[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]
Posts:
Wednesday, November 1, 2017
"A Journey from Where to Where"
Oliver Sacks - humanist neurologist and one of the greatest popularizers of science, and also one of my personal heroes - died a couple years back (2015). RadioLab just released an episode featuring recordings from his final days; he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had many interesting dreams:
See also:
Death
Journey
Mountain
Ravine
I’ve been having a lot of strangely archetypal dreams of a journey I have to make. Getting lost, and getting found; full of surprises, maybe going through a door, which I think will be a door to another room but is a door to a mountain landscape – and sometimes frightening ravines and edge-long, very narrow ledges – but then finally coming to some great, spacious, heavenly mountain meadow, and then waking. Dreams about journeys, an approaching end, and..... it’s a journey from where to where.RadioLab Oliver Sacks: A Journey From Where to Where (10/27/17, 4:49)
See also:
Death
Journey
Mountain
Ravine
Friday, October 13, 2017
Glossary: Libido
Psychological energy; from the Latin meaning “desire,” or “love.” Unlike Freud, for Jung libido was not limited to sexual energy but was all mental and emotional energy. Where the libido goes, there goes one’s fascination and attention. This psychic energy manifests as drives, aspirations, compulsions, etc.
As Jung believed that the psyche is a self regulating system, he felt that a person’s libido “knew” where it needed to go for one’s growth. Our job is to figure out where that is. You can’t control or decide this because one’s libido is governed by something larger than the ego, namely, the Self. When there is intense activity in the unconscious the Self pulls libido out of consciousness resulting in the feeling of depression, or a general lack of energy.
Libido can be blocked, in which case it will find another channel, or change direction. Because of psyche’s tendency to balance itself out, it will often do this naturally when the conscious self has gone too far in one direction, often changing into its complete opposite (compensation, enantiodromia).
Jung quotes from: Daryl Sharp's "Jung Lexicon"
See also:
Compensation
Enantiodromia
Hero
As Jung believed that the psyche is a self regulating system, he felt that a person’s libido “knew” where it needed to go for one’s growth. Our job is to figure out where that is. You can’t control or decide this because one’s libido is governed by something larger than the ego, namely, the Self. When there is intense activity in the unconscious the Self pulls libido out of consciousness resulting in the feeling of depression, or a general lack of energy.
Libido can be blocked, in which case it will find another channel, or change direction. Because of psyche’s tendency to balance itself out, it will often do this naturally when the conscious self has gone too far in one direction, often changing into its complete opposite (compensation, enantiodromia).
[Libido] denotes a desire or impulse which is unchecked by any kind of authority, moral or otherwise. Libido is appetite in its natural state. From the genetic point of view it is bodily needs like hunger, thirst, sleep, and sex, and emotional states or affects, which constitute the essence of libido.- Jung "The Concept of Libido," CW 5, par. 194
For Jung, the hero is a symbol of the developing ego's libido. By libido, Jung means not simply desire or psychological energy but psychological purpose as well. For him, the hero myth expresses the ego's desire to replace dependency upon the unconscious with self-direction - a purpose that necessitates an ambivalent struggle with the mother, who symbolizes the unconscious- Beebe, Aspects of the Masculine (p. 9)
Libido can never be apprehended except in a definite form; that is to say, it is identical with fantasy-images. And we can only release it from the grip of the unconscious by bringing up the corresponding fantasy-images.- Jung, "The Technique of Differentiation," CW 7, par. 345
Always in advance of consciousness, calling us into new activity. Libido in turn is a part of the life energy that drives all organisms to grow and develop. Its first expression is in the energy of growth that causes cell division, budding, etc. (so it IS sexual at first). As you climb the phylogenetic ladder, libido used for sexuality loses its sexual character and flows into other forms.- Craig Chalquist, PhD, A Glossary of Jungian Terms
Libido contains two opposite urges or instincts (see ambivalence/ambitendency): to live and to die, to go forwards and backwards (death drive) into instinctuality/womb/uncon. The libido contains both or no movement could happen.
It does not lie in our power to transfer "disposable" energy at will to a rationally chosen object. The same is true in general of the apparently disposable energy which is disengaged when we have destroyed its unserviceable forms through the corrosive of reductive analysis. [It] can at best be applied voluntarily for only a short time. But in most cases it refuses to seize hold, for any length of time, of the possibilities rationally presented to it. Psychic energy is a very fastidious thing which insists on fulfilment of its own conditions. However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient.- Jung, "The Problem of the Attitude-Type," CW 7, par. 76
What is it, at this moment and in this individual, that represents the natural urge of life? That is the question.- Jung, "The Structure of the Unconscious," CW 7, par. 488
Jung quotes from: Daryl Sharp's "Jung Lexicon"
See also:
Compensation
Enantiodromia
Hero
Thursday, October 12, 2017
Symbolism: Child
[An overview will be written at some point in the future.]
Posts:
"The Fate of Depth Psychology in the New Millennium"
Attis' sacrifice
As the son and lover of his mother [Attis] raises the incest problem. Incest leads logically to ritual castration in the Attis-Cybele cult; for according to legend the hero, driven mad by his mother, mutilates himself. I must refrain from going into this question more deeply at present, as I would prefer to discuss the incest problem at the end of this book. Here I would only point out that the incest motif is bound to arise, because when the regressing libido is introverted for internal or external reasons it always reactivates the parental imagos and thus apparently re-establishes the infantile relationship. But this relationship cannot be re-established, because the libido is an adult libido which is already bound to sexuality and inevitably imports an incompatible, incestuous character into the reactivated relationship to the parents.66 It is this sexual character that now gives rise to the incest symbolism. Since incest must be avoided at all costs, the result is either the death of the son-lover or his self-castration as punishment for the incest he has committed, or else the sacrifice of instinctuality, and especially of sexuality, as a means of preventing or expiating the incestuous longing. Sex being one of the most obvious examples of instinctuality, it is sex which is liable to be most affected by these sacrificial measures, i.e., through abstinence. The heroes are usually wanderers,67 and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the restless urge which never finds its object, of nostalgia for the lost mother. The sun comparison can easily be taken in this sense: the heroes are like the wandering sun, from which it is concluded that the myth of the hero is a solar myth. It seems to us, rather, that he is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’ the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms.- Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, p.5
Footnotes:
66 This explanation is not satisfactory, because I found it impossible to go into the archetypal incest problem and all its complications here. I have dealt with it at some length in my “Psychology of the Transference”
67 Like Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Heracles, Mithras, etc.
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.- Speaking of Jung: George Hogenson (Ep. 14) (Author of Jung's Struggle with Freud)
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.
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