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.

2011.08.09 — Conversations with Carl Jung and Reactions from Ernest Jones Finished 2011.08.02 & a Fushigi*

When I read the back cover, it struck me that this book is the transcript of a snippet of Jung I saw interviewed on a documentary I saw on Jung and dreams called, I think, The Wisdom of the Dream. (Google confirmed it.) I remember the clip clearly because Jung, who looked old, had a giant old-style microphone hanging from his neck like a giant pendant.

Paraphrased, I remember Jung saying with great emphasis: "The unconscious really is unconscious, and so you can't know. The best that can be done is to infer it by its effects on consciousness."

Well, it turns out that this is indeed the book of that interview, and here is the passage:

Dr. Jung: As soon as research comes to a question of the unconscious, things becomes necessarily blurred, because the unconscious is something which is really unconscious! So you have no object—nothing. You only can make inferences because you can't see it; and so you have to create a model of this possible structure of the unconscious(38).

But on to the grist.

Conversations with Carl Jung & Reactions from Ernest Jones.
by Richard Isadore Evans. D. Van Nostrand Company (Canada) Ltd. (Reinhold), 1964.

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, Carl Jung;
Back row: Abraham A. Brill, Ernest Jones, Sándor Ferenczi.

Began 2011.07.15; Finished 2011.08.02.

☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

This blog is not my review of why this book just barely eked four stars, but because of a bizarre fushigi that arose on the last day I read it. And, to add a bit of irony to the synchronicity-petite, it arose from Sigmund Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, citing Freud cautioning about man's place in the natural environment:

Dr. Evans: Now another important problem, articulated not so long ago by Julian Huxley, deals with the conflict between the extreme advances in man's technological development and his very limited socio-psychological development. For example, means have been created technologically that could destroy all mankind, while our socio-psychological development, our ability in human relations, has not come far enough to insure us against such an event.

Dr. Jones: Yes, I've written something on that very matter. As a matter of fact, the third volume of my Freud biography finishes on that note, so please allow me to read the final paragraphs. They deal with those two fundamental instincts that Freud worked on so much — the sexual and the aggressive:

When we consider the breath-taking achievements of man in art and in science, we must judge there are no limits foreseeable to his power to attain happiness and security. But this vision is offset by one as somber as that is glowing. In it are three main strands. The advances in medical science, which are now bound to continue rapidly, combined with the increase in general prosperity, have diminished the natural selection of quality. They have also brought about such an enormous increase in quantity of population that the time cannot be far distant when the resources of the earth to sustain it will be seriously strained. Moreover, greed and lack of foresight have not only failed to nourish those resources, ultimately the soil and the minerals of the earth's crust, but are ruining them at a truly alarming pace. Still graver is the consideration that man's destructive powers have been so fortified by the recently acquired knowledge of new weapons that it is now within his reach to achieve devastation beside which the efforts of an Attila, a Timurlane or a Genghis Khan are but the puny gestures of an infant. It is now no longer massacre that is threatened, but the possible extinction of all life on this planet. There needs only a madman in the seat of authority of the kind we have just witnessed to set this holocaust ablaze, nor can we be sure that someone less mad may not bring it about.

Amid the turmoil of conflicting ideas in which we live, in the spheres of art, of science, and above all of politics where statesmen of towering importance can display in their savagery, fear and unreasonableness, all the worst features of an undisciplined nursery, there seems to be one proposition commanding nearly universal assent. The control man has secured over nature has far outrun his control over himself. Man's unhappiness and the threats of doom overhanging him proceed from this unassailable truth. Man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up within him (p140-1).

So, now comes the fushigi: later that afternoon I saw on the TV-News a story about something called Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which if you haven't heard of it, is where man's plastic waste collects because of the natural tidal patterns, in the North Pacific Gyre. The mass of garbage is reported to be about the size of Texas! Here's one small image:

Photo Courtesy of treehugger.com. Go to link to see other interesting photos.