2011.09.24 — To Speak of Conversations with Carl Jung and a Sigmund Freud fushigi*.

This morning (Saturday as I'm now writing), I stumbled into a 'multi-month' *fushigi. It originally began on an aqua marine sticky dated 2011.06.20. This morning I found it stuck on page 22 of Conversations with Carl Jung and reactions from Earnest Jones as interviewed and edited by and Richard I. Evans.
Canada: D. Van Nostrand Co. Ltd., 1964.

On that sticky I'd quickly jotted:

@ work talked with BV & TR about [the relative] popularity of Jung versus Freud. At some point I said that Jung was [and is] more unpopular than Freud because Jung demanded from his psychology taking personal responsibility, whereas Freud's psychology allows blame to be put on childhood traumas.

This aqua fushigi sticky was stuck in the book because the night of that conversation with B&T I opened CwCJ to read the following:

In New York City on December 1, 1961, a Jung Memorial meeting was held, sponsored jointly by the New York Association of Analytical Psychology and the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. At this meeting we were particularly taken with the interesting and eloquent comments expressed by Dr. Henry Murray about the late Dr. Carl Jung. We may quote Dr. Murray when he says:

"Jung was humble before the ineffable mystery of each variant self that faced him for the first time, as he sat at his, desk, pipe in hand, with every faculty in tune, brooding on the portent of what was being said to him. And he never hesitated to acknowledge his perplexity in the presence of a strange and inscrutable phenomenon, never hesitated to admit the provisional nature of the comments he had to make or to emphasize the difficulties and limitations of possible achievement in the future.

'Whoever comes to me' he would say, 'takes his life in his hand.' The effect of such a statement, the effect of his manner of delivering his a'vows of uncertainty and suspense is not to diminish but to augment the patient's faith in his positions, invincible integrity, as well as to make plain that the patient must take the burden of responsibility for any decisions he might make" (22-3 - my emphasis).

How this fushigi came full circle today began with my finding a quotation about villains to augment an answer I'd given to a 'Which One' question M posted in Weekly Short Stories Game game. The question was to choose between:

"Someone who is sure about things or someone who is at home with uncertainty?"

Yesterday, when I answered that I thought immediately of the brilliant book The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. So this morning I went onto the iMAc to find the quotation I wanted to add to my answer, which is:

The hero is the man actively engaged in becoming himself – never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something.

Donald Richie. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, © 1984 by The Regents of the University of California. Cited in The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt, New York: Hyperion Books, 2000; ISBN 0-7868-6668-3, pg.235

And so it came to pass that a fushigi that began in June came around in an odd circle to be completed in late September with a fictional book that cited a book about the films of Akira Kuroswawa

and an 'uncertainty' question in a social networking game.

Oh! One more thing. The gamester, M, who asked the above question is an avid reader of Jung. I know this because we have corresponded on and via Goodreads. However, to the best of my knowledge, he doesn't read my blog — at least he's never commented in, or about, it even though I am reasonably certain that he has seen me refer to it.

Addendum: a completely trivial and insubstantial oddity happened this afternoon, as well. I'm a little hesitant to blog this, but these things happen to me very frequently, so, given that I'm blogging a fushigi today, I figure that I might just as well. This morning, while parking the car in the super market's parking lot, for some reason the movie with Bill Murray about the body's immune

systems came into my mind. Not sure why, given that it is an old movie and only somewhat amusing. I don't have a copy of it, have no desire to purchase it, and I've only seen it once. One of those quick completely nonsensical thoughts. Except that when I got home, and after a couple of hours of gardening with my wife, I put up my feet and flipped through the TV's channel guide to see listed the movie Osmosis Jones. When I saw it, I said to my Self, 'Oh no. That's just too stupid.' But as I've said, these kinds of spurious thoughts with subsequent manifestation happen frequently.