C. G. Jung

„Es scheint, das eis hat sich bewegt“ schrieb Skácel im letzten Brief, kurz vor seinem Tod, an seinen alten Freund und Übersetzer Reiner Kunze. Er selber aber, sich die ergreifende Sprache des mährischen Volksmunds mit einem kühnen Bild zu eigen machend: „ging still sich hinter der Stille zu verbergen.“  Sein Leben markierten kurze Atempausen der Freiheit und das erschöpfende, mehr oder weniger unfreiwillige Indienstgenommensein durch zwei totalitäre Systeme. Die zeitbedingten Erschütterungen von Skácels sensiblem Geist in den Folgejahren, seine Verabschiedung jedweder Ideologie sollten seine Lyrik prägen, die ihre Verwurzelung in der mährischen Volksdichtung nicht aufgegeben, sondern in der Lyrik der Moderne in gültiger Weise bewahrt hat.
Was Skácel zur Wende und der politischen Entwicklung danach gemeint haben könnte, bleibt ungewiss. Sein Empfinden für soziale Gerechtigkeit blieb wach. Er schloss sich auch Dissidentenkreisen (etwa der Charta 77) nicht an und geizte im Privaten (im Briefwechsel etwa) nicht mit scharfen Worten auch an die Adresse manch eines Systemgegners. Reiner Kunze fasste den Sachverhalt lyrisch-lakonisch bereits früher: „Wie das grab für dich schweigt!“

Anläßlich des 25. Todestages von Jan Skácel (7. Feburar 1922-7. November 1989) und des 25. Jahrestages der Sanften Revolution in der Tschechoslowakei sowie der Preisverleihungen an Reiner Kunze (Preis des Landes Südmähren, Preis Gratias agit des tschechischen Außenministers, Hohenschönhausen-Preis und Franz Josef Strauss-Preis) und der Herausgabe der Kunze-Skácel-Monographie Internationalismus der Dichter. Einblicke in Reiner Kunzes und Jan Skácels literarische Wechselbeziehungen. Mit einigen Bezügen zur Weltliteratur von Roman Kopřiva (http://www.tudpress.de/ThelemXTC2013/product_info.php?products_id=1374, http://www.amazon.de/Internationalismus-Dichter-literarische-Wechselbeziehungen-Weltliteratur/dp/3942411903) . Lesung aus Skácels Lyrik im Original und Übertragungen von Reiner Kunze, Vortrag und Buchpräsentation von Roman Kopřiva.  Rezitation auf Tschechisch Ondřej Černý, Leiter des Tschechischen Zentrums München. Veranstalter: Stiftung Lyrik Kabinett München, Tschechisches Zentrum München, Ackermann-Gemeinde.

Gerard Dorn (ca. 1535–ca. 1584) translated a great many Paracelsian texts into Latin; he also wrote a large body of work broadly inspired by Paracelsus. In an early book on “the whole of the alchemical philosophy,” he made alchemy into an allegory of good living, showing that it had moral as well as medical applications. His writing provided an important point of reference for the alchemical studies of C. G. Jung (1875–1961), and Jung’s comments on it were later elaborated in a series of English- language lectures by his long-time collaborator Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998). Her lectures on the “alchemical active imagination” show one direction that Paracelsian ideas have taken in the last century. Whereas Paracelsus and his school treat imagination as a mental faculty, Jung and his school treat it as a mental pro- cess. Paracelsians think of imagination as aiding processes of divination and discov- ery of correspondences between the inner and outer or upper and lower worlds— correspondences that Jungians regard as synchronicities. In particular, the process of speculation, aided by a strong imagination, is close to the active imagination that von Franz finds in Dorn’s tract on speculative philosophy.

I began reviewing this excellent book by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, when, as is typical with my ‘reviews’ (hence the quote marks), their literary art form became transparent for me and I began to perceive hints of an unknown future coming towards me, a path opening up to an alternative future to the one we are all now facing, it seems—i.e., catastrophe! I began using their vocabulary of existential phenomenology, thief-like, in order to speak or articulate this alternative future and, although my books say it too, thieving as I do from many sources, I feel this attempt may be particularly clear.

Prophetic dreams, or apocalyptic dreams, carry within them, as part of their phenomenology, a mood of inevitability. As C. G. Jung reports for example, a voice within one of his terrifying visions in 1913 says, “Look at it well; it is wholly real and will be so. You cannot doubt it.”  Even with such implicit speech carrying compelling authority and knowing, the question I want to explore here is: do prophetic dreams in fact predict the future? Or to broaden the question, just what is the relationship between prophetic dream and future outer events?

John Donne thought it a wild extension of the imagination when he wrote, in his "Valediction: of the Booke" that "in the Bible some can finde out Alchimy." But many authors attempted it during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. This paper explores the logic behind their excesses, and establishes a link to explorations in archetypal literary criticism.

It is a well-known fact that Jung decided to devote himself to a systematic study of the European alchemical tradition at the beginning of the 1930s. What readied him to do so remains, to this day, uncertain. Shedding light on Jung’s long-standing interest in rituals and processes of death and rebirth, which culminated in his 1932 Ravenna vision, this article traces Jung’s earliest understanding of alchemy back to the pages of The Red Book. A close reading of a sequence of four illuminations, which Jung painted in the fall of 1919, allows us to see how profound his understanding of alchemy as an experience of inner rebirth already was, and how powerfully those early images kept reverberating through Jung’s later alchemical writings.

Ineluctable: Not to be avoided or escaped. Latin: eluctari: to struggle out of; luctari to struggle. (American Heritage Dictionary)

"Thanks to Descartes, we moderns have to face the question: how can we ever get outside of our private inner experiences so as to come to know the things and people in the public external world?" Hubert Dreyfus

Can dreams help us with pressing questions of the ineluctable body—questions of. its illness, or even death? I say “ineluctable body” to make clear that I am referring to the body that we each have, the body that is the concern of current medical practice—the body that in times of health we can more or less ignore while we attend to matters of the mind—matters that now form the basis of our current cultural practices. This modern living body, this physical substrate upon we which we depend to carry out our activities is ontologically dead! We have no linguistic access to our physical bodies which thus remain mute until something goes wrong, e.g. organ failure or pain. We normally do not expect our body to speak to us, i.e., to be its own consciousness, or subjectivity which can address us subject to subject, making a claim upon us. There are some received exceptions to this modern understanding of our bodies e.g. when an infant’s body part gains a kind of frightening autonomy and is felt to act independently of the will; or in the world of anthropology, where there are many descriptions of the physical body as ontologically alive and acting independently of the normal will...

This book concerns my encounter with voices, occurring in 2005, as I was sitting at my desk in a familiar but uncomfortable condition. My entire body had heated up, a sure sign of a creative phase that required some artistic output. I did not know what form it would take. As I sat there, in a kind of stew, I began to hear voices. Two voices were in conflict. They identified themselves as John and Buster and, as I began to record their vigorous dispute, to my surprise another voice joined in, or emerged from this dispute. Her name was even more surprising—Sigrid! ... Together they took me ever deeper into the mystery of the interpenetration of fictional and empirical realities.

A free pdf copy is available on request: jcw@johnwoodcock.com.au

Ineluctable: Not to be avoided or escaped. Latin: eluctari: to struggle out of; luctari to struggle. (American Heritage Dictionary)

In early October 2019, a friend told me about a book that I subsequently purchased (for $100!) and have been studying since. Wit Pietrzac’s Myth, Language and Reality (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011) is an exhaustive study of much of what I was independently discussing here in 2016 (and have been struggling to say for two decades or so). The book places my essay’s findings in a much larger context of the early 20th Century’s Modernism movement. Pietrzac invokes the work of Heidegger, Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens and their individual efforts to overcome the gap between imagination and body, spirit and matter, etc., through poetic speech—to find a way to the forgotten, dark, ineluctable reality (Heidegger’s Earth) that silently undergirds and struggles with our linguistic world.

Text in French

Nietzsche’s "Üebermensch" derives from Lucian of Samosata’s use of hyperanthropos. I argue that Zarathustra’s teaching of the overman acquires new resonances in the context of that terminological origination in Lucian’s Kataplous — literally: sailing into port — referring to the journey of the soul into the afterlife, as escorted by Hermes and ferried by Charon along with myriads of others facing the same fate. The Kataplous he tyrannos, a title usually rendered as the Downward Journey (or The Tyrant), is a Menippean satire telling the tale of the “overman” supposed superior to others of “lesser” station in this-worldly life and the very same tyrant after his (ludicrously recalcitrant) transposition to the underworld. Reflecting on the life (and the death) of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, this essay also explores the politics of kingship for Empedocles as reformer as a political model for Zarathustra in terms of Hölderlin’s Death of Empedocles and Nietzsche’s unpublished drafts on the same. In his Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Nietzsche points to a perspective beyond the here and now, beyond the “values” of our all-too-worldly and all-too-human concerns, whether in terms of perceived political/economic advantage or the pursuit of more everyday enjoyments. In addition to Zarathustra’s literal death (The Adder’s Bite), the essay includes a discussion of Zarathustra’s golden fishing rod (which only makes sense in connection with Lucian’s references in another dialogue, Piscator), food (“with Zarathustra even a king may be a cook”), and Zarathustra’s flight into the volcano together with C.G. Jung’s invocation of Hölderlin’s admirer, the Swabian poet and ghost story teller, Justinius Kerner.

Dream interpretation during early psychoanalysis elicited associations from the patient but also involved authoritarian interpretations focused on whatever the analyst believed to be the key human drives—sex, power, transcendence, etc. Modern dream interpretation relies on non-leading questions to help the dreamer through an associative process to discover their own meaning for the dream. Research finds that patients rate therapy sessions utilizing dreams more highly in terms of session quality, mastery, and insight gained.

"Understanding that the self is capable of transformation and not just accumulation, curriculum studies have opened a broad perspective into a variety of qualitative approaches which question the school-industry paradigm (e.g., Eisner & Peshkin, 1990; Short, 1991; Schön, 1991; Haggerson & Bowman, 1992). These approaches usually call for more interpretation, less measurement, more description, less generalization, more experientialism, less depersonalization, and more personal involvement. In short, moving from the general to the specific, from the socially standardized to the personal and unique, assumptions about the role and place of memory have become engaged: public memory, professional memory, personal memory, and sometimes even expressive (or “fictional”) memory.

It is memory that I wish to explore in this essay. The areas of inquiry that most directly call upon the resources of personal memory are to do with the exploration of the lived realities of the persons who are teachers or students. This exploration calls for the narrativizing of experience, though this narrativizing may take such varied forms as ethnographic inquiry (Janesick, 1991), teacher lore (Schubert, 1991), narrative dialogue (Witherell & Noddings, 1991), teachers’ life histories (Goodson, 1988), teacher stories (Pagano, 1990), narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1991), voices of teachers (Aoki, 1990), or, most important for my purposes, autobiography as research (Butt & Raymond, 1989) or methodology (Pinar & Grumet, 1976). The list is incomplete and too abbreviated to be fair to the intent of the authors, but an idea of the variety of approaches may be suggested.

All the above will be referred to generically, when necessary, as “lifewriting in curriculum.” I take the term “lifewriting” from a 1991 seminar with James Olney on “Lifewriting and Memory,” in which lifewriting was used in the broadest sense possible to encompass poetry (T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, 1944), case studies (Luria, 1968, 1972; Sacks, 1985), novels (Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! 1936/86; Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,1937), and various experimental autobiographies which shall be discussed in a later section. Lifewriting, then, is any writing which expresses, investigates, or seeks a memoried life — whether objectively or subjectively or intersubjectively, symbolically or factually. In autobiography, itself, the question of memory is inescapable, as it is generally taken to be the dividing line between it and “purely” fictional literature, whether memory is construed as historic or aesthetic. I shall suggest that it is also heuristic.

It should be noted that curriculum inquiry often calls on the memory that plays a central role in all phenomenological and hermeneutical discourse (Willis, 1991; Smith, 1991), though this memory may be understood as both personal and social because of the mutual implication of the personal and social in the hermeneutic circle (Gadamer, 1975). Furthermore, as curriculum theory draws inspiration from so many other fields, it regularly assumes ideas of memory drawn from the processor paradigm of experimental psychology (e.g., Ross, 1992), the narrative schemata of cognitive psychology (e.g., Bruner, 1987), not to mention psychoanalytic approaches from Freud (1900/65) to Lacan (1977). The mention of Lacan opens out language itself as a container, or producer, of memory, especially in the fields of semiotics — as found, for example, in Barthes (1957/72) — and linguistics (Kristeva, 1989, among others). All of these traditions will be recalled in later chapters."

En el período comprendido entre el 16 de diciembre de 1912 y el 6 de enero de 1913, la tensión en la relación entre Sigmund Freud y Carl Gustav Jung alcanzó un clímax. Freud propone la ruptura de las relaciones personales el 1/3/1913 (Macguire, 1974/1993, carta F342). En una respuesta de sólo tres líneas, Jung hace el único gesto que le parece posible, accediendo al deseo de Freud: "El resto es silencio" (Macguire, 1974/1993, carta J344).
Han pasado cien años y las dos disciplinas, marcadas por el cisma original dirigido por las dos figuras importantes, hicieron importantes contribuciones teóricas y técnicas al estudio de la psicología del inconsciente.
En adelante, uno de los desafíos para el avance de la psicología profunda es el establecimiento del diálogo entre tradiciones, la construcción de puentes que permitan la fertilización cruzada de los dos campos, sin abdicar las dis- tinciones ni dejar de considerar los matices teóricos y clínicos de ambos. los enfoques, pero estableciendo conexiones, donde hay una intuición original que puede desatar la imaginación de los analistas y psicoanalistas jungianos. El concepto de "campo analítico" me parece una de esas intuiciones presen- tes en el trabajo de Jung sobre el proceso de análisis, al enfatizar el carácter de la influencia mutua de los sistemas psíquicos del analista y el analizando (Jung, 1946/1988).