Said above > As you know the Nazi party was more of a religious movement than a political movement.
All politics is religion . or at least it has been up until now. Hitler relied, after all, on what were (and still are) primarily Christian prejudices and symbols (even as he disavowed them). The separation of church and state has been fought for here in the states for a short two centuries but anyone who follows this administration (Ashcroft) certainly understands that the two are still closely tied together. One nation under God .ect. The oh so easy separation of the two realms would have made Jung smile. (The one denied is the one in control.) In most of the rest of the world it is even more so. Our experiment with secular democracy is so short and fragile.
>Is Jung influenced by the occult ?
Of course!! Read his take on alchemy. It is not that he is right or wrong. (Mark will surely lecture on the mistaken assumptions underlying the duality of such an approach.) It is simply so amazing and fantastic a production!
IMHO there are few easy answers with Jung. I am going to say difficult things in very little space so you experts (Detlof) please excuse my laymans simplifications and over generalizations.
He wrote his dissertation for his medical degree, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena, about his 15 year old cousin, Helene Prieswerk, who claimed to be a medium. She claimed to be controlled by a variety of spirits. He attributed it to dissociation-multiple personalities. He was not so easily taken in.
Somewhat ironically, one of the more far fetched ideas (to modern western ears), synchronicity (you know.. the Sting Album the idea that cause and effect are not so obvious and events are related in not so common sense ways), which sounds mystical-occultist to modern ears, was based on his collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist. Many of his ideas came together during the second decade of this century. The first and second decades were very productive in completely overturning the rather mechanistic Newtonian view of the physical world. In a way the common-sense understanding of reality became non-sense at the cutting edge of hard science. I think Jung was influenced by this and believed that psychology would follow a similar path. At least he was certainly not afraid to think about and explore such things.
He was deeply interested in what we term the occult because he believed that western thought had overvalued thinking and undervalued its emotional/unconscious roots. In a simplified sense he believed certain aspects of thought became habitual and dominant and that without some balance troubles would follow. To almost any western reader he is going to seem to leave the known-plotted-intellectualized world far behind. Again, the second decade of the 20th century saw a war by civilized-scientific western Europe that, to say the least, showed the underbelly of the dreams of reason. He, in fact, believed he envisioned the war. Like him or not, his writing for about a half dozen years after 1913 , after his break with Freud as Detlof points out, and in a state of mind that would have put most of us in an asylum is, as they say, stranger than fiction . and richer too.
This is not to excuse his obvious shortcomings. He was a man. His insights were great and his mistakes were great too. Hindsight is 20-20. Thomas Jefferson banged his negress slave half step-sister. The reverend M.L. King was rather prolific too. Is this cause for concern? Well yes. Does it completely undermine their insight and lifes work? I dont think so (another thread?). One of Jungs better known ideas is that of the shadow and he certainly had his own .but to expect too much from those who walk here is adolescent folly. To expect nothing is fatalistic. But where to draw the line?
Least we forget as we judge Jung. The topic of this thread is a set of cables costing more than the annual gross family income of about half the folks on the planet who are hungry (slowly starving) as we speak. Of course, we have a political/economic ideology that justifies our excesses. Actually, it makes a Virtue of them (from necessity of course). I wonder what they will think of us 100 years from now. Please understand that I include myself in the last comment. I am not aiming it at anyone else... least of all you Narchy. I spend enough on vinyl to feed a small village.
If Jung failed somehow maybe I like him more for it. Compared to most of us he did not take the easy way. He struggled with it and for that I like him.
Sincerely
I remain,
All politics is religion . or at least it has been up until now. Hitler relied, after all, on what were (and still are) primarily Christian prejudices and symbols (even as he disavowed them). The separation of church and state has been fought for here in the states for a short two centuries but anyone who follows this administration (Ashcroft) certainly understands that the two are still closely tied together. One nation under God .ect. The oh so easy separation of the two realms would have made Jung smile. (The one denied is the one in control.) In most of the rest of the world it is even more so. Our experiment with secular democracy is so short and fragile.
>Is Jung influenced by the occult ?
Of course!! Read his take on alchemy. It is not that he is right or wrong. (Mark will surely lecture on the mistaken assumptions underlying the duality of such an approach.) It is simply so amazing and fantastic a production!
IMHO there are few easy answers with Jung. I am going to say difficult things in very little space so you experts (Detlof) please excuse my laymans simplifications and over generalizations.
He wrote his dissertation for his medical degree, On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena, about his 15 year old cousin, Helene Prieswerk, who claimed to be a medium. She claimed to be controlled by a variety of spirits. He attributed it to dissociation-multiple personalities. He was not so easily taken in.
Somewhat ironically, one of the more far fetched ideas (to modern western ears), synchronicity (you know.. the Sting Album the idea that cause and effect are not so obvious and events are related in not so common sense ways), which sounds mystical-occultist to modern ears, was based on his collaboration with Wolfgang Pauli, a physicist. Many of his ideas came together during the second decade of this century. The first and second decades were very productive in completely overturning the rather mechanistic Newtonian view of the physical world. In a way the common-sense understanding of reality became non-sense at the cutting edge of hard science. I think Jung was influenced by this and believed that psychology would follow a similar path. At least he was certainly not afraid to think about and explore such things.
He was deeply interested in what we term the occult because he believed that western thought had overvalued thinking and undervalued its emotional/unconscious roots. In a simplified sense he believed certain aspects of thought became habitual and dominant and that without some balance troubles would follow. To almost any western reader he is going to seem to leave the known-plotted-intellectualized world far behind. Again, the second decade of the 20th century saw a war by civilized-scientific western Europe that, to say the least, showed the underbelly of the dreams of reason. He, in fact, believed he envisioned the war. Like him or not, his writing for about a half dozen years after 1913 , after his break with Freud as Detlof points out, and in a state of mind that would have put most of us in an asylum is, as they say, stranger than fiction . and richer too.
This is not to excuse his obvious shortcomings. He was a man. His insights were great and his mistakes were great too. Hindsight is 20-20. Thomas Jefferson banged his negress slave half step-sister. The reverend M.L. King was rather prolific too. Is this cause for concern? Well yes. Does it completely undermine their insight and lifes work? I dont think so (another thread?). One of Jungs better known ideas is that of the shadow and he certainly had his own .but to expect too much from those who walk here is adolescent folly. To expect nothing is fatalistic. But where to draw the line?
Least we forget as we judge Jung. The topic of this thread is a set of cables costing more than the annual gross family income of about half the folks on the planet who are hungry (slowly starving) as we speak. Of course, we have a political/economic ideology that justifies our excesses. Actually, it makes a Virtue of them (from necessity of course). I wonder what they will think of us 100 years from now. Please understand that I include myself in the last comment. I am not aiming it at anyone else... least of all you Narchy. I spend enough on vinyl to feed a small village.
If Jung failed somehow maybe I like him more for it. Compared to most of us he did not take the easy way. He struggled with it and for that I like him.
Sincerely
I remain,