Cross-Cultural Inspiration

There is little question that Carl Gustav Jung spent his professional and personal life in search of inspiration, not only for himself, but for those he treated and taught. We are about to see a representation of the source of much of what he learned and transmitted to others.

I just spent a week on the shore of Lago Magoirre in Southern Switzerland/Northern Italy, (see photo) in a workshop on “Writing as Ritual” sponsored by Pacifica Graduate Institute at Eranos. This residence/small conference center is being refurbished to re-capture its place as a pre-eminent European location for the exchange of ideas. In the first half of the twentieth century, Eranos was a haven for Carl Jung and his intellectual equals from all over the world.

I had begun reading Deirdre Bair’s biography of Jung two weeks before the trip. This is the most carefully researched account of the man’s life, and enjoys substantial credibility in the Jungian community, even as the family had second thoughts about its publication. Jung was a complex individual (he would have enjoyed the pun), and having studied him now for three years, I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of his intellect, much less touched the depth of his more intuitive and experiential observations of the psyche.

Jung did his own biographical sketch, (Memories, Dreams, Reflections) but not until he was 81 years old. By his account, (and I think Bair would concur) the years just after his break with Sigmund Freud were the most significant of his life.  During this particularly difficult time, Jung traveled experientially into his own psyche to find more about the working and content of the unconscious.

While he has written about that experience retrospectively, his real-time experience was recorded in a volume simply called The Red Book. Jung was wary of releasing the actual content of the book for fear of being thought a mad-man, of having his theories attacked on the basis of his own psychosis.

When I returned home to San Francisco, I found the cover of the New York Times Magazine (September 20, 2009) featuring Jung and the impending publication of an English translation of The Red Book. Apparently the family has decided that it would come out piece-meal anyway, and opted to enjoy the financial reward of a full-blown re-creation and translation.

What can we expect? I’m guessing it is the unabashed and colorful record of fantasy in its true sense, the connection between a person and the myriad of images and symbols that reside in us somewhere, without defining a space but claiming a pre-eminent influence on our thoughts and behaviors.

Jung, unlike Freud, was interested in neuroses, psychoses, dreams and fantasies as portals to self-fulfillment, rather than as problems to be solved. In a discussion with a different vocabulary, he would postulate, I suspect, that the voice of God can only be heard in such sacred places, venues that take up no space and need no cathedral. While these are not the words of the therapy room, they certainly ring with the tenor of being called, of meaning beyond the mundane—of inspiration.

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