Writing

C.G.Jung’s Active Imagination and the Dead

Page 55 From Jung’s Red Book

This was the topic of a lecture by Dr Stephani Stephens that I attended recently within a conference On the Afterlife and Related Themes. For me, this was the superior lecture of the day, because of its focus on a favourite mentor, Carl Gustav Jung, and his ideas about death. These differ greatly from current psychological interests, such as Terror Management theories in relation to Death.

Dr Stephens spoke well, contacting the audience and keeping my attention throughout. I was even inspired to ask a question at the end. In this lecture, the speaker introduced material from Jung’s biographical work Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and from the posthumously published The Red Book, a beautifully presented and hand inscribed book of Jung’s encounters with visionary figures during his ‘active imagination’ explorations.

This book was published in 2009 to much acclaim from Jungian scholars and psychologists, as well as followers of his analytical method of treatment.

Page 56 Jung’s Red Book

The speaker tried to give us a glimpse into Jung’s method of Active Imagination, which is based on the subject envisioning dialogues between oneself and different parts of the psyche. It is the method Jung used for descending into the unconscious where he contacted figures from the depths that formed the basis for all of his main writings on the Collective Unconscious and his later analytical psychological method for treating patients.

The Red Book is a large leather‐bound folio manuscript creatively crafted by Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author’s imaginative, visionary experiences after his break with Freud and the beginning of a period of creativity and emotional dislocation. Despite being named as the most important work, and central in Jung’s oeuvre, it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009. It is an unfinished, personal and spiritual account that was, and still is, at odds with the atheistic and scientific direction of society. Jung’s family were concerned that it might not be accepted positively by the public, and kept it locked away until ten years ago.

Stephens based her lecture around significant dates relevant to Jung and this work:

1899-1900: Jung attended séances with his cousin Helly as medium, but abandoned them when he discovered anomalies and possible subterfuge in the procedures. However, he went on to write his doctoral thesis based on his witnessing these events, which were very popular at the time, especially in his hometown of Basle.

1902: His PhD was awarded from the University of Zurich for his thesis entitled: On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.

1907: His first meeting with Freud takes place in Vienna, when they converse for thirteen hours straight, having much in common. However, Jung’s different perspective on the implications of the Eros function, and his interest in the occult will, ultimately, separate them for good.

1909: Jung resigns his post at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital and, during this year, he also visits the USA with Freud.

1911: His cousin Helly dies from tuberculosis in her early thirties. Jung is more and more interested in the psychology of the unconscious. The first Death Dreams begin the following year.

1913: The break with Freud occurs, and Jung’s first visions of ‘Rivers of Blood’ spreading throughout Europe begin. The war starts the following year, validating his intuitive visions. A period of personal uncertainty and disorientation begins for Jung. He explores what he calls the realm of the dead, through descending into the unconscious. However, when he asks Ezechial, one of the figures he meets in the underworld, if he might accompany him and others on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Ezechial replies: ‘You cannot join us; you have a body, but we are dead.’

Dr Stephens took us on a brief journey, exploring Active Imagination in a session with our eyes closed. Like Ezechial, she warns that getting in touch with the Unconscious Realm requires a mentor to lead us there, or at least the use of advanced meditation techniques. Utilising this method of Active Imagination, that Jung managed to perfect, he conjured up figures from the imagination that he was able to dialogue with. The Red Book, according to Stephen A. Diamond, is a very personal record of Jung’s complicated, tortuous and lengthy quest to salvage his soul, and a first-hand description of a process that would later fundamentally inform Jung’s approach to treatment that he called Analytical Psychology.

One of Jung’s Figures illustrated in the Red Book

December 11, 2018 0 comment

Mythos Writing

Bohemian Rhapsody the Movie

See and hear the original Queen “Live Aid” performance on YouTube (below). I love this music, so eclectic and passionate!

I don’t pretend to be a rock music expert, but I do remember Live Aid and the utopian wish we all had, at the time, to relieve African poverty forever. Dying children shown on television screens nightly. It was 1985 and my children were five and two at the time. Vain wish indeed! But I’m glad the concert happened, and that I took part in the heartfelt groundswell, led by Bob Geldof and rock stars of the time.

I loved the film Bohemian Rhapsody. Freddie Mercury, like his adopted name suggests, belongs to modern myths. Seated, recently, next to my partner in the uber comfortable lounges at the Palace Central theatre, I pressed buttons to recline my seat, and ordered drinks from the phones at my side-table.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a British-American joint venture with Fox serving as distributor. Mercury, real name Farrokh Bulsara, was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania in 1946 and moved to England with his parents in the 1960s.

When Mercury died in 1991 of AIDS-related illness at age 45, Mary Austin was by his side as she had been for much of his adult life. He left her half his reported $75 million estate, including the 28-room London mansion in which he passed away and Austin still lives in to this day.

When Freddie Mercury first met Austin, he was 24 years old and she was 19. Their real-life relationship is examined in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” starring Rami Malek as Mercury and Lucy Boynton in the role of Austin.

“All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s simply impossible,” Mercury once said of Austin. “The only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me it was a marriage.”

Mary saw Mercury go on to live a life of lavish excess, a rock god’s existence fueled by substance abuse and random sexual encounters. Austin would marry and divorce. Austin says she lost somebody she thought of as her eternal love. “When he died I felt we’d had a marriage,” she said. “We’d done it for better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health. You could never have let go of Freddie unless he died – and even then it was difficult.” (OK magazine March 17th 2000).

Different Sides of Love

Of course, there were other lovers, gay lovers, some of whom we meet during the film. Jim Hutton was perhaps his true male love, still with him at the end.

Shortly after the band’s world tour, Freddie begins an affair with Paul Prenter, his personal manager. Mary breaks up with Freddie when he comes out to her as bisexual, although she assures him that he is gay. My very positive take on the movie, apart from the music and the amazing channelling of Mercury’s moves by Malek, is its implicit reference to the many forms of love that a person can hold or experience in a lifetime.

Sophocles wrote that “one word frees us from all the weight and pain of life, and that word is love.” In the west, our foundations of our understanding of love come firstly from the ancient Greek philosophers who identified four forms of love: familial love (storge), friendly love (philia), romantic love (eros), and divine love (agape). And all of these forms of love are present and apparent in the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody”. But I would add the Dionysian type love, which is represented by excess. We all suffer from, or exhibit, some of this type of love in our youth. Even romantic love is a form of excess in its early stages.

Freddie’s love for his parents is obvious in the movie and represents both the Storge and the Agape form of love. They were followers of Zoroastrianism, which is one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions that remains active. The religion states that active participation in life through good deeds is necessary to ensure happiness and to keep chaos at bay.

On the day of “Live Aid” Freddie reunites with Jim Hutton and Mary Austin, after reconnecting with his family and his father’s Zoroastrian maxim, “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”

I say it’s an Oscar deserving movie, despite what critics have said about it.

Queen archivist Greg Brooks was instrumental in helping recreate each scene to make it as true to life as possible. He worked daily with Fox for months from the beginning, providing answers to questions.

It’s a true winner, just like Freddie Mercury himself, who still lives on despite his early death.

The Entertainer

November 24, 2018 0 comment

Mythos Writing

Persephone and Demeter

The Meaning of the Myth

Kristina Dryza is recognised as one of the world’s top female futurists, that is, scientists and social scientists whose specialty is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present. She is also an archetypal consultant and published author. In defining a myth, she referred to James Hillman, Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, experts on mythology. For the purposes of Kristina’s workshop, myths represent the human search for what is true, significant, and meaningful from our cultural past.

Her talk on Persephone and Demeter at the Sydney Jung Society recently, opened me up to some of the more meaningful concepts to do with this archetypal pair. Together, they represent the idea and experience of despair (Demeter) and shock (Persephone), when something untoward happens to you, for example a betrayal, a sickness, or a broken leg. It often comes like a jolt out of the blue.

In my case, it was a descent into hell at the end of a psychoanalytical journey, one which I’d felt impelled to take.

July 14, 2018 1 comment

Writing

Creating A Short Story

First a note about the painting, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, that serves as a symbol for Joni Mitchell and her songs, and for the short story below. The focus of this post, I believe, is on love and beauty.

“For Plato – and so for the members of the Florentine Platonic Academy – Venus had two aspects: she was an earthly goddess who aroused humans to physical love, or she was a heavenly goddess who inspired intellectual love in them. Plato further argued that contemplation of physical beauty allowed the mind to better understand spiritual beauty. So, looking at Venus, the most beautiful of goddesses, might at first raise a physical response in viewers which then lifted their minds towards the godly. A Neoplatonic reading of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus suggests that 15th-century viewers would have looked at the painting and felt their minds lifted to the realm of divine love.” (Wikipedia)

Genesis of the Story: I wrote this story with the intention of practising the narrative arc, and of applying the “seven points” rule to structuring a short story. (See The Narrative Arc ).

The Seven Points: The Beginning; the Inciting Incident, followed by a crisis; the Midpoint/Reversal (2nd Crisis); the Climax (Crisis 3) ; the Falling Action; the Resolution; the End. I have to admit, however, that I did not pre-plan the story. I used the guidelines to re-structure the story after getting it down. Perhaps I was creating the structure subliminally, as I was writing the first draft.

April 26, 2018 0 comment

Writing

The Narrative Arc

I have recently been researching diagrams to represent the Narrative Arc. I had completed a personal memoir, River Girl, based partly on childhood memories, that was complex in structure. How was I to analyse and to improve, if necessary, on this work in terms of its overall structure? I had never mapped out plots and story lines beforehand, preferring to focus on creating believable characters and “zingy” writing in the first instance.

It seemed to me, in fact, that some genres e.g. detective stories and thrillers, were better suited to pre-planning methods, while other narratives depended on the writer “getting it down” first, and worrying about structural issues later on. I saw myself as belonging to the latter category, rather than to the former.

However, I also saw that at some stage in the writing process, any writer will need to consider the overall structure of a longer work. This might take place towards the end, or in the middle, rather than at the beginning of the task of writing a novel. So it became more and more important for me, as I came to the end of writing my works, to consider what makes a successful narrative in terms of overall structure. This led me to try to identify the elements and functions of the narrative arc.

March 17, 2018 7 comments