. One was the basis of Freud’s system, Freud’s theory, relied very heavily on the idea of repression. And repression was probably one of the greatest stumbling blocks for Freud in getting his theories accepted – there were many, many stumbling blocks but this was an important one that he really couldn’t provide evidence for the kind of repression that he wanted to talk about. You have to understand that the basis of Freud system, one of the critical elements of Freud’s system, is that any material that is in the unconscious was originally in consciousness and gets pushed into the unconscious by repression. Jung at the time was doing work on the word association test, and in fact his work on the word association test was extraordinarily important. The word association test had been around for 50 or 60 years as an important psychological tool but he really transformed it’s significance by adding a whole array of measures to what was actually happening with a person in an anomaly with their association

It had started in England with some research that was done before becoming a major element in German experimental science with Wilhelm Wundt and others but what they were primarily looking at was the role in which an association was made, in other words, what kinds of words were associated with one another. Jung added and actually designed the equipment for the galvanic skin response, cardio-pulmonary response, and ways of measuring these things. He had basically turned the word association test into the first lie detector, and in fact used it in a couple of court cases. So the word association test had been around for a long time and Bleuler, who was the head of the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic, where Jung was doing what we would call a residency, amongst other things had Jung and some of the other doctors there diligently working on this. The other thing that Bleuler did was he had his students, his residents, reading all of the current literature in psychology and psychiatry. Jung was an extraordinarily voracious reader and he went through everything, and one of the things he was assigned to read by Bleuler right off – must have been literally the day he arrived at the Burghölzli – was Freud’s very recently published Interpretation of Dreams. So, the Zurich psychiatrists at the Burghölzli knew about Freud and were following his early writings because they were basically following everything.

Jung, as he worked on the word association test, came to the conclusion that he in fact had empirical data that pointed toward something that looked like Freud’s notion of repression. A big part of the original connection between Freud and Jung was because Jung was measuring these lapses in associations; you give a person an association word, like “house,” and they pause for ten seconds before they give you a response. And not only do they pause but their galvanic skin response goes all over the place, their heart rate goes all over the place, things begin to happen and what Jung realizes is that there’s a strong emotional or a strong affective dimension to these lapses in association. They involve the entire organism, the whole body. Then what he does is he sits down with these people – say they had a big lapse; you say “home” and they either come up with a very odd response or these other measure of the affective response are off-kilter – so he sits down with them and says “Tell me about your home life.” He begins to do a kind of simple analysis of why the lapse took place and begins to find out, well “my father was an alcoholic,” he had a very unfortunate home life, and he begins to see that there are real psychological causes for these lapses. He writes to Freud in 1906 and sends him a collection of his papers on the word association test and basically says “I think you’ll find these interesting” and the implication there is “I’ve solved your problem.” You’re telling people about repression but they’re saying “We have no evidence for that. It seems like something that you, Professor Freud, just cooked up to explain phenomena.” Now Jung comes along and basically says “I’ve got empirical data, I’ve got experimental data that looks like Freud’s idea of repression.” So that’s kind of how they get started.

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Jung comes into the relationship with the idea that they are going to be progressing in what we might call a more normal scientific way where you have a group of colleagues who work together to shape a theory as it unfolds. At virtually the same time up in Copenhagen you have Niels Bohr and the quantum physicists and they’re all sort of bouncing off of each other and revising their ideas and writing papers and having arguments and that leads to what we can call a more scientific evolution of the understanding of quantum mechanics. What’s happening between Freud and Jung is that Freud is far less, if he is at all, willing to proceed with this kind of collaborative scientific investigation that leads to variations in the theory. He’s quite tolerant for a while – they’re both trying to make this work – but Jung begins to realize at some point along the way that Freud is not operating that way. Freud has his principles, his ideas about the way psyche works, and it’s very difficult to come in with another point of view on things and have Freud make any serious revisions to his theory on the basis of those kinds of interactions. Now Freud revises his theory many times along the way but every time Freud does make a change in this theory it’s because he’s run into something himself that he can’t reconcile anymore so he has to do something with it. There’s some very famous stories about Freud’s difficulty with evolutionary theory for example, and so on. At a quite early stage they began to have conflicts on some of these things.
- Speaking of Jung: George Hogenson (Ep. 14)  (Author of Jung's Struggle with Freud)
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Friday, September 22, 2017

Symbolism: Dog

Dogs are a complex symbol, one with a long history with humans: as the first domesticated animal they are the very symbol of the domestication of instinct. They represent both loyalty and protection, but also dangerous aggression; the love of God, as well as the lowest filthy vermin. In Judaism and Islam dogs were seen in a generally negative light, a symbol of utter wretchedness (an example of compassion was shown by helping the lowly, reviled dog, as in the Muslim story below). This may be due to the fact that dogs were honored by the surrounding pagan cultures. In fact, the symbol of the dog has a deep connection with Goddesses, in particular with death/ the afterworld. In their attempt to distance themselves from pagans the Hebrews appear to have degraded dogs, just as they turned Cannanite gods into demons (Baal), and destroyed their holy places (the groves of Asherah). The irony, of course, is that this attitude itself is very dog-like; dogs are loyal and protective of their “pack” but aggressive towards outsiders.

Some pairs of opposites contained in the symbol of the dog are:

Protector/ destroyer
Hunts for us/ hunts us
Loving/ vicious
Loyal/ trickster
Wound healing/ eats filth

The Central American cadejo embodies the ambivalence of the dog; there are two different types of cadejos, white cadejos and black cadejos. One is a protector sent by God; the other the minion of the Devil, or the Devil himself.

While rarely negative symbols, [dogs] do have some unfavorable characteristics. Can be a depraved animal, cursed their enemies. 'Sick as a dog' came from the notion that they return to their vomit. Hated (with a few exceptions) at the end of the Bible: 'dogs, and sorcery, and whoremongers' outside New Jerusalem. Also a scavenger, envy, flattery, fury, war, greed, pitiless, bragging and folly.

There is a temple in Isin, Mesopotamia, named é-ur-gi-ra which translates as “dog house” Enlilbani, a king from the Old Babylonian First Dynasty of Isin, commemorated the temple to the goddess Ninisina. Although there is a small amount of detail known about it, there is enough information to confirm that a dog cult did exist in this area. Usually, dogs were only associated with the Gula cult, but there is some information, like Enlilbani’s commemoration, to suggest that dogs were also important to the cult of Ninisina, as Gula was another goddess who was closely associated to Ninisina. More than 30 dog burials, numerous dog sculptures, and dog drawings were discovered when the area around this Ninisina temple was excavated. In the Gula cult, the dog was used in oaths and was sometimes referred to as a divinity.

At archaeological diggings at the Philistine city of Ashkelon, a very large dog cemetery was discovered in the layer dating from when the city was part of the Persian Empire. It is believed the dogs may have had a sacred role - however, evidence for this is not conclusive.

The reason why dogs signify those who render the good of faith unclean through falsifications, is that dogs eat unclean things, and also bark at men and bite them. From this also it was that the nations outside the church who were in falsities from evil, were called dogs by the Jews, and were accounted most vile. That they were called dogs is manifest from the Lord's words to the Greek woman, the Syrophenician, whose daughter was grievously troubled with a demon…

The majority of both Sunni and Shi'a Muslim jurists consider dogs to be ritually unclean. It is uncommon for practising Muslims to have dogs as pets. They are viewed as scavengers.

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There are a number of traditions concerning Muhammad's attitude towards dogs. He said that the company of dogs, except as helpers in hunting, herding, and home protection, voided a portion of a Muslim's good deeds. On the other hand, he advocated kindness to dogs and other animals. Abu Huraira narrated that the prophet said:

"While a man was walking he felt thirsty and went down a well, and drank water from it. On coming out of it, he saw a dog panting and eating mud because of excessive thirst. The man said, 'This (dog) is suffering from the same problem as that of mine.' So, he (went down the well), filled his shoe with water, caught hold of it with his teeth and climbed up and watered the dog. Allah thanked him for his (good) deed and forgave him. The people asked ``O Allah's Apostle! Is there a reward for us in serving (the) animals? He replied: ``Yes, there is a reward for serving any animate (living being).

Jesus told the story of the poor man Lazarus, whose sores were licked by street dogs. This has traditionally been seen as showing Lazarus's wretched situation.

The Catholic Church recognizes Saint Roch (also called Saint Rocco), who lived in the early 14th century in France, as the patron saint of dogs. It is said that he caught the plague while doing charitable work and went into the forest, expecting to die. There he was befriended by a dog which licked his sores and brought him food, and he was able to recover. The feast day of Saint Roch, August 16, is celebrated in Bolivia as the "birthday of all dogs."

When it came to depicting dogs in medieval art, the dog took on some of its classical attributes of watchfulness and fidelity. Sometimes dogs would be drawn next to a married woman, symbolizing her faithfulness. (There’s a reason one of the most common names for a pet dog through the centuries was Fido — it’s Latin for “faithful.”)

Other times dogs were seen as healers by virtue of the natural properties of their tongue. One commentary explains, “The dog’s ability to heal wounds by licking them represents how the wounds of sin can be cured by confession. The dog returning to its vomit signifies those who make confession but then return to their sinful ways.” St. Roch, a 14th-century patron invoked against the plague, is often pictured with his miracle-working dog, who healed sores by licking them.


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The domesticated dog


Dogs are “man’s best friend,” valued for their loyalty and protectiveness. They were the first animal to be domesticated, possibly up to 36,000 years ago, with some evidence indicating that it may have started as far back as 140,000(!) years ago. For comparison the second animal to be domesticated was the sheep, at 11,000 years ago, the goat at 10,500 years ago, and the pig and cow both at 10,300 years ago. It would be fair to say that there’s a very good possibility that the domestication of the dog went far back enough to have influenced humanity’s evolution, as animal behaviorist Temple Grandin theorizes: No other primate hunts in packs, only humans have this very dog-like behavior. We may have learned this behavior from them. Scientists believe that a shift from a plant based diet to one with significant amounts of energy dense animal foods lead to the development of our huge prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for complex thinking); this could mean that dogs were instrumental in humans evolving into the big-brained apes that we are today.

Dogs represent the civilization of animal instinct. The dog is the tamed form of the dangerous, wild wolf. They are protective of their territory and aggressive to outsiders, but when they become dogs they are protective of their human family and aggressive towards any would be attackers. They are associated with civilization, and the bringers of fire. Like Prometheus, the trickster dog Coyote stole fire from heaven and gave it to humans. In Africa, the dog’s true name is Rukuba, guardian of fire, and Mayan codices refer to the dog as the bringer of fire to the people. In Asia (China, Japan, etc.), temples are guarded by lions, the symbol of fire and animal passions. These guardians are interchangeable with lion-dogs, “foo dogs,” and certain dog breeds like chow chows. Other images of dogs with fire is in St. Dominic’s mother’s dream (referenced above), and their association with the underground goddess Hecate, who is usually shown carrying two torches.
The philosophic school of Cynicism in ancient Greece takes its name from the Greek for `dog’ and those who followed this school were called Kynikos (dog-like) in part because of their determination to follow a single path loyally without swerving. The great Cynic philosopher Antisthenes taught in a locale known as Cynosarges (the place of the white dog) and this, perhaps, is another reason for their name.

It is really impossible to say exactly when dogs and humans first made contact. But in the words of the former Vice President of The Humane Society, Dr. Michael W. Fox, "Indeed the nature of the dog is such that it would not be an overstatement to say that the dog helped civilize the human species."

Dogs usually play the role of loyal helpers and friends of men in Native American folklore, just as they do in most other world mythology. Many Native American folktales have to do with the proper treatment of dogs – people who are kind and generous to their dogs are often rewarded, while people who abuse, disrespect, or even annoy dogs are harshly punished.

Presumably these legends reflect the high esteem that many tribes held dogs in – dogs were the only domesticated animals in most of North America and played crucial roles as pack animals, hunting companions, and camp guards. (They were also raised for food in some tribes, which is not necessarily incompatible with the theme of respect – some other animals that were regularly eaten by Native Americans, such as buffalo and bears, were highly respected and had taboos governing their treatment.) Occasionally dogs are represented in Native American folktales with negative traits such as being gullible, easily distracted, or even a tattletale, but in general, most Native Americans consider dogs a symbol of friendship and loyalty.

[B]lack and white dogs became symbols of the Dominican order or St. Dominic. This is in part due to a Latin phrase (Domini canes, “dogs of the Lord”) that closely resembles a Latin name of a Dominican friar (Dominicanus). Also, there is a story from the life of St. Dominic that said his mother had a dream that she would give birth to a dog with a torch in its mouth that would set the world on fire.

English poet Francis Thompson is well known for his poem “The Hound of Heaven,” which pictures God as a dog who continually pursues the wayward soul to bring it to redemption.

Dogs protected people not only from wild animals and thieves but also from supernatural threats. The goddess Trivia (the Roman version of the Greek Hecate) was the Queen of Ghosts, haunted crossroads and graveyards, and was associated with witchcraft. She stole upon people silently to prey on them but dogs were always aware of her first; a dog who seemed to be barking at nothing was thought to be warning one against the approach of Trivia or some other disembodied spirit.

Similar inscriptions in the surviving Mayan Codices depict the dog as the bringer of fire to the people and, in the Quiche Maya holy book, the Popol Vuh, dogs are instrumental in the destruction of the ungrateful and unknowing race of humans which the gods first produced and then repented of.

This creature also represents the often disturbing images that appear from our inner depths, just as the dog and wolf at the beginning of the path represent the tamed and the wild aspects of our minds.
The little dog represents culture, and the “taming” of the animal instinct.


Links:
Chinese temple guardians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foo_Dog



The death dog

Dogs are associated with two main activities: guarding, and hunting. They are persistent and have an excellent sense of smell; they are the hunter who pursues, either for us or hunting us as prey ourselves. One of the best known of these dark hunts is the Wild Hunt of Odin. Not only are they seen as the hounds of entities who want to hunt us down and kills us (like Artemis or, in a more extreme version, Mallt-y-Nos), they are both the guardians of but also the guides of death. Dogs appear in many cultures as either psychopomps, or one’s afterlife is dependent upon how one treated dogs in life. Dogs are repeatedly shown as having a connection with death, the afterlife, and the Goddess in her dark form (Mallt-y-Nos, Hecate); Cerberus, guardian of Hades, is the offspring of the archaic, ancient serpent gods Echidna and Typhon. The symbol of the dog is connected with the deepest layers of the unconscious.
Dogs were closely associated with Hecate in the Classical world. Dogs were sacred to Artemis and Ares. Cerberus was the three-faced guard dog of the Underworld. Laelaps was a dog in Greek mythology. When Zeus was a baby, a dog, known only as the “golden hound” was charged with protecting the future King of Gods.

Xolotl, an Aztec god of death, was depicted as a dog-headed monster.

It is also believed to have a special connection with the afterlife: the Chinwad Bridge to Heaven is said to be guarded by dogs in Zoroastrian scripture, and dogs are traditionally fed in commemoration of the dead. Ihtiram-i sag, "respect for the dog", is a common injunction among Iranian Zoroastrian villagers.

Dogs were associated with Anubis, the jackal headed god of the underworld. At times throughout its period of being in use the Anubieion catacombs at Saqqara saw the burial of dogs.

The Tarascans, like the Aztecs and Maya, kept dogs as pets, for hunting, and for food and also linked them with the gods and the afterlife. The souls of those who died without proper burial, such as those who drowned or were lost in battle or died alone on a hunt, were found by spirit dogs who would ensure their safe passage to the afterlife.

In ancient India the dog was also highly regarded. The Indian Pariah Dog, which still exists today, is considered by many to be the first truly domesticated dog in history and the oldest in the world (though this has been challenged). The great cultural epic The Mahabharata  (circa 400 BCE) significantly features a dog who may have been one of these Pariah Dogs. The epic relates, toward the end, the tale of King Yudisthira, many years after the Battle of Kurukshetra, making a pilgrimage to his final resting place. On the way he is accompanied by his family and his faithful dog. One by one his family members die along the path but his dog remains by his side. When, at last, Yudisthira reaches the gates of paradise he is welcomed for the good and noble life he has lived but the guardian at the gate tells him the dog is not allowed inside. Yudisthira is shocked that so loyal and noble a creature as his dog would not be allowed into heaven and so chooses to remain with his dog on earth, or even go to hell, than enter into a place which would exclude the dog. The guardian at the gate then tells Yudisthira that this was only a last test of his virtue and that, of course, the dog is welcome to enter also. In some versions of this tale the dog is then revealed to be the god Vishnu, the preserver, who has been watching over Yudisthira all his life, thus linking the figure of the dog directly to the concept of god.

Hekate was sometimes identified with Krataeis (Crataeis), the mother of the sea-monster Skylla (Scylla). She was also titled Skylakagetis (Leader of the Dogs), connecting her with the name of the monster.

As dogs were noted as great swimmers, they were thought to conduct the souls of the dead across the watery expanse to the afterlife, the netherworld of Xibalba. Once the soul had arrived in the dark realm, the dog served as a guide to help the deceased through the challenges presented by the Lords of Xibalba and to reach paradise.


Links:
Hecate (“Skylakegatis” means leader of the dogs) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hecate



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Symbolism: Animals

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]



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Symbolism: Sun

[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]



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Sunday, September 17, 2017

To love the least among the lowly

There was a sort of twinkle in Jung’s eye that gave me the impression that he knew himself to be just as much a villain as everybody else. There is a nice German word, hintergedanken, which means a thought in the very far far back of your mind. Jung had a hintergedanken in the back of his mind that showed in the twinkle in his eye. It showed that he knew and recognized what I’ve sometimes called the element of irreducible rascality in himself. And he knew it so strongly and so clearly, and in a way so lovingly, that he would not condemn the same thing in others, and would therefore not be lured into those thoughts, feelings, and acts of violence towards others which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside; upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat.

Now this made Jung a very integrated character… In other words, he was man who was thoroughly “with himself.” Having seen and accepted his own nature profoundly he had a kind of a unity and absence of conflict in his own nature which had to exhibit additional complications that I find so fascinating. He was the sort of man who could feel anxious and afraid and guilty without being ashamed of feeling this way. In other words, he understood that an integrated person is not a person who’s simply eliminated the sense of guilt or the sense of anxiety from his life; who is fearless and wooden and a kind of sage of stone. He is a person who feels all these things but has no recriminations against himself for feeling them. And this is to my mind a profound kind of humor. You know in humor there is always a certain element of malice. There was a talk given on the Pacifica stations just a little while ago which was an interview with Al Capp. And Al Capp made the point that he felt that all humor was fundamentally malicious.

Now there’s a very high kind of humor which is humor at oneself. Real humor is not jokes at the expense of others, it’s always jokes at the expense of oneself. Of course it has an element of malice in it. It has malice towards oneself; the recognition of the fact that behind the social role that you assume - behind all your pretentions to being either a good citizen or a fine scholar or a great scientist or a leading politician or a physician or whatever you happen to be - that behind this façade there is a certain element of the unreconstructed bum. Not as something to be condemned and wailed over but as something to be recognized as contributive to one’s greatness and to one’s positive aspect in the same way that manure is contributive to the perfume of the rose.

Jung saw this and Jung accepted this and I want to read a passage from one of this lectures, which I think is one of the greatest things he ever wrote and which has been a very marvelous thing for me. It was in a lecture delivered to a group of clergy in Switzerland a considerable number of years ago and he writes as follows:

"People forget that even doctors have moral scruples and that certain patient’s confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow. Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst of him is accepted too. No one can bring this about by mere words. It comes only through reflection and through the doctor’s attitude towards himself and his own dark side. If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person’s psyche. He never feels it when he passes judgment; whether he puts his judgments into words or keeps them to himself makes not the slightest difference. To take the opposite position and to agree with the patient offhand is also of no use. Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity.

"This sounds almost like a scientific precept. And it could be confused with a purely intellectual abstract attitude of mind. But what I mean is something quite different. It is a human quality: A kind of deep respect for the facts – for the man who suffers from them and for the riddle of such a man’s life. The truly religious person has such an attitude. He knows that God has brought all sort of strange and unconceivable things to pass and seeks in the most curious ways to enter a man’s heart. He therefore senses in everything the unseen presence of the Divine Will. This is what I mean by unprejudiced objectivity. It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption. We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate. It oppresses. And I am the oppressor of the person I condemn – not his friend and fellow sufferer.

"I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve. But, if the doctor wishes to help a human being, he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is. Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life, it requires the greatest art to be simple. And so, acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem, and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar – that I forgive an insult – that I love my enemy in the name of Christ – all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all – the poorest of all beggars – the most impudent of all offenders – yea the very fiend himself – that these are within me? And that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness. That I myself am the enemy that must be loved. What then?

"Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed. There is then no more talk of love and long suffering. We say to the brother within us: Rocca, and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide him from the world. We deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves. And had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form, we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed."
- Alan Watts on Carl Jung (starting at 7:50)
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Friday, September 15, 2017

The brutality of morality

We must be kind and think of others well being. Or must we? Must we think of others first, and never ourselves first? What is it like to think of ourselves first, and not think of others?

What part of me is freed by not always thinking and doing the "right" thing all the time? What can I let go of?

Can I let go of the anger and judgment of others, when they don't live up to my standards? What do other people not allow themselves, that traps them in it's cage, and makes them judge, and cut themselves off from, others?

What is my jail? What makes my jail any better, objectively speaking, than that person who judges people based on their wealth, or that other person over there who judges people based on popularity? Or that person, who judges people based on power? How am I any different? You think your standards are more moral, and therefore you are more moral, because you respect your own values and look down on those others, but your jail is still a jail. A jail is a jail, whether it's made of shit or of gold. You're still unfree.

What is it like to simply live, without shoulds? Without preconceptions, and judgments? What is it like to accept the facts of life, and people, and their ideas, without immediately judging them? What would it be like to live completely open to this life?

The sickness of our time is tied to our excessive valuing of "right" and rejection of "wrong." The differentiation of good and evil that Christianity brought with it was a positive step forward in the development of human consciousness but it's gone on for too long, and to too great a degree. We're seeing the consequences of our excessive one-sidedness now.

To completely reject all that is weak, stupid, selfish, and ridiculous in us - in other words, to reject our own personal, little evil - is to brutalize ourselves and each other. It is inhuman, and, when taken to its logical conclusion, leads to and only can lead to the most horrific and brutal atrocities. The witch trials of Europe; the extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and leftists during the Holocaust; and the violence against immigrants and progressives in America today are all the result of this sick one-sidedness. An unconscious shadow is the weak spot where collective evil - true evil - can catch us, and no shadow is darker and more unconscious than that of the moralist. To avoid having such a dark and vulnerable shadow we must become conscious of it. Becoming conscious of ones shadow makes it less dark, but this requires of the conscious self that it give up some of it's brightness, because the darkness has to go somewhere.


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Monday, September 4, 2017

The hero sun


The finest of all symbols of the libido is the human figure, conceived as a demon or hero. Here the symbolism leaves the objective, material realm of astral and meteorological images and takes on human form, changing into a figure who passes from joy to sorrow, from sorrow to joy, and, like the sun, now stands high at the zenith and now is plunged into darkest night, only to rise again in new splendor.

The psychic life-force, then libido, symbolizes itself in the sun59 or personifies itself in figures of heroes with solar attributes. At the same time it expresses itself through phallic symbols. Both possibilities are found on a late Babylonia gem from Lajard's collection (fig. 19). In the middle stands an androgynous deity. On the masculine side, there is a snake with a sun halo round its head; on the feminine side another snake with a sickle moon above it. This picture has a symbolic sexual nuance: on the masculine side there is a lozenge, a favourite symbol of the female genitals, and on the feminine side a wheel without its rim. The spokes are thickened at the ends into knobs, which, like the fingers we mentioned earlier, have a phallic meaning. It seems to be a phallic wheel such as was not unknown in antiquity. There are obscene gems on which Cupid is shown turning a wheel consisting entire of phalli60. As to what the sun signifies, I discovered in the collection of antiquities at Verona a late Roman inscription with the following symbols:

The symbolism is plain: sun=phallus, moon = vessel (uterus). The interpretation is confirmed by another monument from the same collection. The symbols are the same, except that the vessel has been replaced by the figure of a woman... From here it is clear that sexuality as well as the sun can be used to symbolize the libido. 

Footnotes:
1. Hence the beautiful name of the sun-hero Gilgamesh, "The Man of Joy and Sorrow," in Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-Epos.
59. Among the elements composing man, the Mithraic liturgy lays particular stress on fire as the divine element, describing it as [Gr. "the divine gift in my composition"]. Dieterich, Mithrasliturgie, p. 58.
60. An illustration of the periodicity or rhythm expressed in sexuality.
- Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, p.3
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Saturday, September 2, 2017

A society of animals

In this rather humorous way the unconscious took up the idea, namely that it is really a great problem, for as conscious beings we can contact each other, but in this inferior function, one person is a cat, another is a tortoise, and a third a hare – there are all those animals! Such social adaptations present a great difficulty. There are all the problems of having one’s own territory, one’s own ground, for every animal species has a tendency to have a few meters of homeland. Every bird and every animal defends its territory from intruders; one may not step on the other’s ground, and all these complicated rituals build up again as soon as human beings join together and discard the persona and try really to contact each other. Then one really feels as if one is moving in the jungle or the bush: one must not step on this snake or frighten that bird by making quick movement, and things become very complicated. This need for bush manners has even led to the belief that psychology causes social behavior to deteriorate, which to some extent is quite true. At the Jung Institute, too, we are in a way much nastier and more difficult a group to get along with than, say, a society for breeding dogs or hares, or a club for fishermen, for there the social contact is in general on a much better level. Such an accusation has often been made not only of the Psychology Club but also of the Institute. But the truth is simply that we tend not to cover up what is going on underneath. In all other societies or groups of people, that is covered up and plays under the table; underneath there are all these difficulties, but they are never brought up to the surface and discussed openly. But, in fact, naturally, facing the shadow and the inferior function has the effect that people become socially more difficult and less conventionally adapted, and that creates more friction. On the other hand, it also creates a greater liveliness: it is never boring, for there is always a storm in a teacup and excitement, and the group is very much alive instead of having a dull, conventional, correct surface. It has even gone so far that in the Psychology Club, the animal tendencies to have one’s own realm became so strong that people started reserving seats; there was So and So’s chair, and you couldn’t’ sit on it; that was a major insult, because So and So always sat there. I have noticed that there are also papers on certain chairs on which people write their names: this is my chair – in other words, there the dog or cat So and So sits! That is a very good sign, and I thought; “Well now, that is better, matters are improving!” It is a restoration of an original and natural situation. But it is amazing how deeply the inferior function can connect one down into the realm of animal nature within oneself.

Apart from the humorous way in which I have described it, it is a very important fact, for the inferior function is actually the connection with one’s deepest instincts, with one’s inner roots, and is, so to speak, that which connects us with the whole past of mankind.
Marie Louise von Franz, Psychotherapy
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