Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book

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Jungian psychology serves as both a protective buffer and a lens to understand and clarify the self. During this time I again made a list of the books that most influenced my life from early childhood until now. He realized after his falling out from Freud, that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework was not enough to help him contain the raw and wuthering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him at the time.

Alchemical Rubedo, biocultural partnership transformation, psychoanalysis, art, powa-ha, are one and the same -they push the mundane world towards the instant of transcendence, to the sublimation and distillation of our human and cosmic story, of our eternal quest to reach and ex-press the "Atmavictu" (Mellick, 2018, p. While the conversationalists don’t try to elucidate the meaning of individual passages of that difficult work, their talks do help the reader to understand and amplify its meaning and possible impact for our culture today, in the aftermath of the Red Book’s posthumous printing. A brilliant collection, evocative of all that is wonderful and strange about Jung’s Red Book and about the human psyche. They are David Tacey, John Beebe, Sonu Shamdasani, Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, Karen Horney, and Hal Stone.

In freewheeling exchanges, they discuss Jung’s de-conceptualization of psychology, his modernist and pseudo-artistic embrasure of fantasy, his psycho-spiritual quest of giving voice to the dead—both literally and figuratively—his struggle to connect the individualistic/existential and collective/essential dimensions of the inner world, the paradoxicality of his usage of demotic, detached, “scientific” language to decry the West’s detachment from humanity’s natural state of “imminent dwelling within the cosmos”: its unreflective participation in the numinous, and Jung’s place within the intellectual streams of psychological science, art, and literature in the twentieth century.

Look up, says spirit, gain distance; there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior. It is a moment that is not our moment and is only partially comprehensible to anyone but the author(s).

Their conclusion is that “the dead'' of our families, society, and human history foist their unlived life upon us.

It is saddening that both Jung’s Red Book and this one appeared so late — the Red Book almost a Century after it was written and Lament of the Dead so late in Hillman’s life and career. Much like a socratic dialogue or a film script the the authors act more as characters and archetypes than essayists. Hillman introduces the concepts of the book with his explanation of Jung’s reaction to the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer. According to the biocultural partnership-dominator lens as expounded by Riane Eisler, this article studies the echoes and analogies between the opus alchymicum and the instruments of self-growth and transformation found in Jung’s The Red Book and Jill Mellick’s profound, insightful and exquisite The Red Book Hours. Hillman and Shamdasani explore a number of the issues in the Red Book—such as our relation with the dead, the figures of our dreams and fantasies, the nature of creative expression, the relation of psychology to art, narrative and storytelling, the significance of depth psychology as a cultural form, the legacy of Christianity, and our relation to the past—and examine the implications these have for our thinking today.

Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, The Red Book has a religious and timeless quality. The final conversations revolve around what has become of psychology over the decade since Jung began his explorations into the psyche. I don't know if I'm just not seeing it but spells don't tell you how much base damage they do either.

There is a deep resonance in the implications these men are seeing The Red Book have for modern psychology. The Red Book represents a proto Jungian psychology as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration.Also, I first ran onto Hillman's work at the suggestion of the late poet Renate Wood some twenty-five years ago. Hillman was such an infuriatingly intuitive person that his biggest downfall in his other books is that he often felt truths that he could not articulate. These models made room for a direct experience in psychology that Jungian analysis does not often do.