Remembering Dr. Jung's birthday smacks of sentimentality. Still I must shamelessly confess that all things Jung mean something special to me. Recently, Marvin Spiegelman wrote a wonderful review of my new book, Embodying Osiris, for the Jung Journal. Aside from the complementary things he wrote, I treasure it for the fact that he attended Jung's lectures and personally knew Marie Louise von Franz. Then there is Robert Johnson, my first analyst, who had a session with Jung to discuss a big dream. I could go on with these examples but this is sounding like bragging - which it is not. Admittedly, I've become a groupie in my older age treasuring signed books, collecting old photographs, reading intimate biographical details and yes, remembering Jung's birthday.
If any defense is needed, I plead "Egyptian." In my research of ancient Egypt, I've learned that these people believed that large reserves of a special magical power, heka, are contained in the gods, the pharaoh and the ancestors. This is the reason why we find the graves of masons, builders and even commoners buried need the pyramids. In one case, a man sneaked his dead child into the tomb of a pharaoh, hoping his child would thereby become immortal. (A ruined ritual described in the Osiris myth suggests a similar experiment.) As a kid growing up in a staunch Catholic tradition, I was impressed with the sacredness of relics - the bones of saints, popes, even some say, splinters from Christ's cross. If we translate heka into its modern equivalent, libido, an explanation for my sentimentality offers itself: I am attracted to the energetic power of life. Call me primitive, magical, Egyptian, whatever, but I believe in the flow of psychic energy and its powerful effects. Venerating Jung's birthday does not, in my view, elevate him to god status, but he does fall into that last category - ancestor.
Just as Jung thought himself a distant relative of Goethe, I like to imagine that I am Jung's kin. And just like his biological relatives who long protected his Red Book from being published, I feel a similar duty in carrying on his tradition through my writing, speaking and therapy work. I feel as though I was born into this family and in it I find a natural kinship with others who feel as I do. So let us cousins celebrate the birthday of this great man and carry on the work he started. There is a lot to do!!
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