You don't need a lifevest Asa the way you swim and I see your point Greg. I doubt that CGJ liked Goebbels though.
Again: He was fascinated by Nazism, which he saw as a collective psychosis, with Hitler as a head-shaman, possessed.
This fascinated him....and yes he was a Nazi, like most of his social class in Europe in the thirties, because he was scared of Soviet Russia and the Commies and a possible revolution, which he hoped the Nazis would prevent and disappear in the process. ( A very Churchillian idea )
....and yes, though he helped Jews and had Jewish friends and pupils, Erich Neumann, Jolande Jacobi and Aniela Jaffé being the most notable amongst them, he was an antisemite, again like most of his kind and social class.......and if you want to bash him some more, he had affairs with patients,the most important, a beautiful Russian Jewess, (sic) highly intelligent, whom he cured, helped her to study medicine and dropped like a hot brick, when the liaison became known and he had to fear for his professional stature. The woman, Sabina Spielrain, whom the Nazis murdered together with her children, when they invaded Kiev,
became a well known psychiatrist of her own right, with interesting publications on the question of a death-drive, which Freud later developed without reference to her groundbreaking work. She was close to Freud, the latter incidentally protecting and covering up for Jung in this affair. She cherished Jung, inspite of his callous behaviour..she knew more about loving than he ever did, but then he knew a lot about "love".
There was a "fascination with the dark" in all of his generation in Europe in those years. A terrible, destructive unrest underneath the surface,the roots of which were more than enconomic, which, as you know, errupted first in 1914 and again in 1939. If you wonder about the Europeans as they are today, it is perhaps a good point to remember, that the best of them on all sides were wiped out in those two terrible wars. Nobody thinks about that, because it is an eleticist view and politically not correct, but it seems to show. But that is another story. If you want to know, what Jung was really fascinated by, it pays to my mind to read up on a dream of his as he was three years old, which he recounts in his "Dreams, Memories and Reflections". It is a pointer towards what he had to face and contend with in his life. A later outcome and a waymark of his struggle is his "Answer to Job" . A wild and highly emotional bit of writing. His torment, which you can feel hehind his words, holds my deep respect and compassion to this very day. Yes, light and dark is as a mirror we gaze in and as we gaze we see some of our entanglement. We have to, in order to perhaps grasp - through suffering only - its illusive powers. Jung was a great man, hence his struggle was so obvious as was his failure. He failed of course, like all of us, and Maya's web is closest, when we think it is gone for ever.........
Help me understand one thing though, why couldn't he take music, why did it shake him up so ? He clumsily called it "emotion pure", but then that is not music per se, that is us, what it can do to us. Obviously his thoughts, his words, his theories must have been a barrier against what is "beyond the mirror" ,which he could see through, sometimes step through, but had to guard against, lest it would destroy him. He once proudly said, that what had destroyed Nietzsche and Hoelderlin and many others, had also engulfed him, but did not break him.......but what do I know...
This all may be off topic, but I have the feeling, when we discuss this man, we use him as a substrate (not substitute) for our own lives, which is so closely linked with music and I am wondering what the role of music is in our lives in our attempt to see through mirrors...I dimly sense here a circle closing, yet alas "everyone is clear, only my mind is not".
6chac beautiful, how much of that are you able to live? (-:
