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I see that Carl Jung was born on this day, the 26th of July, in 1875. Noting that has triggered a cascade of thoughts.<\/p>\n
For some time I\u2019ve been puttering around with a memoir. It hasn\u2019t gone particularly well. Memoirs are tricky things, and at this point the great pile of words I\u2019ve compiled over the past few years are more of the \u201cI did this and then I did that\u201d than the lively narrative that would be worth publishing.<\/p>\n
Still there are a couple of things in that memoir that could be of interest to someone other than me. One of these things is how an aspect of Jungianism has touched me. And with that how it might be useful to others on the intimate way.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve told versions of this before.<\/p>\n
In the 1980s (ah, someone just reminded me how the 80s are as far from today as the 80s were from the 1940s\u2026) my spouse Jan & I could see some writing on the wall, and the words were not promising. I was a High School drop out working in used book stores. I could go anywhere in the country, it seemed, and be qualified for a seven dollar an hour job. Jan, who had dropped out of UCLA in the late 1960s to join the revolution, had since settle into work as a typesetter, a computer generated process that followed \u201chot type,\u201d and proceeded the coming personal computer revolution. She knew eventually her profession would if not die off completely, it would shrink dramatically.<\/p>\n
Our hearts had been elsewhere than making a living. Ours had been lives focused on the spiritual quest.<\/p>\n
It was time to get our \u201cearth plane\u201d act together.<\/p>\n
And with that I began taking classes at Sonoma State University, studying psychology while Jan finished up some general education requirements at several local community colleges before returning to university, herself.<\/p>\n
I was working close to full time and I considered the BA nothing more than a ticket to a professional school, and so was pushing through as fast as I could. Some friends stopped me and said, \u201cDo yourself a favor, James. Find a professor you admire and take whatever she or he offers.\u201d They slyly added, \u201cYou\u2019ll never regret it.\u201d<\/p>\n
One of them who knew the school, Sonoma State, a commuter college some sixty miles north of San Francisco, said \u201cTake a class from Gordon Tappan in the psychology department.\u201d A little reluctantly, but needing some relief from the grind, I signed up. Now, totally by accident I walked into a graduate seminar on archetypal psychology, a variation on Carl Jung\u2019s work. I stood at his desk. Gordon looked at my paperwork, glanced up and said, \u201cBeen a mistake. No undergraduates here.\u201d I said, \u201cI\u2019m on a tight schedule and can\u2019t get another class in time to keep my load up, and as someone let me register, I\u2019m not going to leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
He gave me the fisheye, then said, \u201cSit in the back and keep quiet.\u201d I sat in the back but didn\u2019t keep quiet. I ended up taking three classes with him, and found them pretty much the only things I recall from that whirlwind that led to my being able to get into grad school.<\/p>\n
Gordon was an archetypalist. Now, while I sometimes have referred to myself as a pseudo-Jungian, I\u2019ve never actually had much of a taste for Carl Jung\u2019s work. I think while he was some kind of artist of the heart, he also liked to pretend his work was science. And that just annoyed me.<\/p>\n
But, his disciple James Hillman, well, he\u2019s a horse of another color entirely. As is his subset of Jungian thought, archetypal psychology. A few years ago when I learned Hillman had died, I felt actual grief, as if it were the passing of one of my teachers. While I never met him, since Gordon\u2019s class I\u2019ve read a lot of Hillman. I consider him one of my important guides.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m particularly taken with what Hillman considered the soul to be for someone who doesn\u2019t think there\u2019s a parasite inside us just waiting for the moment it can break free. You may have noticed how spirit and self, and sometimes mind are, in practice, in our times, all taken as synonyms for soul. Actually this is a problem. Hillman suggested this represents a reductionism in our current culture leading to a simple Cartesian divide \u201cbetween outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n