After-Jungian
Dreams & Reflections
Jung Speaks
from the Netherworld
Deeply regretting my reactionary retreat from Freud, I have decided to take up the pen once more, although now in the underworld, in order to atone for the sins of my first youth.
I, the prodigal son of psychonalaysis, am ready to come home—both conceptually and in terms of the unconscious.
The form of depth psychology that I left behind, moving as it was towards a general philosophy of the imagination, was nevertheless designed to undermine the principle insight of psychoanalysis: the sexual nature of the numinosum as such.
Only now do I have the courage to follow my true self as CGJungian, the first post-Jungian or after-Jungian, to walk beneath the earth.
“Thus I discard everything that was laden with meaning, everything divine and devilish with which chaos burdened me. Truly, it is not up to me to prove the Gods and the devils and the chaotic monsters, to feed them carefully, to warily drag them with me, to count and name them, and to protect them with belief against disbelief and doubt.”
— C. G. Jung (The Red Book)
Featured Class:
The Red Book
Finally ready to discard everything that was laden with metaphysical meaning in my psychological project, the unbridled infusion of religious ideology, I take up my Red Book in the rebirth of my death. Now with a new-found attitude, I am no longer in the business of proving Gods and devils, or feeding all the chaotic monsters of archetypal theory. I am no longer working to feed these chaotic monsters, warily dragging them with me, to count and name them and protect them with belief against disbelief and doubt.
Re-reading my Red Book in this refracted light of the Underworld, through the “negative” glass of a spectral dialectic, I am now ready to submit my corpus to Freud's fundamental insights, throwing myself into the critical abyss of re-reading Liber Novus, now in the cradle of in archetypal psychoanalysis.