The cosmos that Dante describes for us in his Comedy is centred on Love. The contours of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise are all understood as various appearances of Love. There is nothing else but Love in this world. The denizens of Hell are not separate from Love at all. They too are embedded in Love, you might say—Love gone wrong through distortions in the personality and they don’t know that Love surrounds and supports them. They valorize their own personality issues instead and THAT is their Hell. Dante thus gives us a complete vision of what the world looks like when its contours are lit up through the perspective of cosmic Love, as expressions of that Love, in all its variations. It is a magnificent vision!
Depth psychology is a logocentric discipline centred on, and privileging, the psyche and its truths.[1] The profession of depth psychology must be uncompromising in this regard, in order to be a profession in the first place.[2] This means that the way the world appears is understood, from the perspective of psyche, as an expression of the self-movements and transformations of the psyche, which we may think of as deterministic in the sense that it is not ours to control. Rather, we humans must suffer whatever transformations the psyche undergoes. The world’s fixed appearances are thus understood as the final residual expressions of the psyche’s descent from spirit to materiality in a movement of increasing coagulation, as governed by contingency. So, when the psyche undergoes a self-transformation “in the background” then those changes begin to coagulate, finally materializing as new appearances of the world’s “things”. This process is not deterministic; otherwise we could predict the future. It is a process of contingency. The future and its appearances are always uncertain.
There are those among us who can more directly participate in the mysterious transformations of the psyche and bring us the news of such “inner” transformations “long before it happens”, as Rilke says. Such an individual is W.B. Yeats who famously wrote in 1919:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity. …
He perceived a psychic movement in the “background” of reality, as psychologically prior to the events of World War I, even though he wrote it after the war. He could not have predicted the subsequent World War II, i.e., its outcome, its tragedy of contingent events, but he knew the centre cannot hold, etc. This is a prophetic poem that tells us the psychic truth that disintegration is at hand![3] It is, as Jung says, just so! How it actually turns out is a contingency problem.
This is the work of our prophets and augurs. And it is a work that is largely ignored or treated as personal disturbance of the “pained prophet”. At worst they are killed off. There is a reason for this “dissing” of our augurs, even if it is not particularly praiseworthy. The fact is, when we lift up our eyes from the poem, nothing has changed, everything looks “in order”, no world falling apart at all—“nothing to see here!” People are getting about, by and large caring for one another, and getting on with the business of routine life. No disintegration, no falling apart!
An entirely different set of skills is needed in order to perceive the new movements of psyche as they begin the process of coagulation into materiality where the senses may begin to make a connection to, and perceive the truth of, Yeats’ poem, in terms of the appearances (rather than the intuitions of the augur).
And the depth psychological perspective can help provide those skills!
This is because only depth psychology understands that, in the psyche’s descent into material appearance, it must appear first as reflected in language. Already-coagulated, pragmatic language is a kind of materiality that we ordinarily accept as real—a dense, opaque matter that has nothing “behind” or “within” it—it is an instrument only of human endeavours—purely pragmatic, prosaic, and literal, now even simply informational. A good deal of research from many fields has demonstrated that our presently reified, solidified language is the material and hardened residue of a once much more fluid, even transparent, poetic language that has now lost its “spiritual” fluidity, i.e. its capacity to “move” us, altogether.[4]
Augurs and prophets can gain direct access to the psychic truth of the times—the truth that Yeats discovered in 1919, for example. The initial “invisibility” of psychic truths begins to first materialize at first as a kind of living “poetic” language filled with power and then later, as our ordinary reified language.[5] Today, in language, we can thus begin to perceive the disintegration and falling apart that the augurs are telling us about, offering the possibility of connecting these linguistic events to the psychic determinant that has always-already happened.
Although there are many astute individuals who have perceived early signs of these linguistic events (of disintegrated language) from within their own discipline, it now appears that we have arrived at a moment when the general population is gaining access to an actual perception of disintegration and falling apart, as reflected in our ordinary language, along with a growing sense of the supreme danger such disintegration poses for us, as a species.[6]
With this new generally-acquired perception we are now becoming aware that the disintegration, appearing as reflected in language, has enormous consequences as it further congeals and hardens into what we call ordinary linguistic reality. Furthermore, and perhaps most surprisingly, we are beginning to understand that the general disintegration may have originated in a non-material source (what depth psychology would call the psyche.) Where can we find evidence for such a startling claim? It’s a matter of gazing with the eyes of depth psychology at some ordinary (linguistic) facts of our world and finding the psyche, as reflected in them.
And so, we see George Will, once the singular voice of Conservatism in the USA, writing yet another column concerning the President:
TRUMP HAS A DANGEROUS DISABILITY
Trump is syntactically challenged … It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence. … It is … too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”[7] His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.[8] Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances.[9]
The general population, particularly those in power now are getting a terrifying glimpse into the psychic processes of disintegration and falling apart—as a phenomenon of language! Although Will explains the problem reductively as Trump’s disordered mind (i.e. a personal non-material cause), he and others are now beginning to perceive disintegration, (the center cannot hold) or falling apart (the falcon has lost the falconer) as a real linguistic phenomenon in the world, one that has huge consequences for all. The weird “beauty” of Trump’s ascendance to the Presidency, achieved largely on the basis of the con-man style of his rhetoric, lies in the stunning fact that his rhetoric cannot be ignored, dismissed, or overlooked![10] As Will says, a vast military power is placed at the discretion of this mind (and its rhetoric). It seems we are being forced to acknowledge language as a real phenomenon reflecting psychic truths.
What the general population does not yet see of course is that Trump’s “personal disability”, or his mind, are not the formal cause of his rhetorical style any more than any one person is responsible for the general loss of rhetorical eloquence that so suffused the orations of past politicians (of the 19th century, for example). Trump’s broken, incoherent, fragmented, contradictory rhetoric is the manifestation of a psychic truth, as yet “’unseen”, except by our augurs or prophets. The psyche, as the determining power of the appearances, has shifted from valorizing and supporting the opposites, which have become reified or frozen, to privileging sheer movement—the movement of Life or Love, breaking in once again into our stultified cultural productions.
Since all our cultural productions (institutions, practices, even our pragmatic language forms) are now reified to the extreme, when Life seeks to “break in”, we, on the human side experience this process only as dangerous disintegration and as things falling apart, like rocks breaking up.[11] Even now you can see that politicians are getting a terrifying glimpse at the extreme danger to their most precious Institutions as well as to the checks and balances they bring to excesses of Power.
Now that we can at least begin to perceive the materialization of the collapse of the “psychological foundations” of a once-stable world of appearances, as expressed in the very rhetoric of the President of the USA, we can begin to attune ourselves to the ubiquity of the phenomenon. It is almost worldwide, as reflected daily in the “speech” of the media for example, i.e., the language of image. I can watch anything these days and if I pay attention to the flow of images across the screen, rather than to any particular content, I can perceive a rapid, disjointed, incoherent and hypnotizing kind of movement.[12] It becomes clear that from the perspective of the media, the content, plot, or dramatic turn is not the issue. Rather, the way images are moving, from one to the other, is the issue—movement, not, meaning or feeling as once understood, is the privileged state, as reflected in this medial “language”.
Neither George Will nor any other human can control this new configuration of the psyche as sheer movement. It has always-already happened, as philosophy likes to put it, meaning that it is a done deal and we cannot place ourselves existentially back into a former psychological configuration, much as we may like to. It has worked its way, so far, into a rhetorical form now known as Trumpism, and it is gaining traction in its further descent into materiality, becoming a new reality along the way, whether we want it or not. That is the meaning of determinism in depth psychology. The psyche determines us, not the other way around.
But we have a great deal of influence about how we want this new reality to appear. While psychic transformations are still manifesting at the level of language (or image), we can synchronize with them though artistic productions that also address this level of reality from the human side as it were. But how we do this as artists is critical, as Barfield warns us:
Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature . . . [b]ut . . . when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react on the collective representations. . . . we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. . . .
We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. . . . in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in someway experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who themselves are willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.[13]
To put it more simply, it makes a difference whether the artist has love in his or her heart when she does the artwork or whether some more nefarious power resides in his or her being.
The way things are going now, I have now concluded that, as far as the generality is concerned, there is no hope possible of such a transformation in our hearts through some general cultural practice or program that might valorize the heart, its speech, and its movements. I say this on the basis that all knowledge of the psyche and its truths has been terminally shut out by our governing language structures and the corresponding cultural practices that have sprung up to support them. Love’s “knocking at the door” e.g., via the Trumpism kind of rhetoric, is met with only terror and the desire to control.
So, no, nothing left to do there for the depth psychologist.
Meanwhile, the incarnation of the new reality continues, coagulating in practices and behaviors that are quickly emerging in support of, or in opposition to, the rhetoric of disintegration and falling apart. Barfield thus reminds us of what awaits us in his prescient essay, the Coming Trauma of Materialism (c 1972):
Let us nevertheless suppose that the resistances are eventually overcome and try to imagine a second stage of transition. This surely must be a climate of extreme depression amounting in many quarters to despair. . . I am simply forced to envisage an epidemic of something like nervous breakdowns, with probably some suicides, within such solid fortresses of conformity as MIT or the London School of Economics and amongst their alumni.
What remains for each of us individually, as depth psychologists or artists, is, I believe, a question:
In the time, remaining to us, do I choose to live in Love or something else? Do I choose to welcome Love if it comes knocking at my door or do I, like so many others, slam the door with all my unexamined terrors of Life?
[1] The psyche is a more modern rationalistic word for Dante’s more poetic Love!
[2] “profession”—to declare openly, to make a vow, to acknowledge, even to confess one’s truth.
[3] My essay, Prophetic Dreams, is available at https://www.academia.edu/31824169/Prophetic_Dreams
[4] I.e., language transparent to spirit—what we call today, metaphorical language.
[5] See my book, Poems of Making, Poems of Death at https://www.academia.edu/17562943/Poems_of_Making_Poems_of_Death
[6] See, for example, Eco, U., Gould, S. J., Carriere, J. C., Delumeau, J: Conversations About the End of Time. Penguin. 1999.
[7] Will’s insertion of this quote from Eliot is a succinct formulation of a man with no soul life—soul life is the presence of the past.
[8] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.033dce062d33
[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-has-a-dangerous-disability/2017/05/03/56ca6118-2f6b-11e7-9534-00e4656c22aa_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.033dce062d33
[10] In contrast to G.W. Bush’s clumsy stilted style which every body could still get by on.
[11] See my book Overcoming Solidity: https://www.academia.edu/22198680/Overcoming_Solidity_world_crisis_and_the_new_nature
[12] Even watching a classical piece on TV, we are forced to attend to disjointed images flitting every ten seconds or so as the camera crew switch mindlessly from camera 1 to camera 2, etc., presumably to keep out interest up.
[13] Barfield, O. Saving the Appearances. London. Faber & Faber. Pp. 145-6.