ARCHIVED—Threads of Thought

This group has been archived due to inactivity.

Extending and deepening the horizons of psychological thinking and new philosophical ideas.

47 Members

Join Us!

You need to be a member of Depth Psychology Alliance to add comments!

Join Depth Psychology Alliance

Comments are closed.

Comments

Martina Young April 30, 2011 at 8:20am

Well now, this is the place of intersection: individual and world soul. It seems to me that as poethical as soul is, there is a guiding and proprioceptive knowing that is palpated by the asking. I will invoke a Hillmanian response here: I feel that as individuals, each of us have an opportunity to discover exactly what in our lives can be "let go of," what we can "allow die" --even tend to the dying -- and therein find a place of living with grace (the is-ness of the times AND our ability to always act with sentient gentleness, compassion, sincerity -- i. e. grace.)
Ed Koffenberger April 30, 2011 at 7:58am

Martina,
Taking what you shared as the state of things today (my assumption that you believe this to be true), what guidance do we who are choosing not to be a member of the Iron Age of consciousness have? Is it a matter of sitting and awaiting the next age to come? Taking up "arms" against the current age? Separating ourselves in some way, mentally/physically/spiritually, from the rest of the world?
Martina Young April 30, 2011 at 7:50am

“This is Kali Yuga,” asserts Zooey Glass in J.D. Salinger’s novella, Franny and Zooey; “[it’s] the Iron Age.”[1] According to Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Iron Age is an evolutionary period in human consciousness beset with “toil and misery”; it is a time when the fifth race of men is “in constant misery.” From this account, we learn that Zeus “will destroy this race of men too. . . . Fist-law men [will] sack another’s town, and there will be no thanks for the man who abides by his oath. . . . Law and decency will be in fists.”[2]

Kali Yuga: a re-contextualization of our times . . .

[1] Franny and Zooey. New York: Little Brown and Company, 1961. 140.

[2] Hesiod, Works and Days. Trans. M. L. West. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. (lines 156-91).
stephanie pope March 1, 2011 at 2:51pm

I wanted to respond to a portion of this strand by way of image. The image is taken from the larger, earlier narrative...

...the Unconsicous is merely from Bataille's point of view... absent, always absent, and never becomes present. It is... full of traces, and those traces... and the organization of those traces by our finitude is the Multiple of the Archetypes.

So the image is "the trace" which remains absent to return by way of its remains; "remains" as in the Hillmaning sense, "the return of the main repressed.". Hillman's "seeing through" is really a seeing from within this absence from its point of view. The shadowy fantasies of psyche-making (soul-making) or the fantasies that shade and shadow psyche (and this thought is suggested by David Miller in his 1976Panarion Conference address on the poetic revolution in psychemaking, a talk entitled, " Mythopoesis, Psychopoesis & Theopoesis: Poetries of Meaning.")

Regarding such archetypal makings in art eXpression (X= the unknown archetypal symbol for this fundamentally dark component of self and world), here is Alwar Balasubramaniam working with "traces" to eXpress the Art of s...

Enjoy.
Bonnie Bright February 28, 2011 at 11:14pm

Kent: I absolutely agree with everything you are saying and wish you well in your quest for understanding. I think it's a vitally important topic. I'm only recommending you mitigate the format a bit for the benefit of the community at large and post your comments and questions in fewer--and perhaps longer--segments instead of so many numerous short postings. I certainly can't speak for everyone--and don't consider the Alliance "my group" at all--but rather an equal consortium of like-minded individuals who all gather her to learn and to share. Hence, my concern is simply that of facilitator (and mother hen)---hoping for a format that will work for all without meaning to limit discussion or quest for depth and understanding in any way...
Kent Palmer February 28, 2011 at 11:03pm

Bonnie--

I have already written those books and they are mostly available. I am not saying much here that I have not already written in my works that are available.

I got to the point I wanted to get to so I can get some help with this problem that I have posed here. It is a mystery. You are welcome to read those more extensive presentations.

It could be that someone in your group will know some key piece of the puzzle that I have not been able to find. And also my idea was to make others aware of the theory I am discussing so that perhaps I might get some constructive criticism.

Sorry if you find it a bit overwhelming. But sometimes actual "depth" is complex. When we put Jung back into the context of the history of ideas on the Continent then suddenly things get very complicated. And there should be lots of viewpoints on how Jung fits into our tradition as a whole. As long as we are in a bubble where all that exists is Jung and perhaps Hillman then things remain fairly simple. But as soon as we start looking at Jung within his intellectual context within the history of ideas then it becomes difficult. Seems like we ought to talk about that since we have decided to go as deep as we can.

If this theory is correct, i.e. Jung knew about the Special Systems and Emergent Meta-system and patterned his theory on that, then that is going to change things pretty fundamentally, because that means his theory has a very specific architectonic structure driven by mathematics and physics that has a precursor in Plato. It also means that Hillman is probably wrong about Jung because there is some structure there, and it is not just a series of texts that we can project anything we like on. I would imagine this idea is provocative along with some of the others that I have mentioned, like the connection between Jung and Lacan (ala Zizek), and the connection between Hillman and Derrida. All that was an attempt to extend and deepen the horizons of psychological thinking and new philosophical ideas.

Thanks for your attention, I hope perhaps someone can help. I have been waiting to ask this question for a long time. So I hope you will forgive my over enthusiasm for the subject. But as you can see I am fascinated by this question, because Jung is almost unique in our tradition in this respect after Plato. It my theory is true it is going to change the status of Jung significantly. To me he is a thinker on the par with Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche. He solved a major philosophical problem with his idea of the archetype which has not been given its due recognition, and I think we as Jungians should attempt to get that to be recognized. We can only do that by engaging in the entire tradition. It is particularly problematic that no one reads Jung within the Continental Tradition because of the fascination with Freud and Lacan.

Kent
Bonnie Bright February 28, 2011 at 9:58pm

Hi Kent: You have offered much food for thought here in the Depth Psychology community. Clearly your knowledge is extensive in the areas of not only Philosophy but also Jung, Alchemy, and the way these topics interact. I encourage you to put all your thoughts in one article or blogpost and publish it all at once so those of us who are interested can read it all in one place and respond. I know for me, personally, due to the fast-pace of modern culture and the lifestyle which I have personally adopted, it's hard to follow a conversation that occurs in fragmentary bits and pieces and I often prefer to sit down and take in ideas at some level of depth rather than breadth. I'll be on the lookout for your cohesive posting: You may have a book by the time you are done--one I would love to read.
Kent Palmer February 28, 2011 at 8:44pm

If we consider that Jung based his Archetypal Psychology on the Special Systems then it begs the question, how did he find that, when it was effectively lost in our tradition. A key piece of evidence is in Aion where he discusses the mariage square of Moses which is given a formation which is called thequaternity of

quaternites. This is in effect an image of the Emergent Meta-system which is a structure that effectively models the arising of something out of nothing (karma). Now the fascinating thing is that when I looked for an image of this structure that Jung talks about in Aion we can see it in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and so we know that has ancient roots. It is in effect the combination of the System with the Special Systems to produce an image of the Meta-system as emergent. So since he knew about the Emergent Meta-system, some how pulling it out of his Alchemical Studies, then it makes sense that he would have known about the Special Systems themselves and this is probably not just my projection. When the Red Book came out I looked for a representation of the Special Systems and the Emergent Meta-system but did not see them there, much to my disappointment. But when the exhibit of the Red Book and sketches came around I recognized that this image of the Emergent Meta-system appears in the sketches, and then those were refined into some of the images in the book. This is I think a pretty amazing confirmation of the hypothesis that Jung's psychology of archetypes is based on his knowledge of the Special Systems and the Emergent Meta-system. And I am hoping that some scholars among you might point out to me where this knowledge came from which I believe that Jung possessed even as early as the start of the Red Book. Did these images just spontaneously appear from his unconscious, or did he understand them from his research into various cultural phenomena, or did it come from his reflection on his patients. I believe it must have come from somewhere, since it is such a rare thing in the Western worldview. One of the only other examples I have of someone who understood the Emergent Meta-system in the Western tradition is Leibniz in his Monadology. Of course, it is almost everywhere in Plato, and since he did produce a dual of the Platonic Ideas as his basic contribution to Psychology, it could be that he understood it from Plato, but I have found no evidence of that in his works. So I am looking for help to try to solve this great mystery which I have failed to solve myself. Hopefully the some help from those who know his works better than I will solve the mystery. Then I think we will have fundamentally advanced the understanding of Jungs Archetypal Psychology. It is not random but as a very definite structure that comes from various mathematical models that can be used as analogies to define the structure of both the Special Systems and the Emergent Meta-system.

"syzygy--together, the archetypes form what Jung called a syzygy, which is "a quaternion composing a whole, the unified self in which people are in search" (504). The syzygy is an equal balance of shadow, anima, animus, and spirit. Emma Jung states that "four-foldness is one of the most universal of symbols for the quaternity often appears as the expression or representation of the growth of consciousness" (84)." http://schneesmom.org/World_Lit_Stuff/lecturenotes.html
Kent Palmer February 28, 2011 at 8:21pm

Jung thinks there are certain cultural phenomena like for instance mandalas that give us some insight into the wholeness of the Self and through which the individual can seek the individuation of his psyche. Wholeness in these terms have to include what is excluded by the Ego. In other words we have a move from the unity of consciousness in the Ego, to a kind of totalization that is global for the individual and does not exclude anything. That means he is allowing the Self to be a general economy. Between the ego (restricted economy = system) and the Self (general economy = meta-system) are layers and these are the levels of archetypal unfolding. They are different for the masculine and feminine finite beings. They are in fact organized by the meta-levels of Being and appear interleaved with what I call the Special Systems. (See http://works.bepress.com/kent_palmer Reflexive Autopoietic Dissipative Special Systems Theory.) It is amazing to me that Jung knew about this structure of the Special Systems. He gives no hint how he learned about it, because it is very rare in our tradition. See Page 14 of Sol Luna Conjunction informal briefing given to group reading the Mysterium Conjunctus. Special Systems theory appears many places in Plato, and he clearly received this wisdom from the Egyptians. It formed the basis of Alchemy as we see in Bolos the Democritian, but then was more or less lost in our tradition except for a few rare instances like Jung. It may be that Jung got it from Gnostic sources, but I have not found that source yet.
Kent Palmer February 28, 2011 at 8:00pm

Jung accepts that Nietzsche is right that there will not be any organization with unity and totality of the Archetypes because the collective unconscious is a general economy in the sense of Bataille. However, he does think we can understand individual archetypes within the Collective Unconscious by looking at culture globally, and by looking at the dreams, fantasies, etc of the individuals that are living in and building culture as they are immersed in their finitude. Best of all this does not require any transcendentals so Nietzsche's critique of transcendentals (Headlands above the world) are met, And we do not have to invoke an idealism or platonism in order to make sense of these phenomena that are prior to consciousness but show up as anomalies in consciousness (i.e. in the Shadows).

of 7

This reply was deleted.

Forum

Extending the application of Jung's Psychological Types from clinical experience.

The title remains a starter to the notion that it is through the inferior function of the patient/client where insight can be forthcoming. A second point is that the primary notion of psych' Types can be both simplified and expanded to include archetypal identities as well as each type having objectives within their primary function. Thirdly: there is a critical path of decision making that can be both found, recognised and once understood, can offer insight into dis function according to where…