The Demon seems to acquire or borrow personality traits or structures from the individual's psyche . . . especially in reaction to the shadow, which is the Demon's gateway into the psyche.  If we think of the personal shadow as the pieces of identity where we feel most vulnerable, confused, needy, and impotent, then the Demon introject is a strategic defense against falling into identification with the shadow.  Much of the personal shadow is defined by the cultures and immediate social environments we grew up and continue to live in.  At least initially, it is the parents, the tribe, the world that both criticize/ostracize the personal shadow and teach us how to conceal and overmaster it.  We might call this "maturation" or learning discipline or civilizing, but it is equally an indoctrination and conformation.  Often enough, these civilizing/indoctrinating scripts or rules of thumb enable us to be more socially successful (as the particular social environment we live in defines such success).  But much of what is discouraged by society is also destructive and limiting to the natural personality.  The innate factors of personality (the Self) are not much benefited by social conformations, especially when these conformations do not facilitate the innate potentials and predispositions of the individual.

Society as we know it is not an individual-facilitating system, but a normalizing system.  Nor does modern society function as a whole (i.e., a singular tribe) based on universal ideologies . . . rather, it is complex and emergent.  The facilitation of the individual is driven primarily by the Self system which urges and organizes adaptivity, survival instincts, and homeostasis.  But the introjected normalization of social conditioning also works to construct a personality or identity that is "fit" by the terms of that society.  But because this norm of fitness represents a kind of ego- or superego-ideal, it is functional for the individual in direct contrast to the facilitation of his or her innate predispositions and potentials.

In many instances, especially where the childhood environment of the individual is "good enough" (and therefore facilitates the individual's innate potentials to a relatively high degree), the Self system has significant influence on the individual's fitness and may not be embroiled in much conflict with social normalization.  If one is the child of two doctors who both lovingly encourage the child to learn and achieve, and that child grows up to become a doctor, she or he has succeeded in achieving an ego ideal that society venerates.  If that individual feels fulfilled by the life and identity s/he has developed, the normalizing aspects of society are both appeased and kept at bay.

But if this individual ended up pursuing the medical profession and identity "artificially" and only in order to appease his or her parents and social normalization, then a serious existential conflict between the Self system and the Demonic system is brewing, probably causing a great deal of anxiety and depression for the individual.  Of course, not everyone is capable of becoming a doctor or other high-status person.  There are limitations placed on the number of high status people in any society.  Sometimes these are economic limitations, political limitations, limitations of prevailing cultural prejudices, other times they are biological limitations (for instance, inadequate innate intelligence), other times still, the limitations could be a matter of a parenting or peer environment that is not "good enough".

But social status is disproportionately invested in certain roles and ego ideals, and the vast majority of people cannot fit comfortably and satisfyingly into these ideals . . . nor would society function very well if everyone could.

The Demon is experienced as the introjected personality that drives one to become some form of ego ideal, some kind of high status norm.  If the normalizing voice of society (a kind of impersonal and lowest common denominator opinion of how one "should" be) could be reduced to a single personality construction and implanted into the psyche and subconscious of an individual, that would be the Demon.  We are all exposed to this hijacking informational virus, and it infiltrates us at a very early age.  It is an inevitable factor of socialization and human relationality.  This isn't to say that all socialization is "bad".  Some socialization facilitates the Self system.  And trying to find a hard line between socialization that facilitates the Self and socialization that normalizes personality in opposition to the Self is impossible.  There are many gray areas, and as a result of this grayness, the internal representations of the Demon and the Self are frequently conflated and blended together in certain attitudes and ideas.

The differentiation of the Demon and the Self is often not possible or manageable until adulthood, and even then, it must be enabled by the onset of an individuation process.  That is, a process where the Self system emerges in a psychic reorganization attempt to counteract the overly Demonized or normalized ego that has become dissociated from its Self system.  This is necessitated only by the breakdown of the Demonized ego that has sacrificed too much of its nature in order to follow a social ideal.  The individuant becomes aware that the Demonic force in the personality is impeding the Self system's dynamic organizing principle.  The treatment of this is complex and extremely difficult, and I won't go into it here.  But it is the hallmark of the individuant that there is consciousness that something in the personality must change, and the individuant aligns egoically and consciously against the Demonic on behalf of the Self system.  At least she or he desires to do so.

Where the personality falls into depression or some other dysfunction related to an overly Demon-impeded Self system, there is often a correspondence with early developmental problems in the parental environment.  That is, if something significantly hindered the facilitation of the Self in early childhood, the adult personality is much more likely to collapse under the control of the Demon.  The Demon, in this instance (especially where there was early childhood trauma) manifests not as the "benevolent dictator" and superego of individuals who have not had to endure childhood traumas, but as a truly terrible abuser.  Another way to look at this is to see the ego as "shadow-identified".  As one begins to identify with her or his dysfunctions, weaknesses, diseases, impotence, etc. more and more, s/he will find that the Demon seems more and more a malicious, abusive psychopath, a genuinely evil torturer.

In a sense, the Demon is always like this, always terrible to the shadow . . . but when the ego identifies or sympathizes with the Demonic program toward the shadow, one tends to overlook the atrocity of the Demon.  The shadow, much of the time, is deemed less-than-human and not worthy of human rights.  Those people and things we do not extend this full humanity to are treated without empathy.  Take for instance many laboratory animals used for testing.  Imagine being that rat who is pumped full of deathly chemicals or has portions of its brain removed in order to serve the experiment.  This is how a person might feel in relation to the Demon when the person becomes shadow-identified.

There are many implications to seeing the Demon introject in this way.  For instance, we can easily derive from such observations that the society we live in, if it could be rendered as a personality, would be a psychopath.  Additionally, that psychopathy can be said to live inside all of us (via introjection, if not also inherently).  And if we are ever to dehumanize another person or group, we become capable of psychopathic cruelty toward them (or at least the condoning of such cruelty).

Why society is psychopathic is another issue (and one I am exploring in my project on the Problem of the Modern).  But in investigating the Demon as it is represented in individual fantasies and dreams, we are also led to ask: what is it about our innate psyches that allows them to be hijacked by a psychopathic personality construct?  This is largely mysterious and difficult to study, but it seems to me that the Demon introject can root down in the soil of our innate, early impotence.  Psychoanalysts have made much of so-called "infantile grandiosity", but I find this construct rather suspicious.  The entire psychoanalytic construction of the "Infant" strikes me as deeply flawed and riddled with odd projections.  At times, the psychoanalytic attitude toward the Infant resembles the attitude of the Demon toward the shadow.  At other times, the Infant is romanticized and used like a cookie cutter on the adult personality.  Both of these usages disturb me, especially on an intuitive level.

But I do not doubt that infants and young children (not to mention people of all ages) can feel terribly powerless at times.  Even if the full extent of their vulnerability and dependency is not consciously comprehended, there is no doubt at least as much familiarity with feelings of impotence as there would be with an inflated or grandiose protection (from the "Breast" or whathaveyou . . . although I am not a fan of the Good Breast/Bad Breast languaging of this).  As the psychoanalytic attitude reflects, it is socially conventional for us to see children and our own childhood selves as shadowy.  We look back at our disempowerment, compulsiveness, and vulnerability judgmentally much of the time.  Even if we do not "blame" our childhood selves for these things, we specifically resist the attitude that this mentality represents, and by making that attitudinal allegiance, we necessitate shadow.  We don't fare nearly as well at generating respect for our childhood selves and tend to reserve our positive considerations for wistfulness, escapism, fantasy, and euphemization of childhood.

The Demon does seem to have a distinctly infantile core of instinctual rage and fear.  And its desires and demands are also typically infantile.  It wants what it wants when it wants it, and it can't endure not getting this precisely.  There is no empathy or compromise with the Demon.  It has no valuation of what is other (part of its psychopathy).  Moreover, it doesn't seem to grow or develop.  Even as it takes on many superficial forms and attitudes, the objective of these forms and attitudes is to maintain a static personality, orientation, and set of goals and desires.  Therefore it is a part of the personality that doesn't grow and that resist growth at all costs.

This needs to be differentiated from the aspect of the Self that could be associated with the Child archetype.  This Child does have needs and appetites, but it primarily represents the delicate potential of the personality that would need to be actively nurtured in order to develop.  The infantile Demon does not want to be nurtured, it merely wants to be fed, served, and obeyed.  The Demon is a usurpation and imitation of the Self in this and many other regards.  The response of the Self to vulnerability and fragility is to grow, complexify, interconnect, and interrelate.  This could be seen as parallel to the human need to interrelate in a community in order to aid survival and adaptation of both the group and the individuals in it.  The Demon, by contrast, reacts to vulnerability with all manners of fortification and defense against what is other or outside.  It tolerates no direct vulnerability or mutuality and will relate to others only manipulatively as tools to increase its power, impenetrability, and fortification.

Faced with the Demon construct, we would have to ask how such a powerful, psychopathic, parasitic personage could invade and seize control of individuals  so unanimously today.  It sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi story.  I must first note that my construction of the Demon principle is obviously very negative . . . and the vast majority of people living in the modern world will not experience this level of negativity from the Demon as it exists in their personalities.  Many people find the Demon to represent their "better selves".  Moreover, the Demon is not truly "maladaptive" as far as human survivability goes.  Modern human civilization and evolutionary success go hand in hand with the Demon.  I don't think the Demon is responsible for driving our success or innovations, but it is certainly willing to take credit for these things.  I would characterize this as part of our myth of modern willpower.  This myth is defined by its aggrandizement of and emphasis on the ego as the seat of greatest intelligence and psychic worth in the personality.  It is seen as the "divine spark", our rational mind and godlikeness, our speciesist supremacy, mark of global entitlement and bestowal of divine right to do with this planet as we please.

This myth has ancient roots, but clearly reaches its fruition in the beginning of civilization as we know it, the beginning of recorded history and writing.  This myth is also the self-justification of modern patriarchy that triumphs by conquering Nature and imposing the patriarchal, "heroic" brand of order on everything it touches and sees.  This myth is very well described in the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest work of literature in the world.  That Gilgameshian brand of patriarchy that cultivates the Demon as we still experience it is definitely effective at asserting a controlled human environment upon nature.  And within that controlled environment, there is a great deal of room for human reproductive success.  That success is the product of the ability to control the environment in which our species lives.

But by controlling the environment in this way (in a way that seeks to make it hospitable to humans . . . at least those humans with the most power and status), humanity no longer has an active "evolutionary relationship" with its environment.  That is, by adapting an environment to human beings, human beings' ability to adapt to environment is greatly curtailed or even stalled.  Yes, we are still evolving (and perhaps quicker than ever), but we are only evolving in relationship to what penetrates our environmental fortifications.  Most of all, this would be disease, which still has the ability to significantly affect our reproductive success.

It seems to me perfectly legitimate to argue that, the Demon aside, our ability to control our environment and isolate ourselves from its harshness is a substantial achievement and well worth the cost of a little parasitic psychopathy.  I don't have any predictions to offer regarding the future of humanity.  Our species may continue to prosper even without evolving on some kind of ethical or psychological level.  My concern is with the fallout of living with the kind of hypertrophic Demon we have in the modern world.  Most tangibly, this fallout is a matter of high rates of anxiety, depression, and feelings of disconnection, loss of meaning/"soul".  We are increasingly recognizing that these things are unhealthy for us.  But even if they take years off of our lives (and make many of the years we live less satisfying), science, medicine, and technology seem to be more than compensating.

The ethical complications are more serious but harder to determine.  That is, what are the ethical externalities of incorporating (and aggrandizing) what is essentially a psychopathic element into our personalities?  At times, this psychopathic susceptibility has helped enable monstrous destruction and abuse . . . such as the atrocities of genocide, mass murder, and world war that color the 20th century.  There are no indications that such things cannot happen again or that either human psychology or human civilization has seen the error of its ways and taken preventative measures.

Social reform is beyond my focus, though.  I'm interested primarily in studying the psychological mechanism of the Demon and the apparatus of our sociality.  Therefore my investigation leads backward rather than forward.  And I am driven to contemplate why it is that our species appears to be so susceptible to Demonic "hijacking".  This line of questioning evokes the meme arguments of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who have compared the religion meme to a similar hijacking.  That argument essentially states that religion is "bad" for us as well as irrational, so we would have no motivation for creating and practicing it unless we were being possessed by some other self-interested "agent" (in this case, a meme).  I don't have much use for the Dawkins-Dennett meme construct (especially when it comes to religion), but there is a notable parallel with my construct of the Demon as introject.

It seems to me that meme theory breaks down where it assumes a kind of motivation for the informational meme.  The drive to self-replicate is not a trait of information, which means that meme theory is metaphorical.  And as metaphor, it gets an attitude or opinion across.  But I find the masquerading of meme theory as science (including the gene-imitative naming and construction)  to be more of an ideological ploy banking on the "rational dignity" of science to cover up an utterly unscientific idea.  The Demon does not seek self-replication, but fortification and empowerment as a compensation for vulnerability.  In other words, it exhibits a psychology and bears more resemblance to an archetype than it does to a gene or anything biological (even if its behavior could be described as parasitic).

But, like a meme, the substance of the Demon is informational, a collection of ideals, scripts, and laws.  The basis of its "personality", though, is borrowed from our dissociable human psyche, which seems to be able to subdivide into numerous personages (splinter psyches or complexes, in Jungian terms).  What I think makes us susceptible to the Demonic introjection is not a kind of weak link or irrationality in our minds.  Rather, we would only be susceptible to the extreme degree we are if we had evolved in a way that such susceptibility was fit for our survival.  In other words, introjection would only be so readily possible for human beings if it was the medium through which our instincts were functionally expressed into or imprinted with our environment.

Human culture is the primary vehicle through which our instincts are interpreted and implemented in organizing survivable behavior.  I am not talking about intentioned "learning", per se.  It is not knowledge that is introjected, but identity.  Identity (as we commonly experience it) is a social phenomenon . . . not an individual one.  And the social construction of identity is the means by which our instinctual ordering principles (i.e., the Self) adapt to the environmental niche in which we live (the informational environment of culture).  Culture itself is (or was, in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness) constructed through the largely unconscious expression of human sociality instincts.  It self-organizes based on the collective input of individuals and is then fed back into those individuals as identity construction.  So, identity constructs culture and culture constructs identity . . . and for the most part, we are unconscious of this and exert no real control over it.

But this complex culture/identity feedback system evolved along with human sociality instincts that are essentially tribal and not well adapted to modern population density.  I feel that, instinctually, this evolved system is trying to drive adaptation to an environment that no longer exists.  It becomes a square peg in a round hole phenomenon . . . and as the "abrasion" from this is multiplied over many generations, the effect is exponential: an entirely new cultural environment emerges.  And that somewhat foreign emergent culture is fed back into individual identity construction, skewing identity in a way that deviates from the instinct-facilitating construction that would take place in an "evolutionarily ideal" environment.  This scenario could lead to a kind of "fitness" that perpetuates genes very effectively while also creating some degree of discord and anxiety in individuals.  And the more successful humans are at conquering nature and controlling/insulating their environment, the more "genetic fitness" and psychic satisfaction or homeostasis can diverge.

What's more, there is a low likelihood that we would somehow adapt to our new, emergent environment when that environment is "designed" to increasingly isolate us from evolutionary/environmental pressures.  Our consciousness is overwhelmed by the complexity of designing a "utopia" with mental tools not equipped to do so (i.e., they are equipped to work unconsciously in the culture/identity feedback system).  This sense of being ill-equipped to design societies can work metaphorically as an "original sin", a trait that seems innocent enough at first (or is entirely unapparent) but snowballs under complex iteration until is becomes a fatal flaw.  And that fatal flaw becomes a major opponent in the battle to survive and prosper.

The idea of the fatal flaw is part and parcel of the tragic hero.  This tragic, patriarchal hero "conquers" nature's supposed darkness and transforms it into a resource for culture (and ego).  But as much as he accomplishes, some karmic force pulls him into his tragic fate.  Not infrequently (in myths, epics, and legends), the original sin and fatal flaw of the tragic hero is hubris.  Greed is a common alternative or accompaniment.  Rage or wrath is another.  The fatal flaw is like the devil claiming the soul of one who had merely leased status or power (with a terrible interest rate).  Such is life lived in the service of the Demon.  It's a life stolen or not truly earned or deserved.

In more modern terms, we have the so-called externalities of engaging in unsustainable behavior.  That is, with our quest to privilege the ego, not only the instinctual Self, but also other people will end up suffering.  But it isn't just "vulgar human nature", our "animal instincts", that determine these fatal flaws.  Quite the opposite is true.  Instinct is the wellspring of empathy and altruism, of functional, adaptive social organization.  This isn't to say that we are not powerfully self-interested.  But instinctual self-interest is not always the same thing, behaviorally, as selfishness (take, for instance, reciprocal altruism).  Selfish self-interest becomes excessive and dangerous to others primarily when one seeks inordinate amounts of power and status . . . and can manage to get away with murder in the name of pathological self-empowerment and -fortification.  The very idea that we "need" so much in order to be valid is a notion (not created but) promoted by modern status-based society.  We are instilled with social values that favor public success, power, and wealth . . . as opposed to values that, for instance, favor kindness, generosity, and tolerance for others.

What this means is that it is not primarily "human nature" that drives modern egoism.  It is the modern cultural cultivation of the ego that creates such a disparity between feelings of vulnerability and impotence and the fantasy of power and potency.  The introjected Demon becomes the landlord of our infantile fatal flaws.  It's important to note, of course, that although we may envy and be fascinated by "tragic heroes" in our culture who attain great power and status only to be undone by fatal flaws . . . most of us are not such tragic heroes.  And our Demonic inheritance is not purely a kind of megalomaniacal selfishness.  Rather it is an Orwellian "endless war" between the power-mad impulse to be "heroic" and the curtailing social mores that discourage most people from seeking or obtaining such power.

But to a significant degree, this conflict is artificial and keeps the ego in thrall to the Demon through distraction, misdirection, and consumption of the resources needed to rebel.  These social mores also help preserve a social status hierarchy in which those elites on top do not have to abide by the same morality as those below them.  Other problems of status hierarchies aside, the failure of modern society to sustain a universal sense of morality is one of the most significant departures from premodern tribalism.  I don't mean to argue that status was a non-issue in tribes (although anthropologists seem to feel that tribes are and were generally more egalitarian than modern societies).  But tribal rites and ceremonies were meant to organize a sense of participation in a universal tribal identity . . . and that means a universal tribal morality and ideology, as well.  The tribal elders, chiefs, and shamans were the promoters and maintainers of the tribes social mores.

How much of the unfolding problems of modern society have to do with the singular development of wealth (thought to have originated along with the agricultural revolution) is unclear.  No doubt the creation of wealth has had a massive impact on cultural constructions of identity and ideology.  But despite wealth's notable evils, it seems untenable to me that modern societies could be sustained as communes or massive tribes.  Tribal organization or human sociality is (genetically) limited to a relatively small number of members.  Beyond those numbers, the manufacture of true egalitarianism may be impossible.  Equally, any social architecture we endeavor to take on may have to take into account the number-limited sustainability of tribal communities . . . and focus less on less on the relationship between an individual and a society and more on inter-tribal relationships.

Whatever the case, we seem to be still quite far away from understanding the relationship between human nature and social organization in the modern world.  And as long as modern society is introjecting Demonic attitudes and traits, any reform or progress will likely be very slow if not impossible.  Most personalities are so consumed by and devoted to the Demonic organizing principle that it is hard to know how or where to begin to treat human sociality.  It is a classical Jungian idea that the treatment of society is best accomplished through the treatment of individuals.  I find this notion both intriguing and totally inadequate.  Obviously social injustice abounds and can be effectively (although perhaps not absolutely) countered with various social behaviors and policies.  We are all dependent on this kind of social activism to even approach a place where individuals can confront and work to depotentiate their introjected Demons.

But those individuals who do manage to make some headway against the Demon do so at the cost of their participation mystique with others in society (which is also the vehicle through which they have influence on that society).  The Demon is unwittingly sanctioned and protected by our tribalism, even as the Demon perverts the adaptability of that tribalism.  I have no answers to these grand social problems, but I think it could only be beneficial for us to develop a better understanding of the Demon, to know it exists and how it exists within and among us.  This would bring us into direct confrontation with various mystiques of our identity construction and face us with more ego-depotentiating realities of our nature.  The movement toward a recognition of our naturalistic "animalism" could not only be a relinquishment of hubris, but also a way of reconnecting with complex nature as a macro-ecosystem to which we belong.  The sustenance, facilitation, and treatment of this ecosystem indirectly treat our species . . . and therefore treat the human soul.  In previous eras, the treatment of the human soul was approached more egoically and Demonically.  Culture or religious dogma was supposed to be the Good Medicine that saved us from our devilish instincts and impulses.  It may now be that our instincts will begin to save us from our cultural "medicines".  But first, they would have to triumph adaptively.

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For further discussion of the Demon, please see the collection of Essays on the Contents page entitled "Differentiating the Shadow in Jungian Theory".

Although sobriety and restraint do not usually color my calling card, compensation certainly does . . . and I feel that there is some need for a compensatory review of the Red Book.  My previous reflections on the Red Book dealt with its psychology (and therefore Jung's psychology), but here I would like to provide a slightly more literary review of the text.  I will forgo the standard descriptions of what the Red Book is and how it came about (both the original and the newly published facsimile).  In other words, this is not a newbie's review of the Red Book.

One of the reasons I did not initially jump on the bandwagon of Red Book reviewing is that I find the Red Book nearly un-reviewable.  There is no such thing as valid universal criticism of texts.  Texts have to be placed into a context of purpose and the specific construction of their audience.  These don't have to be the ones the author assigns to the text, necessarily . . . but when talking critically about a text, it must be fixed and contextualized in some way.  One of the major problems with reviewing the Red Book is that it is ultimately impossible to say what this context should be.  Jung's own contextualization is complicated and rather vague.  Editor Sonu Shamdasani believes (and make a valid case in his introduction) that Jung intended the Red Book to be published . . . which would lead us to assume that the audience for the Red Book would consist of a combination of those interested in Jung's personal life and psyche (e.g., the audience for Jung's autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections) and those who practice or study Jungian analysis (who would presumably look upon the Red Book as a case study of an especially rich individuation process).  Related to and subsumed in these groups are those Jungians who are looking for a kind of paternal root and foundation to their own Jungianism, a touchstone.

It is this latter subgroup that pumps up the excitement of the "happening" and generates the tribal numinosity around the unveiling of the Red Book, although in my personal experience, relatively few Jungians are willing to admit how significant this factor is to them while also looking upon it psychologically and with an analyst's investigative fascination.  I noted this because I would describe this analytical fascination with the relationship between the Red Book and my own "Jungianized" psyche as my primary orientation (as previous posts in the Red Book Diary make clear).  At this point, I have been a bit surprised to see how many Jungians who obviously feel a numinous participation with the Red Book (and with Jung himself) seem compelled not to accept the shadow inheritance evident in the Red Book.  That is, arguably, the Red Book offers insight into the individuation process and into the "way of Jungian individuation", a kind of Jungian identity mysticism.  To the degree that such an identity mysticism is participated in through the Red Book, the shadow of this identity is also participated in (although perhaps unconsciously).  As Jung himself pointed out, every ego position casts a shadow, for to take any position is to engender its opposite or that which the chosen position neglects or opposes.

Therefore, to deny that there is a shadow inheritance for Jungians in the Red Book is to deny that the Red Book has anything to do with Jungian identity . . . which would be absurd.  The publication of this book would not be a "happening" if it had nothing to do with identity.  The book's numinosity for Jungians is essentially a factor of participation.  If the book proves to be numinous to non-Jungians, that too would be due to a willingness to participate in the book's identity mysticism.  Mysticism relates to Mystery (as in the Mystery religions), which is etymologically rooted in "initiation" . . . and an initiation is an identity transformation or reorientation based in participation with a group, tribe, god, or ideology.  Individuation itself can be seen as a generic mysticism . . . while Jungian individuation is a construction of that mysticism through "Jungian-approved" terms, ideas, symbols, and dogmas.

With that in mind, I would like to embark on a journey of contextualizations (and scrutinies of those contextualizations) for the Red Book.  We must first contend with the discrepancy between the way Jung contextualized the Red Book (as far as we can discern) and the way Sonu Shamdasani, the Philemon Foundation, and W. W. Norton & Company have contextualized its publication.  There has been much grumbling and some debate about whether the Red Book should have been published.  Aligned against Shamdasani are various Jungians who feel that the Red Book was too personal to have been published or that it was not really intended to be published, and Shamdasani's efforts to do so were violating on some level.

My position on this is fairly partisan: I definitely feel that the publication of the Red Book was legitimate and necessary (for Jungian psychology to have any chance at evolving).  The fear that the book will verify to the public that Jung was mad (or a Nazi or a this or a that) is if not absolutely irrational, entirely unimportant.  That is, anyone who feels the Red Book proves that Jung was insane already thought Jung was insane.  To the more balanced perspective, there ends up being no fodder whatsoever in the Red Book to corroborate a diagnosis of psychosis in Jung.  If anything, Jung's attitude (as narrator-persona of the Red Book) is extremely sober, Swiss, Christian, upright, and skeptical of/resistant to the fantasies his imagination regurgitates.  This is not to say that he remains unaffected during his psychic journey.  His reactions are very emotive and dramatic (melodramatic at times).  But they are largely the emotions of (to put it a bit too plainly, perhaps) a prude . . . and not a decadent of any sort.  Anyone who has been through an individuation event similar to Jung's (psychotic or otherwise) should be constantly struck while reading the Red Book with how defiant and resistant Jung's narrator persona is to the whole endeavor.  It is not unfair to say that Jung's narrator spends the majority of his attention and effort refusing, denying, resisting, and being disgusted by much of what has fantasies ask of him.  He is not a true supplicant, an initiatory sacrifice.   His "triumph" (and perhaps his personal goal) during the journey is in consistently maintaining some degree of detachment and non-compliance with the "unconscious".

It must be noted that this makes Jung a very odd mystic.  By the standards of mystical convention, Jung remains in some not insubstantial way unchanged as he undergoes his Mysterium, defying the archetypal "intent" of the transformative initiation process.  This is not to say that he is utterly unchanged, but he is definitely not utterly changed, either (as an initiate into some form of Mysteries would typically be or feel; rather Jung's transformation is more characterized by an increase in confidence and sophistication that comes from succeeding willfully at a task he had set out to accomplish . . . Jung is concerned primarily with reaching his own standard of achievement or attainment and does not allow the achievement to be define for him by the psychic forces he engages with).  Of course, there is a historical precedent in initiate figures like Christ, Buddha, and many others of temptation by some form of evil during the initiation or identity transformation.  And this temptation is (archetypally) to be resisted.  But Jung seems to treat the entire phantasmagoria of his process as a temptation.  He is immensely skeptical of the whole affair.  It is odd, as Jung was critical of what he saw as a Christianization of mythical pagan personages that lumped and reduced them all into the Christian devil.  And yet, in the Red Book, Jung's narrator is overtly concerned that most of the personages of his imagination are "of the devil".  Jung's stance is that of somewhat less "heroic" St. Anthony.

This attitude (one might even call it anti-Jungian) compliments the significantly Christian orientation of the Red Book's narrative.  Much of this narrative and the process it describes depicts Jung as a Christian trying to come to terms with a psyche that is either non-Christian or only perversely Christian.  The Jung of most of the published Collected Works (the Jung we are more familiar with) was less prudishly Christian where matters of the unconscious were concerned.  Yet, at the same time, some aspect of his Christian prudishness stuck with him.  He maintained throughout his life that some degree of egoic resistance to the power of the unconscious had to be maintained in a psychically healthy individual.  Jung may have outgrown the state of mind that carried him through the creation of the Red Book in various ways later in his life, but the Red Book very neatly depicts his own prescribed methodology for dealing with the "irrational" and numinous unconscious.  Jung demonstrates his method of what could be called the maintenance of a "strong or resilient ego" during periods of psychic transformation.

I found this demonstration fascinating (and troubling).  On one hand, Jung proves that this kind of ego-resilience can be achieved . . . and I would have thought it utterly impossible.  Now I (and every other Jungian) can finally see what he meant by this ego-preservation and strengthening.  On the other hand, there are two significant problems with this prescription.  First, it is still entirely impossible for the many millions of people who aren't Carl Jung or aren't equipped with the same degree and kind of temperament, will, intelligence, and perseverance he was (and so the method is still unprescribable, at least in a psychotherapeutic context).  Second, this fortification against and detachment from the psychic process of radical identity transformation does not come without repercussions and externalities.

As I wrote previously in the Red Book Diary, I am not satisfied with Jung's treatment of the soul and anima figures in the Red Book.  He never values them to the degree I feel is warranted.  The other side of this coin is that he overvalues the wise old man/patriarch figures of his fantasies, especially Philemon (he seems to eventually see through the previous ones after flirting with them . . . flirting being the most accurate term for his relationships with them).  One can speculate from this that Jung might have had either a father fixation or some significant homosexual tendency (or both).  We know he had such feelings for Freud at one point (as he himself admitted in a letter to Freud).  I'm not inclined to make too much of this or sensationalize it or displace it into our more homosexuality-perceptive postmodern cultural context.  It doesn't matter to me if Jung had a more or less latent homosexual tendency.  I don't think that is any kind of secret passageway into the true workings of Jung's personality.

But I do feel that his intellectual and quasi-erotic attraction to these powerful patriarch figures coupled with his seeming distaste for more emotive and "irrational" female figures says a great deal about Jung's psychic constitution.  It is the kind of thing that would stand out to an analyst who observed Jung as a patient.  What it "means" is hard to determine (perhaps impossible) . . . but it is definitely significant.  We note, as we don this lens, that although Jung remains thoroughly un-seduced by the anima figures in the Red Book (even as he had always characterized the anima as a seductress), he is repeatedly seduced by the patriarch figures.  With a number of these patriarch figures, he has a "morning after" epiphany and then provides a corrective to the previous episode.  But the female figures never penetrate Jung or get him to comply with most of their requests.  More importantly, perhaps, what they have to say and represent is generally not well understood by Jung.  Even when he dismisses them, he fails to see all of them or see through them . . . and they seem to be more genuinely Other to Jung's ego position.

Observing this, we are forced to ask why it is that Jung characterized the anima as so seductive when in fact he himself was substantially more susceptible to patriarch figures and their magical "Logos".  There is in this an easily detectable worm in the apple of Jung's anima theory.  It is even fair to say that Jung seems to have projected his seducibility onto the anima, when in fact it was the Logos-bearing masculine that muddled his mind and attracted his "irrational" heart.  As obvious as I find this conclusion to be in both the Red Book and (along side the Red Book) in Jung's Collected Works, I feel doubtful that many Jungians will leap to the same conclusion.  There are many Jungian tribal affiliations and identity constructs that would have to be seen through and deconstructed before this "obvious" conclusion can be made.  But I feel it is obvious to anyone who is not caught up in those Jungian identity constructs unconsciously.  When Jungians will be able to intelligently and constructively discuss this topic I don't know.

This latent "complex" in Jung's psychology and in his individuation model ultimately raises the question of whether this model (as portrayed in the Red Book) is the only valid one to pursue.  That is, is "Jungian individuation" really an adequate representation of archetypal individuation?  To say the least, I feel Jung's model deserves substantial scrutiny and is probably in need of revision.  I have addressed that somewhat in other installments of the Red Book Diary, and it is only tangentially important to this review, so I will leave it at this for now.

To return to the issues of contextualization, we know that Jung primarily created the Red Book to help signify and study his own individuation experience and engagement with the unconscious.  But he seems to have frequently used it as a touchstone in conducting some of his analyses with patients and more personal interactions with colleagues.  He relied on the Red Book for help in orienting some patients (and himself) to their own irrational and numinous psychic experiences.  He did not necessarily say: "See how I did this?  Do it like that."  But he did treat the contents of the Red Book like pure archetypal manifestations of psychic complexes and scenarios.  In some sense, then, he conducted his analyses (and his mentoring of other analysts) out of the Red Book (not just as a physical text but as an experience of "THE Psyche").  He therefore obviously felt the book had some value in this regard.

In my opinion, valuing the Red Book in this way is very much akin to valuing it as a relevant case study (of individuation).  That is, he does not seem to have directly prescribed visionary experiences out of the Red Book to his patients and colleagues.  Rather, Jung saw the Red Book as a modeling text not unlike, say, Faust.  It did not necessarily represent capital-T Truth, but it portrayed something with universal or archetypal elements that could readily be related to other people's experiences of certain psychic phenomena.  It is my opinion, therefore, that Jung (at least in part) contextualized the Red Book as a case study relevant to the study of the individuation process and the treatment of analysands.  If he also felt the Red Book was a mystical indoctrination text, this does not show as obviously in Shamdasani's reconstruction of the Red Book's history of usage.

And yet, Shamdasani and the publishers have not really positioned the Red Book as a more or less "scientific" case study.  They have promoted it as a numinous text that will revolutionize Jungian scholarship and perhaps mysticism itself.  The book is designed by the publisher and editor to function as a totem, a religious object with some kind of mystery embedded within that possesses transformative powers.  The totemization of the Red Book is quite evident also in the sheer size and cost of the book, in its devotee-perfect facsimile-plus-translation construction, and especially in the (to my mind) odd and excessive promotion of the book's publication with "viewing" and lecture events structured as if some mystical convergence of the universe had occurred . . . and everyone should be excited.  The dawning of the Age of Aquarius, perhaps.  Thus my calling the events of and surrounding the publication of the Red Book a "happening".

But these things encourage us to ask if the specific construction and presentation of the published Red Book is not a displacement (and perhaps even a misappropriation) of Jung's initial contextualization.  I don't mean to proffer a fundamentalist gripe regarding the "amorality" of misappropriating a text.  It is not at all uncommon for objects of art to be appropriated by various ideologies.  An artist even expects this (or should) to some degree.  To create art is to give birth to something the artist no longer fully controls (and perhaps exercises no control over whatsoever).  Although such appropriation can also occur with more academic and philosophical texts, the blatant acquiescence to appropriations evident in the Red Book's publication and promotion seem to make a definitive statement: this is an object of art more so than an academic text.

And this is the arena of conflict with Jung's original contextualization that we as both audience members and potential critics should be most concerned with.  What is it, really, that this object of art called the Liber Novus is representing, and what is this representation saying?  What is being represented is not as much a text created by C.G. Jung as it is an art object (and aesthetic/philosophical statement) coined from the psyches of Sonu Shamdasani, the board of the Philemon Foundation, Norton, and not insubstantially, the collective Jungian and quasi-Jungian imagination.  That is, to some degree (and sometimes very directly and materially in the case of donations to the Philemon Foundation or contributions of effort to its projects and organization) Jungians as a collective have licensed Shamdasani to melt down and reconstruct a Golden Calf, a "craven image", a totem from the numinous stuff of Jungian fantasy and longing.  We should not be deceived by the fact that the Red Book is a dedicated facsimile of the original or that Shamdasani's scholarship bolstering and cradling it is profoundly thorough and excellent.  The Red Book is still a Golden Calf, a totem . . . because that is how it has been position and conceived, and that is how it has been received and how it was intended to be received.

Golden Calf analogy not withstanding, I don't have any intention of playing Moses and chastising all the Jungian idolaters.  What was done, despite having some potential offensiveness to Jung's memory and some of the feelings of the Jung family members, was not a sin.  It is, though, a fascinating psychic phenomena well worth the careful investigation and analysis of Jungians all over the world.  Such analysis, at least publicly published, is it seems, still forthcoming.  It doesn't bother me that the publication of the Red Book has been a totemization.  On some level, I am actually happy to see this, because it provides Jungians a rather transparent psychic artifact, holds up a mirror to our tribal identity, tells us what we want, what we need, where our dreams and fantasies reside.  But my perspective is probably far more analytical than that of most Jungians (curiously so, since I am not an analyst . . . but not being an analyst helps enable me to maintain a slightly more distanced/less participative perspective on the Red Book publication as phenomenon).

But the choice to promote the Red Book as an art object inadvertently (I think) enters it into the realm of aesthetic critique.  Although many Jungians have pranced and brayed about Jung-the-artist, those who are more artist (or art critic) than Jungian remain nonplussed by this new "art discovery".  As well, they should be (says my own inner art critic).  No doubt Jung was a surprisingly talented artist (and a pretty good fiction writer) for also being a world-renowned psychologist and theorist.  But he was not and is not a true contributor to the history of modern art.  Which is absolutely fine, because he had no interest in being any such thing.  This isn't to say that some latent talent for art couldn't have been developed by Jung . . . if he had had a different personality.

In this artistic contextualization of Jung and his Red Book, we need not be concerned that Jung's inner visions will be interpreted by the ignorant and the non-believers (the "uninitiated") as evidence of his madness.  But there is certainly cause for concern that Jungians will foppishly parade themselves out into the modern world with their flies down.  The embrace of the Red Book's artistic contextualization merely demonstrates how profoundly naive and out of touch Jungians typically are where the modern is concerned.  Personally, I only feel a small twinge of shame about this.  Mostly, I find Jungian daftness endearing in the way an absent-minded professor might be endearing.  Like this fictional professor, Jungian naivete regarding the "real world" does not mean that Jungians are fools.  The "real world" is not so hot . . . and "perfect" adaptation to its conventions is by no means something Jungians have coveted or should begin coveting.  But there is still some degree of the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon afoot here.

And I also wish that Jungians wouldn't have tried to reintroduce themselves (and their mystical founder) to the world in so naive a fashion.  Because I feel that Jungianism really does have something to offer the "rest of the world" (even the modern world) . . . and that it is more an issue of our habits, complexes, and blindnesses that prohibit this offering than it is the narrowminded stupidity of everyone else (who do not recognize the"true Christ" in their presence).  Jungians (who advocate such an opinion) are correct, I think, to place much importance on the publication of the Red Book.  The Red Book's publication can help revitalize Jungianism.  But the elixir belongs to and must be drunk by Jungians themselves, not the rest of the world.  The Red Book is not the Gospel . . . it is a potential wake-up call to Jungians alerting them to the fact that they have next to no grasp of their own psychic foundation and no conscious or constructive influence over the way they build on that foundation.

By making this event into a Golden Calf, Jungians tempt their own internalized shadow-Moses to stumble down from the real ecstasy on the mountain and be horrified with the abuses of "salvation".  But no one is that Moses in the flesh.  It is only a personage within all Jungians that roars out from depths within to say that we are on the wrong path, that we have lost the eternal flame, that we do not understand.  Like Prufrock's women who come and go talking of Michelangelo who tell him, "That is not it at all.  That is not what I meant at all."  It's an affective, perhaps even non-verbal voice from the Self that reacts to the ego position and indicates that we have "fallen from grace" and would do well to "get right".

But the publication of the Red Book beyond the Jungian tribe is not that important.  It does not "dare to disturb the universe".  It is not "Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all.”  And we Jungians are not Prince Hamlet.  We are merely an "attendant lord" in this whole unfurling Passion play . . .

one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

T.S. Eliot gives us a wonderful image when he compares the woman who tells Prufrock: "That is not it at all.  That is not what I meant at all."  He tells us that this revelation affects us "as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen".  That is, it projects and illuminates our complex (and our stuckness in it) outward into the publicly visible realm.  Outside of our own grandiose and Lazarus-like conceptions of ourselves, we are observing "the eternal Footman hold our coats and snicker".  We are revealing far more than we think we are.  And the objective, then, is not to become more expertly guarded, but to actually pay careful attention to what exactly it is we are revealing.  What may prove mildly embarrassing "publicly" is a vehicle for our own deeper reflections and possibly, our transformations.

But we have to be ready to look at ourselves, at our Jungianness and realize that although we may very well "have heard the mermaids singing each to each" . . . they do not sing to us (and did not keep singing to Jung, as the Red Book demonstrates).

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown.
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

I don't necessarily think Jungians are collectively ready to embrace their alchemical dissolution.  But the publication of the Red Book affords us a unique opportunity to become reacquainted both with ourselves as Jungians and with a more human version of our tribal founder.  In other words, the Jung we stand to discover (if we are lucky and willing to see) is not the Jung-as-Christ from his Salome and serpent vision.  Yet it is the Jung as true spiritual and psychological founder of our tribe and its identity totems.  We now have deep access to Jung's psyche, his complexes, his obsessions and egoic attitudes.  This Jung is a veritable Pluto of psychic wealth willing to pass on his inheritance to us . . . so long as we are not kneeling in a line with open mouths or upturned hands or ready to cross ourselves or shout hallelujah.

I do not mean to advocate disrespect, but the secret to creating the Philosopher's Stone is to learn to recognize the Philosopher's Stone on your own psychic dung heap.

The Red Book that C.G. Jung created was not an object of art (where art is a public consumable).  But the Red Book that Shamdasani and Co. have given us is.  Or rather, the phenomenon of the Red Book's publication they have given us is.  It's a kind of performance art . . . and it will not glorify Jung or Jungians.  But it is exquisite in the way it "throws the nerves in patterns on a screen" like some magic lantern.  And those illuminated and projected nerves are the nervous system of our Jungian tribe . . . which we have either forgotten about or never known.  These patterns await our investigation and communion like ancient hieroglyphs.  We will have to learn how to read a new language.  And the rest of the world will be as befuddled or misunderstandingly mesmerized by Jung as they have always been.

I think we are standing at the cusp of something new.  It may not be the Age of Aquarius.  In fact, it could very well be the beginning of the Jungian Ice Age and great extinction.  I only know, or feel, that it is an opportunity.  Nothing will be delivered.  Resigned to this inevitability, we have nothing left to us but to create.

What follows is an introduction to and overview of a revised Jungian theory of psychodynamics.  I consider it "under development", and although I feel positive enough about it to use its language to talk about the psyche, my relationship to it is complex, to say the least.  Much of this complexity has to do with my personal relationship with and attitude toward Jungianism.  For instance, it was never my intention to create a theory of psyche.  In fact, it was not initially my intention to be a revisionary or even a "post-" Jungian.  I simply was drawn to Jungianism for the useful tools it provided me in the understanding and "treatment" of my own psyche.  Since these tools were objects of practical application for me, issues of dogma, legacy, and even theory were of minimal concern.  I made small edits as I toured and used Jung's ideas, but thought nothing of them.  Most of these had to do with what I now call the animi work, and I attributed the flaws in Jung's anima and animus constructs to a dated sexism that he had also long fallen under the scrutiny of Jungians for (since the rise of feminism in the 60s and 70s).

Even as I had a fairly well developed (and recorded) conception of my anima work experience that was not altogether on the Jungian map, I assumed for years that what I had undergone was "entirely Jungian" and would be understood and embraced without anxiety by other Jungians if they had the opportunity to hear it out.  It was, in other words, not really a revision of Jungian theory, but another piece of data to add to the massive pile of similar data the anima theory was already reacting to.  It was a nicely elegant, very Jungian case study.

I would be lying if I said that I never had any interest in or attraction to innovation.  I am a poet (or was . . . it's complicated), and creation seems to drive me more than any other force.  But, like many Jungians, I came to Jungianism to find my tribe and to find healing through it.  Only in the last few years and since returning to Jungianism after nearly a decade where it played only a back burner role in my life did I start to recognize that my stance as a Jungian was unusual . . . and even in some ways radical.  With the creation of Useless Science and my ragged, spiraling brainstorms, investigations, and sermons, I pursued the innovator's path reluctantly.  It may not seem so due to my "verbal enthusiasm" (or vitriol, if you prefer), but I have pursued this path with great reluctance and much consternation, and I have proceeded thus for a fairly logical reason.  Namely, like so many others drawn to Jungianism, my dream was to find my true tribe, to find others like me, to find home and familiarity and a way to participate, an group-acceptable identity to participate through.  But I have found myself trapped between the practical drive to innovate and to pursue psychology with honesty and integrity on one hand and on the other hand to fit in and find fellows, companions, and collaborators who are enthused by the same mission I am.

It is an impossible place to be, especially for a compulsive innovator, a poet.  To give up innovation would be to assume a false self . . . and lose my soul.  That is not an option.  So I grudgingly follow my own path and agonize conventional Jungianisms.  There are two main reasons that I have taken such an agonistic tack in my attempts to contribute and survive.  Firstly and mostly, it is a matter of my complex or emergent personal myth, a kind of hero/scapegoat compulsion charged with instigation, innovation, and confrontation of unexamined norms .  Where my attempts to forge identity run into this archetypal dynamic, my gears grind and my anxiety increases "irrationally", but I also receive a turbo boost of drive (i.e., the survival instincts kick in).  This complex is my repeated undoing . . . and also my center of gravity, my engine.

The second main reason I persist agonistically is no doubt that I am scarred from my rather innocent fantasy of finding my true tribe in Jungianism.  Still, it would not be fully accurate to say that my agonistic writing is a product of bitterness due to my exclusion from the group Eros.  I know myself well enough to know that I would never be happy with the simple things I wished for.  To belong . . . it is an impossible dream for an innovator (see above re: losing my soul).  My relationship with Jungianism is more complex than this pop-psych diagnosis of bitterness.

My own diagnosis would be that I have projected into Jungianism a woundedness that is parallel to my own personal woundedness.  And this projection makes Jungianism a kind of clay or workable material through which I project the work on myself.  But this is no blind or utterly misguided transference.  It is the same kind of functional transference that successful analyses are based on . . . and it allows me to have empathy for the Jungian disease.  I have come to see Jungianism as if it was a living thing, a kind of ecosystem that suffers and struggles (with the modern and with its own shadow issues) and needs to find a way to adapt and evolve.  In this evolutionary survival process, I feel like a part of the tribe, a piece of the system . . . and a piece aligned on the side of survivability, adaptation, transformation.  An ally to the Self system's principle of organization.

In that role, I bring my numerous flaws and hold back the system with my egoic frailties, my selfishness and detrimental desires.  But I see the value in trying to work through these and find a way to contribute to the Self's ordering principle.  My fight with Jungianism, therefore, is primarily a fight with myself, a fight between my heroism and my Demon-beaten shadow.  And this kind of fight (as I have often noted on the forum) is one in which the heroic only manages to prevail if it can find empathy for the very shadow that is constantly tripping up heroic intentions.

Therefore, in my at times ferocious critiques of Jungian attitudes and ideas, I find myself caught between the heroic drive to contribute innovatively (and perhaps therapeutically) to the survivability of Jungianism . . . and the Demonic drive to chastise and punish the Jungian shadow (and my own Jungian-like shadow) for its weakness.  To the degree that I fail in my critiques by being too Demonic, I come to feel a deep regret for stepping on my own toes and on the toes of the heroic or adaptive drive of the tribe I feel linked into.  I have failed often.  But to be fair, it is a very fine line one must walk in this matter, because I remain utterly and rationally convinced that Jungianism needs to change some of its ways in order to make it in the modern world, in the future.  To make these changes, Jungianism will have to do its shadow work, look into its darkest mirrors, and stop pursuing and worshiping some of the things it currently holds sacred and unquestionable.  Healthy innovation in this case is critical by its nature, reformative . . . and some degree of passion, lamentation, and sermonizing is essential.  Such things cannot be expressed with cold dispassion, because the intent of the criticism is to spark adaptation and survival.  These are Eros issues, not intellectualisms.

As one of very few individuals who seems to be backing such a Jungian horse at this time, I must admit that I feel I have not done as well in my advocacy as I would have liked to.  My actions have not often matched my intentions.  Granted, heroic quests are not for real human beings . . . but I have no expectation to carry the tribe on my back.  I am more like a "concerned citizen" hoping to contribute a voice or a pair of hands to a just cause.  But I also have a citizen's outrage to bear, an outrage that belongs also to the tribe, to the Demonized Jungian shadow.  Balancing this archetypal/personal outrage with a desire to contribute to and help facilitate a tribal psyche is not an easy task . . . perhaps not even a human task.  Even in my repeated failures to find an ideal equilibrium, I suspect I manage to do this as well as anyone could.

Well, that's my preamble . . . and I have expressed, if nothing else, my consternation with my own theory-making.  But with that out of the way, I will proceed to the conception of a theory I have been calling Core Complex psychology . . . a moniker I am significantly dissatisfied with but have not been able to improve upon.  As a creative writer, I have always believed in the value of titles.  In my poetry, I have depended on the creation of titles to bring some degree of order to the formations that followed them.  But a title like Core Complex psychology feels like little more than a fog that obscures a conglomeration of some very complex archetypal psychodynamic weavings.

I would like to use this unnumbered installment of the diary to reflect on these feelings (it is being written after the 3rd installment).  Many of my reactions in this post will be personal.  I don't want to do much (and ideally no) textual criticism here.  I want to try to suss out what the Red Book meant to me both before I read it and after, how I positioned myself in respect to it and how it has changed me.

As the perhaps provocative title of this post intimates, one of the key questions for me at the end of the book was: does this elaborate mystical fantasy of transformation that Jung indulges in and soldiers through amount only to a failed individuation?  I don't mean that it was "just an illusion" or that it was delusional, psychotic, or meaningless.  I mean that it depicts a genuine individuation event, but that event does not bear fruit or even achieve what it set out to.

To compare the process and goal of the individuation event recorded in the Red Book with my own theory of the individuation (or simply the anima work) process, the conclusion would have to be that, indeed, the Red book ultimately depicts a failed individuation.  It bothers me, though, to be inclined toward this conclusion.

It disturbs me in some way, and yet everything I've been writing over the past couple years or so predicted this.  All the criticism I've written of Jung's theories and of Jungian theories has suggested that Jung and Jungians do not understand the animi work, have not developed a theory that describes it to its completion or that makes sense of it as a whole, and have bungled or at least left dangerously unfinished a viable theory of individuation.  The precedent for these failures is evidenced in the Red Book . . . and that also (if it is possible to establish logically, and it may not be) suggests that my hammering on about the complexes of Jungianism (the Jungian tribe) being firmly rooted in Jung's own complexes is a more viable argument than I even assumed it was.  After all, those failures that are described or implied in the Red Book remain major dark spots in Jungian thinking: the anima, individuation, Christianity, dualism, spiritualism, the hero, the somewhat unseaworthy attitude toward science, patriarchal egoism, lack of adequate differentiation in the shadow, a narrowminded and prudish attitude toward inflation.  These are all elements of what I have been calling the Jungian Disease.  In the Red Book, Jung deals extensively with all of these things . . . and in my opinion, he fails to find a functional paradigm with which to understand them and grasp their interrelationship.

One of the reasons the outcome of the Red Book should not really be too surprising to me is that I have essentially developed my revisionary theories as a treatment of this very disease.  The larger struggle that remains where these theories are concerned is a matter of convincing Jungians to take seriously that they actually have a disease or complex like the one I have described.  It is no doubt much harder for certified Jungian analysts to pathologize themselves and their tribal affiliations than it was for me to pathologize myself as I struggled with the accompanying fevers and delusions of the Jungian indoctrination I fed myself on.  I have always been my own primary guinea pig in the numerous attempts at treatment I've experimented with.  Although I think I applied the Jungian treatment successfully and to significant effect, having to devise ways to treat my own residual Jungianness has been more of a creative and often divisive process.

I think I am over the hump on this leg of the treatment, but the real trick is to treat the specific "poisonousness" of my Jungianism without amputating that Jungianism.  Amputation of any poisoned organ of tribal affiliation does not generally work.  We merely take our disease to a new tribal affiliation until its poisoning manifests.  Then we blame that new tribal affiliation or ideology or religion and fly off to find something we haven't polluted yet.  But even in a cultural or tribal complex there is a fusion between personal and tribal complexes that is inextricable.  I don't mean to prescribe a kind of Jungian treatment by returning to one's original religion, necessarily.  After all, it is unlikely that any tribe or institution has the answers readily available to the problems of its own complexes.

If one, say, has some kind of "Christian complex", going back to the Church or seeking any kind of return to faith is not likely to resolve it, because the Church has no solutions for its real devils.  But the symbols of the tribe or institution can be revised, reworked, pushed to evolve.  It takes a dangerous and potent imagination and an ability to "live in sin" or violate tribal taboos, but it is possible.  The alchemists are a case in point.  They tried to treat the Christian complex they were born into (which was generally a devaluation of matter, instinct, soul, the body, and the feminine).  There is no evidence that alchemists wanted to refute their Christianity or even saw their Work as in opposition to the Christian tribe.

To the extent that the alchemists succeeded in their experiment, a treatment of the Christian disease was devised . . . but its application or regimen was so convoluted and strange that it could not be distributed like some kind of Communion wafer at mass.  In order for alchemy as treatment of Christianity to be affective, one had to become an alchemist and devise elaborate, mystical variations on the general understanding of the alchemical opus.  Each had to, in essence, write his (or her?) own Red Book in which a personal Logos was developed.  I.e., alchemy was a mysticism.  The result, though, was esoteric writing that did not make adequate sense to most others.  Those to whom it did have some resonance still had to recreate the alchemical experiment in their own ways.  It wasn't self-help.

In treating the Jungian Disease, one likewise must find some way, despite what may overtly appear to be heresy, to feel and perhaps still be Jungian.  I'm not sure if other Jungians must be convinced of this.  But it is a necessity of the participation mystique or transference to the totem of the Jungian tribe.  If one individuates, one must do so in association with a tribe.  The tribe is needed in order for there to possibly be an individuated relationship to it.  We cannot individuate in a vacuum.  Even individuation is ultimately all about Eros, about how the individual relates to others and to the tribe with which she or he is most deeply affiliated.  And the validation of that individuation is still determined by the tribe, not by the individual.  The tribe validates the individuant by making use of the individuant's individuatedness, innovation, or revision in some (conscious or unconscious) way.  That is, the tribe must itself form a relationship to the individuant in order for that individuation to be entirely valid.  And if a tribe has an excessively difficult time forming relationships to its individuants, the tribe will gradually begin to ossify and crumble.  That relationship is what allows tribes to be adaptive and survivable in times of environmental crisis.

As for Jung, although there may be many others of note, two tribal affiliations stand out to me.   The first is to a kind of 19th century, rationalistic medical science that believes in rigorous, detached thinking as a kind of patriarchal virtue.  The second is to German romanticism with all of its occult fascinations, its Christian and pagan mysticisms, its arcane metaphysics and spiritualisms.  Jung was no doubt an individuant from both of these tribes.  That is, he stood in relationship to them by also distinctly apart from them.  But he did not, I think, manage to find a way to stand equidistantly between them.  He stayed a bit too much within the opposing tribes participation mystique when he criticized the other.  As a modern, one who stands among but not truly within the innumerable tribes of modern society, Jung's individuation was not completed.  That is, he did not succeed at understanding all of his tribal affiliations to the modern and differentiating them in himself.  He accepted some of his cultural constructions as granted and true.  Perhaps greatest among these accepted constructions was the patriarchal myth of the great man who with individual power subdues chaotic nature and renders it usable to human hands, anthropomorphizes it, perhaps even commodifies it.

In the Red Book, episode after episode of visions pit Jung against the implications and seductions of this tribal affiliation of which he is significantly blind.  And episode after episode, he fails to grasp its impermanence, arbitrariness, and constructedness.  Sometimes he ends these encounters feeling he has failed to understand something, and sometimes he leaves them feeling he has conquered and forced a transformation.  But the inflation of those achievements soon fades, and Jung is back to an abject state of frustration and despair again.

With each failure to comprehend the apparition of the Grail that passes before him, he does generally learn something, sees through some subtle illusion, lifts some veil.  And in this process, he develops (at least the foundations of) many brilliant insights about the modern and about the ways humans deceive themselves.  Yet he prides himself too much on his differentiating cleverness and seems to think he can solve every puzzle, slice through every Gordian knot with the fast blade of his intellect (a Jungian might say, "thinking function").  Sometimes this causes him to leave an encounter or conversation feeling like he has comprehended something of the "Mysteries" only to recognize in the next episode that this comprehension was inadequate or even totally incorrect.

Jung, the narrator of the Red Book, is a devout and very extreme "thinking type" at the beginning of the book.  He has numerous encounters with characters that make him feel complex emotions and affects and beg him to feel his way through various hells and puzzles rather than think his way through.  He understands that he must, in order to follow the hunger of his Self and his instinctual process of individuation, somehow integrate or form a more developed relationship to his "inferior feeling".  He concocts many mystical rituals and anointing conversations with gods, souls, and wise men that are at least in part meant to lead him toward his inferior function.  But he never really gets there.  He is (in my opinion) continually distracted by patriarchal godhead and gods, great men, prophetic attitudes.  He wants so passionately to work on the masculine god image that he seems to completely misunderstand that the relationship with the soul/anima is the true vehicle for this "knowing of God".  The message of the anima work is that one must feel and love God or the Self before any gnosis can occur.  The union of ego and Self does not come in the arena of mind, and although Jung's soul figure does try to convince him that this work is about love (not knowledge or enlightenment or transcendence), Jung can accept this only abstractly and intellectually.  He cannot erotically and Erotically unite with the Self-as-anima because he keeps looking for a patriarchal god figure, something more egoic, more like him and not so Other.

The Jung at the end of the Red Book is no more in touch with his feeling than he was at the beginning.  In fact, he seems significantly less so, because not only do his soul figures become demonized and perverted by the end, he actually finishes the Red Book (as if this could somehow make sense or be the fruit born from all that went before!) with the Seven Sermons to the Dead.  The Sermons are pure metaphysics, Gnostic theology, hierarchies of form in the Godhead.  There is nothing feeling-oriented about them at all.  They are pure "thinking type" texts, the thinking function at its most transcendentally inflated and detached from the earth of its feeling.

To the degree that Jung conceived individuation as some kind of integration of the inferior function or the formation of a more valuating relationship to that function, the process recorded in the Red Book is an abortion.  Without doubt, the thrust of the book's mysticism is all about such an integration/valuation . . . but Jung never accomplishes this in a tangible way.  We cannot say that he has become either more feeling or more conscious of his feeling intelligence as complex and valuable by the end of the book.  He does peak somewhere along the way.  It seems like he is making slow progress and may eventually "get it".  But the last chapter (Scrutinies) marks a distinct retreat into thinking type inflation and devaluation of its other.

This seems to bring to mockery Jung's notion of the transcendent function.  I've always felt that this concept was, although not really incorrect, at least overly mystified and woolly.  Jung's Red Book fantasies portray much of the transformative mysticism, dance out the usual symbols of transformation, but for me the whole process of this mystical transformation stayed almost entirely within the realm (and the grip) of the thinking function.  As he was contaminated with the numinousness of these images he may have felt like he was transforming, but I could detect no real evidence that any transformation of perspective had occurred.

Of course, this is not to say that Jung's individuation process stopped with the journeys recorded in the Red Book.  He lived (I believe) more than 30 years after he stopped working on the Red Book.  Also, it has been my experience that individuation events (like the mystical hazings of the Red Book) become more meaningful as time passes and one is able to language and process the experience better and in more practical ways.  These transformations feel immense when they occur, but then we go back to our everyday lives and find that we have not become gods nor devised any significantly better living strategies.  The real grunt work is done after we detach from the breast of the numinous . . . even as it feels much more mundane and terribly slow and small.

But, despite the inevitability that Jung continued to individuate in ways after his Red Book experience, those flaws that mark his failure to individuate or adequately valuate his inferior function (and soul) depicted in the Red Book always in some way remained a part of his theories.  Even his late works like Aion and Mysterium Coniunctionis bear the indications that those wounds that remained exposed at the end of the Red Book were still bleeding and unhealed.

Jung notes in his unfinished epilogue to the Red Book that he turned away from the project when he discovered alchemy, whose symbol system better allowed him to make sense of his inner world.  And yet, I detect in Jung's alchemical writing the same kinds of mistakes and failures of valuation he made in the Red Book.  Actually, the Red Book is extremely alchemical even preceding Jung's alchemical studies.  It gets at least one of Jung's mistakes with alchemy correct.  Namely, it shows that the Nigredo comes after the Coniunctio . . . or that the Coniunctio leads directly to the Nigredo.  In most of Jung's alchemical writings, the Nigredo is made to seem like a primary state of loss of soul or depression from which individuation then can begin.  This is sometimes more implied than directly expressed by Jung, but as I have written numerous times previously, this is a grievous and unforgivable error . . . even if it is only implied.  It has enabled Jungians to see every depressive introduction to the archetypal or instinctual unconscious as a "Nigredo experience".  But the true alchemical Nigredo is in fact a rather advanced mystical achievement dependent upon enormous sacrifices and painful differentiations and revaluations and enantiodromias.  The Blackening stage of the Nigredo is actually the first forged state of the Philosopher's Stone.  It is not merely the initial dissolution or dissent into the Mercurial bath.

Jungians (who have continued to misuse this symbol in their psychology and metaphor making) have introduced and perverted a mysticism in service of an indoctrinating process.  It is, to me, not only an intellectual and scholarly mistake, but an ethical failure.

Of course, no true Nigredo is depicted in Jung's Red Book (or it wouldn't be a failed individuation process).  There are plenty of deaths and rebirths, descents and ascents, treks through desert and hell.  And aspects of the Nigredo are intimated in the symbols flashing over the pages.  But it never completely feels right to me.  Jung fails to valuate the Other (as anima) and join with it . . . so he cannot find the Coniunctio or truly understand that its sacrifice means both the sacrifice of his newly valued anima (which is to be valued above all other things if the Coniunctio is to ever have the teeth it needs to be a valid threshold experience) and of his newly emergent heroism.  And if there is no true Coniunctio, there can be no Nigredo . . . which is the product of the Coniunctio.

These failings that come under the captivity of the thinking function may also be directly related to one particular fact.  Namely, that the Red Book (though it mentions dreams occasionally) is entirely an active imagination exercise.  Its fantasies develop out of a fully conscious Jung.  And even if that consciousness is relaxed somewhat in order to allow fantasies to well up, the power of consciousness to translate and direct images is still significant.  I have always felt skeptical about active imagination as a provider of genuine individuation material.  And I say that even as a poet and artist myself.  So I know that the instinctual Self can find its way into art . . . as can our autonomous obsessions and complexes.  In my experience, the Self enters conscious creation only in unexpected ways.  We might devise an active imagination fantasy in which we make a token sacrifice in the hope of conjuring a god, and then the god shows up where we can capture or converse with it.

But in art, we cannot call the gods to action with our will or even our need.  We can only make significant openings in ourselves, set out the right kinds of feasts, show the right kind of hospitality.  And this is done through various convolutions and accidents and slips of control . . . abaissment du niveau mental.  The gods only appear in ways we do not dictate.  And it is quite likely that we will not recognize them at first, even that we will despise and reject them in the form they appear.  Jung makes use of the story of Philemon and Baucis, who invited the disguised gods into their humble home and cooked their only goose for these strangers.  He (or maybe something below the surface in him) is on the right track with this symbol, but what is not adequately expressed by Jung is that, in the city of our psyche, there is only one small voice of hesitant valuation, one little impoverished couple, one Philemon and Baucis.  The rest of us rejects the gods, cannot ever see the gods, and even probably hates the gods.

We cannot become the great valuators of the gods (the Self), knowing them, anticipating them, conjuring them with magic (Jung makes Philemon a magician with such powers!).  We have to settle for very subtle, very occasional signs that must practically be divined.  Even to grant bodies, voices, and personages to affective dynamics of the Self system can be to force captivity and therefore devaluation upon the gods.  Perhaps some relative innocent could get away with asking a god to take human form and join a conversation, but Jung was a genius, a man of extremely powerful intellect.  That brilliance leaves substantially less room for the gods to slip into the manikins Jung molds.

It seems to me that conducting a mystical transformation through active imagination is simply too precarious, involves too much control, too much ego.  This sort of thing must be done through dream work or through ritual.  I can see a creative ritual in which some monument or offering is erected ceremonially to a mystical encounter of the past.  And the Red Book claims to be that.  But it is just so difficult to give these dialogs and fantasies utterly over to the unconscious, especially for a modern, very brilliant, very knowledgeable, but very lopsidedly "thinking type" man like Jung.  He just exerts too much egoic power over the theater to allow it to put on the divine play.

And yet, he does surprisingly well, considering.  It does seem to me that the gods and the Self process slip onto and off the stage.  They can occasionally be glimpsed behind the figures in the fantasies they have been impressed into playing.  At least until "Scrutinies", in which the presence of an Otherness seems to finally disappear altogether.  Still, even before that, it seemed to me that Jung's narrator was able to assert too much control over the dynamics of the encounters, and his projected others only got to say what it was he was willing to allow them to say most of the time.

I am also speaking from a personal prejudice here, because I have had a very (strikingly) similar experience to that recorded in the Red Book, but mine was done through dream work.  I never trusted my own conscious imagination and intellect to lead me or conjure true encounters with my soul (even as I hungered to be able to have such sorcery at the time).  What I call my anima work experience took place in a dream cycle, and the anima figures had total autonomy . . . while even my dream ego belongs to the construction of the dream and not my conscious will.  In the inevitable comparison between this dream cycle and the Red Book, I can't help but see that the dream sequence depicted a much more elegant and less muddled construction of the anima work.  It took me many years to even begin to be able to language that experience functionally, but even from the middle of the dream sequence, I had learned to valuate my anima.  And I never experienced any sort of deception or dangerous seduction from these anima figures.  There was never anything I had to resist, to fight off from the anima in a "manly fashion".  (I did have one dream in which an impostor-anima tried to emasculate me, but a genuine anima figure arrived before this happened and told me I shouldn't submit to it.  Anima Work Dream #4, Coniunctio and Sacrifice).

It makes me think that the complexity and complication (and length) of the Red Book is largely a product of Jung's resistance to and lack of valuation for his anima or soul.  By this resistance, he devised hell after hell to traverse, grand puzzle and grand temptation after grand puzzle and temptation.  But there is no puzzle to solve, no dangerous temptation to resist in the anima.  One merely commits oneself to valuing this figure and process utterly, essentially falling "madly" in love with her.  And then one refines that love and valuation, stripping away selfishness and control of the Other, demand that the Other provide, save, or complete the ego.  The anima work progresses on the quality of the heroic ego's love for the anima . . . and concludes only when the heroic ego comes to see that the ultimate state of love is one in which the desire for the Other to be connected to or even within oneself is seen through and recognized as a desire for that Other to provide for the ego.  To love is to ask (or demand) no providence.  It is to facilitate the Other in its specific uniqueness and drive . . . and not blindly or out of unquestioning belief, but out of a deep knowing of the Other's needs and potentials.

At that point, the initial model of romantic love can segue into the facilitating, valuating love of the Self.  Therefore, the animi-as-romantic-partner and twin or soul mate is relinquished and depotentiated, as is the heroic sense of self that woos that kind of partner.  What seemed at first like it would be a glorious Coniunctio, a hieros gamos, becomes instead an acceptance that ego and Self are and must be in some sense divided and differentiated in order to fulfill the deepest love.  This division is not a distancing, but a sense that it is relationship (meaning a self and an other) that is the engine of the personality, not transcendence or becoming or oneness.

In the Red Book, Jung never stops crying out, "Save me, teach me, forgive me, anoint me, obey me".  But he is generally not very responsible with what he does and says to the representatives of the Self.  And he can imagine himself in the role of receiver or demander or thief or murderer (thief of another's life or soul) . . . but as giver, facilitator, intentional healer, as one who treats the other in an enabling or constructive way, Jung is significantly impotent.  This is at times pointed out to him by his soul . . . but he doesn't get it.  And eventually he becomes Demonic and powerful enough to intellectualize, pervert, and mystify the soul's voice, effectively neutering the functional and Self-driven Otherness in his psyche.

That description makes hims sound like a fiend . . . and I don't think that was the case.  In fact, what Jung devised incredible devious and sophisticated ways to achieve and rationalize, most people do without even thinking.  They don't suffer guilt for the murder of their gods.  They are so detached from ever valuating the Self or the Other.  Jung's battle with valuation of this Other was a testament to his sense of ethics.  But in the end, after winning many small but important compromises at the negotiating table, he was simply conquered by the Demon.  But at least he was conquered and did not freely give himself to the Demon with excitement and desire like most people do.  Those compromises he won allowed him to imagine and understand the processes of individuation and mystical initiation very thoroughly (although not completely) on a thinking level.  His contribution won from these compromises is extremely important, and it gives us a way into this citadel of Self.  It may only be a way paved with words and intellectualized thoughts, but it is a way.  And if one has a facility with language, an ability to not fall into transfixed fixed revery at big words and ideas but to put them to use, make them practical, survivable, adaptable, changeable, this tunnel Jung constructed is a great boon, a red carpet rolled out for us to stroll easily down, that ushers us functionally in.

It is more as a mysticism that Jung's psychology flounders.  As a psychology and an attempt at a science of soul, it offers great possibilities.  It is a wonderful foundation and first step, and as a science, it lends itself to being revised logically and as needed.  But as a dogma, as a fully elaborated way and model of individuation, what Jung left us is poisoned.  Not incurably so, at least I hope.  But it is infected.  And to the degree that we use Jungianism as a mysticism and not a science (which is considerable and, I think, even underestimated by those who claim to resist and dislike Jungianism's mysticisms), we perpetuate the Jungian Disease.

Still, I feel grateful for having some truly useful foundations and for having a diseased Jungianness to treat.  It is a great blessing to have something treatable at hand, because many indoctrinated Jungians are analysts.  They are better equipped than we tend to imagine for the treatment and even redemption of the Jungian tribal soul.  But our pride and poisoned mysticism clouds this for us.

I will leave this emotive response off here.  And although I only give the most fleeting valuation of the blessing of treatability the Red Book offers in the previous paragraph (after excoriating Jung for his devaluations of the Other in the many words preceding), I do want to reiterate that this treatability is what most stuck with me in the end.  Yes, the road ahead is intimidating . . . and I have little faith in the Jungian ability to diagnose and treat the Jungian complex effectively.  But the Red Book's depiction of disease illuminates the structure and origins of this disease.  It makes treatment possible and logical.  At this point, Jung and his personal demons no longer stand in the way of Jungian treatment of the tribe and the progressive revisioning of analytical psychology.  Now, only the Jungian demons we have inherited remain.  The battle with these demons has come down from the unreachable ethereal heavens and relcoated itself into our individual psyches.  We fight, therefore, with ourselves to effectively treat Jungianism.  And although these fights with ourselves are the easiest ones to lose . . . they also make victory a possibility.

The second fascinating episode of the Red Book (after the previous dialogs with the soul) involves the already somewhat familiar fantasy encounter with Elijah, Salome, and the black serpent that Jung discussed in MDR (as well as at a conference in 1925).  What I would like to do here is an off the cuff analysis of Jung (and his psychological construct of the anima) based on this fantasy or active imagination.  I don't mean this to be anything like a thorough or clinically adequate analysis of either Jung the man or of Jung's analytical psychology . . . but there is a decent chance that it is possible to shed some light on both of these by looking analytically at this fantasy.  I won't reconstruct the plot.  I'm just going to jump right in.

I propose that Jung's anima is not equivalent to Salome (as depicted in this fantasy of a sequence leading up to the mysterium or deification of Jung or Jung's thinking function).  This didn't occur to me until I saw the full text of this sequence as depicted in the Red Book.  But now I feel it is more accurate and functional to see Elijah, Salome, and the black serpent all as dissociated aspects of the anima figure or process in Jung's psyche.  I am here, of course, applying my own revisioning of Jungian anima theory and making no attempt to adhere to traditions and conventions in Jungian thought.

So, along these lines, I see the anima (and animus) as prefigurations of or envoys to the Self.  I agree with Jung that the animi figure is primarily a transitional figure in the psyche and that it represents a process that has some sense of a beginning and an end.  Systemically, it characterizes a process of state change or phase transition where the system reorganizes itself in a seemingly sudden cascade.  Therefore, it can also be seen as a threshold experience or initiation (when viewed in a more colorful and perhaps tribal way).  We also have alchemical symbolism and chemical reactions to look to for metaphorical grounding.

Two preliminary questions must be asked and addressed.  1.) Why are these three figures all parts of the anima? and 2.) If these three together represent a whole, why do they appear here as divided?

As to the first question, some functions of the anima (or animus) when metaphorically personified are as follows (this is a non-exhaustive list).

1. To present the Self-as-Other to the ego as something incredibly valuable and attractive, something that must be present or connected with in order for the person to be truly "whole" or healthy.
2. To help break down the rigid egoic structures that have stalled the personality in a state of Bad Faith (I call this stasis-making influence in the personality, the Demon . . . and Jung, to the partial degree he differentiates it in the Red Book, calls it the "spirit of our time" and contrasts this with the "spirit of the depths", a kind of Self system; he might also consider it a "persona", but this I feel is inadequate).
3. Along with #2 above, to catalyze a reorganization or state change in the system of personality through what seems initially to be a seduction or poisoning that works to dissolve the prior too-static structure and organization of the system.
4. To woo the ego away from an attitude of Parental dependence on the Self and a desire for the Self-as-God/-Parent to provide sustenance, inspiration, salvation, and libido to the ego.  (See the excerpt quoted in installment 2 of this diary in which the soul says to Jung's narrator, "You speak to me as if you were a child complaining to its mother.  I am not your mother." [p. 236])
5. To activate the archetypal hero or heroic ego (Jung means something entirely different by this term than I do), who is the true lover of the anima . . . and eventually (after the anima work is complete), the devoted facilitator of the Self system.
6. To inspire, co-create, and help conceive (along with the hero in the completed Syzygy) the beginnings of a "Logos" or languaging in which the ego can translate (to some degree) and respond to the needs and "thoughts" of the Self.  Therefore, the anima (in its envoy role to the Self) serves as the initial translator of the Self's affective prelanguage.  The anima makes this language more personal and familiar to the ego.  But the culmination of the anima work (or animi work) is the inheritance of responsibility for the translation and languaging of the Self's organizing principle by the ego.  The acceptance and fulfillment of this responsibility is what I mean by the term "heroic".

We can see in light of this abbreviated list that the functions performed in Jung's mysterium fantasy by Elijah, Salome, and the black serpent are all aspects of the anima process and figure.  Salome as "other" (especially to Jung's prudish, rationalistic thinking function/narrator) represents the affect and sensuality of the anima, the desire for the hero and the attraction of that hero.  She is the invisible borderline where the erotic becomes the Erotic, where romantic and sexual desire becomes "spiritualized" or equated with the instinctual necessity of a functionally interrelated and homeostatic Self dynamic.

Elijah represents the Logos-bearing function of the anima, that which translates the affect of the Self-as-God into the Word.  As the father of Salome, he also represents (as is made more overt in a subsequent fantasy) a kind of alchemical Old King for whom Jung's heroic ego is the replacement and rejuvenation, the New King.  This accords with anima function #6 above.  The inheritance of responsibility for the Logos is part of the animi work.

The black serpent represents the instinctual, regenerative, and transformative aspect of the unconscious as initially portrayed through the anima figure.  Her "love" and partnership is not merely a "completion" or blissful fulfillment of selfish longing (and seeing it as such will prevent the anima work process from completing itself).  This union is a kind of sting, a scarification, or initiation wound.  The anima wound or Coniunctio can take numerous forms, but what is really being marked on the ego is a kind of initiation event and passage into psychic adulthood.  What is taken away (the healthy unmarked, "virginal" flesh where the wound will now be) is the provident relationship to the Self-as-Parent/Provider.  It is like the mother's nipple plucked out of the infant's mouth, a kind of weaning.  In the place of this absent breast, a terrible new burden is left: the burden of responsibility for the welfare and facilitation of the Self system.

This would typically correspond with an individuation event where the individual is severed extensively from his or her tribal affiliations (which were part of the complex that maternally provided the milk of Eros and the sense of tribal identity on which the rigid system of personality has become overly-dependent, necessitating the state change into a more dynamic and adaptive system).  That is, the initial environmental imprint of the Self is the mother, then the family, then the tribe.  We develop (more or less unknowingly) a somewhat infantile dependence on the sense of identity and protection these things provide.  But in the individuation event of the animi work, the Self is being re-imprinted because the old imprinting has left too many dissimilarities between the Self system and its tribal construction.  The Self system is inherently adaptive, dynamic, and fluid . . . while socialization and tribal indoctrination is a matter of laws, rules, specific procedures and role plays, status and hierarchy . . . things that are static and not animate of themselves.  The animi work strips much of the imprinting and "languaging" away from the Self image and allows a new, more individual, and more dynamically adaptive myth to be established in its place.  This myth of self-creation is what I mean by the term Logos.  But at the end of the animi work, we have not yet developed a Logos though which we can functionally interact with the Self.  The animi figure always did this for us . . . and that service is no longer provided.  What follows this animi work is a period of gradually figuring out how to construct a viable Logos in conjunction with the input and needs of the Self.

In this sense, the symbol of a "prophet of God" is one who has established a Logos that effectively conveyed and facilitated the instinctual Self system, allowing it to enter the world/environment as a mechanism of adaptation.  But environment changes . . . especially as we mature and pass from infanthood into adolescence and on to adulthood (all of which constitute different human environments).  Therefore, the Old King (languaging relationship of the ego to the Self) must be dissolved and reconstituted by a more adaptive New King.

The skin-shedding serpent represents the ability to change states or alchemically "transmute" into something rejuvenated.  But its power or mana (as we can derive from its blackness) is chthonic, deeply instinctual, somewhat reptilian.  That is, it is a fully autonomous process at its core in which no egoic intelligence is detectable.  It is alien and devalued/othered.  It is the Self or animi as process or mechanism rather than as familiar and somewhat egoic personage.

These elements can all be seen fairly evidently in the triad from Jung's fantasy.  But do they have to be split in this way, and if not, why have they been?  In my own anima work experience, there was no such division.  But there was a transition at one point from a more erotic/sexualized anima figure to one that was a Logos-bearer who taught me (in a dream) something about that role.  That dream made it clear that clinging too tenaciously to the sexual/attractive aspect of the anima amounted to a missing of "the point" and a temptation of dependency.  She had always been a Logos-bearer, but I had not initially realized this, as I had too intellectual and verbal a notion of language (or, as the anima herself phrased it, my thinking and language was initially filled with "Germanisms").

But in Jung's fantasy, something more severe is impeding the fluid wholeness of the anima . . . and Jung has a very hard time seeing his own "Germanisms" (though there is a moment in the Red Book during which his overly Germanic thinking or attitudes are brought under scrutiny!).  I have the feeling that we see Jung's anima divided into three characters (only one of which is clearly female) because of the extent of his personal and cultural prejudices and misogyny.  He simply cannot understand that the Logos is borne by the anima . . . even as his visions proceed to beat him over the head with this (again, he may have some breakthroughs later in the text on this account, but I have not finished reading the whole book yet).  He also (we can presume from the differentiated black snake figure) struggles to understand that there is a transformative element in the erotic.  Sex and woman are devalued objects for Jung here.  He is really only able to value Elijah, the so-called wise old man figure.

But before the mysterium fantasies, Jung dialogs with his soul as a unified entity (see transcription at the end of the second installment of this Red Book Diary).  Following the mysterium fantasies, Jung reconstructs the same basic scenario of Elijah and Salome as a sleepless evening spent in the castle of an old scholar who is obsessed with his books and his "kept" daughter, who yearns to connect with the outside world (through Jung-as-stranger).  I think I will write separately about that episode in greater detail, but for now it is worth at least mentioning that the old scholar from that fantasy (who Jung associates with Elijah at one point) is so obsessed with his books that he ignores Jung's presence and doesn't enter into any intellectual conversation with him (which Jung whines about to the daughter in a later scene).  There is the Old King showing his age and his impaired Eros.  After Jung finally comes to accept the daughter as a vision of his soul and grant her a bit of valuation (it's an epic struggle!), she concludes their meeting with the conveyance of regards from Salome.

My hunch is that the anima work cannot be brought to fruition and completion if the anima figure is not fully valuated and allowed to be the Logos bearer it truly is.  This work is all about valuation of that which is other to the ego . . . and Jung gets this, but must keep it in a glass-walled case of rationalization and intellectualization.  It is fine to learn by small steps, but I worry that Jung's resistance is so severe, that he will never get to the journey's end at this pace and with this prejudice on his back.  I mean to suggest that there is something essential missing or broken in Jung's dissociation of the anima into erotic female, wise old man, and snake.  It is like an engine with the spark plugs removed.  It can't really rev.  The car won't run.  The system can't convert fuel into fire and drive the mechanism.

I am also encouraged to speculate on something that I have always distantly wondered about: the place of the wise old man in the Jungian pantheon.  It is one of the signature Jungian archetypes . . . and it has always struck me as a pocket of disease where Jungianism has a complex.  I have long felt that Jungianism has an artificial identification with the senex . . . and a corresponding shadow projection onto the puer.  Yet, from the perspective of one outside the tribe, Jungianism is clearly a puer enterprise.  It is only within the tribe that we feel our indoctrination and membership enable us to be wise and old.  Far from being a mid-life philosophy, I feel Jungianism is very specifically adolescent.  The desire to identify with the senex is a failure for us.  A failure to individuate, a failure to valuate the puer, a failure to look into our own tribal shadow in a constructive way.

In my own anima work, although older male Self figures (usually portrayed in dreams by my father) played significant roles from time to time (although not usually as teachers), I never had a wise old man figure emerge.  In waking life, I certainly experienced some father/mentor hunger at various stages . . . but I also saw how my desire for this led to destructive projections or could have (in which I demanded far too much from any potential "initiators")*.  Perhaps my fantasy of Jung himself most of all fit this role and transference for me when I was younger . . . but this fantasy was never one of discipleship or initiation.  Rather, it was more of a commiseration on one level and a feeling of valuation for my "individuation sufferings" on another level.  This fantasy-Jung had no answers for me, just a sense that there was precedent and meaning in my dark, meandering path.  When I pursued an active imagination exercise (in the writing of a song) exploring (among other things) this fantasy of Jung, I met him inside the belly of a whale and he said he would grant me a wish in return for a favor.  His problem was that he was supposed to be dead, but couldn't seem to find his way into the underworld.  He had gotten lost or trapped in a dream in which he was dreaming that he was me.  He told me, "Your life is stupid.  You're a fool."

*This will likely be the topic of a future installment of this diary, as Jung's narrator goes on to petition numerous potential wise old men teachers, throwing himself deferentially at their feet like a disciple-in-waiting, only to eventually see through the "wisdom" they represented.  He comes to identify as a devil because of this irrepressible dark urge to undermine or see-through his paternal masters.  My suggestion (to be elaborated in that future installment) is that this devilish unraveler of dogmas in Jung's psyche is, although he doesn't seem to recognize it, his anima.  There are also interesting parallels between these episodes of failed discipleship in the Red Book, and Jung's falling out with Freud.

I asked him (a la Parsifal) if I should search for a Grail (if I was to be a fool, that is).  Instead, he handed me a photograph of the "underground phallus" from one of his earliest dreams recorded in MDR.  I asked him what I could do for him and my thigh started to bleed.  He replied, "You got Visa, they don't take American Express?"  But I had not "credit" on me, so he then asked for my body in order to make a peace offering to the dead.  I gave this to him in the form of a "crate full of lead".  And the wish I made in return for this favor was to be back in my bed.  The wish was granted: I was back in my bed . . . in the belly of a whale!

A series of misadventures ensued . . . and as I finally started to "get it", I met Jung again.  He was floating down the river Styx on the crate full of lead I had given him while in the whale.  My anima (as Persephone) and I waved to him from a ship we were sailing on, and he threw us a cup.  Persephone filled this with Ambrosia and we both drink as Jung passed, finally, into the land of the dead.  This song (called "Talkin' Hades Return to the Underworld Blues") could be seen as an example of my own "mysterium" or "deification" fantasy corresponding to the fantasy Jung relates of Elijah, Salome, and the black serpent (I have to say, though, that my song is significantly less portentous and more humorous than the Red Book . . . but nowhere near as pretty . . . and this says something interesting about both myself and Jung).

The deification fantasy that Jung does describe in the final mysterium fantasy requires further reflection.  Even as he seems an unwilling participant in the process to some degree, there is undeniably a grandiosity to it all (as there is in my song, where I "find myself" by remembering I am Hades).  Two things must be said about this symbol and the grandiosity that surrounds it.  First is that I believe some of this grandiosity to be a usually side effect of the numinous experience of initiation . . . but I also think that the grandiosity of Jung's fantasy is inadequately tempered by the right kind of humility.  That "right kind of humility" is one that (in this case) needs to supplant the temptation to intellectualize the experience and make wordy, abstract, metaphysical philosophies out of it.  There is just a bit too much "interpretation" in Jung's thinking function assessment following the deification fantasy.  He dulls and distorts it . . . and has a hard time disentangling the symbol of deification (what I would more subtly call heroic initiation or response to the heroic Call) from the exaltation of his thinking function to a level of spiritual truth-saying.  That latter turn or interpretation is, I believe, the temptation of inflation or Demonic colonization of the heroic knighting experience.

For instance, becoming the new "prophet" replacing Elijah is a bit too presumptuous.  The status of "prophet" in one's own psyche is reserved for the heroic ego who has developed an intricate and sophisticated Logos through which the Self system's dynamism is facilitated.  The heroic knighting or response to the Call that is, I think, the real psychic event Jung's fantasy is depicting, is merely the beginning of a journey that will (if fulfilled) end in the Logos-bearing . . . and only after the anima is fully valuated and united with.  And then, to bear the Logos is, especially at first, to bear not-knowing, to have no adequate language, to be lost in blackness and instinctual affect and shadow.  It is no mastery, no "truth-saying".  In Jung's interpretations and elaborations of his mystical encounters in the Red Book, there is an abundance of languaging . . . and that abundance helps resoundingly demonstrate this languaging's inadequacy and Jung's "thinking-type" fear of or defense against not-knowing.

But in fairness, the response to the Call does essentially allow the "Holy Spirit" to descend upon the heroic ego in baptism . . . and that will always lead to intuitions about what the completion of the anima work will bring . . . and numerous Demonic attempts to skip ahead and identify with that fantasy of the completed Self and mystical Goal.  I don't therefore mean to condemn Jung only to inflation.  But I do feel that this mysterium deification should not be interpreted by Jungians as indicative of an "individuation" or spiritual/mystical transcendence.

One thing that Jung either misrepresented or I have misremembered in his MDR retelling of the Red Book deification fantasy is Salome's worship of the deified Jung "as Christ".  In the Red Book, Salome does tell Jung he is Christ (and he replies to her in a way similar to Christ's reply to Pilate: "You, Salome, say that I am Christ?").  She wraps Jung's feet with her hair as the black serpent coils around his body and his face becomes like that of a lion and blood flows from his body.  And when she rises up from this act, she is no longer blind (the symbol of her blindness, by the way, doesn't strike me as any kind of archetypal anima blindness . . . rather it is Jung's projection of blindness and lack of insight upon her.  This blindness personifies the blindness of Jung's thinking function).  Elijah tells Jung his work is done for now.  As Jung leaves feeling somewhat deeply moved but perhaps somewhat unworthy and out of place, Elijah erupts into a huge white flame while Salome, enraptured (and with the snake wrapped around her foot), "kneels before the light in wonderstruck devotion".

Even in the role of Christ, it is as if Jung play only a bit part, acts as a kind of cog in the mysterium ceremony, which seems to have more to do with Elijah, Salome, and the black serpent.  Salome's role here is that of a recipient or bearer of the Logos flame.  Her eyes are opened for it.  And just as she is granted her sight, so is Elijah transformed into pure fire and light.  Jung is not yet ready to take on this responsibility.

Below, I make an error in understanding the notation for the layout of the Red Book.  The painting pictured here is not what I originally assumed it was.  The painting actually depicts the hatching of the egg into which Jung placed Izdubar to carry him inside a house in a later passage.  Jung worships what is released from this hatching; it is not Salome.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this diary of reflections on the Red Book in such haste is that I wanted to allow room for even mistaken reactions like this.  What I learn from this particular one is that the strong emotional reaction I had to Jung's interaction with Salome and his soul (and his misogynistic attitudes in general) led me to associate in my own mind Jung's dream of his father and this painting.  Jung, in fact, has much less of a problem bowing down before images of masculine transcendence and power (as he continuously gravitates toward wise and/or learned men in the Red Book journeys).

Still, this is more of an error of scholarship/citation than a substantive mistake.  As I wrote in my reflections on Jung's dream of his father, the failure to completely bow down to Uriah-as-the-Highest-Presence is a failure to observe the supremacy or greater value of the true hero and sacrificed partner of the anima over the "Great Man", David, who steals/usurps the lusted after Bathsheba and has her husband killed/betrayed in a most cowardly of ways.

I have been learning as I progress through the Red Book that my desire for Jung to "get it", to find a way to valuate his anima as I feel it should be valuated, is an obstacle in the path of my understanding of the text.  I think my assessment of Jung as somewhat "anima-impaired" and prone to misogyny is valid . . . but the Red Book seems to have at least as much to do with Jung's relationship to his own heroism and his relationship to masculine images of divinity, wisdom, and power/mana.  I'll continue to investigate this as this diary progresses.

What I wrote below about the anima as Logos-bearer also remains valid . . . although Jung may not have recognized this.

I am also reminded in the painting of this scene (in which Salome's head is touched to the floor in supplication to the Logos flame) of Jung's dream of his father, the fish-skin bible, and Uriah as the Highest Presence that I previously posted some reflections on.  In that dream, although Jung's father assumes such a position in regard to Uriah-as-Highest-Presence, Jung cannot quite bring himself to touch his head to the floor.  It seems to parallel his attitude toward the anima-as-Logos-bearer.  Just as Jung was witness to Salome's devotion to the Logos flame, he is a witness to his father's devotion to Uriah.  But this witnessing is not the same thing as participating.  Perhaps Jung felt that such participation would have been a sacrifice of his autonomy and right to choose, but this is unconvincing to me.  One must participate in order to be fully transformed.  Autonomy and analysis can come later.  We cannot language these things before or even while we live them.  If we try to do so, we merely create a barrier between ourselves and the fire of transformation, the fire of instinctual affect, which is the force of the Self's organizing principle.

Jung seems to be constantly in conflict with his drive to participate in his own mysticism.  He moves from denials and protestations to distancing interpretations and displacements.  Rarely does he seem to exist in the moment.  It's odd because the Jung of the Collected Works is not what I would call a skeptic.  In these books he seems to usually participate in the subject matter and even falls into flights of poeticism, distraction, and digression.  As a writer, he is often at the mercy of a kind of creative momentum that appears to be a horse that directs its rider.  Of course, this feeling is more readily derived from his later writings . . . while the stuff of the Red Book mostly came on the heels of his split with Freud and "confrontation with the unconscious".  But the dream of his father mentioned above was a dream from late in his life . . . and where the anima was concerned, all of Jung's writing and lecturing seems to have exhibited this inability to completely touch his head to the ground, to valuate.

One last thing to mention in the context of this mysterium fantasy is something that also comes up in various places in the Red Book.  This is the idea of becoming Christ or a Christ instead of worshiping Christ.  This is a bit of Gnosticism that Jung wrestled with.  It intrigued him, but I sense a lot of consternation in his experience of this "Christhood" . . . and the Jungian disease I have written about elsewhere has a distinct problem with its temptation to identify as Christ rather than as Christian.  Jungians typically meet this temptation by thrusting the symbol of Christhood into the shadow.

Jung himself made what I feel is a drastic (but of course, common) error in equating the self (I prefer to use the capitalized Self) with Christ and with the "Christhood" of the whole personality.  The figure of Christ is not the same thing as what I call the Self . . . and this Self can never be "me".  It is not something I can become, even as it is always something that is "also who I am".  The Self is always Other on some level.  But the symbol of Christ is actually a representation of the "ideal individuant" or heroic ego sacrificing itself to valuate and facilitate the Self system.  As a devout "anti-Gnosticism" the Catholicism that Jung inherited contains an inextricable element of propaganda against Gnostic identification with Christ.  The Catholic Christ is exalted beyond human reach through totemization and taboo . . . and his gory Passion and crucifixion function as kinds of ornaments or scarecrows meant to ward off the Gnostic impulse.

But that Gnostic impulse is a natural event in any individuation process.  The heroic ego must be identified with for the animi work to progress.  By tabooing the individual identification with Christ, the Church tabooed the hero, and effectively thwarted the individuation process by associating the natural emergence of the heroic attitude with shame and terrible sin.  This is not merely an accident, as it was the desire of the Church to act as a monopoly where the communion between man and God was concerned.  Gnosticism was a great danger to the success of the Church because it encouraged individuals to self-create their spirituality, to self-validate.  Gnosticism did not seek to profit from implanting itself into a gatekeeper role.  But there is no doubt that the Church did profit, and it profited enormously . . . even as it also served a pivotal role in the destruction of a "middle class" and the lopsided redistribution of wealth in the Western world . . . the establishment of a wide scale serfdom.

There is more to the Christian self-deification taboo than pure sinfulness, but Jung doesn't really deconstruct the Church and its theology.  He seeks merely to revise it.  And even as his inclinations (as those of any individuating person) lean toward the Gnostic disposition, for Jung it is a matter of righteousness and true faith to properly reconcile this Gnostic revisioning with Catholic religiosity and theological dogma.  Jung directed most of his Christian criticism at Protestantism, but he did not exert much effort to deconstruct Catholic Christianity and Church doctrine.  And this is where the self-deification taboo and the anti-Gnosticism originate.

Therefore Jung (with the Jungians after him) has attempted to understand and pursue individuation without resolving the Catholic taboo placed on the hero.  This leaves Jungians in conflict with themselves, continuously see-sawing between the temptation to self-deify and the crushing, Demonic shame that holds that bit of Gnosticism to be inflated, immoral, and mad.  Of course, before Gnosticism, the Mystery religions carried out deification initiations where the madness of the god (Dionysus) was engaged ritualistically as a transformative agent . . . and this process, it seems, did not involve all the self-flagellation that Catholicism would introduce.

I would propose that the taboo and the intense shame surrounding the stuff of individuation as well as the tremendous temptation of grandiosity individuation seems to offer are not actually the products of necessity or inevitability.  These are cultural artifacts (largely, not entirely), the baggage of Catholic inheritance.  As this heroic self-deification was tabooed by the Church, it had no way of ritually bringing individuals into and out of the madness of identification with the god.  Here, Christianity is an irresponsible parent that can only shame but doesn't know how to nurture or "hold".  There is no Christian vessel of transformation for the individuant . . . and that makes the wilderness of the heroic journey all the more terrible and difficult to endure for Christianized Westerners.

Regrettably, Jungians have inherited a wholesale version of this from their founder, who was a deeply Christianized thinker.  Jung definitely made inroads in the heroic journey against the sway of Christian taboo and dogma, but he did not manage to differentiate the self-deification taboo in the roots of the Christian inheritance.  The result was a dissociation, an exaltation and prescription of individuation on one hand, but a shadowed and repressed individuation swampland on the other.  On the Jungian map of individuation, "There be dragons" is written over all the uncharted boundaries.  But what Jung was not adequately clear about was that these uncharted areas of the Jungian world are unavoidable for those who choose or are compelled to pursue individuation.  Therefore, for most of the Jungian tribe (who respect the map's dogmatic warnings about boundaries and dragons), individuation is a totem that can only exist as a sacred tribal object but not as a truly Jungian path of identity.  Individuation is a god we worship rather than a road we walk . . . just as Christ is an object of distanced worship for Christians to be petitioned with prayers and sheepishness, and not a true model to follow.

But if Jungians could find a way to look farther back into the ancient mystery religions, we could at least begin to imagine that the deification can be ritually "held" as a threshold of transformation.  How that could be done in the modern world is up to our invention . . . and it won't be easy.  But the pre-Christian (as well as the alchemical) past allows us to entertain that the successful navigation of such thresholds is at least possible.

What we Christianized moderns so often fail to realize is that becoming Christs is not as exalting as we imagine it to be.  It is the Church and its propaganda that tabooed and exalted Christhood far beyond human reach.  But for initiates into the Mysteries and for early Gnostics, "Christhood" was something that many people could participate in without becoming "superior beings".  Christhood, after all, is not about the power and the glory of transcendence.  It is actually about the facilitation of the god, of God, or of the sacred on earth . . . the facilitation of the instinctual, adaptive Self system in the environment.  Platonic Christianity ripped spirit away from its grounding in instinct . . . and in the process, created the spiritual disease of inflation and psychotic grandiosity.  But that grandiosity that Jungians so fear is properly understood as the product of a dissociation that resulted from the devaluation of instinct (the fall of Sophia or the soul into lifeless Matter).  As the Gnostic myths tell us, the freeing of this soul from Matter or instinct is the province of the Logos.

Jung's Salome is a soul figure who has fallen into Matter (as blinded, beheading, desirous sensuality).  She has been devalued and not allowed to have sight and language.  But she hungers to unite with the Logos . . . and as a figure of Jung's soul, she desires to be redeemed in the ensouled Logos of Jung's language and thought.  But he fails to create an adequate vessel for her to be born in or redeemed through.  We only glimpse her through the cracks in his resolve, where she is surrounded by shadows.

Maybe Jung found ways to enlarge these cracks as he proceeded through his life and psyche.  But the literature he left his intellectual and tribal heirs leaves no directions for accomplishing this.  There is merely a vague indication that, somehow, it should be accomplished.  But because we do not know how and have not been shown the way by the father, we fail again and again and have developed a complex around this with its myriad illusions and misdirections.  We devote a great deal of time and energy to trying to escape from the sword of this complex . . . but we rarely choose to face the blade and work to transform it.  Like Jung in the Red Book, we mostly shrink away from our soul and from the threshold of initiation it governs.

Two things struck me most as I began reading Jung's Red Book.  The first was that it felt very familiar.  It felt (more so than sounded) a lot like things I had written during my anima work.  My journal writings were a lot less formalized . . . there were no revisions, no sense that they would become a product intended for an audience.  But that feeling of somewhat grandiose clawing to make sense of the rush of numinous images and affects that come from the dissolution experience, that feeling of being in over your head in something both fascinating and terrifying, that feeling of being utterly ill equipped to make much sense out of what you are experiencing.

Jung's writing also felt familiarly Jung-ian to me.  All of the dualism, the dichotomization of Opposites, the idea that everything "light" must have a "dark" component.  This seems to run throughout the Red Book.  It is a core layer of Jung's mysticism.  But what is most interesting (to me) in seeing it applied in this style and topic of writing is that it seems . . . perhaps "tacked on" is not the right term, but it seems very much a kind of arbitrary interpretive paradigm held up to a spontaneous psyche that does not really divide so easily into opposites.  And that leads me to my second initial impression.

In Jung's fantasy dialogs with his soul, we see a very distinct opposition.  Jung obviously senses and means to explore this opposition with the text's experiment.  Jung's identity in the Red Book (at least thus far) is, well, not quite that of a scientific rationalist, but certainly a devoted skeptic of anything irrational, mystical, seemingly "untoward".  In the terms of his own type theory, he is an extreme thinking type.  At least this is how he portrays his egoic attitude.

The opposition to the soulful madness and irrationality of the unconscious really stood out to me, because it was not the way I have experienced the unconscious or the anima.  One gets the impression that Jung was "playing up" the degree of his thinking type orientation.  Or rather, that he sought to identify with this typology excessively as a kind of defense, yet it was not completely natural to him.  After all, he was making the decision to have dialogs with his soul and record them in this grandiose, projection-laden, mystical text.  If he had really ever been a scientific rationalist, it's doubtful any such project would have ever been embarked on.

What I think I mean to get at here is that the splintering or compartmentalizing of personality complexes that would come to define much of Jungian psychology develops here as a paradigm or mold fit over an interaction with the spontaneous unconscious.  As one not entirely satisfied with Jungian type theory and the (over-)differentiation of numerous things psychic into specific archetypes, personages, and complexes, the splintering paradigm seemed partly artificial to me.  That is, I believe it was "honest" on Jung's part, but the division and "oppositionalism" struck me as the product of an arbitrary and under-investigated attitude or prejudice in Jung's thinking.

Still, to see these divisions helps us to understand Jung's thinking and theories.  But as a person all too familiar with the abstract, philosophical muddling about in language that the "intellect" is inclined to do when trying to make sense of the "soul", I felt that there was a powerful distinction in the value of what was being written that could be made between what Jung's "thinking function" narrator expressed in the name of interpretation and what Jung's soul figure/s expressed.  And of course, Jung's thinking function narrator has significantly more to say about everything than his soul does.  When the soul speaks, it seems as though Jung's thinking function really doesn't understand at all . . . and then it must go off in spirals of contemplation, speculation, conceptualization, and interpretation.  But these spirals (though I recognize them as an essential aspect of this kind of active imagination/meditation project) felt completely empty to me.  They meant nothing.  Yes, they sound deep and philosophical . . . but they are just elaborate, intellectualized ways of backpedaling and evading the direct comments and criticism of the soul.

I don't mean to completely discredit them.  It is easy to see how a number of Jung's staple theories evolved out of these abstracting, spiraling speculations.  So, for the historian in us, these parallels may seem fascinating.  But as "Philosophy", as insight into the Self system or into the anima, they are a worthless currency.  As one who has minted a great deal of this kind of worthless currency, I recognized its stamp.  I found myself impatient with this part of the text, and I skimmed over it (as much as my guilt over skimming the "sacred Red Book" would allow me).  But during these interpretive passages I found myself hungering for the return to dialog with the soul . . . or at least the retelling of visions and archetypal fantasies.

I don't feel put out by this thinking type "filler", but I worried as I slogged through it that other Jungians would see great wisdom and truth in these passages.  I'm not sure (and will have to wait to read other Jungian takes on these writings).  But these extremely familiar writings are what I call "projection texts".  That is, the texts themselves are meaningless or at least not really important, but the author has introjected him or herself into the subtext, which is a kind of transformative vessel.  We (who write) need to make such vessels and create such projection texts, because it is how we find our soul.  It is a way to let aspects of the Other into our minds in the hope that they will somehow fertilize us.  But it is easy to get lost in the textual facade (for both authors and audiences).  Much postmodern theoretical writing is a matter of projection texts.  The result of such writing is not (for the most part) a furthering of universal knowledge or the creation of a better way of seeing a particular issue.  What happens is that those who fall into a transference with these texts tend to unconsciously move toward classical tribalist formations.  The texts are totems (things into which great tribal value is projected) . . . and they must be worshiped.  They are used for indoctrination and the regulation of tribal beliefs.

Jung was not writing for this reason . . . and it is doubtful that most such writing is made to be propaganda.  It is mostly heartfelt and deeply believed in by its author.  But the problem of the mysticism of language is that it deceives us with the ruse of seeming to hold a latent sense or to be somehow interpretable.  It isn't.  This is not what such writing "means".  This kind of writing is about getting lost in the woods in the hope of finding oneself some place magical.  For the original author, this could be a communion with the Self or soul (as in the case of the Red Book).  But for other readers who are drawn to these texts, there is less draw toward their soul than there is to a sense of tribe.  The facade of these texts becomes the dogma of the tribe.  As Jungians already struggle in this arena, I worry that the Red Book would not help them out of that rut.

But for me, one who is curious about the soul of Jung and of the Jungian tribe most of all (and who doesn't want to fall into an unconscious participation mystique with the Jungian tribe), I wanted only to hear from Jung's soul figure.  Jung the narrator only really came alive for me when he was in conversation with her.  And that is the Jung that is least known to us, the one we are looking for in this Red Book.

In addition to the extreme "thinking type" posture Jung's narration takes in the Red Book, it is also very evident that Jung (or this thinking function aspect of his personality) exhibits deep-seated misogyny.  This distaste for women and the feminine goes way beyond a culturally constructed "19th century, patriarchal prejudice".  Often, Jung puts this fear and suspicion of women into terms that well predate his era . . . and even point back to a kind of Christianized association of woman with the devil.  It isn't quite a Malleus Maleficarum level misogyny, but it is severe.

This didn't come as any surprise to me, as this attitude is evident in his Collected Works, as well.  But it is pointed enough in the Red Book that it seems completely fair to say that Jung has some kind of "complex" where women and the feminine are concerned.  To be fair to Jung, though, the inner exploration recorded in the Red Book marks an attempt to address and repair this misogyny.  But we can say with certainty, being familiar with Jung's later writing on the animi and women's psychology, that the attempt to repair this misogyny through the psychic events that inspired the Red Book did not entirely work.  It didn't entirely work, but it seems to have worked a bit.

Jung portrays himself (his thinking function) in the Red Book as ever the reluctant participant in the "debauchery" of the unconscious's irrational assault (at least until he can rationalize away its sting).  An assault led or characterized by the anima, soul, or Salome.  I remain (being about half way through the text at this writing) uncertain whether Jung has exaggerated his thinking function and its misogyny and prudishness out of a "theatrical dissociation" into roles.  An alchemical text that would come to interest and perhaps influence Jung greatly later in his life was The Speculative Philosophy by Gerhard Dorn.  Dorn's writing takes a very similar dissociative approach (and significantly resembles Jung's Red Book writings) . . . although, in the case of that text, it is fairly clear that Dorn is employing this knowingly as a literary device.  This device was commonly used at least since ancient times.  Whether Jung employed it knowingly or not, it certainly lends itself to his theory of personality structure and complexes.

Whatever the case, Jung's narrator in the Red Book is not all that likable a fellow.  He comes across as simultaneously a bit thick (where otherness is concerned), prone to grandiosity, and excessively fortified with prejudice and prudishness.  Jung may have preferred to interpret some of these qualities as "womanish", but in my opinion they are really a shadow aspect of a rigidly constructed patriarchal masculinity.  He exhibits a pronounced fear of "penetration" or contamination (this is something of an oddity, because Jung was very valuative overall in his published writings where the irrational contents of the unconscious were concerned).  Every foreign thing from the unconscious must be elaborately and sometimes aggressively defended against for many paragraphs before a little bit of empathy and openness develops in his posture.  Even after this empathy is allowed to have a small space in consciousness, more rationalizations and limitations are then placed upon it.  The so called "soul" seems to be severely throttled throughout much of the dialog.  In MDR, Jung wrote something to the effect of having to lend his own voice to his anima/soul because she didn't have one of her own.  I would interpret this more along the lines of: Jung had to force himself to stop choking "her" for a few seconds at a time just to let her squeak out a few words.

And those words that do get out are much more important (to Jung's mental health and to our understanding of Jung's psychology, both personal and academic) than the tirades of rationalized prejudice and squirming that Jung's narrator performs.

I would like to quote a few paragraphs from this dialog here (p. 236-237):

Experiences in the Desert

After a hard struggle I have come a piece of the way nearer to you.  How hard this struggle was!  I had fallen into an undergrowth of doubt, confusion and scorn.  I recognize that I must be alone with my soul.  I come with empty hands to you, my soul.  What do you want to hear?  But my soul spoke to me and said, "If you come to a friend, do you come to take?"  I knew that this should not be so, but it seems to me that I am poor and empty.  I would like to sit down near you and at least feel the breath of you animating presence.  My way is hot sand.  All day long, sandy, dusty paths.  My patience is sometimes weak, and once I despaired of myself, as you know.

My soul answered and said, "You speak to me as if you were a child complaining to its mother.  I am not your mother."  I do not want to complain, but let me say to you that mine is a long and dusty road.  You are like a shady tree in the wilderness.  I would like to enjoy your shade.  But my soul answered, "You are pleasure-seeking.  Where is your patience?  Your time has not yet run its course.  Have you forgotten why you went into the desert?"

My faith is weak, my face is blind from all that shimmering blaze of the desert sun.  The heat lies on me like lead.  Thirst torments me, I dare not think how unendingly long my way is, and above all, I see nothing in front of me.  But the soul answered, "You speak as if you have still learned nothing.  Can you not wait?  Should everything fall into your lap ripe and finished?  You are full, yes, you teem with intentions and desirousness!--Do you still not know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?"

I know that everything you say, Oh my soul, is also my thought.  But I hardly live according to it.  The soul said, "How, tell me, do you then believe that your thoughts should help you?"  I would always like to refer to the fact that I am a human being, just a human being who is sometimes weak and sometimes does not do his best.  But the soul said, "Is this what you think it means to be human?"  You are hard, my soul, but you are right.  How little we still commit ourselves to living.  We should grow like a tree that likewise does not know its law.  We tie ourselves up with intentions, not mindful of the fact that intention is the limitation, yes, the exclusion of life.  We believe that we can illuminate the darkness with an intention, and in that way aim past the light.  How can we presume to want to know in advance from where the light will come to us?

let me bring only one complaint before you: I suffer from scorn, my own scorn.  But my soul said to me, "Do you think little of yourself?"  I do not believe so.  My soul answered, "Then listen, do you think little of me?  Do you still not know that you are not writing a book to feed your vanity, but that you are speaking with me?  How can you suffer from scorn if you address me with those words that I give you?  Do you know, then, who I am?  Have you grasped me, defined me, and made me into a dead formula?  Have you measured the depths of my chasms, and explored all the ways down which I am yet going to lead you?  Scorn cannot challenge you if you are not vain to the marrow of your bones."  Your truth is hard.  I want to lay down my vanity before you, since it blinds me.  See, that is why I also believed my hands were empty when I came to you today.  I did not consider that it is you who fills empty hands if only they want to stretch out, yet they do not want to.  I did not know that I am your vessel, empty without you but brimming over with you.

This was my twenty-fifth night in the desert.  This is how long it took my soul to awaken from a shadowy being to her own life, until she could approach me as a free-standing being separate from me.  And I received hard but salutary words from her.  I needed that taking in hand, since I could not overcome the scorn within me.

My copy of Jung's Red Book arrived 10/14.  I haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but I wanted to start compiling a journal of reactions, reflections, analyses, and so forth.  And I wanted to do this as I was reading rather than after . . . thus the "diary" descriptor of the post title.

First, confessions.  Although I remain suspicious and even rather worried that the publication of the Red Book will be made into a(nother) counterproductive phenomenon by the spiritualistic drive or disease of Jungians, that it will become a totem object that is placed on a pedestal or in a museum exhibit and not truly interacted with or employed at its deepest (and most tribal) levels . . . I also have a touch of the fever.  I'm not sure if it is exactly the same in my own case . . . but it isn't exactly different, either.

For me, the Red Book is also perhaps an object of transference representing a kind of Holy Grail (as author, Sara Corbett, of the New York times article on the Red Book's publication called it).  I'm not really sure what other Jungians want "their" Red Books to be.  A new touchstone that returns them to the source of their tribal religion?  A way to reach out and touch the robe of Jung the prophet?  A demonstration of Jung's mystical pedigree?  Another labyrinth of bliss-following to get lost in . . . now that the real world has encroached more and more?

Those are the cynical ways of looking at it.  I also have selfish motives (for the invitation of cynicism).  Primarily (in the selfish classification, at least) is that I have developed a fairly unique reconstruction of animi (anima and animus) process or work over the last 20 years . . . from the very beginning of which I had felt that the experiences I was recording and the interpretations of these experiences I was constructing were potentially a substantial contribution to Jungian psychology.  I knew enough about the Red Book (mostly from Memories, Dreams, Reflections) to suspect that it recorded a very similar set of experiences for Jung.

Part of that belief in an accord is a matter of transference that drove my own individuation process for years and indoctrinated me into the Jungian tribe in my late teens.  But there are also rational reasons for suspecting such an accord.  Namely, Jung's professional writing on the anima, it has always seemed to me, belies his deep psychic participation with that inner figure.  I always saw it as a strange expression of self-conflict that Jung would write so critically about the anima while also having devoted the many years and tremendous energies to an "anima project" like the creation of the Red Book (which is, of course, a much edited and revised text . . . as editor, Sonu Shamdasani's extensive footnotes superbly illustrate).

My own anima experience was not filled with all the "signature Jungian" conflicts and resistances that Jung's was.  My inclination was simply to dive right into the anima's gravity.  And that (a kind of falling in love, perhaps) never led to any delusion, psychosis, lapse of ethics, or other decay.  Delusion, psychosis, lapse of ethics, and decay (which I like to call the "dissolution experience" of individuation) were certainly my bedfellows at the time I was doing my anima work, but the anima never encouraged these things.  I now attribute those slips and temptations to the Demon.  But I was also much younger and less "socialized" than Jung during this process.  I was (properly, I believe) an adolescent.  It was not a "mid-life crisis" situation for me.  I say "properly", because I have since come to understand the animi work as a function of late adolescence . . . which is postponed until midlife for most moderns as well as in the confusion of the Jungian model (which is too spiritualistic, not naturalistic enough).

As I formulated my animi theory (in recent years) and tried to discuss it with Jungians, I found that they were not able to understand it.  It was foreign to them . . . and my deviations from Jungian doctrine were met with resentment.  Other than its basic foreignness, I came to see that the animi theory I was arguing for was upsetting to conventional Jungians because of a dangerous implication it made: that conventional Jungians were essential "not initiated", that their experience of the numinous unconscious has been non-transformative . . . any indication of transformation being a kind of facade or worship artifact of totemic objects.  This observation would have it that, for conventional Jungians, individuation itself is a totemic object . . . not a lived experience.

This possibility did not occur to me until I saw how put out and/or perplexed many Jungians were by my revisioned animi theory.  It seemed to me that this gut reaction was brewing away in some of them even as they did not recognize what it was about "me" that disturbed them.  But the deep implication of my revisioned animi theory is that, if my theory is correct, it follows that much of Jungian "mysticism" and individuation is a sham.  I have not yet found any evidence that would contradict my revision of anima theory . . . but it is hard to test.  As with Jung, my ideas on this did not come from textbooks, but from personal experience.  My personal creative and professional struggle has largely been a matter of trying to trust my own experience . . . and my interest in science, rationalism, and skepticism has extensively evolved out of my own (often Demonic) self-examinations, self-trials, and self-tortures.

Through all of that, I had more reasons to think and feel that my revisionary theories were credible and useful than the contrary.  When I realized a mistake, I revised my theory.  And I have revised my theory a lot . . . but through all of that, a thread of consistency has remained.  Many of the initial observations and interpretations of my anima work experience have held up, at least as foundations for more complex and "adult" theory-building.

The Red Book, therefore, represents to me a kind of opportunity to demonstrate 1.) the credibility of my theory for someone other than myself (and more importantly, for Jung, whose psychology, healthy and diseased, is the foundation of our Jungian tribal identity), and 2.) that my criticisms of Jung's and Jungians' anima theories, my claims that there is a "Jungian Disease" or complex that veils this issue for us, can be substantiated through the analysis of Jung's anima work text.

As for it being a kind of "Holy Grail", if the Red Book does lend itself to my transference projections, and I can make my arguments clearer through the use of this text, there is a chance of aiding a kind of "rejuvenation of the Father" who is fed from that Grail.  Not a return to fundamentalism, but a kind of alchemical reinvention of the "Old King" into the "New".  I of course don't mean a new totem or figurehead for the Jungian tribe, but a way of revaluating and revisioning Jungianism that is an effective healing or treatment of the Jungian disease . . . a Good Medicine.

It is hard for me to separate my selfish desires to be awarded some kind of identity and status by the Jungian tribe (in whose shadow I've found myself exiled) . . . where I mean basic acceptance and the offer of tribal rights or humanness, the right to survive within the tribe, not any kind of grandiose status . . . from my more archetypal and Eros-driven sacrificial drive to help rejuvenate the damaged Jungian system of valuation.  The former is an egoic desire, the latter a Self-driven reorganizational process which is more collective or tribal than personal.  The former addresses my own feelings of impotence without a tribal credentialing (or while dissociated from the tribe's Eros), while the latter is a potential movement of tribal Eros that I have been able to glimpse and find a way to participate in.  Even as there is a great deal of potential for alignment between these two drives, I have found myself in deep self-conflict over this issue . . . attempting to extract the egoic desires from the process so they don't too badly damage what seems to me to be a healthy treatment of the tribal Eros by the reoganizational and instinctual Self system.  And much more than I would have liked, I have failed to make this extraction and differentiation successfully.

Part of this is due to insurmountable odds and resistance of the Jungian tribe.  I work against participation mystic and tribal/totemic religiosity as an "agonist".  And this agonism constellates archetypal dynamics in the relationality between myself and other, more conventional Jungians.  The more resistance I meet, the more difficult it is to extract my egoic selfishness and derailing desires from the potential rejuvenating process I am glimpsing.  Perfect balance here is impossible, and my inability to be perfect (and feeling that I must be in order to make a useful contribution to Jungian tribal treatment) allows a space in me for the Demon to occupy.

So there is perhaps a bit of refreshment in this "Holy Grail" for me as well . . . in the sense that it gives me a task in which to be more useful to the tribe.  And here, with this text, all Jungians are placed on an equal footing.  Equalized by not-knowing.  We are all getting into some never really explored realm of our ancestral psychology here.  And I very strongly suspect that we will find our conventional interpretive theories and dogmas not adequate to the task of bringing Jung's experience recorded in the Red Book into better focus or transmuting the stuff of the Red Book into any kind of elixir for the Jungian tribe.

It isn't Jung that the Red Book offers a chance to reinvent . . . this chance is afforded to Jungianism.  If we will have to devise new ways and means of understanding the Red Book, this invention will also serve the larger reinvention of Jungian thinking.

But on the skeptical side, I doubt this will happen.  Jungians have shown themselves almost entirely incapable of functional self-reckoning or collective self-treatment.  It is a safer bet that Jungians will simply muddle the Red Book with their projections and fantasies, rendering it inert, sapping its soul, its reorganizational potential.  Still, I am hoping against predictability that this trend will somehow be overthrown.  And if such an overthrow is to occur, I would happily contribute whatever I could to the revolution.

This diary will collect my wanderings and wonderings about the Red Book.  I will attempt to reflect and analyze it in terms of both my own personal equation and the Jungian tribal equation.  I don't know what to expect.  I don't currently have great hopes that anything will come out of the Red Book for Jungians.  And I suspect that I stand to benefit even less.  But it is at least a viable opportunity to institute change.  The publication of the Red Book is a serpent's venomous bite on the Jungian tribal heel.  If it doesn't kill us, it will make us stronger.

My feelings on this subject are mixed. To lay my cards on the table . . . I frequently use the term instinct in my psychological theories. And I do this with complete knowledge of its scientific disfavor. I use the term much more than I use the term "archetype" (which I use mostly just to make a bridge to other Jungians for whom archetype is a familiar piece of language). Still, I have trepidation about this employment . . . which I largely write off when I consider that I should not be bullied by blind traditions and prejudices, whether they be scientific or otherwise. To succumb to such bullying (rather than evidence and logic) is the mark of a less-than-rigorous thinker. And to the best of my knowledge, I remain a skeptic on all fronts . . . at least I strive to.

I don't want to delve too much into the deconstruction and analysis of the scientific prejudice against the word (and idea) instinct. Suffice it to say that I find some of the currently preferred jargon like "fixed action patterns" and "innate releasing mechanisms" substantially more flawed and unwieldy. Giving something a complicated, abstract name does not make it more scientific . . . and refusing to study something as a perceived phenomenon, instead breaking it down into bite-sized chunks more palatable to scientific mentalities is not as "valid" as the rationalist dogma would have it. For instance, as well as being linguistically or poetically flawed, such constructions exhibit a surprising scientific ignorance in regard to the phenomenon of complexity. That is, not every system can be reduced to the sum of its parts. Sometimes, when out of scientific zeal or vogue we disassemble a complex phenomenon to its component parts, we are displacing the object of study from its natural condition and, in effect, creating a "laboratory phenomenon" which may not say all there is to say about the original, natural phenomenon.

I believe instinct is a case in point . . . and I wish to champion its inclusion in the language of depth psychology. I worry that too much of value would be lost should we choose to reject it. Still, there are many valid reasons why instinct has fallen out of scientific favor. One of the primary among these is the unscientific misuse of the term by psychologists. Although by no means the first modern psychologist to consider human behavior instinctual, Freud is perhaps the most to blame for the misuse of the term instinct. That is, to consider the Oedipal pattern "instinctive" is to proffer a no longer sustainable idea. Jung was less inclined to use the term instinct, and when he did, he did so with an air of hesitancy. He preferred to talk of archetypes . . . even though this opened the door much wider for the accusations of Lamarkism (not entirely undeserved, if no doubt greatly exaggerated). Perhaps his disinclination to use instinct was a reaction to Freud's frequent use of the term. But what both men (and the schools of thought that proceeded them) are guilty of is the fallacious assumption that instincts are complex, higher order patterns that govern behavior.

That notion is no longer scientifically tenable . . . and it may be the common psychological misunderstanding and misuse of instinct as an inherited higher-order form that has encouraged biologists to disregard psychology that chooses to speak of instincts or archetypes as such. But the contentious point of this psychological construction is not that modern biology rejects inherited behavioral patterning (as may be the case in non-scientific cultural construction theories that perhaps represent the only remaining fundamentalist tribe in the ongoing Nature vs. Nurture debate). The point of contention is a matter of how we understand complexity and the construction of such "higher order" and otherwise "emergent" phenomenon. In Freud and Jung, very little if any attempt is made to see what we now call complexity in the construction of instinct. That is, both men were ready to assume (without much reflection) that higher order behavior patterns were inherited in their higher-order form. This is something similar to Platonic ideal Forms . . . and the Platonic and Kantian inheritance in Jung, especially is quite notable. [To be fair to Jung, though, one of the reasons he preferred to speak of archetypes instead of instincts is that he felt instincts were unknowable or unstudiable . . . what we could more modernly call complex or, my preference, quantum. This unknowableness of instinct did not seem to carry over to his construction of inheritance and actualization, though (where higher order, thus "knowable", form still seemed to be implied). He is very vague on this issue . . . and complicates it even more by also adding that the archetypal or "psychoid" realm is unknowable . . . making for a dense multilayer mysticism that Jungians are still trying to peck their way out of.]

The basis of my argument (against Jungian archetypal theory and in favor of the use of the term instinct in psychology) is that the connection of archetypes to Platonic Forms was a dated misstep . . . but once freed from this Platonic construction, the concept of archetypes is still more or less viable and not incompatible with modern science (* see my afterthoughts on this below). The fly in the ointment is the assumption that higher order forms preexist their material expression (in, for instance, patterned behavior) or that some kind of abstract archetype is coined upon the stuff of material reality like a royal seal of human DNA. But in something as tremendously complex as instinctual, patterned behavior, the elemental level (down to which conventional atomic materialism seeks to break objects of study) is not scientifically discernible . . . and the formation of pattern from these elements or quanta is a still-lingering mystery. We can posit the foundation of instincts upon such seemingly formless quanta through careful observation and analysis of psychological phenomena. But we also must consider the many precedents for such a construction, from matter itself, to the well-established observations of budding complexity and chaos theories, to the very structure of the organic body, the brain, to neuronal behavior, to DNA itself. These precedents do not translate into scientific proofs, but they offer many strong arguments for the consideration and hypothesis of a quantum theory of instincts. At the very least, we should recognize that it would be unscientific to dismiss the construct of instinct based on our inability to measure and account for every quantum factor that coalesces into the higher-order construction of instinctual behavior patterns.

We have (perhaps out of a prejudice of sorts) spent more time trying to measure and account for the quantum environmental imprinting factors that help catalyze or solidify the emergent order of instinctual quanta. At times, we have effectively demonstrated the arbitrariness of external and non-innate imprinting factors . . . and those with analytic or psychotherapeutic inclinations have observed that there are limitations to this arbitrariness, beyond which imprinting can lead to dysfunctional (not fit or adequately survivable) variations of patterned behavior. Some forms of Jungian analysis attempt to re-imprint instinctual pre-patterning (archetypes) with functional symbols and personages . . . although precisely how this works and is to be accomplished is still significantly open to debate.

But the environmental factors involved in imprinting and the higher-order organization of instinctual behavior patterns are not nearly as complex (or made up of variously interrelated and as numerous indiscernible parts) as the subtle biological factors. The study of these biological and psychological quanta is one that is not readily available to conventional (and comfortable) scientific methodology . . . but we can study instinctually influenced behaviors with enough accuracy to recognize that these quantum biological factors are significant contributors to the formation of both individual personality and human culture and relationality. The field of evolutionary psychology is still very young, but has already produced a lot of interesting data and ideas (even without paying the slightest attention to Jungian archetypal psychology, which would otherwise be seen as its natural predecessor).

Jung, in spite of some of his dated and otherwise flawed terminology and formulations of archetypes was a pioneer of a scientific phenomenology that I think can and should be used (with revision) to found a modern study of psyche and instinctuality. In the simplest sense, what Jung did that was bold and innovative was to pay attention to psychic phenomenon more or less in their "natural habitats". He was perhaps the greatest psychological naturalist. The tradition of psychological naturalism he bequeathed us has suffered, deteriorated, and fallen into disrepair. But like an unrecognized Philosopher's Stone, it still lies on the dung heap awaiting reinvention and rejuvenation.

That Jung failed from time to time as a psychological naturalist (contaminating his data with his own projections and the social constructions of his era, gender, class, race, nationality, and religion) is not the point . . . and we shouldn't let our Jungian complex of shame and disappointment embitter us against the "old man" at the expense of the fitness and survivability of analytical psychology. What is much more surprising is that Jung succeeded in this project and attitude far more often than either his contemporaries or his successors have. What is most worth cherishing and preserving in Jung in my opinion is his legacy of valuation of psychic phenomena. He came to the psyche as a devoted student and observer, more often than not letting it be as it would be, not herding it into the pen of an overly (or inaccurately) reductive theory, not dismissing its pathologies, eccentricities, and mysterious out of a socially constructed prejudice. The cleverness and intellectual integrity this took has been under-appreciated . . . even by Jungians. It wasn't some kind of intrepid, mystical heroism, a "manly" (and colonial) adventuring into the unconscious that allowed Jung's ideas to be complex and compelling. It was merely his ability to step aside without passing judgment on the spontaneous productions of the psyche that differentiated his scientific approach and his personality. He was an individuant (a term many Jungians still don't understand). He was able to separate himself from some of his cultural and tribal affiliations to look upon the psyche with less distorted perspective.

The soon to be published Red Book is perhaps the most vivid testament to this unobtrusive psychic naturalism. What is most significant about this book as a "Jungian phenomenon" is not that it will either prove Jung to be a first rate mystic and guru or a complete nutcase. What is really demonstrated is a devotional stance toward the natural unconscious, a willingness to let himself "go mad" or dissolve in order to enable the instinctual unconscious to self-organize. But whereas an artist might believe in his or her own myth and feel righteous in the fortitude of that belief, Jung the scientist also stood back and observed. He struggled to make sense of these psychic productions without significantly directing and determining them or making them fit into a rational or preconceived paradigm.

Despite the various isms of Jung's culturally constructed personality, in this attitude of naturalistic valuation toward the psyche, Jung was profoundly modern (or post-modern), rebellious, and innovative. The prevailing attitudes toward the psyche and the human animal both in Jung's time and still significantly today are (as the postmodernists might say) "colonial" in the sense that they are extremely colored by a kind of culturally constructed, modern egoism, an egoism that is not in a natural state of participation (participation mystique) with the unconscious. Psychologists, scientists, and even postmodern literary theorists and philosophers of language and culture have not adequately observed how severely the ego is formed and modified by the modern. Even as many cultural constructions have come to light, the establishment of the modern ego and the modern individual have not be sufficiently grasped and factored into an analysis of what and how we perceive and reason. Only fairly recently has evolutionary biology and psychology allowed us to start thinking of human psychology in terms not only of environmental construction, but also in terms of an environment of evolutionary adaptedness that is substantially different than the one we now live in (different than the "modern"). Different environments, different egos . . . as ego is (as cultural constructionists would have it) very much a product of the culture it develops in.

Jung was by no means immune to the modern notion of the heroic or conquering ego whose reason and rationality provided seemingly endless power to manipulate environment. It is evident in his frequent warnings about the dangers of the unconscious, of madness, in his sexist colorings of anima and animus, in his prescription of building ego strength as a resistance against the seductive dangers of the deep psyche. And yet, he also criticized the egoism of Western man in a truly postmodern fashion, relativized it, did not see it as purely good or as inevitable. He saw its sickness . . . that it lacked relationship with "soul" (or what I would call instinct). Jung struggled with his own tendency to look upon psyche with a colonialist lens. That inner war was neither won nor lost . . . while battles were won on both sides. But even in his failure to consistently get outside the modernist construct entirely or consistently, he succeeded significantly more than many others.

Today, although still very rich, very fertile, Jung's writing is not going to give us answers to the Problem of the Modern. But I would argue that this is not why we should read, preserve, and carry on the legacy of Jung. That is the most common Jungian error. We see Jung's examples and theories as prescient ways of answering mysterious questions about ourselves and about the psyche . . . or else we are frustrated with the seeming inability of these things to answer our modern and postmodern questions, and we react with bitterness against Jung's "mistakes". But I don't think this is the way Jung should be read. That is to read Jung as if trapped within the construct (or complex) Jung himself struggled to achieve an outside perspective on. We need a new perspective . . . one that is not stuck entirely in the complex of either the modern or of Jungianism. It is not the answers either posited or implied by Jung that are of such great value, it is his struggle to deconstruct the modern ego, his attitude of valuation toward the instinctual unconscious. It is not what he produced but how he proceeded that should be preserved in the Jungian legacy. And it is this procedure and attitude that remain least understood in both our analyses of Jung the man and our in our Jungian and post-Jungian psychologies.

Jungianism, Postmodernism, and Language

Perhaps starting with James Hillman (who has himself moved away from this experiment since), Jungianism decided to strike up an affair with postmodernism or postmodern academic philosophies, poststructuralism, the French and French-influenced theorists of language and culture, etc. It seems a strange coupling to me. The years I spent in academia were years in which my foundational Jungianism constantly came into conflict with the preferred postmodernist bent of my peers and professors in the literature department. As a Jungian, I felt alienated, suspect. Sometimes noses were turned up at me or my writing was received with perplexed head scratching. But mostly, my professors and peers were non-judgmental and treated me as a somewhat exotic fascination. During the 10 plus years that I muddled through higher education, I tried desperately to conceal (or at least desired to succeed at the concealment of) my Jungianism. I tried to write and speak in non-Jungian terms (while maintaining an allegiance to Jungian ways of thinking). It was extremely frustrating to, for instance, try to analyze a text that exhibits an anima or a shadow figure and not stumble off into "Jungianisms". But there was no other language (known to me) that illuminated these archetypal phenomena (which are so often prevalent in literary texts).

In my fiction and poetry writing, it was even more anxiety-producing to be a Jungian author wielding archetypal themes and constructing and deconstructing my literary characters with an analyst's understanding of psychopathology and individuation. In the non-Jungian academic world of literature, anything "dream-like" is seen as belonging to the surrealist tradition. Such "surrealists" who also happen to be American are in for an especially rough time, because American literature has never developed a true surrealist tradition. Without embarking into an extensive literary theory argument, allow me to just propose (for the sake of this essay) that there are two main branches in the surrealist tradition (which more or less originates with the original modernism of the early 20th century). I think this will all tie in, so please bear with me.

One trend I would call "French surrealism", and it is characterized by a sense of dreamlike play, juxtaposition of terms and images, almost a kind of cut-up or montage where the "hit" the art creates is a matter of the shock and puzzlement these unusual couplings generate. It does at times demonstrate archetypal themes . . . but these are diluted with very heady, ideological, rather religious concepts about what the art is doing, what statements it is making (to the "bourgeoisie"). As a Jungian, I tend to see this surrealism as naive. It is like an active imagination in which the imaginer doesn't really shut off his or her ego, so conscious attitudes blend in with unconscious ones. But the artist cannot differentiate these. This kind of "French surrealist" shocks only the bourgeois construction in his or her own personality, but remains rather deluded about the rest of the world. There is a puer narcissism to this trapped, delusional inwardness, a grandiosity.

The other branch of surrealism is hard to name. It could be called "political surrealism" (but the "French surrealists", who need not be French, of course, would claim that their naive, puer surrealism is also making political statements). It could be called "spontaneous surrealism", because it erupts more like a vision or dream, quite naturally and autonomously from the psyche . . . and is not heavily constructed and egoically intruded upon like "French surrealism". But I think I will call this branch of surrealism the "surrealism of necessity", because it is characterized by reactive and compensating push of the unconscious that pushes back against oppressive egoic attitudes (what I would associate with the Demon). It is a reaction necessitated by oppression . . . it is not a conscious deconstruction and mockery of that oppression. This "surrealism of necessity" erupts subversively out of cultures oppressed by fascism and totalitarianism . . . so it can be seen most clearly in the modernist writing from Spain, Latin America, Russia, and Eastern Europe. This kind of surrealism can even be appreciated by "common people" (unlike "French surrealism", which is really only for an elite, self-proclaimed intelligentsia). It is at times (especially in its Latin incarnations) very romantic and passionate . . . by American standards, perhaps somewhat embarrassingly so. To my mind, this "surrealism of necessity" is not a naive surrealism, nor is it chained up within a bubble of delusion like the puer "French" variety. It is a truly dangerous surrealism, because it delves down into instinctual drives to organize, adapt, and survive what oppresses it.

In American literature, almost all of the surrealist influence comes from the "French" school . . . and that influence remains (as this school always was) elitist, academic, detached from the "folk". It thrives in the quasi-nonsense writing one sees in many contemporary literary journals and Master of Fine Arts programs in poetry writing . . . a culture entirely isolated from the larger reality and the collective psychology of the "folk" population. American poetry had a brief flirtation with the "surrealism of necessity", mostly during the 60s and 70s and primarily at the hands of the Jungian poet, Robert Bly, who championed and translated some of this poetry. But (I would argue) Bly was in some ways his own worst enemy. Even as his translations and championings influenced a number of poets, his attempt to recreate a surrealism of necessity in America (sometimes called the Deep Image school) was flawed by his own personal interpretations and ideals . . . and his own take on Jungianism. I like and was influenced as a poet by much of what Bly translated and wrote, but I do not think that he managed to create (or ever understand) an American "surrealism of necessity". He was (like so many of us), a bit too seduced by the numinousness of the unconscious and by the New Age excitations that clouded and popularized (or bastardized) Jungian ideas. Also, he had/has a flair for movements, a bit of a puer weakness for guruism (which he reacts to with a programme of rigid senexism).

But more than by the obstacles of his own personality, his dream of an American "surrealism of necessity" was, I think, undermined by his inability to really understand the fascism of American culture and life. Although by no means a fascist himself, I think Bly's quasi-pathological desire to embrace and embody the senex (and his shame at his own puerism) prevents him from being a sufficient cultural critic where American fascism is concerned. Fascism is a very paternalistic force that seeks to conform and indoctrinate . . . and control underlings. It is easy for some of this fascism to slip into the guise of "initiation" into adulthood and social responsibility. If the culture is sick, "initiation" into it is initiation into that sickness. It takes something of the puer spirit to break down those diseased walls and barriers . . . even if puers are not the best "rebuilders" of society. Of course Bly has been a cultural critic, especially of American Puritanism . . . and of course, Bly is a first rate puer. But it is that desire to be a senex (as well as his "untouchable" puer shadow) that ultimately limits the long-term value of his criticism.

To be fair to Bly (who has made numerous excellent contributions . . . especially with his Jungian analysis of the Grimm's fairytale "Iron Hans" . . . less so with his management of the cultural movement following the social phenomenon of that book), American artists have unanimously struggled to grasp the "silent fascism" inherent in American culture. It appears to be so subtle . . . beneath the very complex and dense propaganda of American democracy and "opportunity". Even those who sense it have failed to allow a genuinely reactive/compensatory response from the unconscious drive their art (in the way other cultures' "surrealisms of necessity" have). Most of the truly astute cultural critics of Americanism are rationalists who have engaged in their critiques through journalism and non-fiction writing (Noam Chomsky is perhaps the posterboy for this approach). But these rationalist critics are not getting through adequately to the "folk" or to any kind of "folk art". There is a massive disconnect in American culture between fairly academic and rational cultural criticism and common sense, "working class" skepticism about power. We have no "labor party" (the Red Scare crushed the original stirrings of anything like that). Our unions have largely been diluted/polluted or crushed by corporate power. Our voting working-middle class population consistently votes against its own best interests in favor of disingenuous, self-serving propaganda spewed by the wealthy, "right wing" elite. We are consistently distracted, misinformed, and deceived by a mainstream media whose agendas we often fail to comprehend. We live within a muddle of language and spin that manages to oppress us while also misdirecting our frustration and reactions away from the real culprits. We are prisoners of our own (often selfish and petty) desires, which are the "family jewels" by which the fascist and powerful elite have us snared.

Language is in an Orwellian predicament. And what Jungians and Robert Bly and many others fail to adequately comprehend is that we can no longer say, "Rah, rah for the soul! Follow your bliss! Find your sacred space!", because there are innumerable "entrepreneurs" out there waiting to take us by the hand (and wallet) and lead us to the dens of their own usage and manipulation. And because sacred space can no longer be found, healthy tribalism can no longer be found. It has to be recreated. I don't mean to cast out a wild cry of paranoia and impending doom. What I mean to suggest is that we need to be much more careful about the way we use language. Ideas and the language they are conveyed in are not innocuous. The conscious and sophisticated understanding of both text and subtext is both more difficult and more urgent than every before. One of the major Jungian failings in the attempt of Jungianism to find its way into the 21st century is a failure to be savvy enough with its languaging.

Even as some Jungians begin to embrace postmodernist jargon and tribal ideas, I am struck with the great naivete of Jungians in regard to the modern world. The heady, highly abstract, linguistic finger traps of academic poststructuralism have found their ways into the new "Jungian academicism" . . . and we find ourselves looking at the writing of a Wolfgang Giegerich like it is a new holy mysticism. We fail to see that it is (not entirely, but significantly) a rather blurry, muddied mash-up of (already outdated) postmodernist babble and Jungian fantasy and "numen addiction". We seem to lack the tools to boil such language down to what it is really saying. We are like 50% of the American working-middle class population who vote against their best interests.

Our relationship with post-Freudian psychoanalysis is not much different. Psychoanalysts have always had a bit more interest in postmodernist theories (and have even contributed significantly to these theories) than Jungians. But as we have come to adopt the influx of psychoanalytic languagings into our already foggy Jungian lexicon, we have done so without adequate comprehension or analysis of the origins and construction of this language. That is, we have failed to be adequately "postmodernist" in the deconstruction of the syncretism between psychoanalysis and Jungianism. And there is a major complex brewing here (as there has always been . . . as evidenced by the initial split between Freud and Jung, still inadequately understood). If we think we can heroically (and egoically) rise above all of the pathological inheritances of this tribal splintering "by will alone", we are immensely naive. My take on Jungianism is precisely this . . . and it is glimpsed in all fronts of our "post-Jungianism". It is deeply characterized by an immense naivete toward the modern and toward the construction and function of language. Our Jungian languaging does not know itself . . . and it does not know others or comprehend the complex dynamics of extra-tribal relationality. We continue to blindly act against our own best interests and against the best interests (or survivability) of analytical psychology. We are babes in the woods of the modern . . . posturing as wise old women and men. So long as we remain incapable of recognizing and valuating our naive puerism, we live within the shadow of the puer, within the "mother-bound" delusion that the small world or prison we have absolute dominion over and access to is the larger world in which everyone lives.


The term, instinct, has a great potential usefulness to Jungian psychology, because it is through . . . not the specific word, but its model of languaging that we can begin to work consciously and creatively at the modernization of our language and ideas. I think it is commendable that Jung choose terms for his psychological theory that had extensive histories. He made a conscious choice to stay as far away as possible from neologisms. He wanted a language that was classic, that was immediately understood on an intuitively level. Terms like archetype, anima, shadow have historical and intuitive resonance. Jung saw that what was meant by, for instance, anima, hundreds of years before his birth was not at all incompatible with a modernized psychological understanding of the term. And this intuitive/historical understanding was the "prima materia" of the concept . . . the definition and scientific elaboration of the concept was the "Art that perfects Nature". Jung made a very powerful comment on the modern and on the materialistic rationalism that was (and generally remains) the tribal dogma of scientists of Jung's era. Jung was in effect saying that human beings have always understood these things like anima and shadow and Self, but as culture developed, language changed . . . and language must keep changing in order to continue to be able to speak about these psychic "facts". Modern materialistic rationalism has sought to overpower this trend by forcing phenomena into a strict language that doesn't evolve and is the province only of the elite. That Latin terminology is used in the natural sciences is a kind of testament to the colonial power and conquering of otherness that fed Roman pride during the height of its empire.

But to Jung, it was not the ego that "invented" these psychic phenomena . . . nor can the ego ever reduce them to a conquered "truth". The power to language does not work this way, and it is only our modern delusion that convinces us it can. The real usefulness of a "Scientific" or highly precise and sophisticated languaging is in its adaptability, its openness to endless data accumulation and analysis, to change. But a scientific language that truncates its data sets, prejudicially dismissing all of the languaging history that came before it actually fails to be truly scientific. Instead, it is arrogant in its assumption that only modern knowledge is valuable . . . and all else was merely an ignorant error. This is especially problematic in psychology, a young field by name, but an ancient field in terms of its data accumulation. There were innumerable great "psychologists" before modern psychology emerged in the late 19th century. Modern psychology is still wrestling with its 19th century prejudices . . . and although Jung was also quite often a victim of those prejudices, he also, at other times, stood out against them, became aware that they were flawed cultural constructions that impaired the real potential a scientific psychology had.

When we ponder the rejection of the term instinct, we should not be proudly ignorant and dismissive of the past . . . nor should we imagine that we are making a modern and novel decision. The battle with the concept of instinct is millennia old. What we think of as a modern rationalism that would dismiss the "doughy" and dated term instinct is not in any way a modern or rational construct. Instinct was being devalued and turned into what we have now inherited at least since Platonism. In nearly 2000 years of Christianity, instinct has constantly been under attack, rendered simplistic, dangerous to rational intellect, morality, and human culture, demonized. Scientific materialism has inherited this browbeaten and demonized concept of instinct from Christianity . . . and only very recently has some of this Christian/Platonic prejudice been stripped away. Still, evolutionary biologists and cultural anthropologists are not necessarily linguistic specialists. They do not (by the standards of their field) examine the history of language and languaging . . . and are generally not aware that the concept of instinct they have inherited has been the victim of thousands of years of intense propaganda.

Thousands of years ago, of course, the concept wasn't called "instinct", but more typically "Matter" or characterized by the element "Earth". It was often confused with the Feminine, with sexual drive and aggression. The Platonic inheritance is one in which such Matter is rendered non-intelligent and non-complex. "Spirit" was imbued with all that was taken from Matter. In its Christian manifestation an experimental treatment was devised for this "rape of Matter". That treatment was known as alchemy . . . a chief occupation of which was the revaluation or "ensoulment" of Matter or Earth. But the language of alchemy, although not lacking in sophistication and insight, remained arcane (perhaps in part out of fear of persecution for heresy . . . or maybe out of an inbred sense of shame regarding the potential of such heresy).

This alchemical revaluation of Matter was taken up in a new language by Jung. And even as he made significant inroads into modern thought with such a revaluation, Jung was, ultimately, a modern scientific rationalist. He was not only this, but he was undeniably and extensively also this. The alchemical revaluating process is incomplete in Jung's thinking . . . and he himself did not manage to fully understand his work in this way (even as he recognized its parallels with alchemy). For instance, he could not understand the revaluation of instinct as something entirely accessible to scientific, even rational intelligence. He seemed to feel that some element of mysticism was still required, that the approach to instinct had to be taken through a dual and polarized understanding of spirit and matter. He did not quite grasp (although he came infinitesimally close, especially in his essays about spirit and matter as polarized phenomena) that spirit and matter are linguistic dissociations of one thing, and that the dissociation of this thing was not essential to human understanding but was the product of centuries of a prevailing human cultural prejudice.

Today, we are again approaching the realization and revaluation of instinct that Jung very nearly achieved. We have to thank the fields of evolutionary biology and psychology as well as the insights of chaos and complexity theories. That is, through these new languagings, we are learning to see complexity in previously debased instincts and behavior organizers. In some ways, these fields have revaluated instinct far beyond Jung's own efforts. But these fields have not analyzed the cultural construction of rationalistic materialism as extensively and effectively as Jung did. They, for instance, would do away with the data and thinking of the past relating to instinct . . . including Jung's. And that prejudice stunts the scientific progress of evolutionary psychology. Psychological phenomena like art and religion are sometimes still explained away as "irrational" or "purposeless" by some evolutionary psychologists. The understanding of religion and culture as products of complex instinctual behavior patterning is only just starting to nudge at the minds of rationalistic materialists (perhaps in a rather upsetting way) . . . whereas, of course, for Jungians the archetypal/instinctual roots of religion are well known and have been studied (in "Jungian" ways) for decades. Still, there is no unifying language in which science and Jungian psychology can address the devalued complexity of instinct. We Jungians are also guilty of continuing to devalue instinct's complexity with our sloppy, spiritualistic mysticisms and tribal totems. We could valuate instinct more thoroughly, more deeply by revising and expanding our language while editing out our temptations to construe psychic phenomena metaphysically.

Our dabblings in academic postmodernism do not facilitate such a revision. Rather, they are a potentially dangerous distraction from the revaluating (and scientific) potential of Jungian thought. Many of these postmodernisms are the ideologies of tribes for whom cultural constructionism is a totemic dogma. They reject "essentialist" or "innatist" notions like those proposed by both Jung and modern evolutionary biologists. Their bias (not unlike the old Platonic/Christian bias) has it that complexity in human behavior is entirely the product of culture . . . and so they leave instinct debased and devalued in the tradition of Western culture. Perhaps even more tempting and dangerous for Jungians in their flirtation with postmodernisms is the tendency of these postmodernisms to grant carte blanche to all manners of linguistic chicanery and abstract gibbering in the name of "serious thought". That kind of languaging is just another puer bubble to get lost in for Jungians . . . who seem to be happy to be invited out to play rather than seeing through both the postmodern languaging and their own Jungian susceptibility to posturing childishly as "serious thinkers" backed by tribal prestige. As critical as I am of Jungianism, I feel it has more to teach postmodernism about the modern than postmodernism has to teach Jungianism. The decay of identity in Jungianism is itself a factor of a failure to valuate the instinctual complexity that has always been the foundation of Jungian thought. In this instance, that instinctual complexity would have to do with the ways tribes are formed, the way prestige in tribes is divvied out, and the way language is used as an unconscious tool of tribal sociality.

In conclusion, I would like to acknowledge and clarify that my argument for the use and study of the term instinct in depth psychology is an affective argument. I am arguing non-rationally for a renewed tribal valuation of a term and concept upon which (in my opinion) the survivability of the Jungian tribe depends. The argument is more complex than it might seem . . . and if it seems overly emotive or simplistic, I believe that this perception itself is a product of our failure to valuate the complexity of affect. Affect is an instinctual expression. It is an evolved survival tool . . . and no mere fight or flight reaction. It is the source of our complex organization as identities, individual and collective. We cannot go on talking about ideas abstractly. All of our ideas, our languagings have tribal and survival ramifications. The value of Jungian ideas is not ethereal. It is a product of our tribal fitness. If we are unfit, unadapted, unconscious about the organization and welfare of our tribe, we will fail to contribute anything of value to science or to the treatment of the Problem of the Modern.

One wake-up call we can take from postmodernism is to seek to overcome our naivete regarding language and languaging. We have a Sorcerer's Apprentice approach to languaging that is in drastic need of a good hard look at its own messes. How have we constructed our Jungian culture and language (and been constructed by it)? Instead of adding yet more ingredients to our unpalatable stew, perhaps we need to step back and try to understand how each of these ingredients we have indiscriminately tossed in the pot of our collective psyche has constructed us . . . and what the implications of these constructions are.

* How the construction of archetypes can be made compatible with modern biological science.

I did not digress on this above, because I have written about it numerous times on the forum. Still, it is probably best to give a condensed footnote theory on modernizing archetype here (with the assertion that this footnote is not meant to be an all-encompassing argument for what I will propose). Jungians have spent most of their efforts (when they've bothered at all) in the quest to make archetypes scientifically viable by insisting that they are present in human instinctual imprinting behaviors . . . but these arguments will never impress a natural scientist, because they are still fraught with the fallacy I describe above (namely, the notion that higher order patterns of behavior and thought can be inherited). No biologist worth her or his education would advocate that, for instance, the anima exists as a kind of genetic stamp somewhere in the invisible reaches of the prenatal human brain. Even the argument that a Mother archetype or a self archetype exists in this Platonic fashion genetically (pre-environment and even pre-nervous system development) is essentially impossible to make scientifically and not really compatible with the thrust of the field today.

My suggestion is that we need to kill this darling of Jungian fantasy, the Platonic archetype. But we do NOT need to kill the term or its functionality. Instead of the mystical "psychoid" definition of archetype that Jungians have favored, why not just define archetype as a taxonomic categorization? This circumvents all of the problems that the archetype construct faces in the arena of modern biology. One thing is incontrovertible about archetypes, those "classic Jungian" archetypes that we have been obsessed with since Jung first started to talk about them. Namely, as psychic phenomenon, they certainly do exist (i.e., not innately, but "emergently"). They can be easily recognized in innumerable works of art, folktales, religious narratives, films, fantasies, visions, pathological complexes, and dreams. It is not essential that these archetypes be exactly the same from one instance to the next or across cultures. Sometimes this is so, and that is synchronistically fascinating. But when they are left as categories, families of generally related phenomena, they cannot be debunked. We would not be saying, "Look there, inside the genome, that is the XYZ archetype!" Instead, we would merely be claiming that there is value to categorizing patterned psychic phenomena in a consistent taxonomy.

This is the stuff of any scientific study. We are merely finding the relationships, the similarities between certain phenomena. That is valid data. In the study of folktales (where many of the motifs could also be called archetypes, or at least archetypal) a similar taxonomy already exists: the Aarne-Thompson Classification System. Of course, the way a taxonomy is assembled is absolutely debatable . . . and if it could be rescued from a pointlessly academic exercise, I think it would benefit Jungians to make some effort to intelligently carry on this debate. But such a taxonomy would not be a matter of a specific instance of a phenomena fitting entirely into Column A rather than Column B. We can simply say that one of its motifs is classifiable under the Column A family while another belongs more to the Column B family.

Not only is this a perfectly "scientific" (methodologically speaking) way to proceed, we have already been engaging in this kind of classification since Jung himself, albeit without really valuating it for what it is worth. We have concerned ourselves more with "creating" archetypes or speaking of an archetype or complex based on a specific instance of it . . . say, a "Persephone archetype" or a "Perseus archetype". This kind of archetype creation is a perfectly useful exercise much of the time, as it can help illuminate complexes in certain people (although, mishandled, it can also blind us to understanding the psychology of these people better). But what is seemingly missed in this favorite Jungian practice is that such "archetype creation" muddies the construct of archetype itself and prevents it from ever being used scientifically. Archetype creation is a metaphorical usage, a poeticism. It is a matter of saying that a complex psychological phenomena is like a narrative or personage motif . . . and therefore can be seen as having more order and predictability than it might at first appear to. This poetic languaging of the specific psychic phenomena of a patient is one of the essential aspects of psychotherapy (as "talking cure"). But we need to draw a line between this poetic practice and the (would-be) scientific theory of archetypes.

In a scientific theory of archetypes, there can be no metaphysical speculation about "psychoid realms" . . . and the sense of numinousness that so often accompanies archetypal phenomena must itself be differentiated and treated as a component phenomena to be studied (I think it lends itself to neuroscientific research substantially). We must ask, for instance, why the affect of numinousness triggers or is triggered by archetypal images (as the fact that the two are connected is undeniable to anyone who has observed archetypal phenomena). Beyond the construction of a logical and sensible taxonomy of archetypes, a more speculative theory or hypothesis of archetypes can be debated. But the study of archetypal phenomena is not dependent on knowing or proclaiming an underlying metaphysical "truth" to archetypes. So instead of following Jung's lead of constructing a woolly hierarchy of instinct -> archetype -> archetypal image, I suggest that we just do away with the notion that pure archetype underlies archetypal image. All archetype is archetypal image. The "pure" category of an archetype is not "innate" and buried somewhere mysterious and unknowable within the archetypal image. The pure category is in fact an abstraction of the egoic mind, a construction, a way of noting parallels among specific phenomena. The "pure" category doesn't exist anywhere in the data . . . as Jung himself realized. But as a mental tool, it allows us to compare and contrast specific phenomena. It is a placeholder, an as-if, an mathematical variable, a zero. To look for it in a material universe or to construct a spiritualistic universe just to allot it a space to be is both unscientific and absolutely unnecessary. Archetype does not have to carry the baggage of totemic belief with it. It is not a religious artifact.

It may, of course, be too late to convince a scientific thinker or a scientific field that archetype can be rendered scientifically. We have dug ourselves a fine ditch over the last decades on this matter. But it is not "rationalistic materialism" that has been too daft and narrowminded to realize the "truth" of archetypal theory. Jungians themselves are entirely to blame for misunderstanding, misrepresenting, and clinging religiously to a construction of archetype that is simply not viable outside of a totemic, religious tribal dogma. The first and greatest obstacle between archetypal theory and scientific credibility is Jungians themselves who cannot relinquish the totemic belief that archetype demands a metaphysical ingredient. We want to make archetypal theory more fabulous and magical instead of more practical, more useful (and this is no doubt a reaction to the numinous "hit" the careful observation of archetypal phenomena tends to generate). But we cannot be scientists and opiate fiends at the same time. Such intoxication pollutes our ability to understand. If we persist in this selfishness and narcissism, this addiction, we will continue to have nothing to offer science . . . and we will continue to move away from Jung's (perhaps impossible and outdated) original notion of a universal psychology. But if we somehow managed to collectively transform the archetypal theory into what it is capable of being, we would find (and who knows, maybe then science would also find) that we were in possession of an immense and extremely useful data set and taxonomic system. Evolutionary biology and psychology have not yet managed to reconstruct as elaborate and sophisticated a data set as Jungians have. But they will, in time. Here is a place Jungians could contribute . . . but only if we are first able to wrestle with and reconcile some of our unconscious shadow issues.

A Diagnosis and Proposed Treatment of the Jungian Religious Disease

The Symbiotic Jungian Relationship with the New Age

Some contemporary Jungians (e.g., David Tacey) have written books and articles stumping for a revised Jungian (and at times, human) perspective on religion.  Many Jungians find the association of Jungianism with New Age spiritualities not only dismaying, embarrassing, and unfortunate but also dangerous and potential destructive for Jungianism.  I agree with this position, but I have not seen enough fundamental differentiation of and from New Age ideas and obsessions, even in these Jungian critics, to really catalyze change on this front.  What I see in the Jungian unconscious regarding its religiosity and New Ageism is a much deeper, more pandemic issue of the Jungian shadow than is more widely acknowledged.  As is so often the case, when it comes to Jungian religiosity (and religious quackery) there are not "just a few bad apples".  The problem is systemic, and the draw of New Age thinking and spirituality is written into our souls.  It is not merely "those people over there"; this shadow is universally Jungian and we all contribute to it in some way.

In other words, I wish to point toward an internal source of this problem, and that source is the spiritual hunger that burbles within all of those people drawn to Jungianism.  It may be impossible to have it both ways, to have and cherish this hunger and also not have it lead to numerous perversions and delusional obsessions and misdirections.  At least some of this straying is inevitable . . . and I think the best we can do is to first acknowledge that this is our collective shadow for which we are responsible and then to try to more effectively analyze and understand our spiritual hunger.

Of course, it has always been known to Jungians (and Jung addressed this pointedly himself) that spiritual hunger is problematic because it leads (most of the time, even) to some form of delusion and/or self-demolition.  We use the term "inflation" most commonly . . . and in Jung's most detailed writing about the spiritual individuation experience (in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology), he even states that some degree of this inflation is inevitable in any individuation process where "the unconscious is assimilated".  But Jungian thinking on the issue of inflation has, if anything, regressed since Jung's important but still fairly vague reflections on the issue.  As I have bemoaned repeatedly since before the beginning of Useless Science, inflation is a terribly bungled issue in Jungianism . . . and it is reasonable to assume that this bungling is largely a matter of Jungians characteristically suffering from some degree of inadequately addressed and still unconscious inflation.  Most Jungian literature that address inflation (in patients, but never in analysts!) takes a very condemning stance.  Inflation is the Jungian bogeyman.  But we need to be able to look at it more constructively and talk about it more honestly and intelligently if we are to ever treat the Jungian shadow or the problem of our New Ageyness.

The issue of inflation is related to another facet of the New Age problem in Jungianism.  The superficial reason that Jungianism attracts so many religiously flaky and delusional people is that it offers an attractive system of valuation of unconscious contents, visions, and fantasies.  It promises awakenings and approvals of inwardness . . . and it delivers very nicely on that promise.  But the deeper (and rather less attractive) reason it draws so many New Agers is that the Jungian model of individual seems to lack (and generally does lack) a sense of systematic discipline.  There are very few if any observable markers that describe an individuant.  No one really knows what individuation is, even Jungian analysts . . . and so no one places any regulations or standards on it.  Jungian individuation is just another occult, tribal mysticism where learning the lingo and assuming the posture is indistinguishable from any "real" growth or transformation.  The Jungian language in which individuation is discussed (a notably mystical and religious one) is simply too vague and cannot set specific definitions on individuation.

So, wagging fingers at those crass New Agers and their hypocritical, delusional spiritualistic indulgences is utterly beside the point.  The real problem starts at the very core.  Notably, Jung and the Jungians have purposefully eschewed the construction of a unique and specific discipline around individuation.  Instead, they have encouraged misinterpretation and misappropriation of the concept by constantly comparing its motifs to those of spiritual disciplines and mystical practices.  I don't mean to suggest this "amplification" is absolutely inaccurate.  But individuation lacks the structure of many of these disciplines.

Also, instead of developing the concept of individuation in a more scientific way while using previous mysticisms and spiritual disciplines as data, Jungians have concerned themselves with marveling at the artifacts of individuation: active imagination fantasies, visions, unconscious-inspired artwork like mandalas, etc.  One off the most thorough studies of an "individuation process" comes from Jung's own writing in the essay "A Study in the Process of Individuation" (in The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious).  But this essay concerns itself largely with the interpretation of extremely abstract (and therefore projection-prone) paintings without significant effort to explain, in more scientific terms, what the patient who painted these mandalas was experiencing.  This sort of essay has set the precedent for Jungian "individuation studies" . . . and it is next to useless, a mere curiosity.  Granted, individuation is notoriously difficult to gauge or study . . . but I believe Jungians can do significantly better.  Once again, it all comes back to self-examination and shadow work.

In my experience, the presence of artifacts and fantasies of individuation are not an indication that individuation is actively engaged in.  Specifically misleading are fascinations with and visions of numinous objects, ideas, personages, and events.  This numinous affect makes for very compelling experiences, but there is very little indication that these visionary experiences lead to or are a significant part of the kind of systemic reorganization process that a successful individuation or psychotherapy might entail.  One of the most common forms of inflation in Jungian and New Age adherents is a conflation between numinous experiences and individuation events . . . and there is a tendency to believe that fantasizing about a thing is equivalent to the reality and presence of the thing.  But the spontaneous unconscious commonly presents its symbols in very dramatic, even grandiose, fashion.  Additionally, there is a correlation (in dreams and visions) between the affective intensity of an image or event and the vagueness of that event.  By "vagueness", I mean that there is not yet a viable Logos or egoic languaging for translating and understanding the numinous image.  This may seem counterintuitive.  In waking life, the intensity of something is usually directly related to its proximity.  But when it comes to unconscious contents, it is common for things that are "farther away" or not very well defined but which still contain powerful concentrations of affect (i.e., "complexes") to seem more overwhelmingly intense (perhaps because it is inadequately facilitated . . . in this case, languaged . . . affect that leads to disruptions and eruptions of the psychic system; think plumbing rather than, say, radiation).  As we develop a conscious language in which to understand these contents (and interrelate them in active memory systems), their affective intensity is diminished.  Affect, in this sense, is a pre-language.  It can tell us that something is valuable to us, but without a developed egoic language with which to translate and interpret it, we cannot know what the thing is or understand the complexity of our conscious relationship to it.

In my interaction with Jungians of New Agey persuasion, I've noted tremendous and stubborn resistance to languaging some of these affective phenomena.  Instead, they are worshiped . . . and the result is a kind of spiritual grandiosity that is devoted to separating those who "embrace" the affective object and those who "just don't get it".  In other words, tribal boundaries are unconsciously defined based on belief in these numinous objects and ideas.  The faculty of human intelligence that languages and narrativizes is devalued (sometimes as the disparaged "thinking function" . . . held to be valuatively inferior to the feeling and intuitive functions, specifically).  This inflated dynamic tends to make such believers into babes at the breast of an affective Great Mother figure.  The goal of this belief becomes the commitment to the providence of this breast.  To question any of this reality is "masculine aggression".  The chief externality of this dynamic is an unconscious shadow projection onto those who disagree with the cultic ideology or don't worship the "right" god.  All of the so-called "masculine aggression" is displaced in a passive-aggressive fashion onto these "infidels".

Of course, even if Jungianism has been religiously lax, it still (on the professional level) sees through and perhaps condemns that kind of cultic formulation.  But what has happened with many New Age Jungians is that when conventional Jungianism expressed skepticism and concern with New Age exploits, the New Agers parted ways with Jungianism.  It was just another breast to suck from . . . and if it doesn't give the milk that's wanted, some other magical breast will be set up in its place.  So the relationship of some of these New Age Jungians is basically parasitic.  They want and will take, but they will only take what they want . . . and they don't give back.  This will, of course happen, and it can't be prevented entirely.  The problem in this for Jungianism is a kind of codependency.  Many Jungians have been more or less happy to court and encourage New Age hangers on and watered down interpretations of Jungian ideas.  On the positive side, we sympathize with their spiritual hunger and perhaps with their suffering or brokenness.  On the negative side, the professional Jungian community needs an audience and patients in order to legitimize itself.  If Jungians distinctly cut off all the flaky New Agers and asserted a rigorous scientific discipline, they would lose many readers and patients.  So the symbiotic relationship of Jungianism and the New Age runs deep and roots down right in the heart of the Jungian shadow.  It is well and good to grumble about New Age misappropriations, but do Jungians really want to pay the consequences of a more scientific, rigorous, and therefore exclusive theory?

I think that as we proceed in our examinations of the New Age and of modern religiosity, we need to look very carefully at these issues.  They involve tremendously difficult ethical decisions and often serious gambles with fate.  Jungianism after Jung has become precisely what its customers have paid for it to be.  If it really were to reinvent itself, it would have to reinvent its customers.  It cannot exist while dissatisfying its customers.  But what are Jungians really devoted to: satisfying the desires of these customers or treating them and seriously studying the psyche?

That Old Nagging Question: Is Jungianism a Religion?

I have read numerous responses from Jungian analysts to this recurring question (or accusation) over the years.  Unanimously, these analysts dismissed the charge.  Jungianism is not a religion (chuckle, chuckle, scoff).  Personally, I'm not so sure about this.  Jungian analysis is well aware of its similarity to shamanism . . . and some Jungians have actively embraced shamanic ideas and symbols.  Shamanism is perhaps the oldest form of religion . . . a religion distilled to its original, tribal roots.  Claims contradicting Jungianism's religiosity on the basis of its scientific nature are spurious.  We cannot have it both ways . . . and our dedication to science and scientific methodology has been severely lacking for a long time (this issue is more complicated when it comes to developmental school/s of Jungianism, but I won't address that here).

Additionally, we have seen it as within our purview to support general religiosity, encourage belief in the paranormal (and perhaps even the supernatural), and stump for the valuation of an "ensouled world" or animi mundi.  More pointedly, it is well known that Jung advised Jungian analysts not to discourage patients from practicing and exploring their religions . . . and he even felt that many analyses (especially of those in midlife) required a return to a religious perspective of one kind or another.

But can Jungianism be a powerful religious advocate without promoting religions or religiosity?  Can we advise patients to "get religion" while also insisting that the Jungian method is not religious?  Can having a religiosity that is flexible and not well defined be the same thing as not being a religion at all?  We may benefit from a look back at the state of religion in the Roman Empire around the time Christianity was forming (1st century CE).  The religious "marketplace" was huge and diverse . . . and the attitude many people took toward religion was eclectic.  There were many similarities between that time and the modern New Age situation with religion.  "Monotheism" at that time was a Jewish idea (and considered radical and disturbing by many gentiles) . . . but even Judaism had numerous sects and divisions (many of which bore very little resemblance to the Judaisms of today).

In other words, the idea that to be a religion is to be monotheistic and specific/restrictive about beliefs and practices is a notion prejudiced by the monotheistic Judeo-Christian inheritance we in the West take for granted.  Monotheism and controlled belief do not define religiosity or religion.  Jungianism cannot weasel out of its religiosity on this argument.  That Jungianism as religious advocate offers people a welcoming way into religions and religiosity more so than it offers a final and unquestionable dogma to believe in does not really differentiate Jungianism from many of the old pagan religions in the 1st century Roman Empire.  The attraction of proto-Christianities during this period and the next few centuries was largely based on the success of Christian syncretism and its compatibility with various preexisting religions . . . from the worship of Dionysus to the elite state religion of Sol Invictus to Mithraism to Egyptian mysticisms and even including Judaism.  Judaism had many attractive elements to certain Roman gentiles: its personal and powerful experience of God, its proclaimed supremacy (as the only true religion), its focus on dietary laws and purifying the body, and its compelling history of persistence in the face of persecution, sometimes even bordering on and resembling "Dionysian madness".  Also, Jews were the "Other" in the Roman Empire, perhaps more so than any other people.  Yes, they were largely hated, but they were also enshrouded with intriguing mystery (perhaps we Americans might want to reflect on the relationship and fascination we have had with Native American spirituality inspite of the atrocious treatment of and prejudice toward these peoples we have also upheld).

Rather than unconvincingly avoiding our status as "religion", I think Jungians need to start facing and living up to the charge.  We have invited religious responsibility upon ourselves . . . and we need to have a more effective and honest way of addressing this responsibility.  Even if we are "only" awakening Jungian patients and readers to the unconscious, this is a religious process, and one that requires strong guiding principles and a continued study of how functional these principles (and the way we language them) are.  The personal integrity and professional ethics of individual analysts is not enough.  This is a tribal issue . . . and it is inherent in our Jungianism (not merely in our individual practices).

A related issue is indoctrination of patients (and readers, for that matter).  As I have written previously, indoctrination into a tribe can have "curative" effects on many people.  Dissociation (from the sacredness of community and from the sacredness of the instinctual Self) is enormously common in the modern world.  Most people just need to be part of something sacred, something where instinct flows through action (and sociality), where Eros binds people together into like-mindedness and like values.  Jungian analysis is typically good at promoting this re-tribalization.  It offers new gods to ponder and commune with, new experiences to value, and a sense of approval for any such indulgence.  Even if the Jungian tribe is abstract for most patients and readers, believing one is part of the tribe can still be effective.

Curiously, Jungian analysis can be more problematic for individuals who do not merely want to belong to a tribe, but who want the courage (and perhaps the tolerance) to be unique and independent regardless of which tribe they affiliate with.  Of course, we all want to be accepted for "who we are" . . . that is the line we will chant, at least.  But I question this truism.  Do we really want to be "who we are", independent, unique, separated on some level from our tribes?  I don't think so.  I think that most people (even most Jungians) want to find an identity that is connected to a tribal group that facilitates them.  This couldn't be a tribe that completely stifles their sense of themselves (or their Selves), but there is a notable difference between being accepted into a group for being "kin" and being accepted by groups as an "other".

The process of individuation often promoted (at least superficially) in Jungian psychology is more closely related to the latter.  To individuate is to become other to tribes and tribally-identified people.  I mean to say that we cannot accurately call the process of acquainting people with their unconscious and a new religious symbol system individuation.  It is more accurately a form of indoctrination, one that is similar to shamanic "faith healing".  That is, in many tribes, the shaman is responsible for addressing the diseases of tribe members who have fallen out of the sanctity of tribal Eros and cannot participate normally within the tribe.  The shaman her or himself is probably just such a person who has learned about the intricacies of the relationship between a self and a tribe first hand, and has therefore become something of an expert on the issue.  The healing the shaman performs in many cases is not a facilitation of individuation, but a return of the individual to a state of connection to tribal Eros.  Thus, a "soul retrieval" . . . a soul retrieved from the void and returned to the tribe and to functional collective living.

Various traumas can shake us out of our tribal connectedness for periods of time.  This tribal Eros is a transference phenomena . . . and when we suddenly wake up in the wilderness alone, we do not know who we are anymore or where our tribal kin has gone.  The shaman performs a ritual that helps guide the person back to this transference object.  But once the person returns, they are plugged back into the "Matrix" of tribal Eros.  This is not the same thing as individuation.  The process of becoming a shaman, on the other hand, is very much parallel to an individuation.  But we must note that the shaman is forever cut off from the unconscious access to tribal Eros and must always remain in a liminal space where the tribe is concerned.  This liminality is what grants her or him the magic or mana to perform the shamanic rituals.  But they can never again be a normal member of the tribe . . . for intimacy with the shaman is itself terrifying and alien (a transference phenomenon) for most tribe members.

The complication that arises when we try to map the shamanic/tribal paradigm to the modern world is a matter of the Problem of the Modern.  Specifically, tribal living is no longer very possible or very survivable.  We are all disenfranchised tribally speaking (thus the appeal of cults and clubs).  We are therefore always hungering to return "Home" to a tribal environment.  But the modern world doesn't permit this without some kind of repercussion.  That is, in general, modern tribes do not have access to many resources, so those who devote themselves entirely to these tribes must give up many of the resources the wider world offers.  Such devoted tribe members today must also greatly curtail their egoic strategies and diversifying ability to communicate and interact with people of various ideologies, persuasions, and tribal affiliations.  Tribes in the modern world are always in grave danger of going extinct.

Although our unconscious drive is to seek tribalism, consciously we might be able to conceptualize that drive and redirect it.  The conventional Jungian way to do this is to form an individual relationship to the instinctual Self (which Jungians call the collective unconscious . . . and its collectivity is its equivalency and archetype of the tribe.)  The collective unconscious or instinctual Self is not a substitute for others and relationality with those others, but it can be a significant substitute for contact with the sacred.  What we call sacred is what enables the flow of instinctuality.

The condition many individuals find themselves in in the modern world is one in which, despite unconscious drives, literal tribalism is unappealing.  What I believe happens with many of these individuals is that they stumble toward the individuation process with little or no guidance.  They might find ways (usually only if they have guides and mentors who are present and have enabled them) to make a few steps into that process . . . but they very, very rarely find a satisfactory way through and out of it.  Individuation is too complex and demanding for most of us to manage it alone.  Also, it is a work contra naturum . . . or more accurately (as I have put it in the past), it is Nature's Work Against Nature.  By that alchemical phrase, I mean that on one hand, individuation opposes our instinctual nature (which is to belong unconsciously to a nurturing tribal Eros).  Yet, on the other hand, the drive that catalyzes individuation and pushes it forward is equally an instinctual drive.  It is, in fact, the reconceptualization of the very same drive that pushes us to find and connect with our "True Tribe", our kin.

What individuation drives us toward (instead of a literal tribe of others) is the source of our instinctual imprinting, our archetypal potentiality or what Jung sometimes called the psychoid realm, where the ego can become acquainted with instinctual structures and principles of psychic organization that are not overly contaminated with the dysfunctional imprint of the outer environment.  These primary imprinting potentials or instincts or archetypes in themselves must be relanguaged and re-imprinted through the human ("egoic") faculties of conceptualization and narrativization.  Initially, they are concentrated complexes of "energy" or numinous affect with prelingual essences.  But these Self principles of organization can become refreshed and reactivated through a psychic diet of "Good Medicine".  That is, we must begin to feed ourselves on ideas, images, and "sacred" objects that provide functional hooks for instinctual imprinting.  As our diet improves, these affects will become better defined, forming symbols and personages.  A personage in the psyche is an indication that we feel familiar enough with the content to see "intelligence" or personality (ego) in it.  With adequate familiarity, these affective or instinctual personages can be engaged with and valuated by the ego (sometimes experienced or languaged as "integration" of these personages or their attitudes and perspectives).

There is a very good reason that a psychotherapeutic "talking cure" works: our species is dependent on languaging in order to revise its psychic system.  What we find in the advent of individuation is that some of the building blocks of this new languaging (or what I define as Logos) always existed in our memories on more "quantum" levels.  That is, we might have generally thought of a specific image or thing as a whole construct or complex . . . and that complex was tainted with dysfunctional imprinting potential.  But once that complex is broken down into parts (which are less familiar to us) . . . a parallel of the alchemical process of dissolution, those parts can be reassembled into functional imprinting Logos conduits.  This will initially be experienced as a numinous "self-organizing" process.  In fact, our dreams are always building and rebuilding connections for us.  But what we find at the beginning of individuation or healing is that these spontaneous restructurings of memory suddenly "click" for us and enable instinctuality to flow through them.  These images become numinously charged or soaked with instinctual affect.  They will probably go on to serve as building blocks for later, more complex constructions (for which the ego is also consciously contributing language).

Roughly halfway through a process of individuation (and some time after all of the stages of individuation "mapped" by Jungians), a major transition or threshold must be passed through.  There are many symbols and many languages that cluster around this threshold, many ways of seeing and understanding it, but I feel that the most important general shift at this stage is one from accepting the Logos and reorganization of languaging that the instinctual Self spontaneously offers to actively and consciously making, constructing, creating, and revising that Logos.  Alchemical symbolism seems to fit this transition the best, especially when a kind of "dual opera" is depicted, a First Opus and a Second Opus.  The Rosarium Philosophorum demonstrates this as elegantly as any alchemical text.  The signature alchemical symbols marking this transition are the Coniunctio-to-Nigredo shift into "blackness" or "first matter".  Something divided has come together into one out of sheer instinct and mutual longing for that oneness . . . and the energy of that attraction drove the entire process "automatically".  But now that that energy has dissipated, the quest and purpose is suddenly vague, the attractive and wondrous Other is no longer "there" to be felt and engaged with.

In alchemy this is considered the beginning of the work . . . that is, the beginning of the intentioned, egoic work, the discipline.  What came before and culminated in the Coniunctio was merely the precondition and preparation for this work.  It is in this alchemical tradition that I have often used the term "Work" to describe the intentioned Logos-creating process that is engaged in in partnership with the Self (which provides affective reactions to the ego's attempt to construct a viable Logos or Self-facilitating language in which to exist and adapt).  Regarding that ego/Self partnership or shared psychic objective, the onset of the Nigredo does not simply deliver it to the ego's desires.  The affective and instinctual source must first be found within the darkness of the Nigredo's wilderness.  It must be chiseled out of solid rock or excavated.  The "lesson" of the Nigredo is that the sacred or the dynamic organizing principle of the Self is not provided (for example, just because the ego is hungry and faithful).  The relationship to the Self comes only through the dedication to a process of active facilitation of instinct.  "Prayers" to the Self are no longer answered . . . for it is not the job of the Self to facilitate the ego (or "keep the ego together"), it is the ego's role in the psyche to facilitate the instinctual Self.

The Nigredo transition in Jungian psychology is not really understood or even recognized most of the time, because the Jungian process of analysis does not deal with this rather terrible threshold of initiation.  The Coniunctio in Jungianism is held up as an abstract and always distant goal, the phantom of a Holy Grail shining in the distance, an object of totemic longing and worship (or, alternatively, as a transferential merging with the analyst . . . an even greater interpretive error).  The Coniunctio of the alchemists is a parallel door to the return of an individual into the circle of tribal Eros.  But whereas the instinctual Self is projected onto the tribe in the state of tribal Eros or participation mystique (and is then sustained unconsciously and unintentionally through acceptance of and obedience to the totems and gods of the tribe), in individuation, the relationship between the ego and the Self is personalized . . . and the ego becomes entirely responsible for the well-being and maintenance of the Self.  That is an immense responsibility and very difficult to establish or maintain.  It requires a kind of heroic dedication to the Self's principles, a willingness and ability (which must be gradually learned) to take on the role of the Syzygy within the psyche.

There is no viable Jungian literature on the individuation process at or after this threshold because the Jungian method does not actually promote this event (the alchemical symbols that depict post-Coniunctio stages of the Work are misinterpreted by Jungians and misplaced into earlier, pre-individuated psychic states).  Jungians have discovered some of the artifacts of individuation . . . fantasies, fairytales, symbols, and so forth that are common parts of the paraphernalia of individuation . . . but these things are not woven into a structured system or theory.  So individuation itself as an instinctual, complex, and systemic "opus" is not actually studied by Jungians . . . only some of its artifacts are.  And these artifacts remain rather talismanic and poorly understood . . . perhaps in the sense that the discarded garbage of the distant past can become the cherished treasures of museums and archeologists.  Jungians have not yet reconstructed the thing itself from the artifacts it has discovered.  This is not necessarily due to some kind of moral failing.  It is much more likely that Jungians have not managed to piece together the individuation process because it is rarely necessary to understand this process when conducting an analysis.  Jungian analysands don't necessarily want or need to individuate.

And I am not advocating any kind of forced revision of Jungianism where individuation is insisted upon in analysis.  My concern is primarily with the ethical and scientific issues surrounding the Jungian "selling" of individuation.  It is important for Jungians to both know what is really going on with this process and to not misrepresent to patients the purpose of analysis.  I have very mixed feelings about the actual promotion of individuation.  I cannot ethically advocate a general promotion . . . but when it is desired by an individual, I think Jungian analysts should be prepared to help illuminate the process as much as possible.  Some people need to individuate in order to heal . . . and conventional Jungian analysis does not adequately prepare these people for this need or offer enough guidance through or understanding of it.

I digress on the subject of individuation because it relates specifically to our problem with religion . . . and, I think, could point to ways to better address that problem.  For instance, failing to differentiate individuation from tribal indoctrination is not merely a technical analytic failure.  It is also, on another level, a failure to understand the psychology of religion.  I would argue that the psychology or religion is primarily twofold . . . and it breaks down along the same lines as the Jungian indoctrination vs individuation issue.  Religiosity is driven by two main instincts: the instinct for sociality and the preservation of the sanctity of tribal Eros in a group (usually through the worship of gods or dogmas or the observation of tribal taboos) and the instinct for adaptation to environments hostile to our evolutionary adaptedness.  The latter adaptive instinct drives individuation, which is an adaptation to the tribally-hostile environment of the modern.  The medium of this adaptation is conceptualization or languaging or, if you prefer (although it is vaguer), consciousness.

In historical religions, there is commonly a tribal or social thread (composed of creeds, dogmas, taboos, totems, laws, etc . . . all of which serve the purpose of forging and preserving a tribal identity that every tribe member shares) . . . and a mystical thread (a core narrative that depicts the shamanic or heroic individuation quest where one individual finds a way to commune with the god of the tribe . . . and perhaps even founds the tribe on the basis of this communion).  The mystical aspect of religions usually resounds with individuation symbols and artifacts . . . and these can sometimes serve as models and guides for the "mystics" of the tribe.  More commonly, they are totemized and made into objects of worship for tribe members rather than models to emulate.

When Jungians advocate religious involvement, awakening, or return to their patients, it creates a slippery slope.  What is really being advocated: totemic worship, tribal conformity, and an obedience to dogma . . . or the individual mystical journey of individuation (using the symbolic artifacts of a religion's mysticism as stars to steer by)?  Obviously the first option could be difficult to merge with analytic work.  But the latter cannot be blindly and indiscriminately advocated.  That is, the Jungian analyst who advocates these things must truly understand the pitfalls of the process in order to help the patient navigate those pitfalls.  Not all mysticisms are alike or created equal.  Each has its own particular dangers.  Many religious mysticisms have been warped to some degree over many years of dogmatization (for instance, much Christian mysticism was considered heretical by the Church and prohibited from being considered "Christian").  Individuation events also tend to be highly personalized (not surprisingly).  So the possibility of individuating in precisely the same way a previous mystic in the tradition did is very unlikely.

Jungianism allows for the individuality of individuation by adopting a polytheistic religious advocacy.  But in this openness, it also opens the door to all the cumulative problems of various religions.  That is the price of egalitarianism and openmindedness . . . but again, are the Jungians truly aware of these religious problems?  Are they adequate critics of religion?  Perhaps critics is the wrong word.  Are Jungians adequate psychologists of religion?  Do we have to know what a thing is and how it works in order to prescribe it?

Generally, Jungians have felt such knowledge is minimally valuable.  They do not question the process as long as it seems to work.  Analysis is a creative and experimental enterprise, and it is important to always be open to learning and taking cues from the work, from the transference.  There is no valid psychotherapy without moments (probably many) of confusion, "irrational" intuition, guesswork, self-examination, and of course, error.  Human relationship is never perfect . . . and despite some analysts' efforts to refute this, analysis is a human relationship (and should be).  But can we be satisfied with not knowing, ethically speaking?  Is what we remain ignorant of allowing us a selfish form of bliss?  Just because something seems to work once or twice without the analyst understanding why or intentioning it, does this mean she or he is off the hook for ever trying to understand it or that it cannot be better understood?  Don't we have an obligation as scientists and investigators of the psyche to keep trying to understand?  Don't we hunger to know the Self?  Or is faith in magic synchronicities good enough for Jungians?  If so, can we charge our clients professional psychotherapeutic fees based on such qualifications?  If the qualification of Jungian analysts is that they are "true believers" in the magic of the psyche, does this result in the attraction and courting of analysands who want to go to a "faith healer", who want to believe in something magical? To the degree that this is the (perhaps unintentioned or unexamined) Jungian professional stance (among more classical rather than developmental Jungians, at least), can we be truly surprised or legitimately complain about the appropriation of Jungianism by the New Age?

I don't mean to entirely reject the notion that psychotherapy can be a "healing of faith", but should Jungians be promoting faith?  Is it perhaps possible for Jungians to be neutral and to work from a more scientific understanding that beneath the artifacts of faith, issues of sacredness and instinctual systemic functionality are operating?  These sorts of questions are very difficult to answer.  Many are perhaps unanswerable.  And although individual Jungians have chosen to grapple with a few (in the literature) from time to time, we have not made a serious collective effort to analyze these issues.  If the Jungian tribe was merely a tribe of believers, a religious order, or a kinship group, such analysis would not necessarily be important.  But the Jungian tribe is a tribe of analysts.  If we cannot or are not willing to analyze ourselves . . . not merely in individual training analyses, but as a tribe and as tribe members, have we truly made every effort to both assure our work with patients is as ethical as it can be and honestly say that we are focusing consciousness and energy on the dynamics of our tribe and the issues of its survivability?  Are we adequately treating ourselves as a group?  And if not, why is this our analytical weak spot, our shadow?

It is not only possible and essential to make such self-examinations of our tribalism (and its religiosity), it is also entirely within the purview of Jungian analytical theory as the confrontation with (and perhaps the "assimilation" of) the shadow.  We are already set up to do this self-analysis and shadow work . . . so we must ask ourselves why we have been "non-Jungian" in this refusal and hypocrisy.   By what rules did we pick the kind of Jungians we were going to be?  Conscious and ethically governed rules . . . or unconscious, complex-driven rules?

The last thing I would like to add and leave the reader with is the suggestion that, despite the oddity and scarcity of Jungian atheists, it may be precisely these Jungian atheists that are needed to bring self-examination, shadow work, scientific and intellectual rigor, and functional ethics back into modern Jungianism.  I don't mean me.  I am merely intuiting my way into a welling up of reactive shadow that is part of the Jungian tribal soul.  I mean that those of us with skepticism and ethical concerns all need to make a concerted effort to tap into this welling up of shadow constructively.  We cannot be ashamed or frightened of our skepticism, or our shadowy frustration with Jungian foibles.  Nor can we merely "act out" in rejection of these dubious inheritences (as it seems to me is quite common among those Jungians retreating into psychoanalytic ideas and splinter tribes).  There is intelligence and wisdom in this murking belch of affect.  There is value to be mined.  There is a muffled heroic Calling and the wounded moaning of the Jungian Self.  There is a great deal of work to do . . . and we cannot bask in the mystical wonderland of our puerism forever.  Something in us is dying while we flit off to entertain our soaring urges and blissful wonder.  While we go off to play in the psyche and its museum of artifcats, who will tend to the spiritual and instinctual welfare of the tribe?

As I have asserted repeatedly over the last years, I am an atheist.  A Jungian atheist.  As a Jungian atheist I would make a nice case study or perhaps a specimen jar oddity.  I have stated briefly in previous writings that I feel Jungianism is actually fully compatible with atheism.  It is after all a psychology . . . intended as a scientific study of the psyche.  Jungianism is not a religion and should therefore have no conflict with secularism's refusals to believe in a literal God or in gods or other mystical of spiritual things.  But the study of psyche (as Jung often noted) is a study of phenomena without a declaration of what those phenomena literally are or are founded on.  That is, we cannot say what something like the anima is, but we can recognize this ordered phenomenon in many dreams, stories, and artistic creations.

Despite some desire to be provocative, I do not want to "cure" Jungianism of its tendency toward religiosity and even belief.  There has been a wave of secularist/atheistic writing in recent years (sometimes referred to as the "New Atheism", see also the "Brights movement") that has reinforced what I (and many others, even other atheists) feel is a very dated and at times even scientistic tribalist slandering of religion.  These arguments against the usefulness of religion do not treat religion as a complex psychological phenomenon, nor do they effectively and scientifically seek to study the mind that generates religion and religiosity.  That is, dismissive pseudo-theories have been given and dressed up in scientific garb (e.g., the theory that religion is a dangerous meme that takes over human brains and pushes the human species toward self-destruction . . . advocated by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett).  But these are really only tribal arguments, propaganda pieces that are meant to sort Us and Them.  These scientific claims are very spurious and poorly thought out.  In fact, by disseminating these tribalistic dogmas, Dawkins, Dennett, and other atheists are simply engaging in the very same religious behavior as other religionists (albeit without an anthropomorphic godhead on their tribal seal).

I find myself being just as critical of this brand of atheistic tribalism as I am of other more conventional religions.  Of course, New Atheism doesn't have the significant history of mass atrocity behind it that the Western monotheisms do . . . and there is something to be said about that.  But the "problem" of religion in general is not an issue of irrationality or belief in things that are unreal or insubstantial.  The problem is that the tribalism surrounding religions can very easily negate a kind of universal or humanist ethics that the modern world and the human species are dependent on for their survival.  Tribalistic ideologies devalue otherness, and when otherness is devalued, the treatment of others is not governed by the same sense of ethics and empathy that governs the treatment of fellow tribe members.

The psychology of human religiosity is, far from being some sort of mistake or anomaly, one of the most fertile gateways into the understanding of the human psyche in general.  We are, as it has been so frequently stated in recent years, homo religioso.  But one of the critiques trumpeted by the new atheists is well worth considering.  Namely, that traditional views of and relationships to religion are no longer functional in the modern world.  That is, a literalizing view of religion and religiosity that remains intentionally ignorant of human psychology and human religious predisposition (not to mention human religious history) is not compatible with the demands modernism places upon us.  Simple belief is no longer the answer . . . and the (perhaps Catholic/Augustinian but probably much older and more intuitive)  idea that religiosity can be pursued in the modern world through "faith alone" is plagued by externalities.  Religiosity and the pursuit of knowledge are not incompatible.

The combination of religiosity and the pursuit of knowledge (small-g gnosis) in the modern world took an enormous leap forward in the theories and valuative attitudes of C.G. Jung, who was and still is seen as a "psychologizer" of sacred things by some, and a mystical prophet of a New Age religion by others.  For someone of my own persuasion, Jung's language was a clarion call proclaiming that religiosity could be pursued without the sacrifice of knowing or the abandonment of the pursuit of scientific methodology.  In this sense, perhaps he was a "modern prophet" . . . but a prophet of a modern religiosity, NOT of an ancient, tribal religion or mysticism.

One of my strongest continuing gripes with today's Jungianism is that it fails to be truly modern and to respond to the Problem of the Modern with which we are all presented.  Its doctrines and remedies have become regressive.  That is, it prescribes a romantic return to neo-primitive tribalism in the effort to "re-ensoul the world" . . . or rather, in the effort to bring a sense of the sacred back into the lives of disenfranchised modern humans.  And to be fair, this can, in fact, work . . . so long as we are able to find a safe tribal space, a kind of ideological "Tower in Bollingen" where we can be free of modernism's disenfranchisement and desacralization.

But I find this solution flawed and, for the majority of people in the world today, inadequate.  It does not treat the Problem of the Modern (one facet of which is the lack of the sacred in the modern system of existence) but rather fights to withdraw partially from it.  This solution strikes me as fairly selfish*.  It only works for the individual practicing the withdrawal (or for the withdrawing tribe, if the individual can attain membership).  It does not therapeutically treat the larger modern world and its construction of personality.  Sacredness is merely being horded into a kind of introversion or inwardness that exhibits no social responsibility . . . and that kind of anti-social inwardness is one of the major problems of the modern already.  It could be said, then, that this Jungian inrtoversion of sacredness is (albeit in a small way) contributing to the very Problem of the Modern it is supposed to present a remedy for.  Again, the issue of externalities of tribalism.

* in the Jungian paradigm, this period of introversion is supposed to be temporary, a necessary first step.  But the subsequent period or extraverting, or what I would consider taking responsibility for the maintenance of the sacred in the world, does not seem to ever develop.  There is, at least, very little Jungian writing that describes how such a process might work . . . and so the extraverting stage remains only as an abstract idealization, an intangible goal.

Many contemporary Jungians have recognized this tendency toward anti-social inwardness as a signature Jungian problem . . . and as a result we see both critiques of this trait in Jungian literature and propositions for "getting Jungianism out into the world".  I'm not sure we Jungians are ready to make any evangelical forays into the larger world at this point . . . and at the risk of appearing to contradict myself, I would recommend that we first spend some serious time and energy contemplating our relationship to modernism.  I wouldn't go so far as to call the attempts at "social theorizing" and interpretation of modern social trends in recent Jungian literature "embarrassing" (or rather, to the degree I find them embarrassing, I recognize the emotion as a product of my own at times uneasy relationship to my Jungianism), but they are not a very good representation of the best we Jungian have to offer the wider non-Jungian intellectual world.

And this is one of the arenas in which the conventional Jungian attitude toward religion and religiosity is a problem.  Even as we have inherited one of the most fertile valuative systems for the understanding and preservation of the sacred, our Jungian religiosity tends to strike the larger, modern, and much more secularly-influenced world as a rather cultic evangelizing.  We tell ourselves that we really don't care about this impression because we are "true believers" in the know about the soul . . . and because we are really only concerned with those who would answer the Call of the unconscious and be interested in such a return to religion.  But this attitude must be seen for its true immaturity, irresponsibility, and self-destructiveness if we Jungians are to every enter and eventually constructively influence the modern world (and the modernism in the patients our analysts treat).

Self-contentment with our "wisdom" and grasp or religion is at odds with our survivability . . . and we cannot sit back in an ideological stupor waiting (with utter certainty) for the big mothership to return and whisk us away to the paradise we so deeply deserve.  We have an intellectual and valuative legacy to uphold and perpetuate . . . and it is not merely a legacy of belief.  It is a scientific legacy of rigorous investigation, a legacy of "psychologization" (negative connotations be damned) . . . not metaphysics.  Perhaps we would rather be poets, crafting songs to the psychic Muse, wondrous odes to sanctity.  Yes that would be easier.  But this is a puer fantasy.  We are not the bards of the psyche.  That is a temptation that Jung himself decided to throw off . . . and although I feel he did so with a lack of refinement and full understanding, there is something to be said about his decision to pursue science instead of art.

Speaking as a poet who has put aside poetry to pursue Jungian psychology, I am well acquainted with the puer pitfalls lying in wait for those Jungians who would poeticize the psyche.  Even as a poet, I found this romanticism unacceptable.  Poetry today is no longer romantic in this sense . . . it is actually rather ruthless and embittered.  The kind of poeticism we Jungians have sought in our thinking and writing is a shoddily constructed fantasy that is neither good for our tribe or for larger human thought.  Poetry, real poetry, real art is a brutal enterprise, not a retreat into the childlike creative wonderland we have too often imagined it to be as we have reconceptualized it as art therapy and active imagination.  I am not criticizing the value of these creative expressions as therapy.  They help open the doors that must first be opened for healing to progress.  But speaking as an artist and not a hobbiest, the act of creation should involve the whole person, should be an ethical struggle, a painful labor mentally and spiritually . . . and not merely a revelation or mysterious vision.

Active imagination as Jungians so often conceive of it is a kind of tourism of the deep psyche . . . but real artists are locals who must live there in that economy.  If we would like to be artists, then I suggest we strive to be real artists and not tourists or analytical patients.  We have, perhaps, lost the paternal rigor and seriousness that Jung himself used as a guiding principle . . . and we are now caught up in the maternal fantasy of the puer, where everything seems possible and expansive, yet we only exist within the confines of a glass jar.

The pursuit or religion or spirituality, when genuine, is just as rigorous and dangerous as the creation of art.  By accepting a Catholic attitude toward faith in the numinous unconscious and its products, we indirectly cripple Jungian thinking, Jungian science.  I feel we should make greater efforts to keep separate the believer and the knower within ourselves . . . and not stifle our knower but allow it to pursue the psychology of religion and spirituality with all due skepticism.  Even as we might also choose belief.  I am not saying that we should ultimately settle for dissociation (as Jung himself seemed to) where on some level we "know" God, but on another level, we still seek to know.  Personally, I don't feel spiritually divided.  I see no contradiction between scientific naturalism and the devoted valuation of the sacred.  How I have resolved this personally is perhaps not universally prescribable.  Every individuation journey is by definition unique . . . and these journeys don't end in dogma, in belief, in the Holy Word unquestioningly accepted.  There is no One Truth awaiting us at a stage of "enlightenment".

The bitter irony of our problematic, dated, and simplistic Jungian relationship with religion is that we have not only failed to be adequate (and adequately modern) scientists in our brand of religiosity.  We have also failed spiritually to relate to and preserve the sacred.  Spiritually, we have been far too selfish and tried to hoard a "natural resource" of sanctity rather than use it to drive adaptation and progress in our existence and intellectual contributions.  We have, I would argue, misunderstood spirituality . . . which is not about providence.  It's about responsibility.  Spirituality isn't a declaration of dependence on a god but an acceptance of responsibility for the preservation and welfare of that god (or object or system of value).  This is fairly evident in the many spiritualities and mysticisms Jungians have studied and "Jungianized" . . . but this common knowledge is not very well put into practice in our Jungianizations of religion.

I am not proposing that we trade one god for another . . . say Jung for Freud or mysticism for materialism.  I am not advocating a tribalistic solution.  I am saying that we need to deepen and clarify our relationships to our gods.  It is in no way essential for Jungians to "become atheists", but there needs to be a greater awareness and acceptance of the perspective of a Jungian atheist in our thinking and investigating.  We cannot proceed merely with faith as our vehicle, not as psychologists.  Skepticism and self-criticism are also necessary . . . and not out of some ideological or tribal implementation of rationalism, but out of the instinctual necessities of survival and the ethics of valuation of the sacred.

We should, of course, continue the Jungian tradition of skepticism toward rationalistic materialism.  But we cannot merely hold science and rationalism in suspicion out of a tribal prejudice.  We need to turn a gnostic criticism both on modern science and on our own inclinations toward cultic and ancient religiosity.

Jung and Christianity

Although Jung's view of Christianity was certainly complex and at times somewhat blasphemous (e.g., in "Answer to Job"), he should be considered a "Christian thinker" perhaps at least as much as he should be seen as a "modern thinker" or a "neopagan thinker".  The imprint of Christianity is foundational for Jung, and this has gone underexamined by Jungians.  Much Jungian attention has been given to Jung's thinking on mysticism, Eastern philosophy, Gnosticism, occult and paranormal phenomena, etc. . . . but we seem to overlook the "less exciting" and New-Agey fact that Jung was writing largely within the Christian paradigm.  That is, in order to find value for these things that have become New Age staples, Jung had to contend with his Christianity and Christian mentality.  He addressed them as a "Westerner" . . . and that essentially meant (for Jung) "as a Christian" (or one who has grown up within the Christian symbol system).

There is no doubt that Jung stretched his Christianity very far (especially for a man of his time) . . . but it must be understood that he had a Christianity to stretch.  Christianity was a significant, fundamental factor in Jung's personality and thought.  What he created and proposed, he did in relation to Christianity.  When Jung wrote "Answer to Job", he was creating a personalized Christian theology.  It doesn't matter as much that it was "heretical" (by Catholic standards) as it does that this personal thinking about religion and God took place within the confines of Christian language and symbols, Christian imagination and fantasy.  In other words, Jung accepted the foundation of Christian symbolism in his psyche and (like the alchemists) sought to pursue his personal individuation journey within its boundaries (i.e., his use of Eastern and non-Christian symbols and ideas was made as a Christian thinker relating to these as "orientalisms").  He did not question the validity of that foundation.

Although Jung was critical of the Church in some ways (and especially of Protestantism), he was not truly a political critic or historian of Christianity.  For Jung, Christianity was largely a psychological phenomenon . . . not a social or institutional one.  He treated the Church and its symbols and dogmas as if they were spontaneous eruptions of the unconscious, as if they were dreams or myths.  He did not examine these texts as if they were constructions influenced by political and personal agendas.  But today, in the so called postmodern or post-constructionist era, this is how we examine texts.  We no longer accept that there are pure emanations of the unconscious that can be accepted as singular psychic artifacts.  We break things down to more quantum levels.

It is perhaps too much to ask of Jung that he should have done this, should have been more postmodern than modern (of course, psychoanalytic/Freudian analysis of texts is in the postmodern and Derridean DNA and prefigured literary deconstruction).  But for contemporary Jungians, the continued lack of sociopolitical scrutiny and deconstruction of religious and mythic texts is inexcusable and one of the many reasons we Jungians have failed the Call of the modern.  We have (unconsciously, for the most part) carried on Jung's tradition of viewing Christianity and Christian symbolism as pure/unconscious psychic artifacts and have not made any further attempts to deconstruct and scrutinize Christian ideas and symbols.

This is, I suspect, partly due to the fact that Christianity doesn't interest Jungians as much as neopagan, Eastern, and occult symbol systems do.  Therefore, we have largely ignored Christianity.  But such ignorance is dangerous, because Christianity is at the core of our Jungian DNA, driving the construction of many of the theories we have inherited from Jung and continue to advocate.  The attitude we have taken toward Christianity has served as the mold from which our attitude toward all religious ideas and texts has been coined.  Even as some postmodernism has slipped into the language of Jungians (most notably James Hillman and Wolfgang Giegerich and their advocates), we have still failed to turn the postmodern analysis these ideas connote on our own precious things and on the construction of our Jungianism.  Instead, we have used postmodern languaging merely for play and escapism (as it is also most frequently used in other academic areas, in my rather biased opinion).

I feel it's time to start deconstructing Jung's thinking (as well as our collective and personal Jungianisms) in relation to its cultural constructions and influences.  An excellent first step has been taken in this enterprise by Sonu Shamdasani (Jung and the Making of Modern Psychology: The Dream of a Science, 2004), whose scholarship has demonstrated that Jung's psychological thinking grew out of a specific intellectual milieu and context (and did not spring entirely from his own unique genius, as the Jungian myth has preferred to have it for decades now).  Still, to my knowledge, Jung's Christianity has not been so thoroughly analyzed.

Just as Shamdasani's contextualization of Jung's theory development has not rendered Jung entirely un-unique, I don't think a study and deconstruction of Jung's Christianity would entirely negate his  contributions to the study of religion and theology.  But it would, I suspect, be disruptive to Jungian tribalism, because it would help us look more squarely at our Jungian shadow.  A historical study of Christianity grants us a uniquely detailed peek into the construction of a world religion.  Yes, historical texts and artifacts relating to the construction of Christianity are scarce . . . but compared to any other major religion, there is a wealth of information from which we can draw general theories and make psychological observations.

Christianity (as we know it today and as Jung knew it) grew out a period of great turmoil and tribal splintering, a proto-modern collision of cultures and technologies.  Christianity can not be understood adequately within the cloak of its own myth and propaganda (as Jung and Jungians have typically sought to understand it).  What we consider Christian today is what survived and triumphed from a centuries-long, outrageously bloody battle among numerous pre-Christianities.  And the victor (eventually called the Roman Catholic Church) rose to its position not by the glory of truth and God's will, but by political intrigue and a willingness to ally itself with Roman military might, a willingness to allow this might to forcibly and physically wipe out its Christian competitors.  We still often react to such ideas as if they were ideological propaganda (an element of the preposterous "anti-Christian persecution" that many in the enormous Christian majority in Americ like to fantasize about and bemoan), but this is merely the product of our own desire to believe and an ignorance of the historical evidence that has long existed.  I recommend that anyone interested in the deconstruction and analysis of Christianity and its texts spend some time at the snarky (at times offensive) but thorough and well-annotated website JesusNever Existed.Com.  The author of this site, Kenneth Humphreys does have an agenda . . . but he has also managed to pull together a great deal of interesting and well-documented scholarship.  I must also admit that my own final step into self-branding as an atheist was due to my extensive reading of this site and the many books and articles it uses as sources.  Until that point (and in a very Jungian fashion), I had developed my own personal, very heretical Christianity.  But as I was able to historically deconstruct it, I realized that even that construction was problematic.

Most Jungians will not be able to stomach JesusNeverExisted.Com, and that is a shame, because the resistance  speaks to the problem of Jungianism as a religion rather than a science.  Still, we are, as Jungians, not obligated to be believers.  Our legacy is one of investigation and psychologization.  In our Jungianism, it is not faith that we must ultimately preserve, but truth or gnosis.  Our search for the soul is not one (collectively and professionally) that is meant to end in belief.  We have come to the soul not to worship but to observe, measure, contemplate.  And these things can be done in the name of also relating to the soul, valuating it.  Faith from a distance is not valuative, it is egoic and self-serving.  To experience a thing, we must seek to know it as it is in order not to colonize it and make it over into the image of our projection.

I would argue (in accord with Jungian thinking) that alchemy (a favorite Jungian subject) was a more spontaneous eruption of the Christianized unconscious (of the middle ages) than Christian doctrine was.  Alchemy was a reaction of the unconscious in an attempt to counterbalance Christianized consciousness.  This was, no doubt, the source of Jung's fascination with it.  Alchemy attempts to revivify the instinctual unconscious and the Self's organizing principle within (or at least not in direct opposition to) the Christian symbol system . . . and this is precisely why it is the most significant precedent of Jungian psychology.  The alchemical inheritance and the alchemical quest are the same as those in the Jungian paradigm.  We Jungians can no more ignore our Christian heritage than the alchemists could.

Jung saw alchemy as an intellectual heir of Gnosticism, and although this can be hard to establish at times, there is a very legitimate sense in which he was correct.  Gnosticisms were the main competitors with proto-Catholocism both before the Romanization of Christianity and for a century or so after.  These Gnosticisms should not, I think, be romanticized as the "great lost Christianity".  But what is extremely important to understand is that proto-Catholicism was powerfully influenced by these Gnosticisms.  Yet this influence was largely reactive and defensive.  Catholicism was constructed in relation to Gnosticism, and it was constructed intentionally as an "anti-Gnosticism".  As a result, many of the writings of the early Church fathers were devoted to developing anti-Gnostic dogmas and arguments.  The Catholicism we inherited was largely constructed, not as a "true Word from God", but as a system of arguments and propoaganda refuting and dispatching of Gnosticism and Gnostic ideas.

When Gnostic ideas disappeared (partially going underground and syncretizing with other deposed paganisms), it was not because "no one believed them or took them seriously anymore".  It was because the remaining Gnostics were persecuted and murdered and their texts burned (in fact, some of the "Christian Martyrs" adopted and sensationalized by the Church were essentially Gnostics).  That is, Catholicism went to a very severe political and military level to defeat its arch ideological nemesis.  The Gnostic texts we have today come from two general sources: either they were preserved by the Catholic Church fathers as objects for which Catholic counterarguments were made or they were hidden away by Gnostic-sympathizers and forgotten for over 1000 years only to be rediscovered in the 20th century.  Amazingly few texts survived the Catholic book burnings.  Gnosticism (and later, alchemy) are a part of the Christian shadow . . . and the Christian Shadow-Self.  They represent what the Christian consciousness most hates and fears.

Jung was a modern champion of the Christian unconscious who sought to do "shadow work" on the Christian shadow.  Jungian psychology of religion is significantly constructed by this position, but it has taken up the task without concern for the historical and cultural constructionism of Christian mythology.  As a result, the Jungian "hostility" toward and heresy for Christianity exists unconsciously.  To drive Jungianism toward the modern, we Jungians will need to begin taking a conscious approach toward our Christianity.  And to understand ourselves and our roots, we will have to look more closely at our own historical and unconscious relationship with Christian ideas and symbols.  We will need to analyze our own Christian construction.

I think we will find that, despite Jung's heretical positions toward Christian dogma, his limitations were Christian (or Catholic) limitations.  That is, when he failed to form an adequate (and adequately modern) psychological perspective on the phenomena of the unconscious, his failings were very much like the failings of the Christian consciousness as demonstrated by the dogmas of the Church.  I feel this Christian limitation is most notable in Jung's dualistic construction of the Self and other archetypes (as half light, half dark), his particular understanding and valuation of "faith", and in his treatment of alchemy.

Although many Jungians have continued the obsession with alchemy Jung initiated, they have regrettably approached alchemy entirely through Jung's own scholarship and perspectives.  As important as alchemy is to Jungian psychology (as both source and nuisance), Jung's psychologization of alchemy was significantly flawed.  I am not of the "purist" school (perhaps best represented by Adam McLean of the AlchemyWebsite.com) that holds that to psychologize alchemy is to misunderstand it.  This is, in my opinion, a religious attitude (and, of course, I am an atheist).  Everything can be psychologized.  There is no such thing as a pre-psychological artifact of the psyche.  We must be very careful not to reduce these psychic artifacts too severely and sloppily (as we see in many of the Freudian treatments of the contents of the unconscious), but psyche has structure and laws (albeit laws of systemic complexity that are hard to pin down).  Ideally, psychological language should be directed at knowing as much as possible about any psychic phenomena.  It is always under revision, never satisfied with totemism or the language of belief.  To assert that alchemy cannot be psychologized because it is pre-psychological and deals with mystical or spiritual truths is just another kind of reduction that limits the true complexity of alchemical symbolism.  That is, to "psychologize" something is to honor its inherent essence and complexity to the highest degree possible.  This is at least so, so long as the phenomenon being psychologized is given the benefit of the scientific method where the analysis of data is careful, thorough, "detached", and always under revision.