Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations
Had a hard time figuring out where to post this, but as I was typing the title DV automatically showed similar threads, and they were all listed under Philosophy, so that seems as good a place as any other. Jung's psychology is a general one concerning the psyche (mainly the unconscious) and what he calls the Individuation process. Dreams are a vital and important part of achieving full health - in fact most if not all primitive cultures have always honored and respected dreams. It's only in modern society that they've been devalued and trivialized. And modern man is plagued with mental health issues, whereas primitive peoples tend to exhibit excellent mental and social health.
I've been posting a lot about Jung, and I've been reading a lot about his work, but this is the first time I've created an actual thread about it. What made me think of this is a new video posted yesterday about his Individuation theory, and I suddenly realized the Academy of Ideas channel on YouTube has a lot of really excellent videos about Jung. For anyone interested this would be an excellent place to get acquainted with his ideas. I'll start by posting the most recent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssuDqtUcKEw&t=28s
Essentially Individuation is a balanced state of health in psychological terms. Jung believed it requires 'eating your shadow' continually, which means becoming consciously aware of your own weak points and self-deceptions. Most people live largely in a state of denial allowing themselves to engage in some pretty shady behavior, but doing so is basically immature - assuming the person is over the age of adolescence. So to individuate is to bring yourself consciously into balance at an adult level by paying attention to your dreams and analyzing them, as well as your fantasies and any recurrent problems you keep experiencing in your life. It's really just psychology, but with a strong emphasis on dreams and fantasy and imagination - so leaning in favor of people who are artistic, creative, and imaginative (in other words introverts). Those are elements that tend to be ignored in most forms of psychology. I feel like anybody who's interested in lucid dreaming would probably benefit greatly from studying Jung's ideas.
Ok, here are a few more really good Jung videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkoc0ltIBF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0KzUS0b_uc
(Continued in next post due to 3 video limit)
Latest book acquisitions - Jung and The Red Book
It suddenly occurred to me - I don't need to write anything up about Edinger - I'll just copy over a couple of my blog posts here. Glad I wrote about this stuff - I do it because of my faulty memory - now the info is all preserved from when it was still fresh in my mind lol. The first blog post follows:
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Jung books 06 20 17-1 by Darkmatters, on Flickr
(Click on the pic to see it bigger on Flickr)
The ones on the floor are new
Here are the latest physical additions to my library - centered around Carl Gustav Jung's Red Book. Discovering that has been foundational - how on earth did I never hear about it before? Undoubtedly because I last bought Jung books in probably the 90's, and it wasn't published until much more recently. 2009 or so, which is when I was beginning my explorations into science by reading all of Carl Sagan's books (those are offscreen to the left a ways and up on the second shelf). That was actually the beginning of a new renaissance of sorts for me, but I was occasionally bugged by the nagging idea that while science is incredibly useful and necessary (if we're to understand reality objectively and to develop technology), the dimension of humanity - of soul - was missing or at least largely overlooked. I firmly believe we need science - we need the scientific method and its removal of values in order to facilitate unbiased searching. But we need it only for the acquisition of knowledge. For the rest of life - the more important stuff - we need values and judgement. In the moral realm for instance. If you try to be valueless there then you're helpless and have no way to make important decisions. So while in some ways science displaced religion, it utterly fails to replace the most important things religion did for our ancestors. And today's rational materialism gives us nothing to help with that.
I refer you to Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose videos I've been devouring lately and who led me to The Red Book as well as back to Jung, Nietzsche, and many other great writers. His focus is on exactly what I just said - the need for values and judgement - and how to develop your skills for them in this value-starved world.
Here are my latest Kindle purchases:
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Screen Shot 2017-06-20 at 12.05.35 PM by Darkmatters, on Flickr
My most recent revelations - aside from the astonishing Red Book - are Edward Edinger and Murray Stein, who explain some of Jung's ideas clearly and make them accessible. I had waded through all the Jung books on my shelf years ago (well, most anyway, just got a start on Aion) and while sections of them blazed brilliantly in my mindscape, large parts of them remained opaque and frustratingly mystifying. Oh, I discovered these guys largely thanks to another excellent video channel; The Carl Jung Depth Psychology Reading Group.
I realized very recently that I must have had some very early familiarity with Jung's ideas - and I mean in grade school. Because for whatever reason I've always connected with his kind of thinking. I think it's very likely that my mom called me in to watch a documentary about him when I was young or something similar - it's the kind of thing she was into and she would always call me if there was something on she found fascinating. Anyway, whether it was directly from the Maestro himself or more indirectly, I definitely had access to his ideas from an early age and it has formed my development and beliefs ever since. But due to the problems in fully understanding his theories that I've already mentioned, I was unable until now to get a clear understanding of his entire ouvre. Well that;s changing rapidly now, and it seems to be galvanizing me. So much is clicking into place now, and my understanding of the relation between the psyche and objective reality is undergoing a significant sea change. My dreams are getting very interesting lately - filled with powerful and deeply interconnected imagery and symbolism, and I believe I'm undergoing the re-centering process that Jung dubbed Individuation - also known as Self-Realization.
I'll do this post by post - more on the way.
The (Jungian) Books Keep Rolling In
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08 28 17 Books-3 by Darkmatters, on Flickr
These are all new except for Becoming- not sure how that one got in there!
Jung Lexicon: A Primer of Terms & Concepts - Daryl Sharp
The Mystical Qabalah - Dion Fortune
The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit - Donald Kalsched
The Aion Lectures - Edwin F Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness - Edwin F Edinger
Pathways To Bliss - Joseph Campbell
Aurora Consurgens - Marie-Louise Von Franz
The Fear of the Feminine - Erich Neumann
The Interpretation of Fairy Tales - Marie-Louise Von Franz
The Religious Function of the Psyche - Lionel Corbett
The (Jungian) Books Keep Rolling In - to the links on my blog - you know the drill by now.
I've also got the entire Bible now - including the 4th volume, which is an index.
The Qabala is the source for both the Tarot and Astrology apparently, or so I keep seeing (ok, not the source - it came later but does combine them excellently into its matrix). But there are all kinds of claims made about it by various groups - many of which seem weird and cultish. For me it's another source of symbolism to enrich the inner artistic world.
Aurora Consurgens, which means Rising Dawn, is a medieval text about Alchemy attributed fascinatingly to Thomas Aquinas, and supposedly written in a feverish state in his final days after suffering a blow on the head and experiencing some kind of profound enlightenment. Von Franz believed he was undergoing individuation and had realized that in fact that is the mysterious process the Alchemists were really engaged in. If she's right, they believed they were transforming base matter but were actually transforming their own personalities by coming into a more open and honest relation to the unconscious Self and projecting that process onto the matter that they were so busily mixing and melting. The physical transformation of metals became a stand-in for the inner psychological transformation. My God I love this stuff!! That said though, I don't recommend Aurora Consurgens - instead I recommend the green Alchemy book listed below, for reasons I'll explain in a moment.
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08 28 17 Books-4 by Darkmatters, on Flickr
These are the ones I've finished - and the one on the front of the bundle is new since last time:
Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology - Marie-Louise Von Franz
Alchemy with the striking green cover is my favorite of the bunch so far. Von Franz wrote it after wading laboriously through Aurora Consurgens (in the top picture). That one was a hard slog through dense territory - written essentially to analyze the very difficult material. Only after doing that was she able to condense the symbolism and pen this much more readable and in fact amazing little book. Though I don't think I would have understood parts of it without having read a few of the other books on these stacks to get a grounding in the Jungian concepts.
Note - you do NOT NEED to read anywhere near this many books to grasp Jung!! I'm going deep DEEP! With probably 3 or 4 of these you can understand the majority of it. I would recommend a few by Edinger and maybe Murray Stein for that purpose. Though if you're into it, you really should also read Jung in his own words, with some assistance by Edinger and maybe Stein.
I also highly highly recommend the books I've listed by Erich Neumann, though they can also be fairly dense and hard to understand at times. Now we just need somebody to come along and write books explaining his books! :chuckle: