Posts Tagged ‘Carl Jung’
Quote of the Day
I have always said to my pupils: “Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analyzing a dream.”
The long now
In early 1965, Tom Wolfe noticed a book on the shelves of Ken Kesey’s house in La Honda, California, which had become a gathering place for the young, mostly affluent hippies whom the journalist had dubbed “the Beautiful People.” In Kesey’s living room, “a curious little library” was growing, as Wolfe recounts in typically hyperbolic fashion in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
Books of science fiction and other mysterious things, and you could pick up almost any of these books and find strange vibrations. The whole thing here is so much like…this book on Kesey’s shelf, Robert Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. It is bewildering. It is as if Heinlein and the Pranksters were bound together by some inexplicable acausal connecting bond. This is a novel about a Martian who comes to earth, a true Superhero, in fact…raised by infinitely superior beings, the Martians. Beings on other plants are always infinitely superior in science fiction novels. Anyway, around him gathers a mystic brotherhood, based on a mysterious ceremony known as water-sharing. They live in—La Honda! At Kesey’s! Their place is called the Nest. Their life transcends all the usual earthly games of status, sex, and money. No one who once shares water and partakes of life in the Nest ever cares about such banal competitions again. There is a pot of money inside the front door, provided by the Superhero…Everything is totally out front in the Nest—no secrets, no guilt, no jealousies, no putting anyone down for anything.
He closes with a string of quotations from the character Jubal Harshaw, who had affinities to Wolfe himself, including the skeptical but grudgingly admiring line: “Ain’t nobody here but [just] us gods.”
One member of Kesey’s circle who undoubtedly read the novel was Stewart Brand, my hero, who pops up in Wolfe’s book as an “Indian freak” and later founded The Whole Earth Catalog, which became famous for a similar declaration of intent: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” (As I retype it now, it’s that one italicized word that strikes me the most, as if Brand were preemptively replying to Wolfe and his other detractors.) Much later, in the celebrated essay “We Owe it All to the Hippies,” Brand writes:
We all read Robert Heinlein’s epic Stranger in a Strange Land as well as his libertarian screed-novel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Hippies and nerds alike reveled in Heinlein’s contempt for centralized authority. To this day, computer scientists and technicians are almost universally science-fiction fans. And ever since the 1950s, for reasons that are unclear to me, science fiction has been almost universally libertarian in outlook.
Heinlein and his circle don’t figure prominently in the Catalog, in which the work of fiction that receives the most attention is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But Brand later recommended the Foundation trilogy as part of the Manual for Civilization collection at the Long Now Foundation, which may have been a subtle hint to its true intentions. In the Foundation series, after all, the writing of the Encyclopedia Galactica is an elaborate mislead, a pretext to build an organization that will ultimately be turned to other ends. An even better excuse might be the construction and maintenance of an enormous clock designed to last for ten thousand years—an idea that is obviously too farfetched for fiction. In an interview, Brand’s friend Kevin Kelly protested too much: “We’re not trying to be Hari Seldon from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.” Yeah, right.
Brand himself was only tangentially inspired by science fiction, and his primarily exposure to it was evidently through the remarkable people with whom he surrounded himself. In his book The Media Lab, which was published in 1988, Brand asks the roboticist Marvin Minsky why he’s so interested in science fiction writers, and he quotes from the answer at length:
Well, I think of them as thinkers. They try to figure out the consequences and implications of things in as thoughtful a way as possible. A couple of hundred years from now, maybe Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they’re just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren’t very powerful. Whenever Pohl or Asimov writes something, I regard it as extremely urgent to read it right away. They might have a new idea. Asimov has been working for forty years on this problem: if you can make an intelligent machine, what kind of relations will it have with people? How do you negotiate when their thinking is so different? The science fiction writers think about what it means to think.
Along with Asimov and Pohl, Brand notes, the other writers whom Minsky studied closely included Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein, Gregory Benford, James P. Hogan, John W. Campbell, and H.G. Wells. “If Minsky had his way,” Brand writes, “there would always be a visiting science fiction writer in resident at the Media Lab.” In practice, that’s more or less how it worked out—Campbell was a frequent visitor, as was Asimov, who said that Minsky was one of the handful of people, along with Carl Sagan, whom he acknowledged as being more intelligent than he was.
To be honest, I doubt that Asimov and Pohl will ever be remembered as “the important philosophers of the twentieth century,” although if they might have a better shot if you replace “philosophers” with “futurologists.” It seems a reasonably safe bet that the Three Laws of Robotics, which Campbell casually tossed out in his office for Asimov to develop, will be remembered longer than the vast majority of the work being produced by the philosophy departments of that era. But even for Kesey, Brand, and all the rest, the relationship was less about influence than about simple proximity. When Wolfe speaks of “an acausal connecting bond” between Heinlein and the Merry Pranksters, he’s consciously echoing the subtitle of Carl Jung’s Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, which may be the best way to think about it. During moments of peak cultural intensity, ideas are simultaneously developed by different communities in ways that may only occasionally intersect. (On April 6, 1962, for instance, Asimov wrote to Campbell to recommend that he investigate the video game Spacewar, which had been developed just two months earlier at MIT. Campbell spent the next decade trying to get an article on it for Analog, which Albert W. Kuhfeld finally wrote up for the July 1971 issue. A year later, Brand wrote a piece about it for Rolling Stone.) And Brand himself was keenly aware of the costs of such separation. In The Media Lab, he writes:
Somewhere in my education I was misled to believe that science fiction and science fact must be kept rigorously separate. In practice they are so blurred together they are practically one intellectual activity, although the results are published differently, one kind of journal for careful scientific reporting, another kind for wicked speculation.
In 1960, Campbell tried to tear down those barriers in a single audacious move, when he changed the title of his magazine from Astounding to Analog Science Fact & Fiction. For most of his career, Brand has been doing the same thing, only far more quietly. But I have a hunch that his approach may be the one that succeeds.
Quote of the Day
In psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of…Therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient’s secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment.
Quote of the Day
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.
Quote of the Day
Intuition is almost indispensable in the interpretation of symbols, and it can often ensure that they are immediately understood by the dreamer. But while such a lucky hunch may be subjectively convincing, it can also be rather dangerous. It can so easily lead to a false sense of security…The safe basis of real intellectual knowledge and moral understanding gets lost if one is content with the vague satisfaction of having understood by “hunch.” One can explain and know only if one has reduced intuitions to an exact knowledge of facts and their logical connections.
A meditation on the tarot
A few weeks ago, I picked up a pack of tarot cards. As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve long been interested in using forms of randomness to inform the writing process, largely because I’m such a left-brained writer in other ways. Raids on the random of various kinds have served as a creative tool for millennia, of course, although they were seen less as randomness than as divination. And regardless of your thoughts on their validity, accuracy, or philosophical basis, there’s little question, at least to my mind, that they offer a set of valuable approaches to modes of thinking that often go unactivated in everyday life. Jung, for instance, used tarot and the I Ching with patients undergoing psychotherapy, noting—and this is a crucial point—that the results thus derived were worth close attention when they seemed to converge on a single interpretation. Tarot and the like aren’t ends in themselves, but a medium in which intuitive thought can take place, and as such, I think they deserve to be sampled by creative professionals whose livelihoods depend on accessing that kind of thinking on a regular basis.
That said, I resisted the tarot for a long time, mostly because it carries so much symbolic and cultural baggage: it’s easier for an otherwise rational writer to justify drawing one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards, say, than to lay out a celtic cross spread. Still, tarot has received serious attention from writers as otherwise dissimilar as Robert Graves, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Anton Wilson, and when you strip away its distracting connotations, you’re left with a set of flexible, versatile symbols that have been subjected to a long process of historical refinement. Tarot, like most useful forms of creative thought, is primarily about combination and juxtaposition, both with the problem at hand and between the cards themselves. It’s really a portable machine for generating patterns, and while you could theoretically do this with any assortment of random words or ideas, like the protagonists of Foucault’s Pendulum, it probably helps—both pragmatically and psychologically—to begin with a coherent collection of images that other creative thinkers have used in the past.
With this in mind, I bought an inexpensive pack of cards depicting the Tarot of Marseilles, which Jung, among others, regarded as the most stimulating of the many possible designs. (It’s also the pack at the heart of Meditations on the Tarot, one of the oddest, densest books in my home library, although it’s less a work on the tarot itself than one that uses the cards as a gateway into a more discursive look at esoteric theology.) I’ve been laying out cards now and then as I outline a new writing project, and the results have been promising enough that I expect to continue. Occasionally, the readings I get seem to have an uncanny relevance to the problem at hand, and while it’s easy to chalk this up to the mind’s ability to see connections when given a set of ambiguous symbols, this doesn’t make it any less useful. Any practice that encourages ten minutes of loosely structured thought about a creative dilemma is likely to come up with something valuable, and even if it’s the ten minutes that really count, it’s easier when the process is guided by a series of established steps.
And what makes the tarot potentially more useful than other alternatives is its visual nature, as well as the way in which it results in a temporary structure—in the form of the cards spread across the table—that can be scrutinized from various angles. At its best, it’s an externalization or extension of your own thoughts: instead of confronting the problem entirely in your own head, you’re putting a version of it down where you can see it, examine it, or even walk away from it. It’s a variation of what we do when we write notes to ourselves, which are really dispatches from a past version of ourself to the future, even if it’s only a few seconds or minutes away. The nice thing about tarot is that it concretizes the problem in a form that’s out of our control, forcing us to take the extra step of mapping the issues we’re mulling over onto the array of symbols that the deck has generated. If we’re patient, inventive, or imaginative enough, we can map it so closely that the result seems foreordained, a form of notetaking that obliges us to collaborate with something larger. This can only lead to surprising insights, and even if it ultimately leads us to where we were already going, it allows us to pick up a little more along the way.
The dreamlife of artists
Last week, I finished reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, essentially for the first time. I’ve long been familiar with parts of it, but I’d never managed to work through the entire thing from cover to cover, although I suspected that I’d find it useful as a writer. (David Mamet, for one, recommends it to aspiring screenwriters in On Directing Film, noting that the sequence of cuts in movies has affinities to the procession of imagery in dreams.) What I’ve found is that while Freud’s reputation has taken hit after hit in recent years, the caricatured version of his ideas that most of us have absorbed has little to do with his real body of work. Freud was a frighteningly inventive and perceptive thinker—and also an excellent essayist—who was right about most of the big things, even if many of the particulars, as ingenious as they are, no longer stand up to scrutiny. And nowhere is his originality more clearly on display than in The Interpretation of Dreams, which at its heart is a probing, sometimes difficult, but always enlightening act of literary analysis on the most intractable texts imaginable.
What Freud is really proposing, in fact, is nothing less than a general theory of creativity, except that it happens to take place in a part of the brain that we aren’t used to observing. In Freud’s conception, a dream originates as a repressed wish, often from early childhood, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be sexual in nature: it can reflect other physical and emotional needs, as well as such desires as those for power, respect, fulfillment, or the love and safety of those close to us. This primal wish is united with details from the day before—the more trivial and insignificant the better—that happen to provide raw material for the wish to take on a concrete form. The result is then subjected to several additional processes that make the underlying meaning harder to discern. There’s condensation, in which multiple dream thoughts are fused into a single object or image; displacement, in which an unsettling wish is transferred to something else or transformed into its opposite; and the tendency for dreams to depict abstract concepts and feelings in visual terms, often in bewildering ways that owe more to wordplay and association than to waking logic.
Finally, there’s a kind of editing function involved, an attempt by the brain to rework all of this ungainly material into something resembling a coherent narrative. (Freud notes that this interstitial imagery, as the mind stitches together unfiltered components from the unconscious into a sequence of events, is usually the least convincing part of the dream.) And while I don’t intend to get into a discussion of the overall validity of Freud’s ideas, I can’t help but think that this a surprisingly accurate account of how the creative process works in waking life. A story or work of art generally originates in deep-seated impulses—ideas and feelings that have been percolating in the artist’s inner life for some time—but it builds itself up from more recent pieces, images or fragments of experience that have lately caught the creator’s eye. These elements from the real world are progressively condensed, displaced, and dramatized in tangible ways. And ultimately, they’re edited and revised, often at more than one stage in the process, so that the result has a logic that wasn’t present in earlier drafts, but at the risk, as Freud identified, of ending up with something calculated and unpersuasive.
Whether this means that creative thought really is a kind of dream, as so many artists have suggested, or that creativity and dreaming are two aspects of the same process exercised at different times, is something I won’t try to settle here. I will say, however, that I’ve grown increasingly convinced of the importance of listening to the lessons that dreams present. (Freud points out, for instance, that dreams often express temporal or causal logic in spatial terms, so that instead of showing one event causing another, the two events are simply shown side by side. This seems like a promising area of exploration for writers, who are often called upon to compress long chains of causality into a single scene or image.) As Freud, Jung, and others have pointed out, our conscious mind is there for a reason: it’s what allows us to form societies, build bridges, and write novels that can be understood by more than one person, and none of this would be possible if we didn’t keep the unconscious under control. Like an analyst, however, a writer needs to make incursions into those deeper levels on a regular basis, while always sustained by diligence and craft, and in both cases, we may find that our dreams can point the way.
The knowledge of the hands
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands know how to solve a riddle with which the intellect has wrestled in vain. By shaping it, one goes on dreaming the dream in greater detail in the waking state, and the initially incomprehensible, isolated event is integrated into the sphere of the total personality, even though it remains at first unconscious to the subject.
The book and the tower
Over the last few days, I’ve been browsing with great interest through The Red Book of the psychiatrist Carl Jung, the massive illuminated folio that he labored over in private for more than fifteen years, and which was finally published in a handsome volume from W.W. Norton. As someone who has long been interested in learning more about Jung without quite knowing where to start, I’ve found The Red Book to be an ideal entry point, largely because the story of its own origin and development aligns with many of my own thoughts on creativity. It arose out of a long period of thought and introspection centering on one question: “What myth are you living?” Jung notes that he didn’t know the answer at first, and he continues:
So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks, for—so I told myself—how could I, when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person, if I was unconscious of it? I simply had to know what unconscious or preconscious myth was forming me, from what rhizome I sprang.
The result was The Red Book, an unforgettable collection of illustrations and calligraphic texts expanding on Jung’s dreams and visions. (It currently retails for the daunting price of $145, although it should be available at most larger public and university libraries, which is where I found my copy.) When I leaf through it, it feels both like a look backward at such works as The Book of Kells and a prediction of the likes of the Codex Seraphinianus, but would be a mistake to read it as solely an obsessive work of borderline mysticism. In fact, as the lines I’ve quoted above indicate, its motivation was intensely practical. While Jung was working out his visions in private, he was also seeing patients as a practicing psychiatrist, and the work he produced was intended to serve as a kind of catalog or incursion into his own unconscious, as well as an intuitive form of exploration and meditation. For a man whose legacy and career rested on a sustained engagement with his own inner life and those of others, few projects could be more important or pragmatic, and the result served as a source of inspiration for his published books and papers. As Jung himself says: “The years…when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this.”
The Red Book can best be understood, then, as an elaborate intermediate stage in a singular creative process. Intuition and vision came first, followed by an extended phase of development that made equal time for serendipity and meticulous work. Jung went through countless drafts of the text for each page and did careful preparatory drawings for the illustrations, which comes as no surprise: a work as detailed and coherent as this doesn’t emerge out of nothing. As any writer or artist can testify, it’s in the selfless, almost detached process of mechanical perfection—drawing the grid, laying out the design, refining the raw material until the result is both aesthetically pleasing and formally sound—that we make our greatest discoveries. Jung already kept journals of his dreams and visions, but to drill down to their fundamental meaning and transform them into something with a wider application, something more was required. Hence this almost absurdly intricate work of illumination, which unfolded for his own benefit while nourishing ideas intended for a wider audience. (On a much lower level, I’m reminded of how I try to make the notes and mind maps for my own stories look nice for their own sake. No one else will ever see these preparatory stages, but I’d like to think that the effort pays off in the finished product.)
And it’s no accident that Jung’s great work of exploration took a form requiring considerable visual, manual, and conceptual patience, a work of the hand and eye as much of the mind. Later, he purchased a tract of land in Bollingen, on the shores of Lake Zurich, where he slowly built a castle of stone in his retirement, returning on a larger scale to the constructions of blocks that he enjoyed as a child. When you spend your life exploring the inner self, it’s easy to neglect the senses, which is why it can be so helpful to incorporate processes that require all parts of one’s body and personality. (At around the time Jung was building his castle, Winston Churchill was constructing walls on his property for much the same reason: an ideal day, he said, would include “the laying of hundreds of bricks.”) The Red Book is an expression of the same underlying need as Bollingen Tower, a form of thought that requires the artist to be dextrous and untiring as well as intelligent and intuitive. If the result often goes unseen—or, in Jung’s case, unpublished for decades after his death—the effects of such solitary, loving work can have greater reverberations than more seemingly practical pursuits. And if we’re trying to discover, as Jung was, what kind of myth we’re all living, the act of illumination often works both ways.
Becoming a writer for the wrong reasons
Earlier this week, I finished reading Anthony Storr’s The Art of Psychotherapy, which is probably the best book I’ve seen on the subject—it’s humane, richly informed, and full of useful details and advice. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’ve long been interested in the parallels between writing and psychoanalysis, and with that in mind, I was particularly struck by the following passage:
I once had a conversation with the director of a monastery. “Everyone who comes to us,” he said, “does so for the wrong reasons.” The same is generally true of people who become psychotherapists. It is sometimes possible to persuade people to become psychotherapists who have not chosen the profession for their own personal reasons; but, for the most part, we have to put up with what we can get; namely, ourselves.
Storr’s point is that psychoanalysis tends to attract people of an inward, reflective temperament who are looking for insights into their own emotional problems, a quality that can turn into a liability in a field in which the therapist necessarily needs to remain in the background. And much the same is true of novelists, who generally find that the reasons that drew them to the profession in the first place aren’t the ones that end up keeping them there.
Personality issues aside, it’s sobering just to look at the math. It’s often said that you need to write a million words or more before you develop your own voice as a writer, and although we can argue over specific numbers, the underlying principle remains sound. Ten years or more of focused work on different projects usually lie behind any debut novel, which means that, aside from the rare case of a writer who found his or her calling late in life, the majority of authors devoted themselves to writing sometime in their teens or twenties. Writing for a living often amounts to the systematic working out of a childhood obsession, as if you decided after college that you really did want to become both an astronaut and a ballerina, and there’s something inherently irrational about that decision: you’ve chosen to pursue it despite strong evidence that it will never become a viable career, regardless of how talented you might be. It’s the kind of idealistic gesture that a young, inexperienced person is predisposed to make. And if I’d be inclined to be skeptical of any major life decisions I made in my early twenties, why should my choice of career be any exception?
Fortunately, what usually happens is that a writer’s original motivations, once they’ve been tested by the everyday experience of trying to tell stories for a living, are gradually replaced by their opposites. We’re driven early on by ego and ambition, a desire for fame, or simply to see our names in print, all of which yields over time to a realization of how much of himself an author needs to give up: far from enjoying the kind of fame we once imagined, we’re working in solitude, and days may go by before we have a meaningful conversation with anyone outside our immediate families. A writer may start with an urge for self-expression, only to find that detachment—or the ability to give voice to perspectives far outside one’s own—is much more important. (Storr usefully quotes Jung on the subject: “Feeling only comes through unprejudiced objectivity.”) Even if you begin with nothing more than the desire to tell a good story, you quickly find your attention being distracted by everything else: language, discipline, structure, the tedious housekeeping of keeping your ideas straight. By the end, even if you do start to think of yourself as a writer, it’s as a very different animal than the one you first envisioned when you put words on the page.
The writing life, like any other calling, shapes its practitioners in surprising ways, and the instruments that it chooses aren’t always the ones you initially expect. An aspiring monk soon finds that monastery living is less about ceaseless contemplation of the divine than about scrubbing floors, washing pots, and digging ditches, and a writer discovers that he’s defined less by his moments of inspiration than by what he does in the long stretches between those transformative insights. It reminds me a little of the protagonist of Chekhov’s “The Bet,” who agrees to spend fifteen years in solitary confinement to win a wage of two million rubles, then ends up—through long reading and contemplation—despising the physical world so completely that he leaves five minutes before the term is up. A writer’s situation isn’t so stark, and he never entirely gives up the reasons that brought him to writing in the beginning, even they ultimately give way to others. Sooner or later, though, he’s bound to wake up, look around, and realize that he’s no longer the same version of himself who made the wager on which he staked the best years of his life. The wager itself remains in effect, and the stakes, if anything, are higher than ever. But the person who made the bet has changed.
Quote of the Day
One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others may despise it, is the invention of good games.
The curious beetle of Carl Jung
My example [of synchronicity] concerns a young woman patient who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism with an impeccably “geometrical” idea of reality. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would turn up, something that burst the intellectual retort into which she had sealed herself. Well, I was sitting opposite of her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab-a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window and immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer, whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words “Here is your scarab.” This broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.
Alec Nevala-Lee 