SOUL MURDER: The Relevance of Jung’s Red Book for our time
I recently posted the imminent publication of CHIRON’S “The Red Book: Jung`s Red Book for our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions Vol. 1”. [1] And then, something strange happened …
For some days now I had been depressively wandering around in a mood of “what now?” It’s hard to locate a beginning to such moods but I know that one factor lay in a memory of a meeting with a young man recently. He had been involuntarily committed for a few days before being released. I met him in my office and agreed to hear his story before making a decision whether to see him further. He was self-employed in IT, spent 15 hours a day in front of a computer at home, engaging in high-powered trading, or computer games. He was sleep and dream-deprived, and his mood was manic as his mind worked overtime trying to “connect the dots” within an increasingly unravelling psychic movement of mad associations, heading towards fragmentation. He wanted help, not because he was suffering but because he could not connect the dots alone. I said I would agree to see him only if he could tell me that he was suffering from the effects of the way his mind was unravelling. I could not help him with his manic project of trying to hold himself together while his mind, under the effects of severe sleep and dream deprivation was going all over the place. He did not think he needed help in the first sense. In fact, he said, he was interested in overcoming the limits of being human—needing sleep, food, fear of death, etc. and he needed help with that project. So I said I couldn’t help him with that particular project. And we left it at that.[2]
But I remained disturbed at the sight of a man who had, with the help of technology, disconnected himself completely from the healing power of sleep and dreaming. How widespread is this phenomenon, I wondered?
Disconnecting from sleep and dreams! Well, there is only one word for that—soul murder! I recalled Russ Lockhart’s review of Ronald’s Schenk’s “American Soul: A Cultural Narrative.” (2012). Russ has long been onto this largely un-noticed cultural drift towards the destruction of the soul.
In seeking to destroy terrorism, we seek to destroy the soul. This is the fundamental insight of Schenk’s brilliant work and the full realization of this is the necessary starting point for seeking “something else.” If we seek to destroy the soul, as Ahab tries to destroy the whale, we too will go down like all great empires before us.[3]
Schenk’s work displays art that features angels and as I was absorbing these images, a dream memory punched through into consciousness so strongly that I was sure I had read it in the article. But no, it was a memory of a dream I had in 1999. In my dream, Steiner shows me a vision in which Descartes as an angel is about to be beheaded by another angel. It is an act of voluntary surrender and sacrifice.[4]
What does all this have to do with the Red Book and its relevance to our times? As I was searching out anything I had written about my dream of 1999, my search engine brought up an article I had completely forgotten about. It was a transcription of a symposium held at the Library of Congress in 2010. The topic was The Red Book and the guest-list featured Sonu Shamdasani and James Hillman. I have made the entire transcription available to read (see endnote [6] below) but I want to include some quotes here that highlight the relevance of the Red Book with respect to the question of soul murder:
Shamdasani:
- My theme this morning is hell, Jung’s descent into hell and possibly our own…..
- The Red Book should be located and situated within the context of visionary tradition. What Liber Novus presents us with is a way back to hell. Hell that was increasingly lost to the western imagination.
- In 1913 in a discussion of visionary works of art, Jung noted that poets turn to mythological figures to give suitable expression to their experience. This did not mean that they were working with second-hand material but it was the only way to give form to imageless primordial experience.
- In a 1948 letter, Jung noted, “I find Blake a tantalizing study since he has compiled about half of undigested knowledge in his fantasies. According to my idea, they are an artistic production brought in authentic representation of unconscious processes.” Here again, you find instances of this oscillation. It seems to me as though he’s indicating this oscillation (which?) concerns Jung’s own ambivalence concerning his own work: was Liber Novus a work of art?
- Does Jung’s significance lie in his conceptual formulations, the individualization, the collective unconscious, the integration of collective unconscious, archetypes and so forth or rather does it, does it in the terms of his own visionary experience lie in the recovery of hell as made accessible through individual fantasy, through individual vision and enabling a new route to hell and back. If as Jung claimed Dante and Blake clothed visionary experience in mythological forms, could we not pose the question that Jung in turn attempted to clothe visionary experience in conceptual psychological forms? If so, the power and significance of his work does not reside in his concepts which are familiar to us but in the visionary experience which was at the back of them. Publication of Liber Novus then finally enables one to reconsider Jung’s significance in wholly new yet quintessentially ancient manner as recovering the road to hell.
James Hillman
- The revelation that the language, the language of psychology is imagistic, is poetic. Poetic usage is the beginning of the right language for psychology if we’re talking about the powers that have us, a fantasy image and they appear in space and as voice but are not pathological as such.
- That (rational) mind doesn’t do the job and that psychology that arises from that mind can’t do the job. So of course everyone’s in therapy because they’re using the wrong mind to deal with the psyche.
- The profoundly personal is the engagement with one’s own demons or the visit to hell. And the encounter with the figures that Jung had, this is the most intimate, deep, profound, unexpected, completely surprising individualized part of life. In other words, the encounter with one’s own soul and the Red Book begins with that. Jung felt he had lost his soul. It was now his job to find it or to find out where it was or what had happened. This is the profoundly personal.
- Who are the dead in Jung’s book? Are they his personal ancestors? Are they the dead of Jerusalem from the 7 sermons? Who are the dead? What is the message of the dead and what is it in America, what is it in our culture that has so much trouble with the dead? So difficult our President can’t even go to the coffins of the dead, (our former president). That we have this tremendous wall between living and death so that at any cost we must keep the living alive because what’s on the other side. No sense, no sense of the permeability of life and death, of the flow of the others, of the voices of the figures, of the powers into our life everyday, of our relation to those on the other side who in the old days used to say, welcome, to be welcomed by the ancestors when you die. Received instead is something, this great unknown and you die alone and all these horrors are imagined because there is no sense of the ancestors.
- We live in such a narrow technical, rational, explanatory, causal way of thinking. We have shrunk our mindset tremendously since the beginning of the century when this book was not as strange, in my mind, would not have been strange.
Hillman tells us that we now have a wall between the “living” and the “dead”. The wall is our narrow technical, rational, explanatory, causal way of thinking, i.e. the form of consciousness we have become since Descartes. Shamdasani tells us that The Red Book shows us a way back into Hell, a way that is profoundly personal. My “angel” dream shows the beheading of Descartes as a voluntary surrender and sacrifice. The way to Hell, or the depths of Being, then, lies in voluntarily surrendering our Cartesian consciousness in order to enter the “permeability of life and death, of the flow of the others, of the voices of the figures, of the powers into our life everyday” as Hillman puts it. And apparently, according to my dream, such a move is “backed” by the telos of psyche. The psyche “wants” this move from prose to “poetry”, from the static to the fluid.
Jung underwent this move, as recorded in the Red Book, and in so doing underscores the true basis of depth psychology—the poetic mind!
Soul murder is the killing of the poetic mind. The Red Book is a guide for us in this regard. Can we each follow its hint to descend into our own depths down to the depths of Being, our own personal journey to Hell?[5]
[1] Jung’s Red Book For Our Time
[2] I did make sure his support system was aware of what seemed to me to an inevitable outcome.
[3] Russell Lockhart: A Review of “American Soul: A Cultural Narrative.” (2012). Psychological Perspectives Vol. 57 , Iss. 4, 2014. Also see his blog for posts on dream-deprivation: http://ralockhart.com/WP/?p=339
[4] The dream fact of Steiner and angels suggests that the angel cutting off the head of “Descartes” is sword-wielding Michael, the angel of our time, according to Steiner. The Michaelic gesture prepares us to encounter the reality that Jung discovered in The Red Book: i.e. living language or the autonomous psyche, ie discovering our spiritual being.
[5] It’s an interesting detail to note that the first question at the end of the symposium was occupied with the nervous issue of meaning and meaninglessness (“if one can live the meaningless life…”). What could a more poetic response to The Red Book be?
[6] DropBox link to Red Book Symposium Transcript
