I’m looking forward to seeing A Dangerous Method David Cronenberg's film about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Sabina Spielrein. The film stars starring Viggo Mortensen, Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Vincent Cassel.
Synopsis:
“On the eve of World War I, Zurich and Vienna are the setting for a dark tale of sexual and intellectual discovery. Drawn from true-life events, A DANGEROUS METHOD explores the turbulent relationships between fledgling psychiatrist Carl Jung, his mentor Sigmund Freud and Sabina Spielrein, the beautiful but disturbed young woman who comes between them.
Sensuality, ambition and deceit set the scene for the pivotal moment when Jung, Freud and Sabina come together and split apart, forever changing the face of modern thought.”
Mark Vernon has written some short but fascinating essays on Carl Jung. I drew attention to them here. So,having heard about the film, I was delighted to see Mark offer a “teaser” for an article – Fear of the Dark – he wrote for the UK’s Tablet. Here’s an excerpt from his blog post, which you can find in full here, but sadly the article itself isn't online.
“…‘There is no birth of consciousness without pain,’ Jung wrote in an essay penned when he emerged from his creative illness – though that darkness, or shadow, comes the promise of life. Jung later proposed that great spiritual innovators tread similar paths too, finding inspiration from their own confrontations with the unconscious. According to tradition, the Buddha was tempted by the daughters of the demon Mara, a story that Jung interpreted as conveying Siddhartha Gautama’s hard won insight into his psyche. Jesus of Nazareth was driven into the wilderness and confronted the forces that approached him there. That which would have destroyed his ministry he faced to resource it.
More generally, it might be said that sins are forgiven not to be forgotten but so that the individual might be freer to understand their deeper meaning for him or her, ‘to recognise the realities of the human psyche’, as Christopher Jamison puts it in Finding Happiness. The strategy of facing inner hatred, envy, lust and anger can be traced back to the early desert fathers. Jung re-describes the process for our psychologically-minded age. The shadow is fearful and disturbing, but makes for spiritual development and openness to the numinous…”
So, I guess some of the key questions orbit around whether or not we a willining and courageous enough to face into our interior life; to allow our feelings to reveal their deeper meanings. So, for example, Jung argued that alcoholism is a “spiritual quest that had gone off the rails”. “It is an insight”, Vernon writes, “That inspired the foundation of Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of individuation – a change based on a release of vitality from the depths of the unconscious, also known as conversion – the individual gets stuck at the wrong level. Addictions, affairs and compulsions are the often disastrous results.” Replace “alcoholism” with any number of other things, e.g. “fear”, and beneath them all is in fact a “spiritual quest” – a deeper and more profound invitation. Understand that, and we begin to make different choices and engage in different behaviour. Think, for example of the question at the heart of this post - reworded as "what if I was to really love...?"
In other words, when we fail to comprehend the significance of our own shadow, our own interior realities, projections, woundedness etc we miss the deeper invitations opening us to the possibility of healing, individuation, growth, and a fuller, richer, and deeper humanity. “There is no birth of consciousness without pain”, but how many of us are willing to sit with our pain (our seeming “unhappiness”, “lostness”, “loneliness” etc) and to work to make conscious that which has hitherto been “unconscious” and to that degree, profoundly damaging?
How many of us take the easier option, doing all we can to avoid “pain” which, ironically, is a gift? Ionically too, failing to realise the presenting feelings etc don't go away, we just push them down and supress them, and one day we won't be able to contain them any more.
Instead, we make choices that we think are wise and life-giving, but are in fact largely unconscious and unreflective, although sometimes they're also very deliberate avoidance behaviour – we’d rather not face into who we truely are, both consciously and unconsciously (vis-à-vis the importance of what Jung would call “shadow work” or what the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the Desert tradition called “facing their demons”).
Vernon concludes his article, and I agree with him. Jung “…also believed that Christianity had made a mistake in standing too squarely against the shadow side of life, as opposed to securing a containing haven within which to explore it [so, for example, the importance of the role and ministry of Spiritual Director]. It is only then that our inner worlds can be better understood and embraced as the disquieting but energetic wellsprings of life, in all its fullness.”
When we fail to face into and understand the disquieting dimensions of ourselves we “get stuck” and go further off the rails, as Jung would say, making choices that sadly take us in the wrong direction the presenting feelings and longing. I’ve heard so many sad stories over the last month of people who end up facing into huge regrets when they sudden come to the initial realization that they completely misunderstood the invitations that had in fact been extended to them, but which they had avoided unwrapping because to do so would have brought them to the beginnings of a difficult journey into consciousness (and wholeness), a journey in which they would have to face into their own shadow, woundedness and darkness without projecting blame onto anyone else but themselves. This is the challenge and the “solace of fierce landscapes”.
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