Week 1 Jung's Man And His Symbols

[AfternoonTarot]

Hello everyone and welcome to the first week of our book club reading of Jung’s Man and His Symbols.  This week we’re reading the first section of Chapter 1, The Importance of Dreams, pp. 20 - 31.

 

This is very informal, so jump in any time with your thoughts, comments, and questions.  Feel free to post multiple times - you don’t have to save it all for one long post.  

 

Most importantly, let’s enjoy this journey!  

 

 

Some Ideas for Discussion: 

 

Your reflections on the reading.  What stood out to you?  What surprised you?  What did you disagree with?  What did you relate to?

 

Anything “quotable?”

 

In what ways does the reading relate to Tarot symbolism and Tarot practice?

 

Share examples of symbols from art, popular culture, cultural artifacts, dreams, etc.

 

Anything else you’d like to discuss.

 

 

The book is available for free online here. The first chapter is 86 pages long, with many photos and illustrations.  I suggest a eight week timetable, reading approximately 10 pages per week (I’ll provide a syllabus).  This should help accommodate tight schedules and allow plenty of time to discuss how the reading relates to our own ideas about dreams and tarot.  It will also allow us to finish well before Halloween. 

 

Before August 18th - obtain book, review syllabus, read Introduction, pages 9-15 (optional)

August 18-24 Week 1 - The Importance of Dreams, pages 20 - 31 

August 25-31 Week 2 - Past and Future in the Unconscious, pages 32 - 38

September 1-7 Week 3 - The Function of Dreams, pages 39 - 54

September 8-14 Week 4 - The Analysis of Dreams, pages 55 - 66

September 15 - 21 Week 5 - The Archetype in Dream Symbolism, pages 67-73

September 22 - 28 Week 6 - The Archetype in Dream Symbolism, continued, pages 74 -82

September 29 - October 5 - Week 7 - The Soul of Man, pages 83 - 92

October 6 - 12 - Week 8 - The Role of Symbols and Healing the Split, pages 93 - 103

 

 

 

Edited October 6, 2019 by AfternoonTarot
Link to Thread.

[Starlight]

Excellent! Do we have a deadline, @AfternoonTarot? Is it next Saturday?

 

ETA: I've just found it in the other thread: the 24th August. So, 6 days time. 🙂

Edited August 18, 2019 by Starlight

[Saturn Celeste]

6 hours ago, AfternoonTarot said:

first week of our book club reading of Jung’s Man and His Symbols

OMG I have this book!  How much time do I have to read the first chapter?  I'll try to join you!

[Mi-Shell]

Hi guys!

I just saw this!

I am a trained Jungian analyst and worked as such in the psychiatric clinic of the University in Hamburg, Germany.

I would love to join you!

[LeFou]

Subscribed 🙂

 

[AfternoonTarot]

On 8/18/2019 at 9:26 AM, Starlight said:

Excellent! Do we have a deadline, @AfternoonTarot? Is it next Saturday?

 

ETA: I've just found it in the other thread: the 24th August. So, 6 days time. 🙂

Yes, suggested dates for reading and discussion are given, from Sunday to Saturday for each section.  

On 8/18/2019 at 1:42 PM, Saturn Celeste said:

OMG I have this book!  How much time do I have to read the first chapter?  I'll try to join you!

Wonderful! We’d love to have you join in. The schedule is in the other thread - I will copy it to the top of this thread too, to make it easier for everyone.

 

On 8/18/2019 at 4:08 PM, Mi-Shell said:

Hi guys!

I just saw this!

I am a trained Jungian analyst and worked as such in the psychiatric clinic of the University in Hamburg, Germany.

I would love to join you!

So delighted to hear this!  We’d love to have you.  I look forward to your contributions and insights.  Please share any additional resources that you think would be helpful to us.

 

On 8/18/2019 at 4:32 PM, LeFou said:

Subscribed 🙂

 

Great!!

[Starlight]

I'm reading a few pages at a time. Should I post thoughts as I go, or wait till I complete the section?

Edited August 21, 2019 by Starlight

[LeFou]

I like that Jung listens to the patient, and respects the patient's ideas.  It seems collaborative and involved.

 

Page 29: "Time and time again... I have had to repeat the words: "Let's get back to your dream. What does the dream say?"

 

This reminds me that in a Tarot reading, we have to keep going back to the question, and the cards.  It's fine with me if the client free-associates about their situation.  But then (ideally) it gets back to the question, and the cards.

[Starlight]

I've gotten through the section on what symbols are, how the symbol can never be fully captured or explained in words and the idea of soul loss.

 

"Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning.... As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason."

 

"Then there are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note; they have remained, so to speak, below the threshold of consciousness."

 

He goes on to say that sometimes it's in a moment of intuition or after some deep thinking that we realise the full meaning of the event.

 

And sometimes the importance of an event "wells up from the unconscious"  in the form of a dream, "where it appears not as a rational thought but as a symbolic image."

 

The fact that we are capable of creating symbols beyond our rational mind's ability suggests the presence of 2 personalities in one individual. 

 

"Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless."

 

There is resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche. And "primitive people" (do we have a more acceptable term nowadays?) gave the term soul loss to any disturbance in the conscious mind, e.g. not remembering information, acting out of character, etc. In our western world it is known as dissociating or neurosis.

Edited August 21, 2019 by Starlight

[Starlight]

4 hours ago, LeFou said:

Page 29: "Time and time again... I have had to repeat the words: "Let's get back to your dream. What does the dream say?"

I like this. I haven't gotten that far, so I'm interested in learning how Jung knows what the symbols in dreams mean. How he helps the client to pinpoint the meaning.

[Cookie]

I've read this book.  I'll just take a trifling liberty & join in if I may.   In this chapter, Jung talks of "free association" and moves away from Freud's rather stagnate & misleading views  … who just studied this state thru dream analysis & not in waking consciousness.  Jung talks of a colleague in a Russian train station who entered into a reverie state while looking at strange Russian letters on the signs, & he imagined 'all sorts of meanings to them'.  

 

Jung realised that one symbol led to another, and this is important in getting to the center of either a neurosis if a patient or enlightenment if a spiritualist; or just even in looking at a painting or casual conversation it is possible to access such significances (he doesn't actually say this but that is the gist of what I understood...please correct if I'm wrong).

 

"Free Association" is important for tarot-ists & meditators alike, as it teaches us to follow the symbols deeper into the unconscious, and retrieve & decipher the hidden knowledge that was left for us all by the ancients and perhaps a power that is yet to be discovered.   

[AfternoonTarot]

22 hours ago, Starlight said:

I'm reading a few pages at a time. Should I post thoughts as I go, or wait till I complete the section?

Feel free to post as you go!

19 hours ago, Starlight said:

There is resistance to the idea of an unknown part of the human psyche. And "primitive people" (do we have a more acceptable term nowadays?) gave the term soul loss to any disturbance in the conscious mind, e.g. not remembering information, acting out of character, etc. In our western world it is known as dissociating or neurosis.

These points caught my eye too. The resistance saying that if Jung was correct we’d have two personalities and Jung agreeing with them (p. 23)! In my mind, they are two sides of the same coin.  They are congruent but we might not in any given moment consciously understand how.  But once we process unconscious material that is brought to consciousness, we can then understand it to be part of ourselves.  

 

The term “primitive” bothered me also.  Might we say, earlier culture?

[AfternoonTarot]

@LeFou Yes, I think so too.  The spread has its own limitations, just like the dream (p. 29).

 

@Cookie Yes, please join in!  ...Free Association was the method developed by Freud, and Jung’s method is called Active Imagination (although he doesn’t use this term in our chapter).  In our reading this week he calls it “circumambulation.” As I understand it, Free Association would lead from one symbol to another, but Active Imagination is more like studying the symbol from all angles, turning it over and over to discover the “vague, unknown, and hidden” which a symbol implies.

 

 

My favorite quote this week:  “...even when our senses react to real phenomena...they are somehow translated from the realm of reality into that of the mind” (p. 23).  This brought to mind The Magician, who does just the opposite!  

 

 

[Starlight]

As I understood it, Freud's free assiciation had the aim of discovering the trauma or event that was the underlying cause of the neurosis or psychological issue. It was like taking a journey of stepping stones and the stones avoided were perhaps more important than the stones taken, since the avoided ones were probably closely linked to whatever the issue was.

 

Jung felt that one _could_ use free association with dream symbols (and I think he started out doing this) but that he quickly realised it was far more efficient to work directly with the symbols and explore them from different angles. There was a reason the Unconscious had chosen these particular symbols so he felt it was important to work to discover their meaning. Free association always led away from the starting point, so that was not useful for working directly with the symbols.

 

"I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it.... Time and time again, in my professional work, I have had to repeat the words: 'Let's get back to your dream. What does the dream say?' "

 

The end of the section touches briefly on the anima/animus. Every male has an inner female (anima), and likewise every female has an inner male (animus).

 

What I found very interesting about this section is the parallel between the idea of an individual having more than one soul (and soul loss) and Jung's ideas of how many energies a personality has (and dissociation).

 

The link to Tarot must lie in the symbols in the cards and in the different ways each reader interprets those symbols. The Tarot takes the place of dreams.

Edited August 25, 2019 by Starlight

[Esk]

I've finished the 1st chapter and I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to read and understand 🙂

I like Jung's explanation about dreams interpretation and how his method and goal is different from Freud. It's like he goes further in understanding unconscious processes but at the same time he goes less far by staying focused on the dream itself.

 

4 hours ago, Starlight said:

The link to Tarot must lie in the symbols in the cards and in the different ways each reader interprets those symbols. The Tarot takes the place of dreams.

I agree with you. Many symbols lie in tarot cards and sometimes it's not easy to understand them, just like dreams. Also some readings make me feel like I'm a psychologist trying to understand someone's problem and unconscious elements (very often mine and it's  not easy 😉 ). 

 

However I don't know what to think about the passage about "primitive" people. The term primitive bothers me a little but it was the word used at this time, I deal with it. But when he talks about these people, their beliefs and their way of thinking I can't help doubting his words. No doubt he has studied a lot athropological works and meet different cultures, but maybe his conclusions are easy generalities. I don't say he's wrong but I'm just questioning.

I also wonder if the totem animals and gardian animals one can meet with shamanic practices can be related to the bush soul Jung mentionned, so an unconscious part of ourselves. I don't know many things about shamanism but I'd love to read someone's opinion about this. 

[Starlight]

10 hours ago, Esk said:

No doubt he has studied a lot athropological works and meet different cultures, but maybe his conclusions are easy generalities. I don't say he's wrong but I'm just questioning.

Reading another book on memory systems, the author said that people from cultures closer to nature than ours had stories to explain life. Children were told simple stories. As they grew older the stories grew with them until, as an elder, they had the full stories, the full insights, into how life works. Outsiders would only have been told the children's stories. Perhaps that's why those anthropologists from yesteryear considered the cultures primitive.

 

I think that perhaps there is something to the idea that spirit animals were part of the symbols in the unconscious, @Esk. These cultures are so closely enmeshed with nature, it would be more unusual if they weren't.

[Esk]

2 hours ago, Starlight said:

Outsiders would only have been told the children's stories. Perhaps that's why those anthropologists from yesteryear considered the cultures primitive.

It makes sense that they don't tell the whole stories to strangers. And I guess their stories could amso be linked to wisdom and knowledge they gain with their experience in life. In order to know the stories I guess you must also experience and feel things. 

 

2 hours ago, Starlight said:

think that perhaps there is something to the idea that spirit animals were part of the symbols in the unconscious, @Esk. These cultures are so closely enmeshed with nature, it would be more unusual if they weren't.

I've always thought that spirit animals are more some gardians or divine entities than symbols related to unconscious. But again, I don't know much about this. 

 

@Starlight I thank you for your answers 🙂

 

[Mi-Shell]

8 hours ago, Esk said:

I've always thought that spirit animals are more some gardians or divine entities than symbols related to unconscious. But again, I don't know much about this. 

 

@Starlight I thank you for your answers 🙂

Yes! My Totem Guardian = Clan Guardian from my father's Siberian Clan and my personal Spirit Guides are completely different entities from a realm different from the ordinary consciousness and DO reside in what Jung would, for lack of a better word call the collective unconscious.

 

Yes, you have to see Jung's language and choice of words as the sign of the times he lived and worked in and although I never much liked the term Primitive I KNEW myself to BE one.

 

1976 during my training to become a Jungian Analyst:

During the lectures at the uni there were extended discussions about these strange Primitives and what it might be like, to go into trance and see the Spirits and iffff that was a hysteric hallucination induced by drugs or drumming and dancing or if it was just a conniving theatre performance of the charlatan (shaman) to con the primitives into fear and give him a chicken....

THAT is/ was the time, I stood up in the over-full lecture and Said: “Ich habe eine Waldseele” = I do have a Forest Soul.

“I am such a Primitive and you are right now talking bad about my father and both of my grandmothers and also of me!”

You could have heard a hair drop in the huge place stuffed with over 200 students.

Prof Gross of course knew me from my 9 month stint as a student nurse in his clinic, first working on the closed floor o with all the chronic schizophrenics, then with DR Dörner and the consciousness research lab and in the encounter groups on the 5^th floor and also because then I now worked as an RN with the wealthy private patients of Prof Burchard.

I was called to the front, so people could hear me and explained who I was and what I did and that the term Forest Soul had led me to study to become a Jungian analyst and right into this lecture. I explained what Spirit Guides are and what they do and that I am not hysteric, when I go into a trance. I, at another day showed them how and what I see when I do that. That was the first time they saw THETA waves on an EEG and later I could tell them what colour of.... well several neat trivial things easily proven and one life important thing for a patient on MRC 3 = the post op ward of the surgical clinic in Eppendorf.......

 

Quote

 

 

[Starlight]

Wow, thank you for sharing this story, @Mi-Shell. That's amazing!!

 

24 minutes ago, Mi-Shell said:

Yes! My Totem Guardian = Clan Guardian from my father's Siberian Clan and my personal Spirit Guides are completely different entities from a realm different from the ordinary consciousness and DO reside in what Jung would, for lack of a better word call the collective unconscious.

Am I right in understanding that your Clan Guardian and your personal Spirit Guides come from two different levels of reality, or did you mean that they are all from the collective unconscious as Jung called it?

 

The word "primitive" isn't really problematic - unless we are regarding something or someone primitive as lesser than we consider ourselves to be, and I think that could easily happen with a term used at a certain time in history by those with a more colonial outlook, a product of the time. So I prefer to use a more respectful term if I can think of or discover one. 🙂 

Edited August 26, 2019 by Starlight

[Mi-Shell]

Symbols:

In our work we first tried, that the patients confide into us, what their auditory or visual hallucinations were, in order to discover these symbol complexes and then take them apart and find out, why THESE symbols were relevant for THIS patient and what occurrence in life had first imprinted them into the patient's mind. Were they conscious or unconscious? Did the patient remember- were they his/ her symbols or maybe adopted from the mother or father or a horror movie or??

When the meds worked well enough, that the patient was able to participate in art therapy and could actually draw/ paint or lego-build /collage them or other relevant complexes, we then went ahead and dissected these art works, often with the patient together – much like you would sit over a Tarot image with a sitter.

So i often sat over bizzzzzarrre artwork......

Here, what I wrote about a specific deck last week:

 

I wanted to do my daily draws with the Mary El, but then I joined the book club and we are reading C.G. Jung, Man and his symbols. this brought up l lot of old memories from me working as a Jungian analyst in the psychiatric hospital in Hamburg Eppendorf. an important part of my work with sick patients was, to get them to draw and paint - their hallucinations the voices they hear, what these say and stuff  = complexes that came up from their childhood. So almost daily I sat over images - very much like many of the Mary El. when it came out a few years back, I mentioned that. So this time around, I caught myself looking at the cards with the eyes of a therapist and not those of a Tarot reader. 

I just had to pack the cards up and put them away.

I think a more traditional deck will be better, while I delve back into old waters. 

- Or maybe the Animals again: It was back then, that I for the first time read black on white, that there are "primitive people", that do have a "Forest Soul" and Spirit Guides. I knew then, that with my Siberian routs and upbringing I am such a person. 

This recognition figured LARGE in my study and also later when I joined the "Consciousness Project" on the university as a researcher AND a research subject.........

 

 

https://www.thetarotforum.com/forums/topic/7784-deck-of-the-week-sign-up-thread-week-110-august-17-august-23/page/2/

 

 

[Mi-Shell]

27 minutes ago, Starlight said:

Wow, thank you for sharing this story, @Mi-Shell. That's amazing!!

 

Am I right in understanding that your Clan Guardian and your personal Spirit Guides come from two different levels of reality,

NO absolutely NOT!

 

or did you mean that they are all from the collective unconscious as Jung called it?

This is not the right word for it, but it is all there is available in English -

it is the "Anaguilin" a word that does not exist in any European language and can be understood as the realm of

"Being fully alive"

 where else our ordinary consciousness can be translated into the state of

"believing I exist"

aaaaand there you see a little "give away: 😉 the nasty little I = EGO

 

 

 

[Mi-Shell]

Of course we also worked with dreams.

In training we learned several different schools of dream interpretations and also all the archetypes etc etc.

We had to learn to analyze our own dreams and their messages in these different schools and depending on which one you used, the interpretation would/ could be COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and may be further from what was realllllly happening with/ inside us or later our patient.

When I then touched the patient and "saw" their dream or its symbols I usually could quickly find out the real complex.

But THEN it was nearly impossible to tell / convey the psychiatrists that they were "barking up the wrong Tree"

After all I was just a little scruffy primitive nobody..... Still am and proud of it......

[Esk]

@Mi-Shell I thank you for all you have shared with us! It's very interesting to have the point of view of someone who is both Jungian psychatrist and connected to spirit guides. And it's great to be able to mix all this different traditions 🙂

 

 

[Starlight]

Yes, thank you, @Mi-Shell. 🙂

[AfternoonTarot]

On 8/25/2019 at 5:55 AM, Starlight said:

The link to Tarot must lie in the symbols in the cards and in the different ways each reader interprets those symbols. The Tarot takes the place of dreams.

Yes, I feel like the Tarot cards, much like with a remembered dream, bring to awareness elements from the unconscious.  

 

@Mi-Shell What a wonderful story.  Thank you for sharing it and about the symbols in the art work.  I’m curious, did the patients’ artwork then seem like symbols from the unconscious, and that led to you uncover the complex?  I’m wondering if the process with patients was closer to free association or active imagination?