Thread: Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations

Wow - a new book has just been published with writings by contemporary Jungians about the relevance of Jung's Red Book in today's environment - and at least this first section deals with the similarities between the onset of WW2 in Jung's day and the constant encroachment of Globalism in our own time. Powerful stuff.



Apparently this is the first in a 3 book series - and it ain't cheap!! If you wait a while the used book prices should go down.

Symbols of Transformation has come in and I'm well underway in reading it. Totally clear and readable - written for a general public, and not at all difficult like some of his work. In the first sections he's laying out the difference between 2 types of thinking:

On the one hand there's dream thinking or undirected thinking, which is found in dreams (obviously) as well as in ancient man, primitive man, and children, and which we all fall into quite frequently. It has a very mythical or fairytale quality to it - magical things tend to happen - a lot of fantasy and ridiculous unrealistic circumstances, but it's all held together and given shape by a thread of cohesive feeling or ideas running through it. This is why it's possible to interpret dreams, because while they don't follow strict logic or deliberate cause and effect principles, they refer back to the primitive core of our earlier modes of thought and still do reflect the innermost workings of the mind in a pre-scientific, pre-rational state.

The other mode of thought is called directed thinking, and is the foundation of science and reasoning. This is difficult and causes fatigue, and you need to be well educated and trained in it. It's far less intuitive than undirected thinking - slower, and tends to take the form of words (linguistic) rather than images, as dream thinking often does (this is why we call it imag-ination).

And here we see that the unconscious (center of dream thinking, imagination and fantasy) functions very differently from the directed conscious thinking we use in much of day-to-day life. This also explains exactly why a knowledge of religion, myth and fairy tale is helpful in understanding dreams and the products of the unconscious. It's specifically because dreams, fairy tales, religions and myths are all products of the unconscious and its spontaneous story-weaving tendencies and free-association chains.

This is the kind of stuff I really love reading - a plunge right to the fount of human thought and to the core of why we think the way we do today. We tend to take all of this for granted, but when it's all clearly spelled out for us by someone as rational and intuitive (at the same time) as Jung, it jumps out into stark contrast and becomes easily understandable. This is precisely why dreams function the way they do! And as he goes forward from here, over the course of his next 5 or 6 books, he'll lay out from this foundation the rest of his brilliant theories - the structure and function of the unconscious including the Collective Unconscious and its resident Archetypes.

I'm also strongly tempted to buy Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, even at the ridiculous price point. Not sure why it costs so much? But many of the reviews indicate it's one of his best.

* * * * # # # * * * *

I just stumbled across an amazing resource - Abstracts of the Collected Works of CG Jung

Essentially these are synopses of the contents of each of the books in the Collected Works series, and they go into pretty much detail about what's in each section of each book. I wish it was indexed so you could click immediately to a particular section - the way Wiki pages are, but it isn't, so the functionality is rather limited. It's a really long page and you just have to keep scrolling down until you find the book you're looking for. But hey, at least it exists! Just reading through the descriptions of the various sections of Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche has taken a good long time and I'm not even through it yet. The abstract is almost a short book in itself - sort of a Cliff Notes.

I still check in here . Not so much recently, been busy, but will try to get back in. I just got a few books for myself for christmas (and using a gift card from last christmas lol): The Idiot by Dostoevsky, The Demons/Possessed by Dostoevsky and Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, which I will probably read before getting back into Jung, but I will probably read either Aion or Modern Man in Search of a Soul next.

Thanks for the moral support Bro! It's good to know you're still around.

Wow - Skip Conover is beginning a reading of Jung's Red Book! This is monumental - the Red Book is something Jung wrote during a time of extreme stress and is essentially a record of his Active Imagination sessions in which he encountered many Archetypal figures and gradually went through his own individuation process. It happened shortly after he split from Freud, when Freud cast him out of his circle and he had to begin his own practice as a psychotherapist and theorist, with no idea of how his own work would be received by either the general public or the psychological community. The journeys through his unconscious took several years, during which time he wrote down all of it in what he called the Black Books - a series of journals. Later he used the material to create The Red Book, which was a huge folio-sized edition in which he did paintings similar to medieval manuscript pages and hand-lettered everything in beautiful calligraphic script. It was sort of the ultimate dream journal. He refused to publish this book because it contained ideas that went much deeper than anything he had published in his professional papers, and he was afraid it might damage his professional standing and his career. It didn't get published until 2009 in fact, when his family allowed it to happen at last. It changed everything - finally able to see the experiences he encountered with his own unconscious, we can now gain a much deeper understanding of his other writings.



Here's the 2nd Red Book video:


And here is the Red Book Playlist.

A couple of Skip's earlier videos where he tries to explain Jungian psychology for laymen - these are excellent:

Hey just wanted you to know that I am thankful for your work compiling these materials and will be checking in here from now on. I am a huge fan of Jung in short spurts but have never really gotten into reading his work exhaustively. What you have laid down here is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants to begin such a task and I'm already referencing it right now in forming my 2018 reading list. It's funny but, outside of a couple of books on alchemy, I really became obsessed with Jung when I read the Red Book so I'm sort of working backwards into his catalog.

Awesome! Thanks for posting - I appreciate it. Lol yeah, starting off with the Red Book and Alchemy must have been tough - it's some of his most difficult stuff. From there it can only get easier.

Just stumbled across this little gem - Marie-Louise Von Franz on the Shadow:

please ignore this post

This is Skip's most important video yet. A group of ideas that, taken together, explain the value of what Jung has done.



--01:16--“The view that the Soul is a “place” for the experience of God permeates the entire Red Book.”
--01:38—God does not reveal Himself as the “God of Theologians,” who is “dead” and in need of renewal.
--01:49—God, being all, is “in overwhelming experiences of paradoxical dichotomies found within.” Have you had such an experience?
--02:23—“The Supreme Meaning is great and small.”
--03:03—Nietzsche proclaims the “death” of God at the end of the 19th Century; while Dr. Jung proclaims the “rebirth” of God at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Emphasis added by me to draw attention to the most powerful ideas from this video.

Darkmatters, I got caught up with a few friend visits, events, and then the flu, but I'm back and will be reading and catching up with all your posts today! :-)

NO!! No personal life for you!! (Soup Nazi voice)



Whipitaaassshh!!

Lol just kidding!! You can have a little Christmas break...

I had originally written out a response addressing specifically this:

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

--01:49—God, being all, is “in overwhelming experiences of paradoxical dichotomies found within.” Have you had such an experience?

Before having watched the videos, but I found that I wasn't ever finding a satisfying stopping point and had written far too much, especially for not even being totally sure of the context of that quote. Part of why I stopped as well was because I was doing such a poor job properly expressing the concepts I was starting to get into that I felt as though a lot of what was written was edging nearly on nonsense. Having watched the vids now though makes me feel a bit better, it seems like I was talking more or less about the same thing, albeit in a much more confusing manner. As a matter of fact, I'm confident we were indeed talking about the same thing considering I mentioned the concept of "as above, so below" and a lot of stuff about God and the differentiation of existence and a bunch of stuff.

One night about 3 weeks ago I was actually thinking of making a thread about the concept of "As above, so below", and to what extent the apparent profundity of its nature as can be observed manifesting literally through all things can be trusted. What I mean by that was that I'm somewhat paranoid about just how perfectly the way these observable patterns can be witnessed really anywhere you look for them and that the levels it connects the whole of existence together run so deep that it doesn't stop and you wind up getting stuck in a loop of sorts. I really hope you know what both I and, or at least, Jung are talking about so this doesn't sound like nonsense all over again hahaha. Let me use a concrete example to illustrate what I mean.

Jung mentions the blind, primordial creator of existence, is transformed through man through the process of individuation. Creation occurs and if we call the whole of existence itself God, the fracturing of that whole into an imperfect and flawed existence creates many of one, and similarly our bodies themselves, not even just talking about particles or matter, are made up of many living creatures existing with each other but not as part of each other, yet we, our conscious selves are that gestalt whole that is greater than the sum of its parts (analogously to God).

These types of observations and realizations are so terrifyingly present everywhere I choose to look that I can't help but wonder if it's happening as a result of us hitting the absolute boundaries of our comprehensive capacity as intelligent thinkers. That, or perhaps even scarier to me, that we are mistaking our own nature of existence with that of God and the rest of existence as a whole... pretty much because the previous reason, but this takes it a step further I think.

I think Jung's statement about God's transformation and rebirth into spirit through men just proves the point more. It's as if the whole of existence is the emanation of the primordial creator libido's essence is manifesting in all forms possible to take. The more simple of them, fractured and strewn about, reconnect in ways resulting in systems that form within systems within systems, giving rise to more complex forms of being and likely higher forms of consciousess. God's essense disperses from the One and becomes many, the many come together time and time again until those many become like One themselves (human beings... God having risen in the flesh).


Those many One-like beings mark the introduction of a new and surprisingly form of existence; the thought form, the concept, the belief, the image, and the word. The civilization of man and the development of the spoken word and the ability to communicate with language makes God's transformation from something beyond merely just the primordial libido and in living flesh, but to exist at least separately in the minds of all those that think. The construction of God's conception on a societal level eventually transforms his many spirits back into what will be whole and One again, and in doing so overcoming (at least to any that know or believe in God) the blind, deaf, conscioussles, and desireless existence of the primordial creator libido and going further even to transcend mortal physical existence.

When I wind up writing stuff like the last bit out, I never actually have to think about it, the consequences of our existence are just the natural course of events that follow from this line of thinking. That's what really sets off some alarm bells for me though, things don't feel like they should just work out so perfectly. But I mean, this is existence itself and the way it all functions we're talking about afterall, if things didn't happen to work out perfectly in the collective system comprising up the universe, there would be no universe to speak of, so it must actually be the case right?

All I know is, being too certain of anything is something I don't like doing, and it's highly disturbing when the subject around which it happens goes beyond simply making good sense. I can follow this line of thinking down any proposed subject I feel like, and regardless of that it feels like I have almost like... being mentally stuck or forced into following that line of thought and to keep going down it without ever stopping, and the conclusions not being something I come to or discover, but that reveal themselves to me each instant proceeding the next. I mentioned looping before too, and following that line indefinitely is what causes it to happen. Somehow following a straight line causes you to loop back to either the same place you started or to start the general sequence of realizations all over again but with different subject matter.





...........Good God I can't even tone down the amount of writing even a little bit when talking about this stuff. Well, I've been really wanting and almost needing somebody to talk about it all with. I really appreciate you sharing all this material on C.G., Darkmatters, I really appreciate it.

Actually I understand exactly what you're talking about, and I've pondered the same idea many times. I used to have this notion - a metaphor I came up with on a cross country drive through several states. It rained part of the way - I was a passenger in my dad's car being pretty young at the time, and I was fascinated watching the water on the windshield. The wind would push drops up from a big blob of water at the bottom of the windshield, each drop would make a trembling path, all taking different routes but eventually re-joining in another big blob of water at the top. And I saw it as souls splitting off from some collective human mega-soul - each taking material form as a living human being, and then at death all rejoining the collective. And once having thought of that I would see it repeated all around - in water falling from the sky as rain to fill puddles and lakes and streams, then evaporating to merge in the sky as clouds, then rain again for instance. And in other forms as well. And thinking about it just now I suddenly realized how appropriate the water symbolism is since water often represents the unconscious (especially deep water in dreams), and the collective mega-soul is the collective unconscious.

We see this because we're aware at a deep intuitive level that there is a collective unconscious - that in some way we all share a common root. That of course is deep in the unconscious though and we can't become aware of it at a conscious level, but we do know about it - we can feel the truthfulness of the idea and so we project it - we see it all around us in nature and in all sorts of things.

Basically what the metaphors are referring to is this - in the collective unconscious we all share the same knowledge and experiences, in the form of the archetypes. We often experience the archetypes through dreams, inspirations, fantasies, visions, etc - so when we do the archetype is being manifested - incarnated and given actual human existence through us, in much the same way Christ was an actual human manifestation of God. In fact that's what Jung is saying - that the Biblical idea of Christ being an incarnation of God is the way the Hebrews projected their own understanding of the Archetypes - in particular the Self, which he calls the God-Image. So - since the collective unconscious is a reservoir of wisdom and knowledge - psychological instincts that we all share and that are the same in each of us, it's as if somehow the same God or soul exists in you as does in me and in everyone. Naturally we associate unconsciousness with death and consciousness with life, so we get this metaphor of souls being separated from the great mass soul at birth, then rejoining at death - but that's just a simpler way of thinking about these difficult concepts, because until you've studied Jung you don't even know what the collective unconscious is, and when most people first encounter the idea they misunderstand it and think it's something magical or telepathic, which it isn't. And until a person develops a clear understanding about the psyche and the collective unconscious, the only way these ideas can take form is through projection, as metaphors like we've seen repeating fractally throughout nature.

To be clear because I don't think I quite explained this well enough above - the Hebrews developed the idea of God becoming manifest as a human being, living a life filled with turmoil and vulnerability just like the rest of us do, and then on death re-joining Heaven. This idea was their understanding of the Self; Christ is a symbol of the Self. They weren't aware of the psyche so they called it heaven. Different cultures have expressed the same ideas in different terms and forms, and individual people often have sudden visions or revelations as we've been talking about - it's an idea that recurs continually. I still don't feel like I've explained it as well as I could, but I don't know how else to put it.

I feel like I should also try to address some of the other stuff you brought up in that post. The looping thoughts could be OCD or something similar, or it could just be that you keep experiencing the same archetypal ideas over and over, or get obsessive about it after the experience. When people encounter an archetype it's always a profound experience and carries a sense of revelation with it - like literally encountering God or a spirit or something. We tend to encounter them at certain times - during a crisis or at certain natural growth points in life when we need to change and grow. And the archetypes are like gods or spirits - they can be cold and frightening or regal and ponderous - usually anything but warm and human and friendly, though they are there to help us adapt and adjust in ways we might be having trouble with.

But it's important not to identify with an archetype. The archetype is not you, it's an idea or a group of ideas that has an autonomous existence, as if it's a separate living being, and it expresses itself through you. Some people identify with an archetype - for instance the God-Image of the Self, and think all the power and majesty of the archetype is theirs. That is what Jung calls an inflation - inflated ego. You are your ego - the conscious part of your mind. These helpers, gods spirits and what have you, are sent from the unconscious, which is very different from the conscious mind. When you encounter the Self you are in the presence of God, but you are not God. You experience him, he works through you in fact, but he is not you. Just as near the point of his death Jesus cried "Father why have you forsaken me?" - God had left him totally human at that point. I suppose otherwise he could not have died - I don't know. But it points out the importance of not confusing what works through you as belonging to you. Inflation leads to a sense of grandiosity and power but also a sense of cosmic scale, which can make a person feel insignificant and worthless like an ant and like life is pointless.

Here's a really good video about psychological alchemy. It does a good job of explaining how Jung arrived at the idea that you can study history, religion and mythology etc (and alchemy) to learn about the structure and functions of the human psyche:

LOL, I can't keep up! but I hopefully will now as I have a bit of time off.

I'm just watching the Lion King videos, by Jordan Peterson...

Originally Posted by Rosanna

I'm just watching the Lion King videos, by Jordan Peterson...

Those videos are amazing, aren't they? So is this one:

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Those videos are amazing, aren't they? So is this one:

Thanks, I'm working my way through while I've got time.

Jordan Peterson is brilliant, I noticed he talked a bit about the meeting of the animus and the anima,
particularly the transformative effect of the female on the male.

I know I haven't got up to date with everything here yet, but wondering if there's any accounts out
there of the effect of the male upon the female also?

I'll make more comments as I go along

Originally Posted by Rosanna

wondering if there's any accounts out there of the effect of the male upon the female also?

There's a lot less of that, at least in Jung's writing itself. He said the way we understand psychological things is to observe them in other people and then experience them within ourselves. So being a man he couldn't actually experience the power of the animus. Though later in life he did say that everybody has both an anima and animus (the yoked szyzigy). I assume in most people the countersexual one is most powerful and the same-sex one is pretty much unnoticeable most of the time, unless you become too unbalanced. It's all about balance - these complexes and archetypes etc constellate when we become too unbalanced in one direction - whatever you need to bring you back into balance will start showing up in your dreams, spontaneous visions and fantasies etc.

There's a good chance one of his female students wrote more extensively about the animus - maybe Von Franz or Toni Wolf or Sabina Spielrein.

Here's the Amazon search page for Animus. Looks like several good candidates - particularly the one written by his wife Emma, or some more recent ones by third generation Jungians.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

There's a lot less of that, at least in Jung's writing itself. He said the way we understand psychological things is to observe them in other people and then experience them within ourselves. So being a man he couldn't actually experience the power of the animus. Though later in life he did say that everybody has both an anima and animus (the yoked szyzigy). I assume in most people the countersexual one is most powerful and the same-sex one is pretty much unnoticeable most of the time, unless you become too unbalanced. It's all about balance - these complexes and archetypes etc constellate when we become too unbalanced in one direction - whatever you need to bring you back into balance will start showing up in your dreams, spontaneous visions and fantasies etc.

There's a good chance one of his female students wrote more extensively about the animus - maybe Von Franz or Toni Wolf or Sabina Spielrein.

Here's the Amazon search page for Animus. Looks like several good candidates - particularly the one written by his wife Emma, or some more recent ones by third generation Jungians.

Thanks for that Darkmatters, I'll go check it out! I'm also going to continue with the rest of the Peterson videos. Will report back when I've caught up :-)

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Animus
The inner masculine side of a woman. (See also anima, Eros, Logos, and soul-image.)

Like the anima in a man, the animus is both a personal complex and an archetypal image.



Whereas the anima in a man functions as his soul, a woman’s animus is more like an unconscious mind. It manifests negatively in fixed ideas, collective opinions and unconscious, a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth. In a woman who is identified with the animus (called animus-possession), Eros generally takes second place to Logos.



The animus becomes a helpful psychological factor when a woman can tell the difference between ideas generated by this autononous complex and what she herself really thinks.



Jung described the four stages of animus development in a woman. He first appears in dreams and fantasy as the embodiment of physical power, an athlete, muscle man or thug. In the second stage, the animus provides her with initiative and the capacity for planned action. He is behind a woman’s desire for independence and a carreer of her own. In the next stage, the animus is the “word,” often personified in dreams as a professor or clergyman. In the fourth stage, the animus is the incarnation of spiritual meaning. On this highest level, like the anima as Sophia, the animus mediates between a woman’s conscious mind and the unconscious. In mythology this aspect of the animus appears as Hermes, messenger of the gods; in dreams he is a helpful guide.

Any of these aspects of the animus can be projected onto a man. As with the projected anima, this can lead to unrealistic expectations and acrimony in relationships.



The existence of the contrasexual complexes means that in any relationship between a man and a woman there are at least four personalities involved. The possible lines of communication are shown by the arrows in the diagram.

Attachment 9812
Click thumbnail to enlarge

While a man’s task in assimilating the effects of the anima involves discovering his true feelings, a woman becomes familiar with the nature of the animus by constantly questioning her ideas and opinions.

Sorry to back track, but just read this again and it's pretty close to what I was looking for.

It even talks about how the anima, and animus can act as guides to the unconscious, something that I was confused about before when I heard this
on you tube....interesting that the anima and animus can act like Hermes in that respect, a psychopomp....

I'm fascinated by everything Hermes (Mercury) but that's another issue, maybe for another time :-) Anyway, thanks again for this......still ploughing through....

Just out of curiosity, has anybody here heard of or read the Kybalion? It's a book published under pseudonyms that compiles and kind of centralizes what is supposedly the essence of esoteric Hermetic wisdom and the overall teachings of Hermes Trismegistus.

I feel a lot of it actually sort of complements (or perhaps supplements is a better word) what you can learn from Jung's work, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theories, and Nietzsche's philosophy greatly. The ideas and concepts expressed aren't necessarily related all that directly, but taken into consideration with what you learn from the Jung, Nietzsche, and Lacan (and I suppose Freud as well), it allows for a very comprehensive look at reality, existence, and our fellow human beings.

Well, at least in my opinion. What I feel I've learned and come to understand by digesting and integrating the ideas from those sources is much more complete and whole than any one of them in particular. There's a free PDF of it available for download here.

I promise my next reply will be more about Jung, lol. I just figured this might be relevant considering my personal experience with Jung's theories and it.