Carl Jung - Matter of Heart

These are my notes from a 1983 Documentary I found on YouTube. His psychoanalyst colleagues talk about the meaning of his work and life with wisdom interspersed from the man himself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxXyTrdgJKg&list=LLml9jcp4pNd3vTbJu2_yb8A&index=1

Analyst who met him at 18: he told me the psychic world is the real reality. We had burgundy and he told me it would take 10 years to digest what had happened that day.

Another: most concerned with wholeness. Stillness, oneness, wholeness. Studying what was wrong with people and how to make it right is find the wholeness or opposite. Tremendous encounter with the unconscious. He didn’t let you pick flowers by the wayside.

Another: Concerned in “supernatural food” the depths. Speaks of your dreams before you came in. he speaks your own language.

Jung “after I went to Africa I found so much witchcraft in Switzerland that I had to deal with all that witchcraft before I went back.” He would say he was an old witch doctor. Im only an Africa who finds his gods in his dreams. Animal warms and immediacy.

Schopenhauer: humor is that only divine quality of man. Basel people have an extraordinary sense of humor. Their carnival is marvelous.

If man lived his life religiously, symbolically The first spirit passed his power and responsibility to the first human being. The human being had a god-like task in performing creation. The extent to which he created is the extent to which he derived his meaning.

Jung: “humanity is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. When the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.”

“There are things in the psyche which I don’t produce which have their own life. All my works have come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912.”

Man’s totality is not complete unless we take our human failings into it. I don’t have to live by failings. They are part of me and part of every human beings.

Consciousness is one factor. Unconscious is equally important. “The interference of consciousness.” Someone in this house is playing tricks. I had to deal with the unconscious victims of those forces every day in my patients.”

Take responsibility for manifestations that have remained in the unconscious. If you start taking responsibility for it it’s a strong case for your conscience. Moral courage to face facts that haven’t been considered or repressed.

I asked him for advice on my marriage and he wouldn’t give it. I got angry I said “why is everybody so mean to me?” he said “why are you so mean to everybody?” I stormed out. Everyone thought he was a charlatan.

“I really got more from Jung when he hit me over the head.:

Jung had small, squinty eyes. He was looking at something you could see. What came out was a simple fact. Something about your ordinary life or situation. Jung didn’t enjoy personas. He wanted to bring out the shadows.

Jung; “Biographies should show people in their undershirts. Geothe had his weakness, Calvin often cruel. These ideas reveal the true greatness of a man. This way of looking at things is better than false hero worship!”

Jung was very critical of my rowing technique. I was better than him. It was hell, I told him to do it himself.

Inferiorities get sent to the unconscious. Collective shadow is shadow of the god image. People see their personal shadow in dark collective.

Personal shadow is the door to collective shadow. If you know your personal shadow you can shut all the doors.

“The great events are profoundly unimportant. The essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history. Here alone do the great transformations first take place and the whole future, the whole history of the world ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals.

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.”

We all became analysts because we had big fat neuroses. Eventually we realized it would be nice to be an analyst.

The archetype seizes you. Falling in love at first sight. She looks like your imagination.

That is the anima. He thinks its all his soul. Like girls think a man has a spiritual attunement because he can sing very high. She is disappointed when she marries him. That’s the animus. (Doesn’t work for me)

We feel like projection of anima and animus and peeling it off and taking it in again and integrating. This androgynous state of being is the way one hopes to be before they throw the swtich. (Evolution of the soul)

Generally a lot of projection in anima and animus. All the love problems come from this. Crossing the swords. The love problem is the same all over the world. That is projection. If people work it out and take back the projection. I see you represented that in me goodbye. Or relationship is built up and can be expressed fully.

Thinking function vs feeling function. “Men think and women feeling” but it didn’t have to be so with us.

What he did for women came from his interest in the individual. Women could be individuals too. What is feminine and masculine is second to that.

It went better with women. Women don’t look for their father they look for their lover.

Transference: what’s missing in you must be seen in someone else.

Jung- “When you talk to someone and they give you insight into inner preoccupations and motivations and complexes. You get slowly into the situation where you have authority or a point of reference.

You’re in possession of all the important items in a person’s development. That creates an emotional relationship through the analyst. It’s as if people handed out their whole existence and that can make the person hate you for that or love you for that.” THIS IS IMPORTANT

I thought he would have a solution to life’s problems. He was setting me up to solve them. That’s what

he did.

We didn’t know if we were fish flesh or foul. We had to find ourselves anew. I had a dream: I projected my protestant upbringing and imagined others in a whole when they’re not.

You project because you’re not conscious. You have an idea of a deity.

You are the living experience of that architype. It made me indispensable to her. She is in the arms.

“That is the thing that people are looking for. An archetypal experience. They depend on desires, their ambitions, other people. Because they have no value in themselves, only rational, not in possession of a thread that would make them independent. When she has that experience she can’t depend anymore.”

It was as if it was inside of your subconscious. It was not trespassing because it was as if he had been wherever one was and he knew how to piece it. He didn’t ask for associations, he’d just talk. I was not making the connection with what he was talking about but I knew better, that I would find the connection eventually. Then he told me the second part of the dream which I hadn’t told him.

I had a dream Jung had died. Then I got a shock of life and I told Jung this happened. He told me then I was ready to see patients.

He wouldn’t fall into the traps of the women. He never misused his position and his transferences.

Tony Wolfe- he was proud he saved her. He was proud to fit her exceptional spirit. The more exceptional the more suffering there is. Jung thought what made life tear apart was because the feminine was rejected. Driving mad by a world of men. Rejected by a masculine dominated world. She grabbed him by the ear and led him through the depths of the unconscious. She introduced him to eastern spirituality and philosophy. They were sleeping together. She grasped things before he understood it. He was an intellectual doctor until he came to know her.

James Kirsch- “There was nothing hiding. It was in this relationship he had tremendous experiences mystical aspects of sexuality the architype working him. Jung wanted to be as conventional as possible whenever possible. In the inner world, in his relationships He could be as unique as he really was. Not an affair another wife”

Jung should’ve understood that was his anima and stop.

Johanna Meier-Fritzsche: Mrs. Jung had a fantastic sense of humor. A nice woman, motherly, helped a lot in working out anima animus problem. Those three did the work.

Emma Jung said she never ceased to be grateful for Toni Wolff. Gave him something she couldn’t have.

Emma Juing: “In our time, when shuch threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals, and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded on the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual human being as well as without. Bringing these opposites into union is one of the most important tasks of present-day psychotherapy.”

Man must live in a world of his biological truth and has always lived in the myth and we think we are able to be born today and to live with no myths, without history. That is a disease that is absolutely abnormal. Man is not born every day. Only complete when he has a relation to history. Without it youre born without eyes and ears.

He had techne: art, skill, he sensationalized thinking in its natural state and was therefore very creative.

Poems are about the inner mythological process. Man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.

Warriors gave their sword a name. They knew the sword in that sword was the solidity of their fate.

Matter if it’s to cooperate with you needs loving care. Not only technically. But living with it.

We want to see how the present moment has evolved out of the past. Alchemy are religious ideas that are the foundation of all science. Religion was an attitude of life that had nothing to do with any kind of creed. A creed will stop you from experience.

Conscious of the center, the self.

Man’s relation to God has to undergo a certain important change: instead of the propitiating praise to an unpredicatable king or that child’s prayer to a loving father, the responsible living and fulfilling of the divine will in us will be our form of worship and commerce with god. His goodness means grace and light and his dark side the terrible temptation of power. Man has already received so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet. Let us hope that god’s good spirit will guide him in his decisions, because it will depend upon man’s decision whether God’s creation will continue. Nothing shows more drastically than this possibility how much of divine power has come within the reach of man.

Allowing becoming in the midst of your being. This is the hardest thing you can ask of human beings.

A civilization needs a myth to live. If it’s destroyed it destroys them physically. No civilization lives on welfare. All great civilizations were thriving on a living myth. The Christian myth has degenerated and become one-sided. Alchemy is the complete myth. If we have a possibility for survival it would be by accepting the alchemical which is a completion or continuation of the Christian myth. The Christian doesn’t satisfy a great amount of people anymore. Not including feminine, only the purified feminine. Treating matter as the realm of the devil. Not facing problem of opposites, of evil.

We have to be aware of our excrement the dark side. This is the beginning of finding god.

Demand psychological illumination awareness or else people are barking at their own shadows. The human being starts by withdrawing his own shadow from his neighbor. Something of immense immediate political and social important.

Personal shadow of people didn’t upset him. Problem of evil is complete destruction. The only thing you can do is confront yourself with it where you are. If benevolent teaching would help we would be out of the problem long ago. The only way you can deal with it body to body is in yourself. Hope to change the world is a childish illusion.

“The world hangs on a thin thread. We’re not threatened by natural catastrophes. The psyche is the great tension. It’s demonstrated to us the power of the psyche. We know nothing about it. No one would give credit to the ideas of an ordinary man. Well housed and well fed, you have no idea of it at all.”

At the end of his life he predicted humanity would end in 50 years.

“The whole feeling goes against this idea. I don’t allow myself to be too optimistic. We’ve always had wars and catastrophe. The beauty of life is that billions of years ago evolution built up nature. That man would destroy it all without anywhere to go. I pray to god for us to reflect more. We might just sneak around the corner without too big a catastrophe. He said he saw enormous stretches of earth devastated. Thank god it’s not the whole planet. If you paint and interpret a dream then it becomes real. Being alone loads up the unconscious and it manifests. I am the friend of whoever is lonely. We must support the unconscious.” -his partner