Cast upon this planet so many aeons ago, imperiled, sensitive, semi-conscious, and vulnerable, humankind learned fear. Their fears were not imagined; their perils were real as ours remain. However, the danger rises in how those fears metastasize and begin to morph into multiple behaviors and venues, leading to this necessary interrogation of our fears: “what do they make us do, or keep us from doing.”

In 1937 C. G. Jung was invited to give the distinguished Terry Lectures at Yale University, a series of three presentations gathered under the title “Psychology and Religion.” In the second essay he speaks of how groups of people congeal their fears around some focus, and very quickly find someone to blame for their distress. Given that a palpable cause, a definable agent has been constellated, that group wields its assembled powers and weaponry against the enemy. The power of this assault on the presumptive foe is explained, Jung observes, “by fear of the neighboring nation, which is supposed to be possessed by a malevolent devil. As nobody is capable of recognizing where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, one simply projects one’s own condition upon the neighbor, and thus it becomes the sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas.” (“Psychology and Religion,” p. 60, 1938).

What we cannot handle in ourselves will be repressed, split off, projected off onto others. What we cannot face in ourselves becomes demonstrably intolerable in the other, the other who embodies what we find so repulsive within. Since this self-protective mechanism is designed to shelter the fragile ego state, we can in good consciousness claim to see the repelled contents embodied in the neighbor who now carries what is disowned by us. (How different is that from the speaker in a short poem by Bertolt Brecht who, looking in the mirror, says, “there is a person you can’t trust.”).

Back in 1912, Jung wrote that our daily summons is to stand up to fear. Fear, he metaphorically describes is the serpent whose toxic bite quickly spreads through our systems and triggers a general weakening. Accordingly, he adds, our daily summons is to risk and reclaim our lives by stepping into and through those fears. If that risk is not taken, the meaning of life is violated. (Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, para . 551)

If Jung is right, then the fear that I would have to face is not in my opponent, or my neighbor; it is in me, the one who stares back from the mirror. If it is so difficult to face our fears, our limitations, our compromised limitations how fragile our ego states must be. I can face your limitations, your humanity, apparently, but I cannot face mine. When the Roman playwright Terrence concluded over two millennia ago, “nothing human is alien to me,” he demonstrated the courage of simple honesty. His is a courage which today continues to challenge all of us, and frankly, intimidate us.

Later in those lectures at Yale, Jung comes round to the same conclusion and explains, “if you can imagine someone brave enough to withdraw these projections,…then you get an individual conscious of a pretty thick shadow.” Such a person, he adds, “knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow then he has done something real for the world.” (“Psychology and Religion,” p. 101-2, 1938) Such a person helps the healing of a society by lifting his or her unexamined life off of the collective, off of the partner, off of one’s children. Such a person has contributed to the healing of his or her world by acknowledging and accepting the work of healing oneself first before trying to fix others.

In our belligerent and contentious time, we are asked to clean up our own backyards before we criticize our neighbors, own our own fears before we dump them elsewhere. How many of us, and how often, can we find the courage to do that? How much easier it is to remain fearful, timorous, and blameless.

James Hollis, Ph.D. is a Zurich-trained Jungian analyst in practice in Washington, D. C. He is also author of fifteen books translated into nineteen languages. 

“It has become abundantly clear…that life can flow forward only along the path of a gradient.”

(CW 7, 78)

Since the Fall, several of us in the Jung Society of Washington’s Reading Seminar have debated what Jung meant by “gradient.” The term skips through the Collected Works (CW) like a bright star—all streak and color—but is never defined satisfactorily. You won’t always find it in the indexes, and when you do stumble across it, there’s not much to chew on, as if Jung decided to be annoyingly vague on purpose.

I like elusive concepts. They activate my inner scholar adventurer, compelling me to piece together the tesserae until an image appears. And, this possible image has made a deep impression on me, stunning me with its poetry and beauty.

Before digging into the gradient, it’s important to revisit the energy Jung believed flowed along it. He called it “libido” and “psychic energy,” but we also know it as “chi,” “prana,” “ki,” or “mana.” This energy, which moves through all of life, is like “water” (CW 5, 337). It has a “natural penchant” and crackles with its own intelligence—it wants what it wants. You can’t will it to move or force it to take a particular direction. Nope. This energy acts fastidiously, insistent upon the fulfillment of its own conditions (CW 7, 76, CW 8, 78).

Jung felt that the energy’s flow had a definite direction (goal)—a natural, right way. If you could follow it, then you could realize the Self. “No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you” (Red Book, p. 308). Yet, following one’s natural gradient (way) is much easier said than done. Today, it’s like trying to keep an eye on your True North in whiteout conditions while your man-made, Siri-powered GPS shouts, “Please return to the highlighted route.”

Anyone who has spent time in the proverbial midlife crisis knows the collective is not interested in your self-actualization. It would prefer you go its way, choose its more favorable gradient, and set your energy along its prescribed and unnatural ways.

Such Faustian bargains never turn out well for the Self. Very slowly, the energy of our lives retreats, often goes on walkabout into the unconscious, and waits for us to claim it. Many of us don’t even notice it’s gone until we wake up feeling hollowed out, dried out, and alone. Even Jung succumbed, having first invested his energy on Freud’s gradient before painfully discovering his own.

If you’ve been likewise hooked, don’t fret. You’re in the best place possible to rediscover your gradient. Everything you need is within you. The biggest question is whether you have the courage to go within and sit with what you find. This isn’t overnight work. Jung sat in the tension of his opposites for close to a decade, relying on creativity and curiosity to make sense of it all. His inner voices filled hundreds of pages and gave him everything.

I think one path back to the natural gradient is a radical acceptance of our own humanity—the good, the bad, and the ugly—a willingness to love what we find when we’re with ourselves, and a desire to make amends to the parts we have cast off and neglected. As we become the container for our Self, we have a better chance to listen deeply, honor what we hear, and take authentic action.

Jung said it well in the Red Book, “Protect the riddles, bear them in your heart, warm them, be pregnant with them. Thus you carry the future…Great is the power of the way. In it Heaven and Hell grow together, and in it the power of the Below and the Power of the Above unite” (p. 308). The gradient is the path the heart must take through the mind’s abyss. It is the road that takes us to our holy center and where we become wholly centered.

While reflecting on a recent encounter I was reminded of a seminar at the C.G. Jung Institute Boston on the Self as Paradox, and Jung’s observation that “the other is always present.”  Recently some colleagues of mine and I stopped at our local pub one block away from the school where I worked.  Over drinks we talked about the upcoming Christmas Show and the songs that the children were going to sing. One of the standard songs that the Early Childhood students (ages 3-5) is a popular song “Happy Birthday Jesus.”  This version of the song is not set to the familiar tune. It is, to my ear, quite opposite. When I hear the version the young children sing I hear a strong hint of melancholy. Perhaps its the chordal structure that might stir a whiff of sadness, not overwhelming, but a subtle sadness that I connect with the Christian myth of the Divine Child.  

Today, as I was reflecting on the upcoming performance, I remembered a traditional carol where the text includes a stanza that reflects both the joy and sorrow of the birth of Christ.  The Infant King, a Basque carol I’ve sung for years as a chorister, is a lullaby, reminding the listener to sit quietly as the Holy Child sleeps.  In the second and third stanzas the choir followed by the soprano soloist sings: 

“Sing lullaby!

 Lullaby baby, now a-sleeping,

 Sing lullaby!

 Hush, do not wake the infant king.

 Soon will come sorrow with the morning,

 Soon will come bitter grief and weeping:

 Sing lullaby!

“Sing lullaby!

 Lullaby baby, now a-dozing:

 Sing lullaby!

 Hush, do not wake, the infant king.

 Soon comes the cross, the nails, the piercing,

 Then in the grave at last reposing:

 Sing lullaby!”

At first listen, one might be tempted to turn from the brutality of the crucifixion and the contrasting image of a sweet baby sleeping.  Yet in the Holy Child, lies a paradox, the sweet baby, who will be sacrificed years later, only to rise again in Eternal Form.  

“Sing lullaby!

 Lullaby! Is the baby awaking?

 Sing lullaby.

 Hush do not stir the infant king.

 Dreaming of Easter, gladsome morning,

 Conquering death, its bondage breaking; 

 Sing lullaby!”

Keeping in mind Jung’s idea of the Self as paradox during this holiday season, we might think the Infant King understood what was in store for him.  Perhaps as listeners, when we all understand that Joy and her sister Sorrow come to us hand in hand, we might be able to hold the paradox in mind that both exist together in the tender form of a baby, born long ago in a manger, thousands of years ago.  

Rolando J Fuentes MSW is a Diploma Candidate at the C G Jung Institute Boston.  He is in private private practice in Woodley Park where he sees individual adults, couples and families.  His areas of interest are cross-cultural relationships. In addition, he consults with parent-infant/young child dyads.  

I shudder each late autumn as I reflect on the hardships our distant ancestors bore as the sun plummets into the underworld, an annual catabasis which must have been, if not terrifying, at best problematic for their survival. Given that we are that animal that desires to know, to make up stories that help us relate to the inexplicable and sometimes monstrous forces around us, their primal imagination conjured up all sorts of cosmic animals that had eaten the sun, or malevolent gods that had abducted it from warming our crops and our person.

But I particularly think on my visit to Newgrange, about an hour's drive north of Dublin, Eire. A number of years ago, what were thought to simply be hills were revealed to be burial chambers. (Aerial photography is helping find many more such sites). Today, rightly controlled by the government to protect its fragile state, one can go down into the recesses of one of those domes. (From afar, they almost look like football stadia). One descends about twenty meters into a cavern in which one light bulb now hangs. The guide informs that this structure was built c. 5000 years ago, which makes it older than the pyramids, and much older than Stonehenge. When she turned off that one bulb, we knew what dark dark was really like. We were one with those whose bodies had once been placed there, in the underworld.

Further, we are shown what is called a latch-key slot in the ceiling about the size of a shoebox. In the late days of December, for a matter of minutes each dark day, the slot is aligned with the sun now at its furthest perigee from our sight. Stunningly, the room is briefly illumined by that light. There in the dark cavern, in the darkest time of the year in the Northern hemisphere, the light appears. What are we to make of that elaborate construction which so clearly was tied to a solstice ("sun standing still") ritual?

In the depths of that sacred space I had three thoughts which came to me in this order. First, I marveled at the engineering acumen that had cantalevered those stones to create that space. And I hoped that their skill would persist for another few centuries, given that I and others were under those stones. Second, I was moved by their astronomical sophistication which could so accurately calculate the movement of the stars and planets which they could only see by the naked eye. Thirdly, I realized, and was moved by recognizing that I was in the presence of the Great Mother archetype of which Jung spoke.

An archetype is recognized through its incarnation in a form available to consciousness but not created by individual consciousness. It is a timeless, patterning process whose contents vary greatly, but whose form is universal. The Great Mother is a personification of the forces of the birth, death, rebirth process through which individuals, and cultures, move.

So there, in that Irish cavern I bore witness to the archetypal idea that even in death, even in the darkest hours, a scintilla of light is present, the germ of rebirth, renewal, and the great cycle catalyzed into rotation back to the fullness of summer. Any person, any culture who has a sense of participation in this great cycle feels a deeper psycho-social connection to a transpersonal energy. And any culture, such as ours, which has cut itself free of the cycle will suffer dread with aging and mortality, will feel rootless, adrift, and live a stranger on this earth.

There in that dismal cavern, I felt linked through the archetypal imagination common to all humanity, linked to those distant predecessors and mindful that we are all summoned to reconnect with those forces which lie outside our powers, and in which we daily swim. We can thank those ancestors for their labor which now informs our age, and Jung for describing the archetypal field of energy which allows us to stand in relationship to that which is larger than we. Immortal sap runs through the world tree, and while we are very mortal, perhaps we profit to remember our connection to the larger is obtained through the archetypal imagination which courses within each of us.

James Hollis, Ph.D.

Jungian Analyst

     Jungian concepts can facilitate deeper insights into literature, especially in works which abound in archetypal imagery. Haruki Murakami’s most recent novel, Killing Commendatore, is a complex but authentic representation of a life crisis in a young man, told as a magical realistic individuation saga. The immediate psychological challenge to the young man, a painter whom we shall call the hero (he is never named in the novel), is the unexpected divorce by his wife after 6 years of a tranquil but childless marriage. This sudden, inexplicable and wrenching loss causes him to quit his adequate but uncreative job and up and leave his home in Tokyo for an extended road trip to the north of Japan. The road trip morphs into a kind of dream sequence, a modern-day heroic night-sea journey, with macabre encounters of ghostlike, demonic characters that stir up paranoid and murderous impulses. This first iteration of the night-sea journey is vague, confused and overwhelming, and does not lead to understanding or insight, but rather suggests our hero has fallen into a state of morbid depression. He takes refuge from this nightmare in an offer to stay at the abandoned home in the mountains of an aged but famous artist of the previous generation, who has moved out to a nursing home for the demented. In this mountainside temenos begins a series of interlocking subplots, all of which are now clearly presented in mythological symbolic form.

     The young painter sets up a studio in the house, and begins to paint creatively, in new ways he had never done before. He befriends a somewhat older, wealthy, highly refined man, his neighbor, who is a projection of an idealized self-representation, (complete with his own anima problem). He also explores the house, which yields nothing personal of the older painter, until he goes up into the attic, where he finds a single, carefully wrapped painting unknown to the world. The painting depicts a variation on the famous opening scene from Mozart’s Don Giovani, when the enraged Commendatore, father of Donna Anna, Don Giovani’s conquest, confronts Don Giovani and is slain by him. Shortly after pondering the meaning of this odd but powerful painting, the hero hears a bell in the middle of the night, whose source cannot be found. He ultimately has the back yard of the house dug up to discover a magical and numinous ancient circular pit buried in the ground. The pit is just deep enough to prevent a person from jumping out, and the walls are perfectly sheer stone blocks which cannot be climbed. Caught in this trap is a magical figure, none other than a miniature version of the Commendatore in the painting. The hero rescues him and brings him into the house, where he describes himself as an Idea embodied. This Idea of the Commendatore becomes the genius loci of the increasingly uncanny studio temenos, appearing randomly to speak to the young artist in cryptic oracles.

     There are many further developments, but the most important all revolve around the hero’s relationships with women, beginning with his younger sister who died when he was a teenager. In an elegant weaving of old memories intermixed with plot episodes involving several females of various ages, Murakami lays out the anima problem of the hero and the neighbor, both in his life historical developmental reality, his current love life, as well as in his conscious and unconscious (dream) erotic/sadistic fantasies. None of this however seems to relate directly to the hero’s newly creative painting and his increasingly fascinated obsession with understanding the secret mystery behind the old painting he discovered.

     Following the urgings of the Idea of Commendatore, one of whose attributes is to recognize the importance of “the right time,” which this now is, the hero tracks down the old artist in the nursing home. He attempts to learn from the dying, mute artist the significance of his painting. It was done during WWII while he was in Vienna, in love with a woman whose Nazi father ultimately killed her. While learning this, the Idea of Commendatore suddenly announces that the time is right now, and demands that the hero must kill him immediately, and literally, just as in the painting. The shocked hero is deeply averse to such a tangible, palpable murder, but eventually does indeed slay the Idea of Commendatore, thus enacting in “reality” the imagery depicted in the painting. The immediate result of this violent bloody “human” sacrifice of an Idea, is the opening of a new tunnel into the earth (right there in the nursing home!), which the hero is bidden to enter by a previously encountered but ill understood trickster/Hermes figure, “Longface,” who had identified himself as a Metaphor (rather than an Idea). There follows a second, now truly mythological night-sea journey, fully articulated in all its richness of archetypal imagery, which leads our hero across a kind of River Styx, meeting various shades of the underworld, and journeying through ever more dangerous and difficult obstacles, until at the nadir he is about to be devoured by a snake monster. At the climax of this mortal crisis, however, the hero is suddenly transported/transformed from the “belly of monster,” but only to find himself now trapped inside the very same the pit in his own back yard, just as the Idea of Commendatore had been trapped earlier in the story. There, he must “incubate” in this alchemical vas and overcome his fears of suffocating or starving, or even worse, immortal abandonment. Then, when he has, he is rescued by his doppelganger neighbor, who had previously “modeled” for him how to allow the experience of the pit to deepen his consciousness rather than overwhelm it. The hero is fundamentally transformed by enduring all these trials of Herakles. He is able to reconnect with his estranged wife. He embarks on a new phase of his life with a renewed relationship to his anima and a more conscious awareness of the personal colors with which he had painted his sister’s death in his psyche.

     The symbolism in this novel is powerful, it is a contemporary mythological epic. What makes it 21 st century is the consciousness of both the archetypal symbolism and the real historical, developmental trauma which damaged his relationship to his anima in adolescence. This overview may give you a hint of the elegance and depth of the writing, but if you are intrigued, I urge you to read the novel and grapple with its density, both literary and psychological. There are many other characters and subplots, none of them irrelevant or incidental, and deciphering the whole opus will amply reward the adept.

John Boronow, M.D. is a retired psychiatrist from Baltimore. He has rekindled a long set aside fascination with Jung in his retirement, and is thoroughly enjoying reading Jung’s works in his third year of the Jungian Studies Reading Seminar.

     Sometimes we wake up to find that we have lost our soul. Sometimes trauma interrupts and breaks our connection to our self and life. And sometimes this interruption is something that has happened a long time ago, resulting in the building of a wall in our very self that separates us from ourselves and the world. This wall, built along the ego-self axis, results in the inner world of trauma and we see its dissociative effects in our social-political world and in our personal-psychological worlds. Both worlds create their exiles and underworlds—socially and politically, among the outcasts and scapegoats; personally and psychologically, in the underworld of the unconscious.

     But the problem with the underworld of the unconscious is that it is not outside of this world. It is not even under. The underworld of the unconscious exerts its effects in the world in which we live. We swim in it. In it, we live and move and have our being. What Jungian Analyst, Donald Kalsched, has shown in his two books, The Inner World of Trauma (1996) and Trauma and the Soul: A Psycho-Spiritual Approach to Human Development and its Interruption (2013), is that powerful dissociative complexes are marshaled in the inner world of trauma which paradoxically both protect the soul and harm it, by keeping it from embodiment in life and the world. These dissociative energies are at work in our inner worlds and exert power in the “overworld,” as may be readily apparent.

     The psyche symbolizes these both self-protective and dissociative complexes and they emerge in dreams, myth, language, affect, bodily states, all those aspects of experience which are human. Kalsched calls this the self-care system. When trauma hits, that most precious part of us, that quintessence called soul, goes into exile and recedes to the nether regions of the psyche, because it is not safe to be embodied in the world. While the soul is whisked away into a kind of innocent hiding, it is taken care of by archetypal powers that “take care” of this exiled soul even as they dissociate it from the world and life. There the soul awaits its being found again and brought back into the world. In order to find the exiled soul, the inner world of trauma has to be entered into and it is a scary place held together by a strange combination of violence and tenderness. The tenderness expresses the innocence of the lost child, but the violence expresses the violent and cutting protective powers of the dissociative complex.

     There is a mytho-poetic dimension to the psyche—indeed, a distinguishing function of the psyche can be seen as mytho-poesis in a relational context. The psyche keeps score and expresses the music of this score in its mytho-poesis. It is there—in the mytho-poetic stories of the psyche—that we may find, imaged forth and held, our own lost souls. These symbolic stories hold the mirror up to our inner worlds of trauma and hold the mirror out to our social worlds to reveal the dissociative dynamics operative in these inner and outer worlds.

     One such telling forth of the journey into the inner world of trauma is Dante’s Inferno. Himself a social and political exile, Dante finds himself blocked in his life’s journey and the only possible way forward is down into the inner world of trauma—the Inferno. Fortunately, Dante has a mytho-poetic guide, the embodiment of Latin poesis and culture, the Roman poet, Virgil, someone who knows the terrain, having written of it in the Aeneid. From being blocked by a wall, Dante’s relationship with Virgil forms a symbolic bridge which enables Dante (and the reader) to confront the dissociative energies at work and play in Dante’s actual social-political and personal-psychological world. He sees their true nature symboled forth and finally comes face to face with the core complex at the root of this inner world of trauma—the powerful archetypal energy of dissociation which Dante calls Dis. With the wise guidance and symbolic witness of Virgil, Dante is able to find a bridge to belonging in the world of light and eros, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradiso). He has found a symbolic bridge between the worlds and thus regains his own soul.

     In his influential, The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk brings out the inescapable somatic dimensions of trauma and argues persuasively for bodily interventions in the psychotherapeutics of trauma. However, he does not mean this in a reductive way, as if trauma were merely physiological. In a conversation at a recent conference, talking about the current field and sharing my own interests and concerns, Bessel said to me, “Don Kalsched is a wise man.” In this brief yet meaningful conversation, I took this as an acknowledgement that there are dimensions of the human which register trauma which, including the body, involve other dimensions of experience. The psyche keeps score. And when events, traumatic or not, happen to the human psyche, they “happen” symbolically. They register and are registered according to symbolic processes that involve the body and the full range of human experience.

     The introduction of the symbolic into the field of trauma, is really the reintroduction of something that has been operative all along, from the beginning, even in our sleep.

     And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget,

     falls drop by drop upon the heart,

     And in our own despair, against our will,

     Comes wisdom,

     By the awful grace of God. (Aeschylus, Agammenon)

     For, mytho-poesis was where the psychology of trauma was before it became psychology. In recent presentations, Bessel refers to the great tragedians, the Greeks and Shakespeare. What these “people who knew everything,” as Bessel has called them, knew was that the mytho-poesis of trauma, engaged in a relational and feeling way, helps to metabolize the traumas of being. But we need a mytho-poesis worthy of the depth of human experience—its dramas, losses and tragic victories. Fortunately, when the psyche keeps score, it may also rise to the occasion and descend to the depths of trauma’s underworld, there to find its lost soul and bring it, in a new birth, to a new belonging in a world now more worthy of the name human.

Mark Napack, M.A., S.T.L., M.S., studied archetypal patterns in comparative literature at Columbia University, after which he applied Jungian theory to the redemption motif in medieval theology for his thesis at Fordham University.  He further studied Jung, psychology, and the history of religion at Loyola and Catholic Universities.  A long-time graduate and college instructor, Mark has presented at international conferences and his work has appeared in scholarly journals and books in English and French. Mark Napack, LCPC, is also a Jungian informed psychotherapist in North Bethesda, MD.

Life on this planet is humbling. We know so little about anything. Take the night sky. Increasingly, in order to see starlight, we must find an equivalent darkness. We race out into the countryside, turn our eyes upward, and pick out familiar constellations one by one. We gasp with delight when a meteor races past and feel wonder when we catch Jupiter on the elliptical.

The Great Mystery is all around us, and we are in it. It beguiles and keeps the sap of our lives awake. Yet, neither you nor I nor any of our relations have discovered its true name—the name that breathed us all onto the scene like salted lanterns or Roman candles, each with our own part to play. It is only when we turn our gaze to unexpected places, not toward the light, but toward the dark rivers that hold the light, that we are gifted with glinting breadcrumbs to guide us on.  

This Mystery is as real as you or I. It moves through the world wearing a symbol cloak of images, “speaks a secret language” (CW12, para 315), and “keeps an eye on ‘age-old, sacred things…remind[ing] us of them at a suitable opportunity” (CW12, para 85). A year into the Jungian Studies Reading Seminar, I know this is true and have enough sense to know that I am the fool here—the solitary human sitting high in an attic, daring to reach my fingertips out to the Mystery, hoping to coax a note of onto this page.

To engage the Mystery takes courage and a willingness to stride into dark, uncharted places full of archaic matter. Jung engaged the Mystery head on, plummeting into his own depths—uncertain if he would become mad or enlightened…uncertain if he would return at all. He wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them...I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear…I let myself drop…below the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life” (pp. 178-79).

Dark-matter physicists are twinned companions on the journey for they also search within the Mystery for the shadowy presence that refuses to interact with light. To do so, they too must venture into the depths, down into the bowels of the underland, far beneath the strata that holds the world’s memory. A half-mile down, they hunt for what they cannot see—for the something that does not emit light, reflect it, or block it. Like the alchemists, they look for thelumen naturae, the light that lives in the black blacker than black (nigrum nigrius nigro,CW12, para 433).

Perhaps it’s really as simple as this. We are a part of everything and everything is within us. As we explore the star-strewn heavens and luminous depths, our eyes and egos adjust to the larger Mystery. We begin to allow that these scintillae, these golden sparks scattered through the Mystery, whether we call it Psyche or Cosmos, are one in the same.

What happens then is perhaps the most beautiful mystery of all. We realize we are matter on the move, adrift on ancient seas, like a pulsating regatta lit with soul fire. The stuff we seek is already drifting through us. There is nothing to do but feel wonder at how our unique granularities and constellated angles reach out into the Mystery and haul on board what we need the most. Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies, “The eternal current whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever…” All we have to do is ride what already is.

Kelly McGannon, M.A., M.A.R. is an executive leadership coach in private practice in the Washington Metro Area. She completed her graduate work in medieval art history and pilgrimage at Yale University Divinity School and Princeton University. She is a current student in JSW's Jungian Studies Reading Seminar. 

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” This statement first appeared on April 22, 1970 for the first Earth Day poster designed by cartoonist Walt Kelly, the man behind the comic strip “Pogo”. The cartoon shows Pogo looking out across his beloved forest now littered with trash. This iconic image and quote among others was intended to encourage Americans to become more responsible for their behavior and treatment of their environment and homeland. It was an apt representation of a growing public awareness of how fragile and interconnected our ecosystems and human life are. And it worked.  As a result of greater consciousness of each American, a national movement was created and “we, the people” changed our more wasteful habits and transformed our environment.

Kelly’s statement also reveals something even more personal and psychological. Jung identifies ‘the enemy’ as the shadow within each of us. Last year at this time, I wrote a blog entitled “Can the Youth of Our Nation Save Us from Ourselves”? I focused on the outspoken young people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the aftermath of the Valentine’s Day shooting. Sadly, we have had additional shootings since then. But their voices were heard. They joined many others touched by these violent acts. Sparked by their activism, which also had a hand in the mid-term correction in Congress, a bill was passed in the House of Representatives on this past Valentine’s Day closing the loopholes in the requirement of background checks for those buying guns. Also, as of this March 14th, families are now able to sue gun manufacturers for the guns used in school shootings and other massacres which had been outlawed until now.

These are small steps, but major victories over a powerful lobbying group that had amassed too much power and influence over politicians through financial contributions and other support for elections and re-elections as a quid pro quo to support and push through legislation in favor of their interests. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Great leaders we have had, but we could not have had great leaders unless they had a great people to follow.” And a few short years later, Harry S. Truman stated, “The people have often made mistakes, but given time and the facts, they will make the corrections.” When people look within, then amass with passion around an issue of concern, they become empowered to change themselves, their environment, their communities, their country and the world.

“The people” did this. These young people held a mirror up to us and said, “Look! You are the enemy!” They challenged us to dig deeper into ourselves, into our souls, to confront the enemy from within. Jung said that our greatest enemy is ennui, more commonly known today as apathy. Through apathy, we allow things to occur as long as they don’t seem to impact our lives. Yet, what we are painfully having to accept through numerous international and domestic terrorist acts and hate crimes is that we are not innocent in our ignorance.  We cannot turn a blind eye and hope someone else is taking up the mantle of the good fight.

In “Aion”, Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung describes the shadow as “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.” Becoming aware of our inner demons empowers us to realize we don’t have to be swayed, even dominated by the enemy within.

Noted writer James Baldwin laments: “ I’m terrified at the moral apathy; the death of the heart which is happening in my country. It’s a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them and until that moment when we, the American people are able to accept the fact that I, who have ancestors both white and black, that on this continent we are trying to form a new identity for which we need each other. Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream because people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it and if that happens, it will be a very grave moment for the West.” The white nationalist incident in Charlottesville in 1917 revealed how little some hearts and minds have changed since Baldwin wrote this after the race riots and assassinations of black civil rights leaders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s.

In the past year, Americans, indeed the world, has watched and often felt the war of good and evil right in front of us as political divisions, reputations of notable figures, acts of brinkmanship, the veneer of institutional governance and all that have emerged from our shadows, personal and public, have been peeled away, exposing our dark shadow psychological content.

Jung states in “The Philosophical Tree” that “a man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.” If, in fact, we begin to do the hard work of removing our projections from others, we soon discover our own inner dark angels, and we are not as quick to blame others for their shortcomings. “Such a man [or woman]” Jung says, “knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”

Obama eulogized after the Charleston shooting in 2015: “As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves. For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present.

As we have examined the darkness outside of ourselves parading across our TV and internet screens, we have been confronted with the darkness of our nation. Only by working through what we see and do not like that makes us feel uncomfortable, angry, even rageful, can we bring forth a better nation, our better angels. We can choose to look away, but it is at our peril.

Jung’s words on love and power ring true today more than ever. He said: “Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” Our issues are not impossible to solve if we bring love to inform our power to act. A recent poll shows 93% of Americans do not approve of our current divisive politics. This means we are allowing only 7% of us to dominate our lives. The Dalai Lama shows us a way out:  to find in our enemies our commonalities beyond our opposing perspectives. This can only be done when we bring compassion to our brothers and sisters whom we regard as Other. Only when we are able to face our enemies within and without are we then able to work through our differences and our fears. If we can, this brings us closer to what the foundations of our democratic ideals are all about and we, the people, through greater wisdom will form “a more perfect Union”.

Janice Quinn, PhD, LCSW, s a Jungian Analyst with a private practice in Arlington, VA. She is a member and past president of the Jungian Analysts of Washington Association  (JAWA) and is a Training Analyst for the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts (IRSJA).

When it was suggested a few years ago that one could prefer a hero who doesn’t get captured, it was another one of those decline and fall moments of “there goes the culture.” Why and how could this reveal a big deal? The myth of the hero is one of foundations of human culture. I recently had the pleasure of rereading Carl Jung’s classic, Symbols of Transformation (CW 5, cited below by paragraph) and was struck by how truly foundational the hero myth is to a culture, a civilization, and human development itself. There is a pattern to the hero myth that is worth exploring, if we are to get out of the ways in which we have been captured.

Jung beautifully summarizes the archaic and “typical mythological motifs” (par. 42) of the hero in the following:

He journeys by ship, fights the sea monster, is swallowed, struggles against being bitten and crushed to death (kicking or struggling motif), and having arrived inside the ‘whale-dragon,’ seeks the vital organ, which he proceeds to cut off or otherwise destroy. Often the monster is killed by the hero lighting a fire inside him—that is to say, in the very womb of death he secretly creates life, the rising sun. (par. 538)

Thus condensed is the underlying pattern. There is some capture, symbolized in different ways, which indicates a “going under,” a night sea journey, a neykia, a type of death and resurrection. We only need to think of Jonah and Jesus, Odysseus and Aeneas, not to mention, in American culture, Washington, Lincoln, Sojourner Truth, MLK, among many others. Some kind of dangerous journey to the underworld of darkness and suffering is required, if one is to gain something of true value that has the potential of renewing the culture and oneself in the process.

For Jung, this myth of the hero symbolized the risks and possibilities of becoming fully human. The forces and regressive rip tides of unconsciousness are all too real. Indeed, Jung referred to unconsciousness as a “deadly threat” (par. 548) which could take over an entire nation. However, the dragon of the unconscious could be engaged, entered into, and transformed with the lighting of the fire of consciousness and discovering, in the darkness of suffering, some source, some treasure hard to find, that transcended one’s previous sense of self. “The treasure which the hero fetches from the dark cavern is life,” and one’s very self, new-born (par. 580). In this way, the hero is “an archetype of the self” (par. 612). Even more, for Jung, the question, myth and status, if you will, of the hero is internally connected to the role of religion in a culture and a psyche. How these heroic questions of the unconscious, suffering, darkness and unknowing are negotiated and dealt with, in many ways, determines whether religion serves the spirit—“the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath”—or the various alienating structures of the ego’s spiritual materialism and appetite.

The hero has gotten captured, in our selves and in our culture. And, the myth of the hero has been captured by a two-dimensional story of aggrandizement and various forms of narcissism with its insatiable hungers. Whether the hero is freed and the myth of the hero restored is really up to us. A long time ago, when Star Wars was first released, I remember the heroic journey being played out on screen. In particular, I remember seeing the heroic Han Solo being captured by the kleptocrat, Jabba the Hutt, that grotesque image of bloated ego. In the end, Han is freed and Jabba is done in by Princess Leia, twisted into an image of objectified feminine and abused soul, to give it a Jungian interpretation. We need to be conscious and brave here. In recovering the hero in our midst, we need to remember that the unconscious has its own logic. If we spurn and chain it, it may come back and do us in, as it did to Jabba. But, seen from the angle of the hero, and venturing forth into life on the basis of such a perspective, after being captured and finding the treasure, one may find oneself on the new shore of a renewed human relatedness —Han finds Leia, the hero finds soul, feminine finds masculine—the opposites of the self are reconciled and a glimpse is given of what King imaged as “the Beloved Community.”

Mark Napack, M.A., S.T.L., M.S., first studied the hero's journey as a student of comparative literature at Columbia University, after which he applied Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces to the redemption motif in medieval theology for his thesis at Fordham University. He further studied Jung, psychology and the history of religion at Loyola and Catholic Universities. A long-time graduate and college lecturer, Mark has a special concern for areas of psychology and spirituality and an ongoing involvement with the Collected Works of Jung and Jungian classics. He has presented at international conferences and published in scholarly publications. Mark Napack, LCPC is also a Jungian informed psychotherapist in North Bethesda, MD.

The way is within us, but not in Gods nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life…. May each one seek his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.” (The Red Book, p. 231)

The path to discovering the oneness of creation starts with discovering our individual oneness. C.G. Jung took this path in 1913 when, having lost his way at midlife, he returned to his journals and let himself drop into the underworld to confront the unconscious. He writes in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.” (p. 203)  So begins the story of The Red Book, the story of Jung’s journey toward finding himself, of how he reached out for the hand of his lost soul. Jung encourages us to do the same, to ask our soul to stay by our side as we make our own journey. And to write it all down in our journals, in our own red books.

We have another example of finding the way within, in the journals of Etty Hillesum, Dutch Jewish author of An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork, written from March 1941 to September 1943, when she was deported to Auschwitz. She died two months later at the age of 29. Fearful of what loomed ahead, Hillesum started a journal, describing herself as “a miserable, frightened creature.” Slowly through intense inner work, with pen in hand, she uncovers a deep well inside herself. “And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there too.” (p. 44) She draws prayer around herself in order to rest calm and collected, and to keep her body at peace with her soul. “The sky within me is as wide as the one stretching above my head.” (p. 145)

It is in bringing together opposites—body and soul, the conscious and unconscious—that we uncover a wholeness, an essential oneness. During his journey of individuation, transcribed in The Red Book, Jung continues to call out to his soul. At one moment he asks her to dive down into the depths of darkness and to bring him all that she finds. She finds old armor, painted stones, images of Gods, stories from the ages. It is too much, he exclaims. His soul scolds him, “You wanted to accept everything. You do not know your limits…. Take shears and prune your trees.” (p. 306) Jung takes an imaginary knife and cuts away everything that has grown without measure. He cuts down to the marrow to find himself.

His journey continues until in 1928 when he dreams of being in Liverpool, where in the middle of the dark, rainy city, there is a dimly lit square. In the middle of the square there is a pond with an island. In the middle of the island, there is a single magnolia tree in a shower of reddish blossoms. “It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was at the same time the source of light.” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 223)  Jung sees the blossoming tree as a symbol of the Self, the goal of psychic development. He painted the dream in a magnificent mandala, naming it Window to Eternity.

Window to Eternity, C.G. Jung, Image 159, The Red Book

This oneness is both within us and around us. After this dream, Jung stopped writing in The Red Book, and turned to the study of alchemy and Eastern religions. The groundwork for his scientific opus was done. Jung taught, lectured, wrote, experiencing an ever expanding wholeness. It was during a stay in his tower at Bollingen, on Lake Zurich, that he wrote, “At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons. (ibid, p. 252)

We find ourselves at one with all the creation. We experience a feeling of belonging, a feeling of being at home in the world around us. Jung summons us to find this oneness. “May each one seek his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.” (The Red Book, p. 231) From inward, we stretch outward. Our path takes us to those around us. We discover our shared ways and our shared earth. We are part of this greater wholeness, one small whole within greater wholes – within family, community, country.

When we embrace ourselves, we embrace all creation.