Usless Science Forum
The Psyche => Depth Psychology => Jungian Psychology => Topic started by: Matswin on January 17, 2013, 04:51:00 AM
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I doubt that active imagination has this powerful capacity of archetypal integration that Jung claims. This was also the position of his own anima, something which he relates in his autobiography. When Jung was painting images the anima told him that this was art which he was doing. He reacted strongly against this and argued that the anima had tried to mislead him, which is a controversial interpretation. I submit that she made an opposite evaluation, to balance out his conscious standpoint. Arguably, he overvalued this activity, or had adopted a lopsided view of it, and the compensating factor was activated. The unconscious compensates the conscious standpoint.
Art history contains movements, such as symbolism and expressionism, which allow expression to the unconscious, to a degree. Arguably, Jungian active imagination should be categorized as a form of art. Novelist often say that their characters take on a life of their own. They are not mere constructions of consciousness. Thus, it is not obvious that the artist's or the novelist's activity is essentially different from active imagination. This could explain why the Jungian form of active imagination seems to have no pronounced effect on personality. It is, after all, an art form. The argument of Jung's anima could be correct. I hold that active imagination easily reverts to artistic creativity, if the creative energy is raised beyond the feeble energy levels where the spirit roams.
I discuss the subject of creativity in this article (evidently it needs some reworking, which I will probably do soon).
http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/creativity.htm
Mats Winther
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It does. Particularly if you can accept your shadow to a mercurial degree. I'm currently doing it, and it is probably one of the greatest vehicles of healing I've had in my life. I'm not Jungian cling-on, but if the dude had discovered his technique of active imagination, I'd be screwed into a psychotic hell. Quite literally.
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Err, hadn't. I suppose that slip will offend the psychologist in you. (-)smblsh(-)
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His anima probably was trying to screw with him. She'll say things sarcastically and leave you to feel her meaning. It can put a man up against his knowledge and acceptance of feeling, but also his ability to allow himself to be emasculated without being a retributive ass about it. She is trying to lead him to a deeper understanding of himself, but this requires that he feel her meaning instead of blindly following her word. There is often a bit of spite in her and that is simply as real as it gets, and, yes, a man can get pissed off because he realizes that if he is too stupid to fall for it that she may mislead him into all kind of delusion. She can also be quite awesome and functional, so to speak, so this can offset the experience of her as a seductress into the world of fantasy.
Being completely submissive to your anima in an attempt to enlighten yourself is noble, but the reality is that the anima will force one to understand her without telling him how. This is much like actual women that refuse to tell a man how to love them. You have to feel her to understand her. Jung also had a feeling function that was probably a bit underdeveloped, but he did have the extreme wisdom to see beyond her tactics. Probably because he had such a great understanding of the shadow. I.E., the devil.
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The realm of "fantasy" is hard to explain. It can both lead a man into an insane asylum and lead a man to enlightenment. Believe me, however, the anima will screw with a man. I can just hear her now bullshitting him by poking fun at his confidence in himself. What you don't get from reading the text is how she said what she said. I used to get pretty pissed off at my own for leading me this way. I'm a lot more even-keeled about it, now. I realize it has purpose, as crappy as it may be. Women provide a very nice path for a man, away from his own inflation and towards his own contact with a personal life, which he should be humble and learn to enjoy. Personal lives are very intimate and are the envy of many men that have given it up for a "greater way in the world."
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Without our personal lives and intimacies we become foreign to the world, as great as we may become the grass will no longer smell the same, even on the path to our grave. Be sure to be connected with life and not be a fool for the greater. (-)yinyang(-)
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Hello, Mats and Ryan.
Sorry to have never properly welcomed you here, Ryan, but welcome and I've enjoyed reading your posts.
I think active imagination can have a place in psychological work, but it seems to me that it will always be at risk of being led by, and interpreted by, the person's ego (unlike in true dreaming). There may be some people who are more adept at getting their ego out of the way and allowing more unconscious input. Perhaps artists or other creative people are better at "channeling," so their active imagination might be more useful that way. I personally have found it more difficult to be "honest," or at least to be honestly "out of the way," with active imagination than with dream work. So, on the one hand, I agree with Mats that "archetypal integration" through active imagination alone would be exceedingly difficult. I also agree with the widely held understanding that the unconscious often compensates the conscious standpoint (when necessary).
Personally, I think that the anima or animus, once properly identified, never misleads you . . . that is, not if one accepts that its function is as an emissary of the Self. My understanding (and my feeling, after working with Matt and doing my own dreamwork) is that the animi figure in a dream is revealing, or leading one to discover, the needs of the Self. It is interacting with the other aspects of the psyche, especially the heroic ego, to entice or otherwise convince the heroic ego of the need to facilitate the life of the Self. Matt has described the heroic ego as that which is, or is becoming, Self-aligned. That which responds with empathy to the anima or animus (NOT that which "heroically" in the Western tradition of conquering hero resists his or her "tactics"). That which tries to understand what it would take to "keep the god alive," and which is willing to sacrifice itself for this. As such, the anima or animus doesn't "screw with you," though I can completely understand why it could feel like that.
I'm doing a terrible job of this, but what I'm trying to say, Ryan, is that I have no doubt that active imagination has helped you immensely and it seems that you've done a lot of shadow work and have deep understanding and insight. I like and agree with much of what you wrote. I also believe that there can often be a "tricksterish" aspect to the animi. But I think that the times when it gets muddy and confusing, the times when it feels like the animi are "misleading" us, are actually the times when we're simply not as heroic-ego-identified. Because it's true that what facilitates the needs of the Self is often at odds with what facilitates our functioning in this world, in this culture, with our need to earn a living and have relationships with other people. And so it is entirely understandable to feel that one is being led straight to hell or to delusion or something similar. My feeling (based on my admittedly limited reading and understanding of the Red Book but also through discussion with Matt) is that, at least in this particular instance, Jung's anima was simply being honest, compensating, not screwing with him. It seems to me that he misinterpreted her intentions, and maybe this is because it was through active imagination rather than through actual dreaming. I don't think the animi are ever trying to make us "submit" or otherwise be emasculated or disempowered (see Matt's dream, The Anima Work, IV: Coniunctio and Sacrifice (http://uselessscience.com/forum/index.php?topic=373.0), for discussion of this). When we feel like that, I think it is through some combination of misunderstanding (ie, not fully heroically-identified) and also perhaps when the anima or animus is not entirely differentiated from other aspects of the psyche, ie, when it is perhaps conflated with the Demon or with aspects of the Self. I think the anima or animus becomes more and more fully differentiated and "anima-like" (or animus-like) as one becomes more and more heroically-oriented (ie, they become more twin-like).
Again, I'm having a hard time communicating what I mean to say. Yes, if one does go through with initiation with the animi, one experiences a death of sorts, which could potentially be seen or felt as the ultimate in disempowerment or emasculation, but what is really a deeply rich beginning. Matt writes a lot about the year-gods here, too, which is helpful in understanding the difference between (the weakness of) submission/emasculation and (the great strength and courage of) being penetrable/mutable.
Quote from: keri on February 13, 2008, 11:35:46 PM
Quote from: Matt Koeske on February 13, 2008, 02:54:52 PM
An old poem of mine, only indirectly relevant, comes to mind:
Dream of the Thousand Men
I dreamed I was
a red-haired girl who fell
into a lake of semen.
I locked my strong thighs together like
holding a gulp of air.
Strange things moved in the thick milk.
A hand fell under my arm,
dragged me out.
I coughed on the shore,
the bearded lips of Dionysus
kissed me.
I dreamed the Thousand Men hanging.
You, as tall as a father, whispered,
“They are the year gods of all the years.”
A moth wove past your ankle.
Disgusted with myself
I gave birth to the head of a donkey.
You held it up, dirtied with my blood,
bright as a Christchild.
I dreamed of my naked body on the ground
knocked down by the snowchild women with their heavy masks.
The sound of drums.
From behind the mask
once again you touch me.
All night long warm
beneath a shadow of you the fire has designed
I beat on the earth.
The song we sing tells me
when I awake
your name will continue to dance away from my tongue.
Well, to be honest, tonight this sounds scary to me. Maybe I just shouldn't write on these insomnia-producing call nights
It is scary. I wrote the "dream" (not yet a poem) in an old story. It was the dream a woman character had when she was going through a very difficult animus transformation/erotic awakening period. The dream was a nightmare. The story was called "The Dionysus Women".
The poem is a good example of what I was talking about above regarding relating from the opposite sex position or from some Other's perspective. I imagined/created the poem as a kind of shadow-animus dream of a woman who had some kind of relationality wound. Perhaps she had been sexually-abused. The animus is darkened, horrific. Like the Beast or other enchanted animus from fairytales. The woman sees "impregnation" by the animus as dissolution and violation (falling into a lake of semen). In my experience, the main obstacle for women to the animus work is precisely this attitude . . . which is perfectly understandable. Inviolability is a necessary defense and survival tactic.
But Dionysus is the god of "Fallen women". He does not judge or take advantage of them. What the "dreamer" imagined initially as a violation/dissolution, thanks to the intrusion of Dionysus, becomes a baptism ritual. Dionysus intuitively understands her fear and struggle and pain. I see his kiss of the woman/girl on the shore as a gentle, calming, protecting/redeeming kiss. It is fatherly (but not patriarchal). It tells her that she is allowed to, welcomed to forgive herself for her feelings of shame. It isn't a seductive kiss. Although there is some kind of Eros there. it is not desire.
In the second stanza, Dionysus shows her the year gods, which are the true symbols of masculine fertility or Eros. They are the dying gods who live eternally only through resurrection and surrender. Not willful force and transcendence. She sees the moth by his ankle, which is a transformation symbol . . . but only in a foreshadowed sense. She is still concentrating on the horror of the scene: the Thousand Men Hanging. What Dionysus is trying to show her is the Masculine/animus Wound . . . which neither patriarchal man nor patriarchal woman can bear to look at. It is the fallibility, acquiescence, weakness, impotence, penetrability of the masculine . . . which terrifies the patriarchal ego, but draws its real strength from its cyclical perseverance, its Erotic receptivity. This is not a "Feminine" quality . . . as the patriarchal mindset misconstrues it. Dionysus is trying to show the woman that what she has been taught is "feminine", submissive, receptive, passive is false. True receptivity requires enormous strength and courage.
The girl has, despite her resistances, become impregnated by the animus, but she is still having trouble accepting the Otherness that is growing inside her. She is still ashamed that her pregnancy has come as the result of a Fall. The "product of her labor" seems monstrous to her. She cannot value it. She see its creation as another shameful failure. But Dionysus understands the new birth is redemptive and wondrous. As I mentioned above, the donkey is one of his sacred animals . . . and what the girl has brought into the world is the intelligence (head) of this instinctual, burden-bearing animal. She doesn't yet understand, but he knows that this instinctual intelligence is the essence of the redeeming drive that will, once valuated, become her alchemical gold, her gift to herself and to the world.
In the final stanza, the girl has entered the initiation ceremony. She is naked and still detached from her body (as if she and her body were two separated things). The initiated, erotically-awakened women of the "Dionysus cult" seem powerful and dangerous to her, frenzied. They also reflect back to her her own "frozenness" and childishness (snowchild). Their masks like mirrors knock her to the ground. The numinous force of the god is behind the strength of these women, but so long as she cowers from her reflection, the force will knock her down. She must find her own wildness in order to survive, to persevere. She must learn how to channel the god's erotic power instead of deflecting it. But she also needs to be "brought down" or to come down to the earth, the connecting principle that the ego tries to transcend and avoid. She needs to realize (as we have seen from the previous scenes) that she is a true bride of Dionysus: wild, strong, resilient, capable of "transmuting" the instinctual drive of the god. This drive doesn't violate or penetrate in the way she initially feared the animus would. In the initiate, the Dionysian drive is focused, intensified, directed. The initiate is a lens, and no longer a victim.
Finally, she allows the transformation to begin, and she accomplishes this by accepting that the source of the heat, protection, drive, energy, Eros is the shadow of Dionysus. The source is not a bright sun shining down ("Apollo"), but a deep fire burning-though. She is touched by the Masculine that can't be seen or named or captured by the ego. It can only be felt, channeled, focused, transmitted . . . with rage and ecstasy and grief and desire and joy. These feelings are so powerful they can't be contained, but must be allowed to flow through us. It is not "my" rage or my "grief". It is Rage, Grief, Desire. They are divine, transpersonal. They are too large to belong to us and will only destroy us if we stand against them. But once we let them move through us, we are connected Erotically to everything, bonded to everything empathically. The self-centered ego moves aside.
The greatest and most common mistake we make in our woundedness is to imagine that pain or grief or joy can be possessed, usurped, hoarded away safeguarded against other people's knowledge and access. They don't belong to us. They are the gateways through which we connect and relate. Our ability to survive and adapt and persevere is not a matter of our fortitude and self-containment. True strength is permeability.
I had to feel like this girl to become initiated and to understand and accept my masculinity. And all the shame she experienced, all the fear of impregnation and violation and being overpowered or poisoned was an expression of my shame regarding my own masculinity. But as I learned to burn away this shame, I found Dionysus, the nurturing, redemptive, empathetic Masculine. And it was wild, instinctual, ecstatic . . . and yet somehow also quiet, harmonious, gentle. It was bisexual in the alchemical sense. True masculinity means pure receptivity to the Feminine . . . which includes an openness to "feminization". But this openness is not emasculating. It seems like a contradiction to the patriarchal ego . . . but it isn't at all on a deeper level. True masculinity and true femininity inspire, drive, imbue, create, and redeem one another. There is no conflict at the instinctual level. There is only co-generation.
Keri
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Ryan, let me say again (or anew . . . because I feel like I keep bungling it! (-)smblsh(-)), that in the subtext of your writing, I feel like you totally get this. But in some of your language about the anima being misleading and emasculating and such, I felt a need to "redeem" the animi. :)
Keri
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Hello All,
I have been away from the site and just now saw this thread. I've probably written many posts touching on these issues over the years.
I also have some skepticism where active imagination is concerned . . . but this is largely due to observing many Jungians who base their "spiritual realities" in active imagination fantasies yet seem to lack a kind of genuineness or experiential insight such spirituality is "supposed to" bring. Active imagination can be very useful therapeutical and in self work, but it can easily lack a strong ethical element. That is, it does not guarantee that the Other is adequately represented and fully present, nor does it make relationally with and conduct toward the Other a priority.
There is, of course, no active imagination experiment more robust than Jung's (recorded in the Red Book project). As an experiment (i.e., as "science"), I think the Red Book is extremely successful. That is, it tells us a great deal about an attempted creative/therapeutic process . . . and a great deal about Jung the man and thinker. But I don't think it was successful as psychotherapy in the way Jung and many Jungians hoped/imagined.
Although that assessment is a matter of my opinion (I could make a strong case for it, logically, as I have tried to do in my writings on the Red Book), Jung himself also seemed to feel it was ultimately inadequate. He leaves the Red Book unfinished and writes a brief addendum (itself unfinished) years later noting that once he found alchemy, he no longer needed to pursue the Red Book project (in my interpretation, "as psychotherapy" or self work). Alchemy became for Jung a better language in which to get at the images, symbols, and vital otherness he wanted to connect with and comprehend through the Red Book project.
This is not terribly surprising when we recognize that the Red Book ends with a complete absence of Otherness. All of Jung's psychic not-I characters leave. He is left with his idealized ego, Philemon the magician, the great "Gnostic" orator and "necromancer" . . . Philemon, the conqueror of the "dead" (i.e., of the Otherness of the psyche).
Around this time, Jung also finishes/revises his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology in which he essentially analyzes his experimental active imagine process in the Red Book (of course, he doesn't go so far as to admit he was his own guinea pig, but that was always his M.O. . . . such as when he used his own mandalas and dreams "disguised" as an anonymous patient). In Two Essays (an essential companion piece to the Red Book), he writes about the "mana-personality" that "conquers the anima" and take her "mana". He recognizes that this is an inflation for the ego (another "possession by the archetype"), and not a psychotherapeutically sound end point. Yet, the Red Book (doesn't go this far) ends with the mana-personality in "victorious transcendence" . . . with Philemon's Seven Sermons to the Dead.
Jung had psychotherapeutically moved beyond the Red Book by the time he made these revisions to Two Essays . . . even as he clearly still respected it for the wealth of personal (and he hoped, collective) psychic material it gathered together.
The question one must ask (once one moves beyond the classical Jung worship and idolatry of Philemon, the mana-personality) is what went wrong with the Red Book's self work? Why was it a psychotherapeutic "failure".
My argument is that the flaw was a matter of Jung's treatment of his psychic Others. The quintessential Other in the Red Book is the Soul, his anima figure. The Red Book catalogs his conflicts with this figure. Jung's ego character/narrator spends most of his time protesting and refusing her, treating her like some kind of leprous monstrosity that means to devour him . . . although that behavior is never indicated in his actual representations of the anima figure/Soul. One cannot help but sympathize with her as Jung (for the most part) treats her mere presence as a heinous temptation of the Devil.
Jung's steady (if circuitous) movement toward Philemon, the mana-personality, is a movement toward a fortified ego position that can "exorcize" the Otherness of the anima via intellectual/psychological philosophizing. Jung sought to find an ego position he felt was more "righteous" and immune to the penetrations of the anima/"unconscious". He (not inaccurately) recognized this power of the mana-personality as "magic". That is the kind of primitive magic that can repeal or compel gods and dangerous spirits.
Let's not forget that the Red Book's Seven Sermons conclusion is literally an exorcism. Jung writes (in MDR) that he felt his house was haunted at this time, and only when he wrote the Seven Sermons (originally put into the mouth of Philemon), were the spirits exorcized.
So, to jump to the conclusion and sum up a very complicated process, Jung's Red Book experiment failed psychotherapeutically because he was seduced NOT BY THE ANIMA, but by the mana-personality, Philemon. Jung fell into an inflation (even as it was embraced out of fear he would fall into a different inflated identification). In Two Essays, Jung sees a path of progress from anima to mana-personality to some kind of nebulous depotentiation of the mana-personality. But this is frankly wrong. The identification with the mana-personality is NOT indicative of moving beyond the "anima work". It indicates a failure to accept and complete the anima work, a failure to pass through the threshold of that work's initiation.
All of the "blame the anima" rhetoric that characterizes Jung's writing (even to his final works) is founded in this blind projection of malicious seductiveness onto the anima. In fact, the maliciously seductive figure in Jung's psyche is a male, a Great Man and dark wizard, the transcendent ego and conqueror of the unconscious. Jung has insight into this figure, but not enough.
What we are able to learn about Jung from the Red Book is that this figure is the personal complex Jung struggled with and needed to work through via the active imagination process the Red Book portrays. But, as fascinating and complex as this active imagination is, it ultimately doesn't work for Jung. Jung himself was largely aware of this (although I don't think he had worked out a viable alternative by the end of his life . . . he merely had a lingering dissatisfaction despite a richly lived psychic life, which is noted by some of those who were close to him near the end . . . Laurens van der Post mentions this in his Jung biography: Jung and the Story of Our Time).
Regrettably, the Jungian legacy is one in which this failing is not seen, and is instead dressed up in the emperor's new clothes and made into a divinity to worship (as the "Philemon Foundation" reveals of itself in its choice of name). Jung carved in stone at his Bollingen tower: "Philemon's sanctuary; Faust's repentance". But Jung's Philemon of the Red Book/Seven Sermons is not a humble, earthy, compassionate old man. He is merely another version of Faust . . . Faust transcendent. Also important to note is that, in the Red Book, the figure of Baucis (the woman, wife of Philemon) plays no role, whereas in Faust, she is more of a moral anchor than Philemon.
These figures and Jung's active imagination of them depict the deepest core of Jung's personal complex (the complex that lies at the heart of what I have called "the Jungian Disease"). Despite Jung's best attempt his "inner Faust" hijacked his "inner Philemon". I don't mean to condemn him for this. Despite never being able to fully work through this complex, he develop a great deal of rational and sophisticated insight into it and into the issue of inflation. He recognized it as a poison to psychic health, but he never managed to alchemize a "cure".
See this article at the Philemon Foundation for some additional details and insights: <url=http://www.philemonfoundation.org/resources/jung_history/volume_2_issue_2/who_is_jungs_philemon_a_unpublished_letter>Who is Jung's Philemon?</url>
In conclusion, my contention is that Jung's portrayal of the anima as a "seductress" or as in some ways malicious or "daimonic/demonic" and dangerous to the ego are deeply flawed and do not accurately represent a healthy relationship of a man with the anima. That said, so often the anima work DOES begin in this kind of conflict with the foreignness of the anima. But through the anima work, one comes to see that the darkness attributed to the anima is a matter of egoic projection, a disowning of egoic darkness and maliciousness that is snared by the Otherness of the anima. The anima, in fact, doesn't "approve" of these tendencies in the ego (even as she might tolerate them for a time).
That work began very much in this tradition of projection for me, as well. My first glimpse of the anima was in a dream where a mad woman of unbelievable strength seized my arm and plunged a syringe filled with mercury into it. She was Kali-like to me then, terrifying, violating, even somewhat emasculating. She was (in the dream) a companion of the devil (to whom I had chosen to sell my soul). I found the devil perhaps "suspicious" but ultimately less terrifying than this madwoman.
But I was already reading Jung when I had this dream. I wasn't well read in Jung yet, but I became interested in the anima because of this dream (and subsequent anima dreams). The dream figure set me on a companion intellectual/analytic quest to understand the anima. Of course, the first thing I learned was that mercury is the principle transformative substance of alchemy (which I didn't really grasp before I had the dream). Perhaps it was with that recognition that I began to valuate this anima figure. Although I felt that mercury injection in the dream stilled me and was going to kill me (just as I awoke), my ensuing research into alchemical symbolism introduced me to the complex, transformative symbolism around mercury. I saw that that "death", was a beginning rather than an end.
And I never had another negative anima dream after that . . . even though Jung's writings on the anima were my primary guide in that work. My dreams never abided by Jung's negative projections, though. They remanned free of most of the classical Jungian trappings . . . and where some of Jung's complexed analytical ideas were woven into my dreams, the dreams remade their negativity into more functional stuff.
For instance, I had recognized in Two Essays and in Jung's talk of the anima in MDR that the anima was a "finite stage", perhaps something to "conquer". My anima dreams utilized that symbolism, but portrayed it as a sacrifice rather than a conquering of the Other. The heroic work was not the oration of an exorcism sermon, but a surrender of the desire to be dependent on the anima (for "inspiration", spiritual feelings, "wisdom", etc.), an acceptance of her death/departure/descent/transformation. A component of that was an acceptance of the sacrifice of my own feelings of heroism as her partner and "chosen one". It's not that those dependencies are "evil" or "wrong", but they must be shed in order to pass through the threshold of initiation . . . in order to become responsible for the facilitation of the Self-as-Other.
That facilitator is a genuine archetypal "hero" . . . not by glory and transcendent might, but by compassion, penetrability, openness. This archetypal attitude remained foreign to Jung. Jung could only see this type of masculinity as a kind of demonic puerism, tainted and blackened. But that too is a projection from his more "Apollonian" superego that strove to be a Great Man, a prophet and leader, a saint, and wiseman. Such a Great Man doesn't need to be allied with the anima, he purports to be everything unto himself, master and creator of his own perfect universe . . . which is "perfect" because "Other-less".
That is the opposite of the anima work's lesson. What we learn form the anima work is that we are massively interconnected ecosystems, not islands unto ourselves. We affect and are affected, and our "goodness", our ethical consciousness and integrity is measured by how we recognize these relational ecosystems and embrace them rather than try to determine them (as any such determination or colonization must become an assault on Otherness of one kind or another). Through the anima, a man learns to "live with and among" what is Not-I rather than shaping "his" world to suit an idea like a Patriarchal God.
Best,
Matt
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Philemon, the mana personality, is an image of the self. Following your line of reasoning there is something amiss with this self image. It is daemonic, and it gives rise to an unhealthy form of identification. This theory is born out, I believe, by his 1913 crucifixion vision, which is here partly described:
"Then a most disagreeable thing happened. Salome became very interested in me, and she assumed that I could cure her blindness. She began to worship me. I said, 'Why do you worship me?' She replied, 'You are Christ.' In spite of my objections she maintained this. I said, 'This is madness,' and became filled with sceptical resistance. Then I saw the snake approach me. She came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. The coils reached up to my heart. I realized as I struggled, that I had assumed the attitude of the Crucifixion. In the agony and the struggle, I sweated so profusely that the water flowed down on all sides of me. Then Salome rose, and she could see. While the snake was pressing me, I felt that my face had taken on the face of an animal of prey, a lion or a tiger" (McGuire, 1989, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar in Anal. Ps. given in 1925, p.104).
Already in the dream Jung realizes that this is madness. The anima takes a submissive stance towards him, and he becomes a daemonic god. The message of the dream seems to be that this can't be right. Arguably, the spirit of falsehood encoils Jung (the snake in the Christian context signifies falseness) and causes him to turn into a subhuman and demonic deity. I hold that this snaky spirit is none other than Jung's unitarian view of the self, symbolized by Philemon. The snake encoils him and holds together the many warring opposites that threaten to tear Jung apart, thus serving as a symbol of wholeness. But Jung's face acquires demonic features. Thus, it is a false solution to the problem of the self. The submissive stance of the anima symbolizes her subdual under the one-sided self ideal. But its falseness is due to its one-sidedness. Had Jung allowed room for the complementary aspect of self, Philemon would have been alright.
Arguably, the anima here represents the feminine and submissive aspect of self. It is the aspect of self that submits under God in humble worship. But this was exactly what Jung refused to do. He rejected Christian notions of faith and submissiveness. His notion of the encounter with the unconscious remained heroic. The effect of his powerful dream, in which he is told to kill the hero Siegfried (in MDR), wasn't deep-going enough. Thus, he remained suspicious and slightly contemptuous of the anima, which is the side in him that is devotional and "weak". It is feminine and weak in the sense of a Christian contemplative who allows himself to be weak before God. He makes himself into the feminine chalice into which God can instill his spirit.
But that thought was alien to Jung's nature. His ideal remained that of the mana personality, whose destiny it is to do battle with the unconscious, with great cunning and sorcery. But on the British isles, Merlin receded, and the virtuous and reclusive ideal of the Christian monk took over. Arguably, Jung should have realized that Merlin's recession is a significant symbol, and allowed room for the complementary aspect of self. As he didn't, his self ideal remained one-sidedly masculine, geared toward power and cunning, like Merlin. This is both worthwhile and necessary, up to a certain point, when it is time to give up the powers of the self-deifying ego and its luminous consciousness. I have written a critique of Jung's unitarian view of the self in the following two articles, and elsewhere: Critique of Synchronicity; (http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/synchronicity.htm) The Complementarian Self. (http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/compself.htm)
Mats Winther
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It is significant that the anima worships the Christ. That's what she believes, anyway, because she is blind. Her name is Salome, which means 'peace'. But this is not the Salome who is the wife of Herod (the treacherous seductress responsible for the death of John the Baptist). This, I believe, is the Salome who is the mother of James and John, and who was an early follower of Jesus. Salome was among the women who stood and watched as Jesus was crucified (Mark 15:40-41). She was among the privileged women to first learn that Jesus was resurrected (Mark 16:1-8).
Jung viewed his anima as a treacherous seductress, but in reality she was a devout follower of Christ. In the vision, she said that Jung can cure he blindness, that is, he can make her conscious. It probably means that he ought to realize the truth about her. She is the lesser known of the two Salomes in the bible. Jung's anima was, in fact, a Christian.
Mats Winther
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What is represented in this daemonic image is essentially the Jungian view of the ambivalent godhead, and its derivative, namely the ambivalent self. If the self is an ambivalent spirit, it means that it is evil. By example, an upstanding and competent individual murders his wife. According to modern moral consiousness, this means that he is evil and should be locked up for life. However, he is ambivalent because in all other respects his conduct in life is fine. Hermann Göring was a jovial and generous person, a good comrade. He was also a courageous war hero. Today, we view him as one of the worst criminals in history. King David was a murderer, too. There is no way around the fact that ambivalence, in human psychology, means that the person is a dark character.
Jung had a hobby-horse, namely the conjugation of the ambivalent "binarius" and the "ternarius" (the Trinity). But it would imply that the resultant godhead is ambivalent, too, i.e. it is infected with the evil principle. (That's why Dorneus warned that quartarius is the hidden binarius.) It doesn't matter that He is the creator of the universe. If he is guilty of murder, then he is evil. In fact, this was the quandary of Job. King David created Israel. Yet he was a murderer, and he would have been locked up if he had lived today.
Such a self-ideal would eventually invoke a retrogression and actualize such characters as Hermann Göring and King David as model personalities. Indeed, such characters are model individuals in phallocentric culture. So it seems the ambivalent self-ideal is no good. We know that ambivalence is characteristic of the unconscious, whereas modern consciousness is moulded by the trinitarian spirit. Hence, the self as a 'coincidentia oppositorum' of conscious and unconscious results in ambivalence, which is morally objectionable.
So it seems that the Jungian view of the self as a 'coincidentia oppositorum' isn't good enough. I have proposed another solution which I call the "complementarian self". Jung's version of the self I denote quartarius. I do not repudiate this self model. I conclude that it is merely half the truth. Ternarius and quartarius are complementary opposites (I use Niels Bohr's definition of complementarity). This means that the godhead can be envisaged as complementarian: the Trinity and the Quaternity are mutually exclusive, yet both defintions are needed to define the godhead in its entirety.
Mats Winther
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Mats, I agree with much of what you say, although I am inclined to (no doubt arbitrarily) use different terms and foci in places.
Jung's Philemon was an image of the Self in a Jungian sense and is conventionally held by Jungians to be a Self figure. Although there is enough overlap in my own construction of the Self with the Jungian concept to share the name (and derive an initial inspiration to stay with that name), in my definition Philemon would not be a Self figure. I would consider him an amalgam of the heroic ego and the Demon . . . in other words a "poisoned" hero.
In my thinking, Philemon cannot be a Self figure because he is not a true Other to Jung's ego but an idealized version of it. Philemon is Jung's fantasy ego pumped up to full potential and utterly sans shadow. This kind of poisoning/inflation of the heroic ego can occur once the heroic ego has triumphed over the more basic, supergoic form of the Demon introject. That is, once the "son" overthrows the "father" and starts to value a new organization of the psyche over the old, socially conditioned one. That attitude was very prominent in Jung when he was writing the Black and Red Books, taking very particular shape thanks to his relationship with Freud. Jung also exercises (more than explores) this dynamic in his work that helped cleave his bond to Freud, Symbols of Transformation (written just before the visionary experiment that became the Red Book began), although much of Jung's focus there is on Son/Mother conflict.
Perhaps the principle theme (and problem!) of the Red Book is the conflict between son and father figures and the struggle of the son to become the "New Father". That myth was always very important to Jung (who was profoundly dissatisfied with and developed himself in reaction to his father, Paul Jung). Although the Red Book introduces the anima/Soul in a supporting role (and she turns out to "steal the show," at least for the audience), it is really a drama about Jung and his father figures. The attitude he takes to these father figures is very interesting. He begins with a very worshipful approach, appearing like an eager disciple. But he quickly grinds through them, exposing their limitations. He wants more . . . and he is clever enough to get it most of the time (though his expansive imagination).
I sense a distinct sense of rage in Jung directed at father figures and "powerful patriarchs" but masked with passive aggressive pseudo-humility. It is no wonder Freud was afraid that Jung harbored murderous wishes toward him. Freud and Jung were perfect pathological partners for one another. They had complimentary complexes. I still think Freud was overbearing and contributed greatly to luring out Jung's complex in a catastrophic way, but Jung deserve much of the blame for their split.
The Red Book culminates in the image of the ego ideal, Philemon, because that was Jung's best solution to how to be a "superior man" to his father and father figures and to the "inheritance" of their model of manliness. Although Jung makes Philemon a wizard steeped in chthonic darkness and perhaps (it is at least implied) something "demonic", Philemon is really a shadowless figure . . . a being without real weakness (from Jung's perspective at the time). Philemon is capable of fully mastering and manipulating the unconscious that Jung felt was undermining him (via the anima most of all) and waylaying his attempts to be strong, perfect, and secure in his knowledge, selfhood, and social position.
To Jung's credit, he remained skeptical about this identification with Philemon (even as he succumbed to it). He recognizes it as a "mana-personality" or archetypal inflation with "the wizard". Jung never falls entirely or permanently under the spell of this inflation . . . but his solution is far from perfect. He chooses to differentiate himself from the mana-personality by forcibly disidentifying from it. He allows it to exist as it appears, but makes a Herculean effort to chisel off a piece of himself apart from it that he will call the ego. But making this differentiation for Jung is like splitting an atom. One must be a Titan to keep the explosive energy of this splitting at bay. That is, one must always be a kind of Atlas pinned beneath an impossible burden. That is Jung's "holding the tension of the opposites."
I don't think it works. For one thing, one is still identified with a mighty figure . . . one capable of such Titanic strength and supposed self-discipline. For another, the figure of the mana-personality is never functionally resolved or transformed. It remains fully formed in the psychic pantheon. That might be how things work in a culture's mythology, but in the individual psyche, greater dynamism is required. Archetypes are not mere stars fixed in the sky, they are complex, interwoven relational patterns that have narrative, dynamic properties. Although archetypal personages might not be entirely soluble, they are quite transformable . . . and I suspect that that transformation is often the mark of a healthier psychic organization. It is such transformation that we see as a staple of folktales (as opposed to classic Western myths). No Demon or mana-personality figure in folktale ever survives intact. They either are led to destroy themselves or they are redeemed or have their "blackness" removed.
A serious problem of Jungian thinking about the hero and individuation is that it ossifies the hero as a kind of Demon-posioned mana-personality. Jung never separates the hero from the Demon . . . and so the "true" hero is not known to him or to Jungianism in general. Equally, the Demon is not known to Jungianism, because the Demon is caught up in both the hero and in the so-called "archetypal shadow" and Jung's "real evil". Missing from Jung's constructions of individuation are the genuine mystical experience of the hero surrendering to the way of the Self. In fact, his passionate efforts to rebel against identification with aspects of the autonomous psyche become ways of refusing to surrender to the Self's principle of organization. The "unconscious" remains something to be resisted and to only embrace when specifically cultivated and colonized by the ego.
That makes for a very "theological" construction of the psyche . . . and I prefer a more "naturalistic" one. There is no Great Dark Unconscious trying to defeat and devour the ego. There is only an adaptive and instinctual principle of organization to the psyche that the ego is subject to, albeit with some autonomy and partial (often illusory) free will. The psyche's principle of organization does not always fit neatly into the process of living in the world and among other people. It does not address the kinds of problems ego consciousness does. Mostly, it seeks to grow and to move toward a kind of dynamic homeostasis, to perpetuate itself, even while embracing adaptation and mutation. I don't see the autonomous psyche as particularly anthropomorphic or "like consciousness writ large". I also don't see it as inherently opposed to the ego, although it is the nature of the modern world that we often end up in conflict with the autonomous psyche.
The story of Salome you recount form Jung is very telling. I'm not sure I would interpret it precisely the way you do, but I agree it is extremely significant to understanding Jung and Jung's thinking. I think we should keep in mind that this is taken from an active imagination experiment. I am disinclined to see Jung's Salome as a pure expression of the anima or the "unconscious". Her characterization is riddled with Jung's signature sexism. He tries to find "archetypal" meaning in her, but fails to recognize how she reflects his own prejudices and complexes. I think her blindness and worshipfulness of Jung are reflections more of Jung's own projected blindness and sense of self-importance than of any inherent traits of the anima archetype.
This Salome seems a lot like Sabina Spielrein (and some of Jung's "other women") thrown in. We should also contextualize the fantasy Jung describes with his relationship to Spielrein in which he may have wished he could act above her, as her doctor and mentor, but he could not control himself well enough not to also (it seems) act as her lover, as someone who desired specific things from her. The crucifixion/deification fantasy seems to depict Jung in a much more resistance position to the anima than he was able to muster in real life regarding Spielrein. It's wish-fulfillment . . . at least at first.
"Against his will" he succumbs to her and ends up ensnared in the transformative coils of the snake "curing" Salome's blindness with his profuse sweat. It sounds to me (among other things) like Jung imagining he can "cure" Spielrein's neurosis with the sweat (and other bodily fluids?) of sexual passion. Whatever the truth might be, the fantasy definitely demonstrates his inner conflict. He cannot resist the "temptation" of the anima, and this gives him an excuse for his behavior . . . i.e., it is she who is a "temptress". Throughout the Red Book, Jung is fighting with the anima figures, despising and insulting them, pushing them away. But they keep creeping back in various forms. He hangs all blame on them (like eating the child's liver in a later scene), but the only progress in the Red Book (if there is any) comes out of his interactions with the anima.
But he longs for the personal power (which he comes to call "magic") to dispel and overthrown the anima, which for Jung embodies the difficult and unwelcome otherness of the autonomous psyche. Only once he completes and seeks to become Philemon does he have the "might" to make the anima go away (or perhaps give up on him). And he very astutely (if incorrectly) recognizes that it is the mana-personality that "defeats" the anima and takes its mana for his own and in accordance with his mighty will.
I'm less inclined to read Christian ideas into Jung's symbols. Consciously, he was very Christian and exuded (especially in the Red Book) all of the conventional Protestant moralisms and prudishness as well as the dogmas. But Jung's spontaneous symbols seem much more "pagan". In fact, I suspect that they are made to seem especially "pagan" because they are seen through such a Christian lens and with conventional Protestant superiority (regarding the "pagan"). Like a "good Christian", Jung tends to turn a lot of the Otherness of the "unconscious" into the demonic. It's certainly true that Jung is deeply dissatisfied with Christianity and critical of it . . . but I think it is HIS OWN Christianity he is most dissatisfied with. It is the way he wears and feels oppressed by that Christianity that drives Jung out questing toward the pagan, the occult, and the East.
So, I wouldn't look at the serpent in a Christianized way (as "falseness", as you say) as much as in a pagan way, as a symbol of transformation, or devouring and rebirth. It is that symbolism that most fascinates Jung . . and TEMPTS him, because he is seduced by the possibility of becoming something new, something more than what he was, by transcending himself. Just as he is seduced by the romanticization of the pagan mind (even as he simultaneously maintains a very Protestant and very modern attitude toward his own romanticism).
Jung cannot bring himself to actively identify with the Christ. He recognizes the hubris in this (even as he desires some degree of Christification, it seems). So he must find an earlier prefiguration of the Christ archetype, one that is available because it has been tarred by Christianity's brush and thus labeled "demonic" or false. Jung also clearly feels that the Protestant Christ is too etherial, too perfect, not fleshy enough, lacking the kind of genuine darkness that natural expressions of the autonomous psyche usually exhibit. I think he is dissatisfied with a kind of Christ that neither he nor any man could ever become. Maybe that is partly a product of his inflation and desire to transcend and become a "Great Man", but I also think there is something valid and perfectly functional to Jung's dissatisfaction (although he didn't quite figure this out).
Namely, the Christ figure is a potent, natural, archetypal expression of the autonomous psyche enmeshed in the modern era. But the Christ of the Church is a very distorted being (or perhaps emblem) that is wrenched away from its roots and displaced as a lofty hood ornament signifying the Church's right to determine truth and the nature and will of God. It is like waving an FBI badge in front of someone's eyes for a second as an indication that you must reveal to them exactly what they want out of fear and awe.
But the natural Christ figure is merely a tribal shaman and archetypal hero . . . not some kind of omniscient and all-powerful God. The death and rebirth of Christ are products of the shamanic initiation journey signifying the surrender of the individual to the principle of the Self, not the supremacy and "divine right" of the Church or those empowered by it. I think the Christ figure in its purest proto-Christian expressions (the proto-Gospel, whether "Q" or whatever it was, and some of the early Gnostic texts later purged) was not meant to be a superior being so much as a somewhat exalted ego figure one was meant to identify with and emulate. Such was the objective of the Gnostic "pneumatic". That Christ is the heroic ego, the embodiment of the attitude one must take in order to pass through the threshold of mystic initiation.
Only with the rise of the orthodox "Catholic" Church was this personalization of the Christ figure ripped away from the individual psyche where it belonged and made into an expression of patriarchal power and transcendence. Jung is too Christian to fully see or believe this, but intuitively and instinctively he leans this way. And this splitting makes for some degree of rupture in him. He is "possessed by the natural archetype of the Christ, but it drags along all its institutional Christian baggage and serves to ensure his brush with mysticism becomes a desperate grapple with inflation.
I think this inflation is built into Christianity (where it is only a problem for Christian mystics or Church authorities) and therefore built into Jungianism. The "Churchified" Christ figure is simply unhealthy for the initiate into the Mysteries . . . and intentionally so, because those Mysteries (in their various pagan and Gnostic expression) were the arch competitors of the early Church. Catholicism became the anti-Gnosticism. It was reactionary by design, rejecting and arguing against an older tradition rather than truly innovating.
Jung was always seeking to "treat" Christianity, although he was limited by being, himself, so Christian and by using such decidedly Christian tools while remaining tethered darkly and romantically to pre-Christian pagan drives and ideas. In a sense, he was like an early theologian or Church Father who sought to explain the universe, but only within the context of Christian assumptions about nature, humanity, and God. In "Answer to Job", for instance, Jung tries to work within these restraints, albeit with a more "heretical" and personalized project. But the psyche is not theologically bound. It is natural. A better tool to understand the psyche is science, because science allows things to be natural, to be objects. It does not (at its best) insist that they be seen relative to arbitrary human assumptions about the unknown/unobservable universe. There are no such assumptions in science, only what is evident. At least, any assumptions used are considered "experimental" and subject to falsification. But religion doesn't approach objects with the notion that its assumptions might be falsified by what it comes to observe.
Jung was caught between these kinds of perspectives (and probably among others, as well).
I do sympathize with Jung's dissatisfaction with becoming the kind of Christian contemplative you use in your example. I am personally more fond of the heretic's path. I can't identify with the assumption of belief. It simply isn't rigorous enough. To me, that kind of faith can easily become caught up in an identification between God and ego in which one speaks or acts as if by the "will of God", but since one has never functionally differentiated the ego from God, one is really acting out of egoic will subtly deified and refracted. To live a life of such profound and contemplative faith, one must assume they know God or the spirit and are abiding by its desires. But that is too big an assumption for someone like me, which is why I prefer science and its preference for objectivity.
For me, "faith" was a kind of tearing at the scenery of everything, always testing, trying to see things from alternative perspectives. It wasn't a matter of finding The One Holy Truth and then setting myself up as its prophet and devotee. I was always too impressed by the relativity of things, by arbitrariness. I am also largely pragmatic and tend to evaluate ideas by what good they can do when put into use. Does a belief lead to the dismissal, condemnation, or abuse of an other or others? If so, it's not so righteous in my book. Its exaltation depends on having a convenient scapegoat. I am unimpressed by "religious" ideas that can too easily be used to do some kind of harm to others.
I don't know if Jung had quite the same beef, though. My sense is that Jung was frustrated with Christianity because if prevented him from being "reborn" in the way he imagined. It hampered his romanticism. It was like a coat too small to fit his mind. But for better and/or for worse, he kept trying to put it on. I think that was largely an act of tribal solidarity. He wanted (as a heretic of the highest order) to demonstrate that he was one of the Christian tribe and deeply concerned with its wellbeing. It never really worked to the degree he desired. The very idea that Christianity is changeable, is treatable, is redeemable by a more modern mentality is itself a romanticism . . . and one that threatens to inflate those that might believe in it.
Curiously, that is an essential part of the Christian myth. Jesus was (by the story) a Jew who sought only to be a good Jew and to serve God and do right by Judaism . . . . where necessary, to treat Judaism where it had become crippled or diseased. But he never meant to make a new religion. The treatment of the tribal identity construct is a shamanic task. Jung desired something similar. He wanted to treat the Christian tribe, and that activities the shaman/scapegoat archetypal pattern.
One of the most distinct problems is that Christianity is no longer a tribe (despite superficial tribal pretensions), and Jung was never an official member or person of status in it. One of the great failings of many modernisms of the 20th century was the assumption that modern monotribes could be conducted like pre-modern monotribes. That they can be homogenized (like Nazi Germany sought) or shamanically transformed (as Jung fantasized). I don't know what if anything can be done, but these solutions do not work. At worst they do massive damage, engendering atrocities like genocide.
One of the great lessons of the modern (which Jung had pioneering insight into) was that the tribe no longer really exists in the outer world, can no longer really be understood as a group of people organized around specific survival purposes. The tribe lives in the psyche of the modern individual. We carry our tribes along with us wherever they go. They are like Jung's gods that became diseases, hidden in our personal darkness, away from our awareness, yet powerfully influencing our behavior and thought. This is something Jung well understood yet also deeply resisted . . . as in the case of Christianity, where he seems to seek and desire a treatment for an institutional or tribal body of Christianity. But the best he could do was work (sometimes "shamanically") within the context of an individual's own personal Christianity.
Within the individual's mind, a monotribe can have massive, modern scale . . . and it can be treated and transformed because the individual can be a kind of alchemical vessel containing such a transformation. But the mistake is thinking that these individual, inner transformations can affect some kind of outer institution in the world. The experience just doesn't seem to translate over to "the world". In effect, one can alchemize and live along side one's own Christ, but there is no room for Christs in the world. That is something I think the Gnostics grasped and may have approached more functionally than the Catholics. The Christ is an archetype residing in the individual psyche that can never be flesh.
Therefore, the story tells us that the flesh of the Christ must be torn away . . . and that it is God's will.
Although your interpretation of Jung's Salome (as "the other" Salome from the Bible) strikes me as a valid way of seeing it, I am less inclined to see her this way . . . or less inclined to see her in only this way. Jung very much saw the anima as John The Baptist's decapitating Salome . . . and himself (at times) as a kind of John. Her seductiveness threatens to hand Jung, the Great Man, prophet, and intellectual, his head. What is interesting (as you also note) is how, despite Jung's strong feelings about a decapitating anima, his Salome is both the blind follower and companion of Elijah (won Jung sees as a prefiguration of Philemon) and a ready worshipper of "Pagan Christs In Waiting". So, instead of decapitating like the whimsical but sadistic Lolita that was John's Salome, Jung's Salome "decapitates" by her worshipful Christmaking. It is (from Jung's perspective) as if she devours and even "rapes" Jung into unwanted identification with his desired but passionately resisted pagan Christ image.
Despite being imagined through Jung's sexism and complexes, I still feel this Salome has a glimmer of the real anima in her. It is the anima that loves the hero and wants the ego to "become" heroic (I mean this in the way I define the hero archetype/attitude, not in Jung's way). Jung is afraid of his own temptation to identify with the hero (not irrationally, since his vision of the hero is very inflated and patriarchal, a la Siegfried). He projects the temptation onto the anima figure which is the force of "inspiration" behind the transformation of his personality. And instead of dismantling and depotentiating his inflated identification with the hero, Jung decides to take out his frustrations on the anima as temptress. It is "all her fault", because Carl Jung would otherwise be an upstanding Swiss citizen and well-scholed son of a minister.
Jung's solution (as was the case in his personal, sexual life) was to have the "affair" with the anima, but only clandestinely and while paying public lip service to her condemnation. He is rather a hypocrite on this issue . . . but as regrettable as that might be, I suspect we are better off with a hypocritical Jung that at least had backdoor affairs with his anima than we would have been with an utterly anima-less Jung. Still, in Jungianism, the anima needs a great deal of redeeming (it is trapped at an early, "enchanted" stage of development as we see it in folktales before the hero fully embraces and redeems her). That redemption is part of a package that would require the differentiation of the Demonic/inflated hero from the genuine hero. Where the inflated hero can use and conquer the anima, turning her into a natural resource (we see this theme in some fairytales where the imprisoned princess is forced to perform some special task for the Demon figure, whose powers are in some way dependent on her imprisonment and usurpation.
Jung is surprisingly neglectful of the large tradition of anima folktales in which the male hero succeeds by redeeming the anima figure (who may be enchanted or cursed in some way that completely or partially imprisons her). His model of the hero comes from the myths and epics of great Western civilizations, which adopt (and misconstrue) only some basic elements of the folktale hero's model. Jung leans toward (or is drawn by) the motif of the conquering hero's battle with the Terrible Mother dragon, which is often a patriarchal cultural epic motif signifying the rise of the patriarchal ego over the darkness of Nature and instinct, which it transforms (temporarily, as the sun brings temporary light in daytime) into "fuel" for the development and progress of civilization. This is the myth of the modern male ego that is exalted through self-mastery and dissociation.
But the male folktale hero redeems the anima from its animalistic or demonic enchantment, often causing the imprisoning Demon figure to destroy itself by its own greed or hunger to control. And that hero ends up "happily ever after" with the anima as his queen. He never conquers or smites the Demon, but rather is focused on the rescue and redemption of his bride. And that redemption is often made through self-sacrifice, patience, and deep acceptance of her otherness or oddity. In other words, the folktale hero is not a creature of might but of valuation for what has become devalued, lost, or "enchanted".
There is no grasp of this in the Red Book and barely any awareness of it throughout Jung's work. Curiously, ironically, Jung is preserved in his insight into the autonomous psyche largely by the "power" of his rather persistent anima. She was not one to be easily defeated or dismissed. Jung maintains an awkward and indirect connection to her through his "susceptibility" to the unconscious, to his "weakness" for romanticisms, his capacity to keep second guessing himself, and his inability to fully embody the mana-personality. I.e., it is NOT his great success as a wizard and "balancer of the opposites" that gives Jung enough contact with the anima for it to imbue his work and worldview. It is rather that Jung can't help but "be seduced" consistently (if only temporarily) by the "magic" of the unconscious, which he is always indirectly in the process of valuating . . . even as he also issues condemnations of its "evil", darkness, and "feminine seductiveness". Jung is an anima's man despite himself.
It is not the anima or the "feminine" that is "weak" (as Jung often had it). It is that Jung's incurable and persistent ego "weakness" became for him the vehicle through which his anima relationship survived. I think that wherever Jung choose to detect his strength was where the anima vanished. When he was being overly "scientific" and "rational", rising above the chaotic and swampy unconscious, the anima snuck in through his closeted romanticism and susceptibility to the complex "otherworldliness" of the autonomous psyche. That is, he was just so damn fascinated by the "unconscious", that he was willing to sit at its feet patiently observing everything it put forth . . . even when in his writings he often made efforts to interpret and even reduce it.
And when he identified with his romanticism and sought to prophecy about the non-temporal, acausal, mystical, "psychoid" unconscious, his rationalism and capacity to psychologize or treat experience as objective, analyzable phenomena, helped bring these inflated wonderings back down to earth, grounding them somewhat in what could truly be observed. It was as if he was then rational in spite of himself. Either way, he was self-conflicted, and it was the nature of this complex self-conflict (a kind of primal and continually life-giving Wound, perhaps) that gave rise to his openness to and appreciation of the autonomous psyche. Jung famously sees himself (in MDR) as a creature of two conflicting personalities, but what he doesn't fully grasp is that Jung the object and observable self as well as the objective Jungian psychology is a synthesis of these forces even as Jung the man remains divided and turned against himself.
That synthesis, though (like Jung himself), has only ever been a potential. Jungians are left with something to heal or unite, which would seem to be a work much resisted. There is more inclination to gather the low-hanging fruit than to take care of the tree and its seeds.
-Matt
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I haven't read the Red Book, so I cannot make a critique of your reading. Concerning the anima being a Christian; this is how she presents herself, so we have to take her word for it. She compensates the conscious standpoint. So, if his anima was a Christian, Jung's conscious standpoint is averse to Christianity. Your notion of a warped or a shadowy self ideal rhymes with the fact that the truth of the anima isn't realized. She is blind, that is, she is unconscious. Jung thinks she is the treacherous Salome, but she is really the lesser known Salome, that is, the virtuous one. If the truthful anima isn't realized, it will result in a lopsided self image, since the anima is part and parcel of the self. There is virtuous femininity missing in the self.
Jung says in the text that she is "that side of the inferior function which is surrounded by an aura of evil." So Jung thinks she fulfils a destructive function, which is a very curious way of looking upon the unconscious. It is difficult to understand why evolution should have endowed us with a function that wants to harm us. It is as if Jung sometimes looks upon the unconscious as a spiritual Gnostic universe, where some spirits, corresponding to the evil Archons, aim to destroy our plans of redemption. I won't buy the idea that the anima, the most important archetypal complex of all, is an evil Archon. Jung keeps returning to the phenomenon of anima possession, and says that men must avoid being possessed by their anima, which means that the man cannot control his emotions, but is controlled by them. Jung says:
"If there were only such an evil figure as Salome, the conscious would have to build up a fence to keep this back, an exaggerated, fanatical, moral attitude. But I had not this exaggerated moral attitude, so I suppose that Salome was compensated by Elijah. When Elijah told me he was with Salome, I thought it was almost blasphemous for him to say this. I had the feeling of diving into an atmosphere that was cruel and full of blood.
This atmosphere was around Salome, and to hear Elijah declare that he was always in that company shocked me profoundly. Elijah and Salome are together because they are pairs of opposites. Elijah is an important figure in man's unconscious, not in woman's. He is the man with prestige, the man with a low threshold of consciousness or with remarkable intuition. In higher society he would be the wise man; compoare Lao-tse. He has the ability to get into touch with archetypes in others [...] This plays an important role in man's psychology, as I have said, but unfortunately a less important part than that played by the anima." (p.101)
Jung never questions that she is the evil Salome, Herod's wife. He simply takes it for granted. He also grapples with the problem that she doesn't seem to compensate his conscious standpoint. Then he comes up with the curious idea that she compensates the self in the form of Elijah, thus compromising his own structure of the unconscious, where the anima is subordinate to the self. In fact, she is compensating his conscious standpoint. In this context, he also accounts for the battle of two snakes:
"Then I realized I had a conflict in myself about going down, but I could not make out what it was, I only felt that two dark principles were fighting each other, two serpents. There was a mountain ridge, a knife edge, on one side a sunny desert country, on the other side darkness. I saw a white snake on the light side and a dark snake on the dark side. They met in battle on the narrow ridge. A dreadful conflict ensued. Finally the head of the black snake turned white, and it retired, defeated. I felt, "Now we can go on".
Jung then enters a Druidic sacred place, where Salome appears, etc. Jung interprets the snakes in a reductive way. He says they represent a conflict in him, whether to go down into the kingdom of darkness or whether to move into the daylight. The tendency to go up was stronger. So Jung understands this conflict as resolved, as the image had passed, since he took the decision to go on. It seems like he thinks that active imagination has an immediate effect on personality. When it is played out, a resolution will also take place. This cannot be right.
I think the two snakes represent the trinitarian (white) spirit in battle with the Druidic pagan spirit (that is, the binarian or quaternarian spirit). Jung was strongly drawn towards the latter, to the detriment of the former. That's why the unconscious compensates this by presenting an image where the trinitarian spirit defeats the pagan spirit by making it conscious. Merlin, the son of Satan, is converted to the light side, so to speak, which is also what takes place in the Arthurian myth.
So we seem to agree on these facts: there is something amiss with the image of the self, and the anima is unduly subverted by Jung. These biblical figures don't belong in this pagan setting. His self notion is a conglomerate of incompatible elements, and it can only be held together by resort to black magic involving a spiraling serpent and demonic transformations, relating the image of a crucifixion. It is a warped and disharmonious image. These elements must be separated, and Salome must be moved into a Christian setting. Thus, we may arrive at a complementary, bipartite, self image, and harmony is restored.
Mats Winther
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To me, it is not the quality of "Otherness" which is missing in Jung's conception of the self. What's missing is its "Otherworldliness" (but this might be what you really mean). I call the missing aspect "the self of transcendence", as opposed to the this-worldly aspect. I think that Elijah symbolizes the transcendental aspect. Elijah defeated the Phoenician god Baal, a suitable symbol of the this-worldly self of completeness. This has a bearing on Jung's vision of the white snake defeating the black snake. Elijah was the first man to gain entrance into the heavenly realm, when he was taken up in a whirlwind (2Kings 2:11). Thus, he is connected with transcendence. Elijah and Salome are held captive in a tiny house, in the pagan underworld, where they don't belong. So the figure of Elijah here fulfils a compensatory function. He is entirely a positive figure, I think.
On account of being held in this pagan realm, Salome's Christian faith is frustrated. So she mistakenly makes Jung target of her wish to worship the Christ. After all, she is blind. Thus, Jung undergoes deification. The repression of the transcendental self has this consequence. When the divine realm of transcendence is not given its due, the result is self-deification. Evidently, if you won't bow down to the transcendental spirit, but your sole aim is to realize the self as this-worldliness, it has harmful repercussions in terms of identification. Elijah and Salome, as representatives of the trinitarian spirit, are being repressed. This is emphasized in the vision, since they appear as miniscule doll-like beings who live in a tiny little house in an underworldly place, inside a crater. The conclusion is that this vision compensates Jung's lopsided view of the self as an immanent ideal.
Mats Winther
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Mats, I find your analysis of Jung's Salome and Elijah active imagination very astute. It is good to know that someone else out there interested in Jungian studies (and not simply a detractor like Richard Noll) has a major problem with Jung's constructions that were rooted in active imagination episodes like this.
I still struggle with some of your languaging (e.g., your unique use of trinitarian, complementarion, etc.). These terms feel overly abstract to me, and I find myself having to constantly go back and try to grasp what you mean. They are rooted in very complex assumptions and analyses and seem to emerge from a world view that may or may not be valid. That is, the world view must constantly be reevaluated in the context of each argument. It is not self-evident.
I also have my own world views (also potentially problematic at times) and pet terms, and where innovations are being made, this may be unavoidable. My goal (only occasionally achieved) is to stick with "naturalistic" neologisms as much as possible. That is, I want to make these complicated, multilayered term-concepts as tangible as possible. And I strive to have every neologism and unconventional assumption move as close to familiar and as-transparent-as-possible territory as they can. It is Jung's capacity to do this (also imperfect, but notable) that appeals to me and helps ground my own "Jungianness".
Jung, I think, was often better as a "phenomenologist" (generally defined and not referring to the philosophical school) than a "theorist". That is, he was a great observer of phenomena and a fairly adept identifier and namer of complex patterns. But his reasoning and use of data can be flawed at times. For instance, he was highly prone to overusing anecdotal evidence and for not putting sufficient effort into falsifying his intuitive assumptions (instead looking selectively at data that might seem to corroborate his guesses). Despite that, I still find him more compatible with contemporary science than Freud is. Freud was more strictly a theorist (not a phenomenologist), and he was prone to making the more drastic scientific error of ignoring or distorting data for the sake of theory-preservation. That, I suspect, is one of the reasons Jung became a "phenomenologist" . . . it was a reaction to a tendency in Freud that Jung found fault with.
But what I meant to say about neologism and original thinking is that I suspect everyone's neologisms and original theories are difficult to grasp for others, I wrestle with my own languaging all the time, especially in the context of my participation in IAJS discussions. It is extremely clear in those circumstances that I am working from original theories and making different basic assumptions about data than other IAJS members (Jungian analysts and scholars). As the IAJS is a scholarly society, there is a heavy emphasis (a bias, in my interpretation) on academic styles of information evaluation and conveyance.
So, for instance, in academia, one is conventionally building on the arguments of others, using citations and references most of the time. Announcing allegiances and declaring enemies. Original thinking can be treacherous. Original interpretations are OK, but they gain acceptability from being planted in a soil of references to other scholars (so that they can be understood as belonging a particular to a school or schools of thought). And often there is little or no evaluation of the quality of that previous scholarship (i.e., in the humanities this is a significant issue, less so in the sciences).
As an "amateur" thinker, I am less impressed by citation for citation's sake and academic name dropping than I am by sound logic and evidence. Probably I have a "problem with authority", but I mostly just find logic and evidence more reliable than authority. In my experience, academics often prefer authority to evidence and logic. It is part of the tribal dynamic of academia . . . particularly in fields that do not much rely on evidence based arguments (like the humanities).
In my school days I also quickly wearied from the use of neologistic "power words" in postmodern philosophy and literary theory. As a poet (an unofficial but devoted "keeper of the language"), I took offense at the way complicated abstract terms were being unnecessarily substituted for more concrete, descriptive terms . . . and as an amateur psychologist I noted and found problematic the socio-psychological effect that using these power words had. Namely, they tended to create cultic followings of acolytes who scorned anyone who did not use and admire the power words. But, when pressed, these acolytes could often not give clear definitions of the terms and the theories behind them. Even the highest ranking acolytes (not to mention the philosophers themselves, who were deemed above such revelation) could not explain their pet theories and terms clearly to a well-educated layperson and nonbeliever. I recall Noam Chomsky once leveling similar criticism against academic postmodern theorists. He basically said, either they are so much smarter than me that I am incapable of understanding them or they are full of shit . . . and as I am a relatively intelligent and highly educated person, chances are higher that the latter is true and not the former.
So, I saw tribal cults growing up in academia around these power words and the exalted thinkers that coined them . . . and I passionately disliked and objected to that. Even if some of the theories are insightful and perhaps even valid and useful in certain ways, that is eclipsed for me by the shady way in which "truth" is manufactured in these academic cults. It is a very small scale example of "Truth by Might". Where those who are not embracing this "Truth" are bullied and assaulted by the faithful. My suspicion is that this style of academic cultism or tribalism has spread for two main reasons. 1.) It appeals to the human instinctual inclination toward monotribal social structures and identity constructions, and 2.) It facilitates sloppier thinking instead of demanding the rigors of sound logic and valid use of data. That is, it is easier to follow a charismatic leader and believe in the Word than it is to either carefully evaluate or construct sound ideas and theories.
I guess that is a long and digressive way of saying that I can be overly-scrutinizing of language, especially abstract terms that are not self-evidently descriptive. I still bristle whenever I find myself using my neologisms or terms I have radically redefined. When I can think of another way to say the same things, I usually go with it. Over the last few years at Useless Science, I have whittled away many of the neologisms and abstract terms I coined as I meandered through my analyses and speculations. A few remain (as well as a few classic Jungianisms) . . . like "valuation", "Demon", my unconventional definition of the "hero archetype". I like Jung's terms anima, animus, Self, and shadow, because they are phenomenologically sound and steeped in a long history of observation. They are not, for instance, interpretive. They describe the phenomena they represent as they appear superficially and immediately (perhaps the Latin is a little problematic these days . . . yet the Latin doesn't have the baggage of soul and spirit and helps denote that anima and animus are more particular phenomena, not just extremely broad categories).
"Self" is a little vague and prone to confuse (conflated with small-s self), but it is not hard to differentiate this as an objective Self as if viewed from the outside (and not from one's own perspective). I've never been able to find a more descriptive term . . . although I typically add some qualifications like "Self-as-Other". "Shadow" is perfectly descriptive and simple. As is my own coinage "Demon", although I am self-conscious about this when trying to talk to Jungians who are not used to this term and figure added to the Jungian "archetypal pantheon". But I have become increasingly careful about using terms like "archetypal" and "unconscious", as there has been a lot of foggy thought behind them . . . and they are perhaps not sufficiently accurate as descriptors (especially unconscious).
Probably most scholars wouldn't wrestle with language as much as I do . . . but I've always been inclined to make a pretty serious affair of language. If I ever stop caring so much, I will know the poet in me has finally died. But I don't expect that to ever happen or be possible.
In any case, returning to Jung's imagined personages, I am less keen on Elijah than you are. Jung somewhere called Elijah a prefiguration of Philemon. He may be a "self of transcendence" . . . I'm not sure exactly what that would mean, but I have a problem with transcendence as a spiritual goal, so it may just be one of my semantic quibbles. One of the quotes you cite from Jung is especially telling: "[Elijah] is the man with prestige, the man with a low threshold of consciousness or with remarkable intuition. In higher society he would be the wise man; compoare Lao-tse. He has the ability to get into touch with archetypes in others."
Jung is describing not the Self (as at least I would define the term), but his own ego ideal that later evolves into Philemon. Jung is a little obsessed with "prestige" or what he later calls "mana" (as in mana-personality). This may have been what originally intrigued him about Hitler. He wasn't entirely without reservations about "prestige", but he was a bit of a sucker for it . . . than intangible, magical inner power that draws other people into one's own myth or complex. Jung tended to see this as a mystical substance (mana) and not a sociological pattern or larger complex system.
I also see less inherent (psychological) conflict between Christian and pagan mindsets or attitudes than either you or Jung do. In fact, I see Jung's polarization of these mindsets as a somewhat artificial dissociation particular to his own personality complex (although far from unique to him, of course). In the Red Book (and continuing throughout his works), Jung seeks creative ways to reunite these dissociated aspects of his complex. Therefore, in the Red Book he is trying to hurl his Christianity at what he feels are very pagan symbols and ideas. It is a real battlefield for Christianity and paganism . . . and Jung doesn't want either side to win. He wants to bring about some kind of synthesis and compromise. He sees things in "paganism" (as he romantically and as a somewhat lapsed or dissatisfied Christian imagines it) that he feels Christianity has lost and needs to regain in order to be "whole" and healthy.
But he is extremely Christianized in his constructions of what is "pagan", and still associates paganism with darkness and the devil, with flesh and with both passions and deceptions. In other words, it is what Christianity has repressed rather than what pre-Christians might have seen and felt themselves. I see this less as "valid" than as a scenario Jung set up for himself in order to find some kind of personal transformation. In fact, Christianity had always been extremely pagan in many of its manifestations. Many lay-Christians were more interested in the saints or with Mary (who were more deeply infused with "pagan" ideas and themes) than with Christ and God. The central Church may not have liked it, but practicing Christianity was always moving toward paganism. The Church made innumerable concessions to this, choosing to control a core dogma more so than actual practice and belief. That is, it would rather slap a saint's name on a bit of pagan worship than actually do away with that worship.
And of course, there is nothing more "pagan" than the Christ myth itself. There are numerous pagan precedents to the motif of the godman from which the figure of the Christ is syncretized. But I don't mean to go into that here. My point is that, Jung saw Christianity as a theological matter (as a minister's son and an intellectual might). It was a matter of Church doctrine and scriptures and texts, the arguments of the Church fathers, etc. It was a very intellectual, textual Christianity, a Christianity of the Word and the Letter that had little to do with how Christianity was practiced and understood by many people. It was a book-learned Christianity . . . and it characterized paganism as a defeated and debased opponent (history is written by the winners).
But such a Christianity is not substantial enough to really root down in the autonomous psyche for many people. In that level of the psyche, Christianity is naturally "paganized" . . . and the "pagan" is not really repressed. It functions as the lifeblood of faith and practice. It is only among the clergy and theologians that there is such a vicious battle with paganism (one "paganism" usually wins through the manifestation of Freudian defense mechanisms and the "return of the repressed").
Jung always felt himself to be partly a "crude" Swiss peasant. He recognized that theological Christianity was not enough for him. It didn't stir his "pagan" psyche. But as an educated minister's son, he was indoctrinated into the theological mindset and had to come at his "paganism" like a monk might come at the devil within (in purely theological trappings).
This is precisely the way the Red Book is set up. Jung positions himself as a Christian prodigal son. He is wholly enmeshed in a Christian paradigm and in the Christian imagination. I think it limits his approach to what he envisions as a "pagan" unconscious. He can only see it as opposite from his conscious Christianity and only from distinctly Christian spectacles. He has no choice but to see anima figures like Salome and the Soul as "pagan" and to tar them with Christian prejudices against the other.
For Jung, that the prophet Elijah would hang out with pagans (and young women!) and serpents is shocking and disturbing. This may be a function of Jung's repressive sense that the great man (the man of prestige) within him or that he was "destined to become" should be able to transcend darkness, paganism, sex and "the feminine" . . . perhaps in the way he strove to transcend his knowingly shameful relationship with young Sabina Spielrein (in his later correspondence with her, he is extremely "high horse", professorial, acting as a mentor, acting as if whatever happened between them only a couple years earlier was entirely imaginary and irrelevant).
It is hard not to see a likely connection between Salome and Spielrein. He seems to treat them the same way. He is both excited and disgusted by their desires to worship him. He desires most of all to transcend them, to throw off his lust and romantic curiosities and become the wise old man who is righteous and not tempted. My guess is that his deification fantasy played out much like his relationship with Spielrein . . . he succumbed in spite of himself, and he dissociated his ego ideal (Elijah, the man of prestige) who was supposed to be a man above any such "Falls". It was Elijah he most desired, because Elijah was not susceptible to sexual seductions. He was "above the flesh".
And Jung fantasized that if only he too could be "above the flesh" and be a Great Man, who has conquered the anima and taken her mana for himself he would be free of shame and feelings of loss of control. It is a pretty straight forward battle with inflation where a Great Man figure, a transcendent figure, is constructed to compensate for feelings of smallness and weakness and shame. The question we should psychoanalytically ask here is: what is this Great man supposed to be transcending?
For Jung I suspect it was his "subjugation" to superiors and father figures like Freud . . . but also to those compulsions and behaviors he (Jung) was himself susceptible to that made him feel less than superior and fatherly. Like having affairs with patients or entertaining fantasies about deification.
Although Elijah in Jung's vision is not in himself a negative figure, I think he represents an unhealthy temptation for Jung, an "easy out" into inflation rather than a hard slog through the shadow and into transformation via intercourse with the Other (the original manifestation of which is the anima). As backwards at it might seem (and no doubt seemed to Jung), he needed to have that anima intercourse in order to transform and grow and break out of his complex (his inflated identification with the Great Man as ego ideal). Because it was a need and not just a desire, it dissolved away at his ego personality and perhaps made him susceptible to having an affair (or at least an improper relationship) with a young patient. It may have continued to prompt his other future affair/s.
The anima always seemed to be pulling Jung down into his shadow because he so desperately wanted to transcend that shadow. The shadow for Jung was a gateway to better psychic health. But his grasp of this was not always sophisticated enough. He sometimes seemed to allow himself "shadow indulgences" in the name of therapy without actually moving through and beyond the indulgent nature of these episodes. It was as if he said, "A man needs a little shadow tomfoolery now and again to ground his humanness and stay sane." He did say as much, but I think there is more to this than he acknowledged. The point is not to muck about in the wayward swamps of the shadow and then return to the clean and proper world having gotten one's rocks off. The goal is to learn sympathy and compassion for the shadow so one does not align one's ego overly much with the superegoic, shadow-punishing Demon that demands that the shadow be transcended.
Where sympathy with the shadow develops, the seeming need to indulge in bouts of shadow impersonation/identification dissolves. Jung's "solution" created a vicious cycle of Demon-identification (and shadow abuse/disparagement) and shadow-identification. But this cycle enslaves one to the Demon's power. It is like a form of self-flagellation: the more one whips oneself for one's "impure thoughts and deeds", the more those impure thoughts and deeds gain power over the imagination . . . and therefore, the more one has to whip oneself. That is how the Demon imprisons the ego. It makes the ego both jailor and prisoner, torturer and tortured.
The anima is effectively the emissary of the Self that seeks to break down this cycle and install a more functional dynamic, evolving, homeostatic system. The anima helps the ego understand that it need neither be nor hate and punish the shadow. The shadow is not the ego's shame. What is shameful is the Demonic cycle where one blames and beats the "other" which is inextricable from oneself.
Jung had a lot of insight into the shadow dynamic . . . but not enough. He saw only that the shadow had to be given some care and tolerance, but not how this could effectively be done. And he knew this "rationally", while in practice he despised his shadow and never stopped wishing it would just go away.
In the last section of the Red Book called "Scrutinies" Jung actually (i.e., in his fantasy) engages in a self-flaggelation verbally and in a sense "physically". I was astounded when I read this the first time, because it was so consistent with my understanding of the Demon introject and never before had I seen Jung so "Demonized". It was an eye-opening moment for me in which a lot of Jung's strangely self-conflicted ideas and attributes really fell into place. Bit one needs to understand the Demon and its complex relationship to other psychic/archetypal features like the animi, the hero, the Self, and the personal shadow to be able to use this key. To many, it might seem perfectly reasonable that Jung would self-flaggelate. After all, his criticisms of himself are generally correct. But his fantasy act is actually indicative of a Demonic "possession" and this makes perfect sense of why Jung seems to fail to "individuate" through the Red Book experiment. He ends in identification with the mana-personality, which is a victory for the Demon over the Self.
To return to the pre-Philemon mana-personality, Elijah. Although not as actively negative as Philemon (who actively exercises his power over the devalued psychic contents Jung called "the dead"), Elijah's flaw is manifested in (as a kind of dissociation) Salome. She is like the wound he carries along externally. He can only be a "man of prestige" and a great and wise prophet of God because he has her "held captive" in her role and in her blindness. It as if he is only able to see because she is blind. He has usurped her sight for himself. Obviously I am interpreting, but I think it is fairly clear that Elijah is what he is because he is not what Salome has been made out as. Rather, because the anima has been devalued into the blind Salome figure, Elijah can become the Great Man and Ego ideal Jung imagines.
Jung so strongly identifies with Elijah that he does not see or judge this. He assumes she is some pathetic piece of baggage clinging to the Great Man that, as he is so great and above temptation, he tolerates out of pity. He doesn't (yet) see that Elijah is a kind of dark wizard that has placed a curse or enchantment upon Salome to take her power for his own apparent transcendence.
Jung does come to understand this by the time he has revised Two Essays and reformulated his talk about the conquering of the anima to take her mana and the identification with the wizardly mana-personality that has "assimilated the unconscious". I.e., I am not "reading my own opinion into" the Elijah and Salome images, merely using Jung's own interpretation as applied to some of the data he drew that interpretation form. He might not cite Elijah and Salome just he does not refer to his own Philemon construction, but there can be no doubt that the dynamic of anima-conquering mana-personality is rooted in these personal images of Jung's. And he is still dangerously sympathetic to the mana-personality even as he sees its flaws. He has not gained much if any sympathy for the anima. She is still troublesome but unshakable baggage for Jung. Important as a "resource", but trouble as a "relationship".
But the theme that I see as implicit in Jung's Elijah and Salome vision is very conventional in folktales where a wizard (or Bluebeard) has abducted a princess or other young woman and holds her imprisoned in some tower or dungeon or unreachable place where he manages to somehow leach power from her. The princess's imprisonment is directly linked to the empowerment of the wizard/mana-personality/Demon. She is his "resource" as long as she is contained. And the princess can only be freed and rescued or redeemed by the true hero, who is often humble and foolish and openminded/openhearted. Not obviously a "Great Man" (like the wizard).
As her redeemer and partner, he "inherits the kingdom" and is raised up to (does not transcend) inclusion in the Self's principle of organization, acting as its facilitator. But that motif never enters into Jung's constructions. The anima is never redeemed in Jung's theories or personal life. She remains a "slumming" indulgence, a "sometime whore" that he can always leave behind to return to respectable life. That, it would seem, is Jung's and the privileged man's "right". A very Victorian notion. Compartmentalization of sex and spirit, righteousness and vice, heaven and earth.
Jung moved toward the treatment of this dissociation, but only far enough to imagine it as, at best, a harnessing of opposites with a temporary (rather Herculean) yoke. He doesn't go all the way to the redemption of the fallen or the valuation or what has become devalued by the modern, patriarchal, and then Christianized mentality. But as a kind of silver lining, he does not himself stand above the disease of his age. He remains a paragon of the very modern spiritual woundedness that he made so many efforts to understand and treat in others and in the world. And he seemed to fare a bit better in the treatment of others than in his own self-treatment in this regard. Although I would say that he had swallowed an especially lethal dose of the poison, and that he managed as well as he did in his own self-treatment is remarkable and stands as an essential case study for future Jungian psychologists (should they care to look).
Ultimately, I recognize that where we make different interpretations from one another, we are engaging in our own unique work. I see logic in either interpretation . . . and there is no shortage of arbitrariness to any such creative analysis. I see that there is an impetus in my own thinking here that begins in a fairly critical position toward Christianity and Christian tenets (even many mystical ones). I have no special love for either Christianity or paganism and tend to be atheistic and generally skeptical about all religious and spiritual endeavors and beliefs systems, preferring what many (spiritualists, at least) would probably consider a psychological reductionism.
In my approach, I take Jung's tendency toward psychologization of religion to a greater extreme (and what I feel are its inevitable conclusions that Jung resisted somewhat out of an admiration for theology that I in no way share). In other words, I seek to construct an utterly "non-spiritual" system of understanding spirituality. Not "non-meaningful" and certainly not debunking, but I mean to analyze spiritual behaviors and ideas to understand what they are composed of (human psychological predispositions and patterns of thought and behavior). For me (as someone who used to be more conventionally spiritual as well as more conventionally Jungian), this analytical reduction has not relieved spirituality of its mystique and power at all. But I recognize that for many others it might.
In psychologizing spirituality, I find it becomes (or reveals itself as) more complex. I mean this in the same sense that zooming in to microscopic and even quantum levels of matter does not result in an understanding of matter that is "only quantum". What one comes to see are many levels of complexity and emergence. Neither the highest nor the lowest level is all-important. What is fascinating is how all these levels are nested, subtly interacting with one another.
Where spirituality is concerned, I am interested in this nesting, in both its multi-level components and the way its higher levels emerge from its lower ones. Where one disassembles a "magical machine", its original brand of "magic" may seem to be dispelled, but that can open the way to a deeper brand of magic. Not one that projects an anthropic mind and intelligence into the design of things that have emerged complexly, but one that suggests an utterly different, non-human construction or behavior of systems.
Or to put it in more religious language, one might need to move beyond looking for the human-ish mind of God to begin observing the natural "mind" of God. The mind that is not mind of a God that is not God. From my perspective, science is looking for a deeper mystery than religion. Where religion ultimately looks into a mirror, science strives to look into a void, into absolute otherness. And (modern) science is not afraid to see otherness where religion has always recoiled from it at the most intimate levels. I am speaking purely of spiritual hunger here, not ethics, sociality or any other function where religion clearly has something to offer that science makes no claims to (although that also opens up the danger of bungling such offerings, which science is able to avoid).
-Matt
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Christian theologists refer to their own theology as "trinitarian", that is, it is a theology centered around otherworldliness, i.e., the transcendental God. Therefore, a trinitarian mindset would motivate the individual to stand apart from the world. Jung, as we all know from his incessant harping, took exception to the trinitarian view of the divine and created his own "theology", where the fourth and earthly element is added to the trinity. This is the quaternity, and hence we could denote this theology quaternarian. These notions are used, for instance, by Lindorff in "Pauli and Jung" (2004) where he compares Kepler and Fludd and argues that their respective attitudes represent the trinitarian versus the quaternarian. However, Jung's own favourite thinker, Gerhard Dorn (c. 1530–1584, here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Dorn)) warned against quartarius (the quaternarian god) whom he identified as the cloaked binarius (i.e., the devil). But Jung interprets this as a weakness in Dorn, and says that he remained stuck in a trinitarian, Christian, conception. Such notions are often used in alchemy. Mark Haeffner cites Thomas Vaughan (1621−1666):
"Thomas Vaughan in Anima magica abscondita:
- The first principle is One in One from One. It is a pure, white Virgin, and next to that which is most pure and simple. This is the first created Unity. By this all things were made, not actively, but Mediately, and without this, Nothing can be made either Artificial or Natural. This is the Uxor Dei et Stellarum [Wife of God and the stars]. By mediation of this, there is a descent from One into Four, and an ascent from Three by Four to the invisible, supernatural Monas. The diameter line in the circle creates the Ternarius. The second principle is the Binarius which fell from its first Unity by adhesion to Matter, which rendered it impure. This third [principle] is properly no principle, but a product of Art. It is a various Nature, compounded in one sense, and Decompounded in another, consisting of Inferiour and Superiour powers. This is Magicians fire, this is Mercurius Philosophorum, Celeberrimus ille Microcosmus, et Adam. This is the Labyrinth and Wild of Magick where a world of students have lost themselves.
This is a cabalist view of the world, as being a process of emanation from divine unity. The third principle, the Ternarius, is the key to reuniting impure nature with the purity of divine unity. Thomas Vaughan again:
- This Ternarius, being reduced per Quaternarium ascends to the Magicall Decad, which is Monas Ultissima, in which state quaecumque vult potes; for it is united then per Aspectum to the first, eternall spirituall unity." (Haeffner: Dictionary of Alchemy, pp.253-54)
When Jung struggles with both Christian and pagan notions in the Red Book, it probably reflects on his wish to unite Christian theology with a fourth and pagan element. Thus, in his scheme, if the binarius is conjoined with the ternarius, we arrive at the quartarius. Arguably, the binarius represents an attitude characterized by an unconscious form of wordliness, along lines of pagan religion. The pagan world was materialistic in the sense that worldly goods and gifts were viewed as boons of the gods. If a person had riches and beauty, for instance, it was a clear sign that he/she was both favoured and patronized by the gods. In the beginning of our era, pagan spirituality had run its course. Its degradation into materialism created a rebound in an extremely spiritual type of religion, namely Christianity. Worldly goods and chattels, or individual talent, weren't proofs that a person was favoured by God. All are equal in the eyes of God. In fact, "the last will be first, and the first will be last." The divine spirit did not remain in earthly things anymore, but had become transcendentalized. I hold that it is only on the surface that the Christian religion has pagan elements in it. Its theology is very transcendental.
I am sympathetic with Dorn in his suspicions about quartarius (i.e., the quaternity). Jung's quaternarian standpoint could be understood as the individual's return to the pagan and worldly mindset. However, this time he is endowed with an enlightened mind, that is, an advanced psychological consciousness. If the binarius represents unconscious pagan spirituality, the quartarius is its conscious counterpart. Jung, of course, has made immense contributions to the advancement of consciousness. According to Jung, only a strong and differentiated consciousness can withstand the tensions present in the quaternarian self. Anyway, it would explain why the ternarius cannot conjoin with the binarius to form quartarius and why Jung's Red Book project was a failure (if it is indeed correct, what you say). If the quartarius is the enlightened binarius, then Jung's view of the formation of the quaternity was misguided. The enlightened binarius is the serpent, in Jung's fantasy, who was defeated and whose head turned white.
Of course, Elijah, in Jung's terminology, represents the Wise Old Man, or the mana personality, so there is no contradiction in seeing the anima and the Wise Old Man as compensatory opposites, along lines of Jung. So what I said earlier about it being self-contradictory, isn't correct. However, I maintain that Salome is the Christian woman who was present during Jesus's whole oeuvre. However, Jung has forgotten completely about her, and instead identifies her with the Salome who was the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas (cf. Shamdasani, Notes of the Seminar on An. Psych. Given in 1925, p.100). This is all the more curious as Herod's Salome was not a follower of Christ, which Jung's Salome says she is. Both Elijah and Salome, the disciple of Jesus, appear in Jesus's presence in the bible. (Elijah appears in the transfiguration on the mountain). The disciple Salome also appears in the Secret Gospel of Mark. (In early Christian tradition, there is also a Salome referred to as sister of Jesus.) So, contrary to what Jung says, it is not such a strange thing that they live together in Jung's fantasy.
In the crucifixion fantasy it seems like the pagan and Christian elements are conjoined, according to the quaternarian ideal. Jung turns into a pagan deity, encoiled by a serpent, while being worshipped as the Christ on the cross. This combination seems almost like a Freudian wish-fulfillment. Jung says that it signifies deification (p.106), that is, he is transformed into the quaternarian god, himself. In these lectures he is very brilliant, as always, but he misinterprets his own unconscious, which is a well-known problem. This, I hold, is not deification, but its very opposite. He is subjected to exorcism. The Christian woman exorcises the devil in him, which takes the appearance of a beastly pagan deity connected with the Mithras cult, which was the foremost pagan competitor of Christianity during the first centuries. Just as in Hollywood films, the demon is forced to come to the surface there to be faced and confronted. The possessed person temporarily takes on demonic features, before being liberated. During the procedure Jung is sweating profusely, which is a purgation symbol. It could signify how the evil spirit is driven out. After the exorcism, Salome has gained eyesight. This would signify that Jung's soul is no longer blind, that is, no more unconsciously Christian, but instead consciously Christian. This came as a result of driving out the pagan deity.
Mats Winther
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I should say something about "complementation", too, since this is the only word that I have tentatively introduced to psychology (it already exists in genetics and elsewhere). I really think it is needful. It is defined here and there in my intellectual musings on my homepage. The psychoanalytic paradigm builds on "integration", that is, the making conscious of the unconscious. On account of its "worldly" emphasis, Jungian psychology is centered around integration, too. In mythological language, the boons of the gods must be realized in worldly reality for the welfare of humanity. Although Jung and von Franz are wise enough to see the backsides of a consciousness that grows to overpowering dimensions, Edward F. Edinger has no qualms about it. He sees the phenomenon of integration as the royal road to salvation.
However, in theology (both pagan and Christian), there is also the opposite trend, namely that of giving sacrifice for the replenishment of the divine world. For instance, the Vedic sacrifice serves the purpose of keeping the gods powerful and nourished. Salvation is thus reversed. The devotee must give sustenance to the gods. Both Indra and Shiva must come down to earth to expiate their sin, in order to regain their vitality. In village Buddhism, the worshipper is involved in salvation of the deity by transferring merit.
Such naive albeit charming notions don't exist in Christian theology. Here the sacrifice to the nourishment of God comes to expression as a life of reclusiveness and rejection of the world. The cloistered contemplative sacrifices his (or her) worldly life and devotes his life's energy wholly to God.
According to Mesoamerican theology the gods gave rise to everything we see in the conscious world. Creation came into existence thanks to the sacrifice of the gods. They offered up their own life-blood for us, and their severed limbs turned into trees, mountains, maize, fruits, etc. Of course, such a movement cannot go on unilaterally. It threatens to exhaust the divine world, with the consequence that the universe can no longer run its course. That's why the sacrificial priests must always sacrifice their own blood, or the blood of the sacrificial victim, burn it on the altar or otherwise send it to the gods.
In full analogy with this, there is no way that the unconscious can be seen as a cornucopia, capable of an endless provision of goods, for integration with the conscious world. There must be a payback, a return on the investment, to keep the unconscious world alive. Thus, the notion of "integration" must be complemented with a notion that refers to the replenishment of the unconscious. This is not the same as anti-integration, because what has been established in consciousness must remain there. Conscious functions cannot be uprooted, short of going through psychic illness or a deterioration of the brain functions. So it is not the question of a regression to a former unconscious condition.
The gods can heal themselves. They can grow new limbs to replace those that were severed. They can restore their vitality. To this end they must drink ambrosia, as the Greek gods, or they must have recourse to the golden apples, as in Norse mythology. I have argued that the central idea in alchemy, namely the notion of circular distillation, refers to this very process of autonomous growth in the unconscious. The process goes on in a sealed vessel, known as the pelican. The alchemists say that one must take care not to add too much heat to the vessel. Some even say that the rays of the moon are enough, which signifies a faint light of consciousness.
In the mean time, the alchemist must give himself to prayer and meditation, and practice a reverential lifestyle. The conscious world that was created by the gods is only lit up by the moon, whereas the strong light of consciousness, the sun, has receeded. It means that the functions and content of consciousness remain the same. A regress has not occurred. But consciousness has dampened its light and the process of conscious expansion has come to a halt. This favours the unconscious process of restoration. It may grow new kinds of fruit. This is why the spirit of ternarius plays such a big role in alchemy. It is the key. The sacrifice is quintessential. The enlightened binarius is shut in as the serpens mercurialis in the retort. It is also what happened to Merlin in Celtic myth. The ternarius is reduced per Quaternarium and ascends to eternal spiritual unity.
Of course, such trinitarian notions don't speak to Jung. Jungian psychology has, to my knowledge, provided no proper interpretation of the process of circular distillation. The notions of integration and regression aren't sufficient to give it meaning. I have suggested the notion of complementation for this process. The unconscious, or the unconscious archetype, may undergo complementation, thus to grow new limbs. The unconscious tree can come to life again and bear new fruit. It is the complementary opposite of integration, corresponding to theology's sacrificial act for the boon of the gods.
Thus, contrary to what Jung says, there is no need for a severe crisis of consciousness, which includes the relative destruction of the individuant's conscious world, in order to uphold a relation with the unconscious. In fact, the world can be lit up by a much fainter luminary, another kind of consciousness. First is established the quaternarian consciousness, provisioned by the riches of the unconscious. Consciousness is reduced, having gone via the quaternity, to the stage of unio mentalis. Complementation occurs semi-autonomously, supervised by a trinitarian consciousness. The alchemists say that the spirit Mercurius will rise from the ashes inside the vessel.
Mats Winther
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[...]Jung, I think, was often better as a "phenomenologist" (generally defined and not referring to the philosophical school) than a "theorist". That is, he was a great observer of phenomena and a fairly adept identifier and namer of complex patterns. But his reasoning and use of data can be flawed at times. For instance, he was highly prone to overusing anecdotal evidence and for not putting sufficient effort into falsifying his intuitive assumptions (instead looking selectively at data that might seem to corroborate his guesses). Despite that, I still find him more compatible with contemporary science than Freud is. Freud was more strictly a theorist (not a phenomenologist), and he was prone to making the more drastic scientific error of ignoring or distorting data for the sake of theory-preservation. That, I suspect, is one of the reasons Jung became a "phenomenologist" . . . it was a reaction to a tendency in Freud that Jung found fault with.
But what I meant to say about neologism and original thinking is that I suspect everyone's neologisms and original theories are difficult to grasp for others, I wrestle with my own languaging all the time, especially in the context of my participation in IAJS discussions. It is extremely clear in those circumstances that I am working from original theories and making different basic assumptions about data than other IAJS members (Jungian analysts and scholars). As the IAJS is a scholarly society, there is a heavy emphasis (a bias, in my interpretation) on academic styles of information evaluation and conveyance.
So, for instance, in academia, one is conventionally building on the arguments of others, using citations and references most of the time. Announcing allegiances and declaring enemies. Original thinking can be treacherous. Original interpretations are OK, but they gain acceptability from being planted in a soil of references to other scholars (so that they can be understood as belonging a particular to a school or schools of thought). And often there is little or no evaluation of the quality of that previous scholarship (i.e., in the humanities this is a significant issue, less so in the sciences).
As an "amateur" thinker, I am less impressed by citation for citation's sake and academic name dropping than I am by sound logic and evidence. Probably I have a "problem with authority", but I mostly just find logic and evidence more reliable than authority. In my experience, academics often prefer authority to evidence and logic. It is part of the tribal dynamic of academia . . . particularly in fields that do not much rely on evidence based arguments (like the humanities).
In my school days I also quickly wearied from the use of neologistic "power words" in postmodern philosophy and literary theory. As a poet (an unofficial but devoted "keeper of the language"), I took offense at the way complicated abstract terms were being unnecessarily substituted for more concrete, descriptive terms . . . and as an amateur psychologist I noted and found problematic the socio-psychological effect that using these power words had. Namely, they tended to create cultic followings of acolytes who scorned anyone who did not use and admire the power words. But, when pressed, these acolytes could often not give clear definitions of the terms and the theories behind them. Even the highest ranking acolytes (not to mention the philosophers themselves, who were deemed above such revelation) could not explain their pet theories and terms clearly to a well-educated layperson and nonbeliever. I recall Noam Chomsky once leveling similar criticism against academic postmodern theorists. He basically said, either they are so much smarter than me that I am incapable of understanding them or they are full of shit . . . and as I am a relatively intelligent and highly educated person, chances are higher that the latter is true and not the former.
So, I saw tribal cults growing up in academia around these power words and the exalted thinkers that coined them [...]
You must take into account the economical perspective, as well. You won't be able to create a career in the humanist sciences if you refuse to chime in with the ruling ideas. Jung himself lost his status in academia after he began defending Freud, and after Freud had dissociated himself from Jung, he lost all his pupils, who turned to Freud instead. There's another important factor, namely the psychological. Most people are deadly afraid of free thinkers. They can create a quagmire of once firm ground. To me, personally, this is no big problem, because I am an intellectual myself. I can find my way in the marshland and am not deadly afraid of going astray. An intuitive intellectual is not strongly dependent on clear rules for thinking as he has mastered the art of thinking himself, to a degree. It seems like most people in academia, including the authors in journals, have not the intellect as primary function. That's probably why it's so hard to understand what they are saying, sometimes.
Arguably, that's why there is a strong tendency to embrace post-modern authors who endorse muddled and subjectivistic thinking, because it allows you to say almost anything, as long as it sounds intellectual. Post-Jungian thought repudiates the intellect altogether, and elevates fantasy. Thus, it cannot reform classical Jungian psychology, but only distance itself from it. A person who isn't endowed with a logical faculty, may instead ingest a lot of information, resort to name-dropping, create an abundance of citations, etc. I don't know how the land lies in the U.S., but in my country, the average doctor is incapable of thinking. He can only refer to the database of learning that he has acquired. This means that he cannot relate to the patient the way that Sherlock Holmes would do, that is, grapple with problems that he hasn't encountered before, and try to find a solution. Instead, the average doctor is perfectly helpless when his learning proves to be inadequate. He reacts like a computer that gets the wrong input. A computer only outputs ERROR on the screen.
It is very, very irritating. I overheard on the radio a lady talking about her rare disease. She had gone to 29 doctors, but nobody bothered to investigate her problem. Had they done this, they would immediately have discovered that her rare disease has a remedy. She refused to give up, although she told the story in a despairing voice. Only the thirtieth doctor bothered to investigate the problem and look it up in the manuals. So she got her medicine and she is now quite restored. Otherwise her life would have been destroyed. It's amazing, but there are a great number of people who function like this. There's just an ERROR print-out in their brain, if they come up against a phenomenon that they cannot immediately identify. The problem is that many a psychoanalyst is recruited from this category of people.
Most therapists are keen on learning methods of how to deal with patients. They want journals to publish articles with case histories of counter-transference issues and whatnot, so they can expand their knowledge database of how to deal with problems. This, I think, is more or less fruitless. It risks creating more confusion than it resolves. It's because such therapists cannot function like Sherlock Holmes. The majority of therapists seem to lack a rational function. This is also how the traditional "learned" person in academia functions. He has adapted to learning, but not to thinking independently. It's two very different things. Jung was well versed in both. That's why he was able to undergird his thinking with his enormous knowledge database.
The reason why I have developed a few ideas of my own, within the confines of Jungian theory, is only because Jungian theory isn't wholly traversable in my personal life. My unconscious sends out partly a different message. When looking into it, I think I have demonstrated that also Jung's unconscious was partly digressive. Nor am I able to swallow certain aspects of it, such as the pronounced Platonic aspect, and archaic notions such as synchronicity. I think my ideas, unlike post-Jungian psychology, are wholly compatible with Jungian psychology, but they are really revisions for my personal sake, that is, for the sake of my own individuation. I must revise, otherwise I go under. I would have done this work whether or not the Internet existed, that is, regardless if I can publish my ideas or not. I am, however, convinced that there are other people who have similar qualms about Jungian psychology, yet have a great appreciation of it, and they would probably benefit from reading my articles. I have now posted a new article on my homepage, here, (http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/crucifixion.htm) which builds predominantly on my posts in this thread. I have also added a discussion about four other dreams, of which one by M-L von Franz.
Mats Winther
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I began writing this reply about a month ago and did not finish it before going on vacation. It is still not really concluded, and in spite of its lateness, I will post what there is. I have also been working on a number of other things and didn't want to hold onto this one, even if unfinished, any longer.
-Matt
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Many thanks, Mats, for your elaborations.
Regarding Vaughn and Dorn on quartarius and similar terms, my quibble is that these are esoteric ideas that are not rooted in empirical or scientific data. They may be very useful as interpretations of psychic and spiritual phenomena, but there has to be a prerequisite assumption and at least a handshake of faith to justify them. Their usefulness as a lens into Jung's or a universal psychology seems to me limited by any audience's willingness to commit to that handshake. As a generally faithless person, I'm rarely willing to begin observation of an object or phenomenon with that kind of assumption. That is not to say that these terms might not be useful metaphorical tools (the necessity of such I do recognize, even in science). But there needs to be (for skeptics like me) a preliminary argument that demonstrates why these tools are 1.) needed, and 2.) better than various other metaphorical tools for the observational task at hand. And that argument needs to be largely free from abstractions and non-empirical assumptions. I.e., we need to be convinced that the unique or at least unusual way the terms are being used is warranted by the special case of a particular data set.
For example, when Jung introduces his conception and term "anima", the discerning reader/evaluator requires both a logical argument for why the specific term is being used and also a demonstration of how specific data are illuminated by the employment of the term/concept anima. Although I can no longer recall where, I am pretty sure Jung takes pains to do both of these.
Although I also have a deep interest in alchemy and Hermetic thought and imagery (mostly from a psychological angle), I can't help but feel stricken by the problem of alchemical esotericism and even outright obfuscation when trying to use alchemical ideas in modern (psychological) language. From what I can discern, you make excellent and wholly logical use of these alchemical terms/concepts. It is only the underlying assumption that the esoteric alchemical ideas are valid foundations for a modern, psychological argument where I remain unconvinced. So, for me, an atheist, it is a little like hearing an argument that is founded on the assumption that God is real or that the Christian religion is true and right.
Jung, where trinity and quaternity are concerned, takes a similar approach (which you are obviously revisioning) and seems to argue that there is a particular "psychology" or attitude/mindset that can be associated with either a trinitarian or a quaternian symbol. He enters willingly into theological debates on such matters, veering away form his psychological/more-empirical lifeline. He justifies this by treating the trinity and quaternity symbols as naturally occurring archetypes innate to the human psyche/brain. I have yet to be convinced that this is valid and that 3 and 4 symbols have an inherent, universal meaning. Surely they have a "numinous" kind of effect as symbols that appear spontaneously, and I do think they lend themselves to interpretation in many cases. But the interpretation, I think, needs always to be contextual. There is a core logic to certain numbers (3 and 4 are some of the most clear). 3 has a beginning, middle, and end, and triangularity, while 4 lends itself to squareness and the neat division into halves of half of itself and to the delineation of physical spaces (as in the four directions). But where Christian (or other religious) theological and alchemical interpretations of these numbers occur, I don't think universality can be assumed.
Therefore, I can't accept that Jung's thinking can be faulted for being "quaternian" or that Christian thought can be seen as either right or wrong based on its "trinitarian" conceptions. Equally, "trinitarianism" does not inherently indicate for me "transcendentalism" or an orientation to otherworldliness (in these instances, threeness would be functioning as a sign given a specific, somewhat arbitrary meaning by a group of people and not a naturally occurring symbol with inherent, structural meaning). I would need other, less abstract criteria to evaluate Jung's psychology or Christian thought. This is where psychology would function to reduce arbitrary signs to psychological phenomena and attitudes (and perhaps to historical development in cultural contexts).
I'm not sure if that languaging issue is ultimately surmountable for me, but despite my reservations, I find the further extension of your arguments largely compelling and insightful. It remains then merely a curiosity for me that you are able to derive logical and adept insights from what seems to me a foggy linguistic foundation of assumptions. As long as your argument doesn't claim to be self-evidently true because one of your assumptions is self-evidently true (and I rarely see that happening in your writing), you avoid potential linguistic pitfalls.
When Jung struggles with both Christian and pagan notions in the Red Book, it probably reflects on his wish to unite Christian theology with a fourth and pagan element.
Leaving aside the "numerian" analyses you provide for the time being, I think you are correct here. At least, I would agree that Jung saw his imaginative efforts as some kind of amalgam of Christian and pagan . . . and that he sought to treat what he felt was an "imbalance" in the Christian mindset with a dose of a paganism he believed was repressed and devalued/demonized. He is using Freud's repression model here with his own romantic tweak, as what has been repressed is a kind of "inferior function" that ends up being the seat of the god (or God) itself. Jung's Red Book experiment is an effort of sorts to revitalize his Christianity with this repressed pagan element. But Jung is profoundly suspicious of this "pagan", inferior element that lurks in the "unconscious". He fully accepts that it has been relegated to this darkness because it is truly unfit for the righteous, Christian attitude. He doesn't (as later, even more romantic, New Agers would) deem the repressed element somehow superior to the more-conscious Christian elements. Rather, it is a curious missing piece that in itself is perhaps demonic and rightly suspect, yet is necessary to complete a fully functional attitude when coupled with the more-conscious Christian approach. Without it, an individual (or world view) can continue on, but only with a gradually increasing emptiness or waywardness, a loss of soul. And as that loss or wound accumulates, the desire and even need for this lost soul becomes increasingly charged with libido.
That libido swelling was also something Jung treated with suspicion, worrying that it needed to be handled very carefully so as not to explode or inflate and contaminate the ego. It needed still to be mediated by a strong consciousness.
Never does Jung approach this like some kind of closeted pagan occultist. As romantic (and volkisch) as he was, his Protestant rational side seemed to take precedence. The Red Book experiment is filtered entirely through a Christian lens, with Jung constantly moaning in protest to every appearance of a "pagan" other like an old nun compulsively fingering a rosary as a talisman against demons everywhere. He is extremely uptight and defensive, particularly when anima figures are around. He basically has his fingers shoved into his ears and mumbles, "This is not happening. This is not happening." He gleans only the very slightest from his encounters with the anima, recognizing only very generally and in a detached way that these relational experiences are meaningful and should be transformative. But he only gets to this idea after the fact, and only in an intellectualized and detached way (much of the Red Book is divided into alternating episodes of experience/interaction and private reflection/psychologization/philosophizing). During his encounters he is a complete ninny, coming across even in his very slight acquiescences like a child with his fingers crossed behind his back as he emptily promises to do what he knows is right.
This all gives the impression that Jung's dissatisfaction with his Christianity is relatively unconscious. He doesn't understand it and doesn't want to believe in it (just as in his childhood vision of God's church-shattering turd, he struggles to repress the thought for some time). He is like a man in a flood creeping to ever higher, rapidly vanishing ground. He does not choose to swim for another shore or hop in a boat. He intends to wait it out all the while screaming, "My God, I'm going to die!" And he is very adept at finding ever-higher ground and escaping the worst and deepest of the water.
But as a modern, non-Christian reader of the Red Book, I find his constructions largely "hysterical" and the dangers mostly self-imposed. Nothing remotely sinister approaches Jung until well into the text and only after he has wailed on and on about how terrible that otherness is. It reads to me like he is convincing himself of what he had always believed. There is a regression of the anima in the Red Book as a result of this. She becomes more marginalized, more determined to have Jung face his own shadow, and eventually she seems to have basically had enough and says she has to leave (along with a version of the shadow that is a bit like an aborted pagan Christ image for Jung). But toward the beginning, when the anima figure is more robust, she offers Jung some truly useful insights and critiques (that he, of course, fails to take to heart and weasels away from).
Jung characterizes his own prudishness as Christian (and sees the others he encounters as pagan and demonic), but I suspect it runs even deeper than his Christianity and is a fear of otherness, which he blames for being seductive and violating rather than recognizing his own hungers and complexes.
My contention, though, is that the whole couching of the Red Book's relational experiences in a Christianized, pagan=debased and evil attitude is responsible for much of the eventual failure Jung experiences. Even as he rationally and intellectually faults it, he embraces the Christian demonization of all things pagan . . . and is drawn toward that paganism entirely in spite of himself. It "seduces" him, in his addled opinion. He is an "innocent" being bullied by a greater power. Never does he have a truly positive (or even neutral) portrait of these "paganized" others, and never does he experience his contamination with that "paganism" as truly revelatory and enlightening or positively transformative. Instead, he "reasons" that he must be tarred with this shadowy paganism in certain (small) ways in order to become more "whole". And that wholeness Jung sees as important, because he recognizes that his Christian righteousness is a sham. Thus emerges the fairly crazy idea that one needs a dose of the devil to make the whole Christian cocktail work properly. It's a kind of "exception that proves the rule" idea that self-servingly usurps that exception to mean the opposite of what it implies (namely, that the "rule" is flawed).
Jung's later writing is kinder to paganism and the pagan elements of the unconscious, but in the Red Book he is merely a lapsed Christian, a Christian who wants desperately to be good but is overwhelmed by and must acquiesce grudgingly to "pagan darkness".
In all this, Jung Christianizes his approach to the autonomous psyche and applies the lens of conscious = Christian, unconscious = pagan where I find this to be a false dichotomy. It would be much more accurate to characterize the autonomous psyche as "natural" or naturalistic compared to the seemingly rational, scripted, algorithmic construction of conscious selfhood (i.e., conscious identity is largely made of verbal language, sets of beliefs and value-based response routines; it is not dynamic and complex like a natural living thing).
Jung largely buys into the conventional, Western Christianization of history that rendered "paganism" dark, bloody, corrupt, and sinful. The Church's propaganda machine constructed this history and attitude toward paganism, but the actual history (which can only be gleaned through the almost absolute wall of Christian historicizing propaganda) seems to be much more complex and much less favorable to Christian salvation. The rise of Christianity as a state religion of Rome and the first Christian emperors was hardly a matter of salvation, and there is no evidence that it bettered society or the lives of Roman citizens. In fact we know that Christian power presided over the "decline and fall" of the empire and rise of the so-called "dark ages". How much Christianity as a belief system is responsible for this is a matter of very complex debate, but state Christianization was verifiably used in the state oppression of other religions, the burning and demolition of pagan temples and libraries that housed much of the knowledge and thought of classical Greco-Roman culture, and the assault and often murder of probably hundreds of thousands of "heretics" who resisted oppression. Science, medicine, and art suffered massive technical regressions under early Christianization . . . losses that were instigated and sanctioned by a Christian doctrine that actively discouraged any such pursuit that might seem to contradiction Christian "truth" and wisdom. E.g., there is no need for scientific medicine because God determines all health and life. All one needs is faith and humble obedience to the Church.
Much of the cultural "salvation" that eventually returned came with the Renaissance and saw the return of classical Greek and Roman (and Muslim, especially in the case of alchemy and metallurgy) knowledge that had been preserved by Muslims and regained indirectly through the Christian Crusades meant to annihilate and convert this "dark other". Although Jung was a critic of Christianity in many ways, he never took a political or historical tack in his criticism. He treated the theological writings of the Church Fathers like pure expressions of the unconscious, failing to see their social and political contexts and use (totally undisguised) in propagandizing.
What I mean to say is that "paganism" isn't just flesh, blood, polytheism, and decay. It was high modern culture, science, democracy, philosophy, diversity, technology, and even (often neglected by Christian historicizing) complex systems of ethics (some of which Christianity adopted, none of which it "invented"). But Jung doesn't focus on this in constructing a largely "pagan" unconscious. He accepts the self-justifying Christian prejudices and evaluations as objective fact about the psyche. And that is a non-psychological, unscientific move.
Still, he was right in a sense that (for him personally), the autonomous psyche presents itself initially out of the personal shadow. It rises up out of the filth, out of what has been devalued. And for the Christian Jung, this was distinctly pagan, polytheistic, fleshy, earthy (the first layer of the repressed and devalued . . . as Jung seemed to be or at least think himself a Christianized Germanic "barbarian" by innate disposition). Jung's insight on this point is quite strong. Where I fault him is where he decided that what he saw and felt through his shadow was an accurate portrait of "the unconscious" rather than a distortion of the autonomous psyche created by Jung's own cognitive habits, self-constructions, and socialized prejudices. Even with his wise introduction of the "personal equation" idea, he still didn't quite see through the shadow to the onbective Other. Perhaps this was because he always remained a bit too hostile toward his personal shadow and a bit too likely to stereotype certain others (women, Jews, blacks, etc.) devaluingly.
You write:
The pagan world was materialistic in the sense that worldly goods and gifts were viewed as boons of the gods. If a person had riches and beauty, for instance, it was a clear sign that he/she was both favoured and patronized by the gods. In the beginning of our era, pagan spirituality had run its course. Its degradation into materialism created a rebound in an extremely spiritual type of religion, namely Christianity. Worldly goods and chattels, or individual talent, weren't proofs that a person was favoured by God. All are equal in the eyes of God. In fact, "the last will be first, and the first will be last." The divine spirit did not remain in earthly things anymore, but had become transcendentalized. I hold that it is only on the surface that the Christian religion has pagan elements in it. Its theology is very transcendental.
As you might guess, I simply don't agree that your construction of history here is correct. I am not an expert on the religions of pagan Rome, but I know they were diverse, and that Christianity arose in a period a massive religious diversity. Christianity itself is a supreme syncretism combining elements of Mystery religions, Roman state religions like Mithraism and Sol Invictus, Egyptian death/rebirth religions, multiple forms of Judaism, and a dose of Hellenistic philosophy, particularly Cynicism (which deserves much of the credit for the "highly spiritual" anti-materialist ideas some forms of Christianity adopted). I'm not sure it is accurate to call it "extremely spiritual". It's proto-Gnostic and Cynic roots along with a neoplatonic devaluation of the body in favor of the mind/spirit give Christianity a very non-corporeal focus, divorcing it from flesh and world, lending it to forms of asceticism. But all of these things are clearly inherited from pre-Christian (i.e., pagan) sources and are in no way original to Christianity. And to look historically at early Christianity, institutionally, it was never ascetic and anti-world. It functioned much like a modern corporation and accumulated enormous wealth . . . sometimes by converting rich people and getting them to donate their money, but also by less savory means like collecting certain kinds of tariffs (after Roman Christianization, non-Christians in the empire were taxed massively) and selling indulgences and (fake) relics. Essentially, especially for the early Church salvation was for sale . . . and the Church was a business that commodified and exquisitely advertised its product in much the same way useless crap is sold to people today.
That's not to say that their weren't "spiritual" Christians. There have always been many. But the Church has notoriously used those individuals (and invented or reinvented many others) to hawk their wares and keep revenue coming into the Church coffers. Some of these kinds of things were addressed (not resolved) with the Reformation, but we are talking over 1000 years of Christianity before that . . . and even after that there was a great deal of corruption and horrific levels of bloodshed in battling between Catholics and Protestants as well as witch burnings, inquisitions, and the various assaults on heretics and others of various kinds. Although it isn't my favored brand of spirituality or mysticism, the Christian mystical vein did produce many spiritual and not a few highly ethical and good people. But even a "good" person who allows himself to be exploited by a corrupt institution or for ultimately corrupt purposes is not a positive model in my mind.
It should also be noted that the Christian demonization of worldly possessions and earthly interests, historically speaking, was largely a form of propaganda used to control the poor masses and peasants that made up the majority of the Christian constituency. Since Christianization presided over the destruction of a modern civilization, it destroyed a larger middle class of skilled and often educated workers (a large middle class is a mark of modern civilization and does not generally exist in premodern forms of society). The vast majority of people in the Christianized world were extremely poor (especially after the large Roman military had largely dissolved and could not longer be sustained), and the Church happily encouraged that to allow wealth to be redistributed to Church officials. While these poor suffered miserably, the Church grew larger and more powerful. The condemnation of early things was a hypocritical doctrine. That sacrifice was only made by the already destitute (and bamboozled and/or oppressed) and by a very few "saint-like" Christian mystics, ascetics, and monastics that (as above) were either used as posterboys for the Church or, if they were "off message" in any way or had anti-power politics, were accused of heresy and abused or killed.
So, in my opinion, it is not at all a matter that "the divine spirit did not remain in earthly things anymore". Earthly things continued to be of enormous interest and desirability for those Christians empowered by the Church. There was just a massive redistribution of wealth to the very few due to the destruction of a middle class.
Also noteworthy regarding the "extreme spirituality" of Christianity is the vicious war (both physical and propaganda) the Catholic Church waged against the Gnostics. Gnosticism was a more specifically spiritual and anti-worldly variety of religion. And it obviously appealed to many. But it did not make for a lucrative business model. While not fiscally empowering itself, it took revenue away from the Church. The Church therefore set out to crush its "business" competitor. There were many reasons given for this "necessity", but one was that Gnosticism encouraged too much asceticism and was often anti-institutional, discouraging members from giving all their money to a church. In this sense, Gnosticism has to be seen as more loyal to the model of Christ in the gospels than Catholicism was (in early Catholicism, the poor must stay poor, but the rich can stay rich or even grow richer . . . as God ordains). I suspect that some forms of proto-Gnosticism predated all the eventually Catholicized Christian institutions, texts and ideas, and that what would become the Catholic Church took the compelling ideas and figures and general story of Christ from these proto-Gnostics and commodified it for mass consumption and serious profit-earning. That notion (dating forms of Gnosticism before proto-Catholicism) is not currently accepted in mainstream early Christian studies, but not because it can be disproved with evidence. Only because that is the convention. That is what the Church Fathers claimed (when constructing the pre-history of Christianity).
It makes more sense to me that proto-Gnostic forms of Christianity came first, and the great ire of the Church directed at Gnosticism in the 3rd and 4th centuries was part of a propaganda (and outright warfare) campaign to wipe out the most dangerous competitor that the Church had . . . dangerous because it laid (accurate) claim to being, or being derived directly from, the "original Christianity". This is the theory of Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God? (2001). That book is flawed in a number of ways (references are often a bit dated and selective and the authors want to promote a New Agey neo-Gnosticism), but I find their basic thesis logical and compelling. There is valid evidence for that thesis, just not conclusive evidence. More importantly, there is no compelling evidence against it.
My point is that there are numerous historically evidenced reasons to question the Christian claim to being an "extremely spiritual" religion or at least for casting that term in a positive light.
Although I am obviously an extremely hard sell on anything remotely Christian, I find your idea of Jung's deification fantasy as an exorcism in (relatively loose) disguise very interesting and sensible. I'm not sure it is the most accurate interpretation (as it is always dangerous to deviate from what a person says about or associates with his or her own fantasy or dream), but I like it. Despite the images you point out, one possible strike against your interpretation is that Jung does not appear to be exorcized of this "demon" god. He continues to be just as drawn to and repelled by it . . . arguably until the end of his life.
Whether exorcism or deification, Jung seems to be something of a pawn or stand-in in this fantasy. He is not permanently transformed. It is not, for instance, a shamanic initiation fantasy in which the shaman's body is dismembered and reconstructed with pieces of iron. Instead it is at best a temporary high that Jung neither comprehends nor draws transformative or inspirational meaning from. That temporariness would seem to lend itself to your exorcism theory. Although, it is also true that Mithraic (and other Mystery) rites like the Taurobolium were meant to identify the initiate with the god only temporarily.
Another potential flaw with your exorcism theory is that it takes a very Christian assumption that a pagan god is equivalent to a demon and is something that can and should be exorcized from a person. As above, in pagan Mystery rites, the initiate's identification with the god was a specifically controlled, brief one. It is different than say, the Christian Eucharist, which transubstantiates into the body and blood of Christ within the individual. My sense here is that for the Christian, the believer is infused with Christ. The "Christ" is not meant to "leak out" or be consumed and passed (although, like a drug, future doses may be required to keep the Christ-quotient in the individual high enough). In Mystery rites, the initiate is meant to experience the god (through temporary identification and empathy) and be (lastingly) transformed by the observation and ecstasy of that experience. That initiate does not go on feeling righteous because the god is in her or him. Rather, the ecstasy with the god like a ritual wound enables the initiate to always remember the empathy with the suffering god. In that sense, there would be nothing to exorcize.
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If I should try to substantiate my ideas, and give them a scientific underpinning, then it would take a much, much, greater effort. I am not ready to do that. I have no scientific ambition, nor have I a wish to publish myself in a journal. I am more of a spiritual searcher. Thus, I have no other choice than to give "pointers" to what I mean, such as "quaternarian", "complementation", etc. I can't explain myself to the full, short of writing a book or two. There is a slight chance that my ideas will have an impact, anyway, if some ambitious author is inspired by my meditations.
There is a general agreement among historians that Christianity served to prolong the Roman empire by two centennia, or so, by creating a condordance under a new ruling idea. Yet again, there was something to live for and to fight for. So Christianity did not cause the demise of the Roman empire. In a sense, it served to prolong it to this day. The Catholic Church, especially, is very roman in kind, not only in its architecture, but also in its foundational spirit. Roman law survived into the 19th century.
The Middle Ages represents an age of introversion that has had an enormous impact on the Western psyche. It was during this epoch that our inner locus of control was firmly established. A westerner can have a projection and swiftly withdraw it. It is true that it coincided with a decline in science and engineering, which represent extraverted knowledge. But this could not be avoided if inner development is going to take place. The Arabs continued with their science and learning during the Middle Ages, but look where they are today. Due to their constitutional psychology, they still remain with an outer locus of control. As a result, they seem unable to establish a democratic state. That's why they must instead resort to outer control, that is, rules that strongly regulate life.
Without having gone through the Christian epoch of interiority we could not establish our advanced level of civilisation. I've written about this issue in my article "Understanding European psychology - European psychology and its rooting in the interiority of Christian Middle Ages", here.
Jung expected to find a living pagan spirit in the collective unconscious. So, in his fantasy, he arrives at a dead volcano where he discovers a Druidic shrine. But the only living beings he encountered there were two Christian spirits, Elijah and Salome, the first of which had achieved transcendency. Arguably, the pagan spirit that he sought had already taken residence in his own head, through his capacious readings.
I think that this gives us the correct image of Jung's psyche. If he is in conflict about being a Christian or a pagan, it is because he could not see that his anima was a Christian. She is the same spirit who was worshipped in medieval times, in the cult of the Virgin. But the pagan spirit represents his conscious insights and knowledge, which he expected to find ample living evidence of in the unconscious.
I don't know why it gives rise to a conflict, and why he is being disturbed by the pagan images. If he is agitated about encountering a fearful pagan spirit, then he charges it with energy. He knew very well that energy is created through the conflict of opposites, and that it will activate the archetype. Thus, there is no better way to uncover the pagan archetype than to contrast it with the conscious Christian mind-set, that is, a modern moral consciousness, which Jung wholly acknowledged. By remaining true to the Christian conception, energy will be released when it is contrasted with unconscious paganism. After all, if a modern mind isn't disturbed by the pagan spirit, then it isn't pagan at all. At least, it has lost all its power, and what remains are only artefacts buried in the ground in a long since extinct volcano.
Mats Winther
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I forgot to give the link:
Understanding European psychology - European psychology and its rooting in the interiority of Christian Middle Ages (http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/interiority.htm)