[a brief recap on who is Bouttes, and then some 5000 words from his book on Jung]
I posted a while back some excerpts from the work of Jean-Louis Bouttes, a collaborator of Roland Barthes, from his first phase of writing in the late 70s. During that period, in dialogue with Barthes, he was principally concerned with the problem of ‘intensity’—how contemporary life, with its political and moral regime of generalized tolerance and egalitarianism, seems to make it impossible to rise to the sublime heights of aesthetic, erotic, religious etc. experience, even as these experiences, if we do manage to have them, may destroy us. How can we be open to callings from beyond ourselves, to the extra-human or most-human ‘intensities,’ without becoming violent fanatics, or simply madmen whose egos have dissolved?
In his contemporaneous Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse (which I wrote about here) Barthes was asking specifically how we can keep alive the possibility of falling in love without being thus overwhelmed by it—and how we can think about love or other fundamental experiences without theoretically generalizing them into an impersonal, abstract meaninglessness (here Barthes was playing something like Kierkegaard, or Walker Percy’s Kierkegaard, to the Hegel offered by Lacan—whose form of psychoanalysis seemed to deny the possibility of love being a genuinely meaningful experience for a particular person). This, I argue elsewhere, is at the background of his new ‘second liberalism,’ the politics of the ‘Neutral’ that he was developing just before he got hit by that truck.
Today Eric Marty is (as I complain in the piece linked to, somewhat problematically) trying to continue that line of thought, drawing the parallels between Barthes’ project and the late Foucault (see my previous post for a rundown on my writings on that topic—here I totally agree with Marty in seeing Foucault in his last years as a resource for a kind of thoughtful refoundation of liberalism) and Lacan, whom I don’t claim to understand. But interestingly, in Lover’s Discourse Barthes hinted at a means of moving beyond what he saw as Lacan’s uselessly totalizing and impersonal structuralism, which had the rigidity of a new religious sect, into a more flexible approach, one that overcome the false binary in the pair ‘Hegel-Kierkegaard’ (system-individual; this was also, I’ll be writing about soon, Judith Butler’s initial agenda before Robert Pippin shat on her first book and prevented her from becoming the po-mo interpreter of Hegel we should have had—Imagine the Committee on Social Thought with a Butler unbothered by gender, instead of Bubba Pippin!) by thinking through his painful experience of love via the figure of ‘The Lover’. Thus Lover’s Discourse analyzes, Barthes says by way of a pretext but also in a real theoretical innovation, not his own personal discourse (theorizing the ‘not me writing about myself in love’) nor the universal discourse of human beings qua human beings, but the discourse in which we participate when we happen to become, or perform, or be gripped by the role or spirit of The Lover. In other words, Barthes is thinking about archetype.
I don’t know if Barthes—or anyone in France in those days—had read Jung. But in the decade after his death in 1980, Bouttes studied Jung—and Jung’s then-largely-forgotten patient-mistress-collaborator Sabina Spielrein. In 1990 he published, to basically no reviews, Jung or the Power of Illusion. This text is not an easy read exactly, and it’s never been translated into English, but it strikes me as terribly important because in here Bouttes takes Barthes’ and his own agendas a step further, trying to develop not quite a theoretical framework, but rather an affective style—a form of play—in which it would be possible to move back and forth among the various positions that has seemed to be irreconcilable. Between a capacity to be captured by ‘intensities’ and to protect oneself by being dissolved in them; between a desire to comprehend the world and self within a system and the desire to rescue one’s particularity from such totalizing ambitions; between ironic detachment and commitment; and, here not between but among the various archetypes that are not, Bouttes insists (echoing the late Barthes’ post-ideological fragmentary writing style) as pieces that compose a whole, or as stages in a dialectic moving towards synthesis, but as parts that are played out, roles taken on, in an endless dramaturgy by which we learn not this or that bit of information or glimpse some vision of the whole, but rather acquire a kind of practical wisdom, a gamesmanship by which we learn how to play ourselves.
The book is also interesting for its way of reading Freud by the light of Jung, and Jung by the light of Freud—and both of them through Spielrein, who corresponded with both even after their break, and tried to re-integrate their thinking. She was also, Bouttes shows in the middle of the book, the living basis of Jung’s concept of anima. Bouttes refers in the last chapter to Jung’s practices of self-consciously provoking mystical states, one of which involved addressing real, physical letters to his anima, sending them off in the mail, and then answering them, in what Bouttes invites us to think of as a form of serious play (another model for how to play with psychic life—which is both oneself and others, both real external others and imaginary internalized and archetypalized others—is by learning how to hold on to Christianity [or any belief system, mutatis mutandis] by seeing it not as a single dogma but rather as a repertory of varied god-terms, as a spiritual version of the liquor-organ played on by Des Esseintes, as the civilizational heritage out of which we make our works of art [Jung and Freud and Spielrein, as Bouttes explores, passed among themselves the fantasy, derived from Nietzsche, of a new Christ-figure who would be ‘AryanoSemitic’, multiple, complex, holding two inheritances together in a tension of opposites])
I’m still thinking through all this—I’ve only started trying to make sense of Bouttes, and his relationship to Barthes. I’m going to Bulgaria soon for some months on a fellowship to think more about this, and how Kristeva shaped and responded to their work. But I find Bouttes really fascinating, and frustrating, so I wanted to make a preliminary translation of the first and last chapters of his book on Jung available. They sound very translated—sorry! The French version (Jung ou la puissance de l’illusion) is available for pretty cheap on Amazon. I’ll probably post some sections of the middle of the text (which is often disorganized, repetitive or boring, but sometimes amazing—at least, to me!) Anyway, here goes…
***
Carl Gustav Jung, a Germanophone Swiss writer, a psychoanalyst or a psychologist, was born in 1875. He died in 1961.
His influence, although his theoretical contributions began in 1902 is really part of the intellectual context of post-1945 era; Jung passed through the history of the twentieth century less damaged, in his very flesh, than Freud. Switzerland, of which he was a citizen, is neutral: he did not have, as Freud did, sons and close friends who went to war, and later, sisters who died in the Nazi concentration camps.
Jung’s writings have a hermetic aspect. Seeds from which shoots have not sprouted. To write in this way while one is still alive is to take the side of the dead: those who await interpretation. Jung reverses the relationship between living and dead. The living must learn from the latter what their “soul” tried to say or do.
It may be surprising that a man of science should use the word “soul”… if one has a narrow conception of science. But for thousands of years, humankind believed… in something around which, in every language, this word orbits: an interlocking formation of changing shapes, the rustling of leaves at Dodona’s oracle; a breath of Pentecost; the golden calf on a statue of a woman; the gifts of maternity; the spiritual milk of doctrine; the water of wisdom, the sperm of life, the singing blades of grass.
*
A strange shudder seizes the observer who comes from Freud and moves towards Jung: the Jungian text unrolls itself in a back-and-forth motion among three different positions.
First, an extremist, Freudian one: Jung is, at times, more virulent than Freud in his critique of the Western religious mentality; he describes himself as irritated by Swedenborg, that summit of European romanticism; and although his autobiography seems to be filled with ‘visions,’ he declares himself to be un-visionary. A statue of Voltaire stood at the entrance to his home. At a conference, he expressed his annoyance with reports about life after death. This is, by the way, in contradiction with other writings from the same period. This critical, antireligious line remains until the end of his life: it is a Freudian commitment; so much so that in a guessing game, I often was unable to tell whether a given quotation was from Freud or Jung.
But there are two other lines of reading that can be designated, just as important, and enduring, as the first: a middle line, for a sketch of a system of analysis compatible with that of Freud, Adler, and, in time, other analysts; and a Jungian line, hard and violently idealist (with a pronounced interest in parapsychology).
The middle line is the most difficult to see: it is the one that more or less coincides with that of the disciple of Jung and Freud, Sabina Spielrein… “Mme Doctor of the pure game” about whom there will be much discussion later. It is to this line, in any case, that interpretation must adhere.
There is no lack of examples, in Jung’s body of work, of shifts in tone that necessitate the movement from one theoretical perspective to another. What I call the middle line of reading is, certainly, in the greatest extent of its possible definition, to be found in the writings of Sabina Spielrein; but it can be seen, less clearly, in any text attributed to Jung: some phrases, taken from the work Dialectic of the Ego and the Unconscious, concerning the immortality of the soul, correspond quite well to this middle, gray-colored, line of reading, brought about by a simultaneous movement across two extreme points of view, each of which can be symbolized by cliches applied respectively to Freud and to Jung.
‘Beyond the grave and death’ signifies for psychology: beyond that which is conscious. The expression has no other meaning, because the doctrine of the immortality of the soul cannot be comprehended by a living person; who has no standing, insofar as he is living, to speak about any sort of ‘beyond.’
From a scientific perspective, the attribute of personal immortality, which religious conceptions affix to the soul, is a mere indication of the autonomous nature of psychic life (…) In its psychological sense, ‘immortality’ refers to a psychic activity that transgresses the borders of consciousness (…) Asia, in its conception of things, has no notion of the soul, such as we have fabricated here.
This, with all its rational reticence, is practically Freud. What’s more, the opposition between European and Asian conceptions frames the ‘soul’ as something historically produced.
Our terrible gods have only changed their names, now they appear as -isms (…) Only a tiny fragment of humankind, which, essentially, lives on the furthest abutment of Asia battered by the Atlantic and confers upon itself the title of ‘civilized,’ has been reduced, by its defective manner of contact with nature, to see in religion a strange mental problem, characterized by a search for that which cannot be found…
This part of the text is the counter-echo of the apparent thesis of Freud in The Future of an Illusion, and could have been added in 1929. The text is hard: and obviously directed against someone.
In other passages, the aggressive tone can seem to be a hair in the soup; it perturbs the sentences, then, as suddenly as it came, falls silent. Has it been noticed in the meantime that the object of this indignation was unnamed? Generally the enemy is Freud. Then the text leaves off its shamanic tone and becomes Freudian again; which, on a first reading, gives the reader the impression that Jung is having fun at his expense.
It’s a back-and-forth. The same discursive constraint reappears everywhere: it forms a structure that defines the transferential status of Jung’s body of work. There falls a continual rain of reproaches, explicit and implicit, addressed to Freud; then, with the suddenness of tropical weather, they rise back into the sky. Or rather it’s like a cartoon in which the role of the good guy and the bad guy is played by the same figure: Freud, who is sometimes the Gruzzlebeard of the littlest science, sometimes the Sage, the divinatory inspirer, the nymph Egeria, the Prophet.
So is this a sign of the imperfection of psychoanalysis, which appears to be made out of crossed fanaticisms, or is it rather the proof that no psychoanalyst has managed to overcome envy?
*
Jung and Freud, between 1906 and 1913, crossed each other. They alternated the positions of disciple and master. Nineteen years younger than Freud, Jung was, between 1906 and 1912, his spiritual son, in the literal sense. Freud loved games of title and ceremony. He adopted Jung in circumstances that are odd for a thinker reputed to be a positivist and materialist. There was no witness. It all happened quite late one night, in Freud’s home, 19 Mountain Street, Vienna. Their correspondence alludes to the method of this adoption: a Catholic rite used for the unction of bishops by the sovereign pontiff!
1907: Freud sends Jung a telegram every day, and a letter every three days. Freud takes the long train ride from Vienna to Zurich to see the person he considers to be an elite fighter in the struggle against the Queen of the Night, of shadow and prejudice.
It should be remembered in any present-day interpretation of psychoanalysis that the latter then had an epic dimension. We amputate the Jungian dimensions of Freud; we believe that he didn’t really believe in the return, within his own subjective experience of temporality, of the polis’ time of Tragedy. We thus misunderstand that he explains the fear of castration as much in terms of fear of a volcano God as through a Primordial Laius. The rite of the dismembered Osiris governs his understanding of schizophrenia. We don’t know that he explains circumcision in terms of ethics.
Every night, near midnight, Freud transformed himself into a fantastical storyteller and became the imitator of Maupassant and James, terrorizing Ferenczi and Jones, imitating the allure of familiarity with the occult to which Jung had initiated him by making spirits knock against the furniture.
What was Freud’s favorite fantastic theme? Think of the Great Pan of Arthur Machen, of Maupassant’s Horla, of the end of She, when the Egyptian princess is transformed into a baby baboon, writhing in the dirt; these are all favorite readings of Freud: they center around the collective image of the Unnamable, throughout the snakes that appear in his letter to Fliess. The great mythical monkey in Totem and Taboo, the power of the primitive father, will be struck, a sun gobbled up by the moon, the shadow of a star, horrifying mother, awful siren of the night, cousin of the undefeated sphinx that Oedipus believed he had defeated.
Why all these examples? I want to show that, beyond the aggression and imagined differences between Freud and Jung, they shared, in brief, a common irrationalism that was the energy powering their discoveries.
Freud reckons, backwards, the date of the fundamental human fantasies. He hesitates between dates that go back, when he is close with Ferenczi, to the origin of the first cellular organisms; and even, in Moses and Monotheism, to the creation of the universe; he returns, in discussing the probable mutation of Grimaldi’s Negroid, to the Solutrean era (20,000 years ago) and the climactic events of the last glaciation.
Keeping in mind this intense identification with the irrational, we can take hold of the principles that are at the center of Jung’s method, which rests on the most naive identification with the other, whether that other is imaginary (a fragment of knowledge, an image, an impression, a mood) or—and this amounts to just the same thing—real (his mistress, his wife, his friends, his relatives, his patients, his readings, himself).
Jung began theorizing by studying the forms of the imagination: for example, the imaginative fantasies having to do with sea voyages. This fantasy can be related back to a habit of the European who is off to make himself known in America. When Freud and Jung get on the boat for America (1909), Jung imagines himself on a huge fish, of the sort that transported the prophet Jonah. Changing species isn’t such a big deal, in mystical comparisons, nor is changing century.
When Freud and Jung fell out (1913), I can say without much exaggeration that Jung convinced himself he was living in a Second Era of Fish: this second era would have started during the European Wars of Religion, during which fish bit each other’s tails even more than they do in the Zodiac. Taken up in the aquatic parade, bathed in the primordial waters, and in the blood-red wave of the primordial soup, Freud is a fishy foe. Psychoanalysts live, in this era, as if they were in a cartoon! Thinking there was an analogy between tunnels and the uterus, Freud dedicated a portion of his analysis to the effects of the train. When one considers the number of dreams about train stations, in The Interpretation of Dreams! The analytic session is compared in that book to the unrolling of a countryside through the window of a train compartment. This reference can be explained by the otherness of the unconscious, and the fact that one can see it ‘as if through the retina’ without having any possibility of touching it.
The theory of birth-trauma, developed by Otto Rank, rests on a series of ‘tunnel’ dreams, found in the index of The Interpretation of Dreams.
After that book, Freud became more interested in the telephone, the ocean liner, and, lighter than air: the Zeppelin, flying from Germany to England, was a non-trivial symptom of the war of 1914.
*
In Jung and Freud can be found that barbarism particular to young bourgeois men of the last century they invented a sort of tractor to enter the head, as Ford invented a car, and Jules Verne invented everything. In that sense, they can certainly be called sorcerers; provided one admits that a great deal of science is, in essence, sorcery.
___
To run towards the waves and then back again, playing at being chased by them, without getting wet. This exemplifies the Jungian analytic game, if one replaces the sea with the ocean of fantasies. For Jung, it is a matter of accompanying the imaginary right up to the point where the subject risks being drowned; and then to return to dry land, where the waves cannot reach. The game begins by taking seriously the element in which it is played out. In the case of a child’s game with the sea, the limit of seriousness would be drowning. In the case of the individual in relation to his own soul, the dangerous extreme is falling entirely thrall to the imaginary. But in order for there to be a game, there must be a feeling of a possible triumph of technique over the element. In just the same way, there must be in the analyst the possible jubilation of a victory of human technique over the imaginary. The game is basically configured by the synthesis of contrary things. The child who plays with waves fabricates[1] a third element that is neither land nor water. The analyst who plays with fantasy creates a third element that is neither the conscious nor the unconscious. Besides, quite early in his career, Jung had already defined the acquisition of mastery of psychoanalytic technique as an oscillation between two opposing domains of psychic life, two complementary images.
That analysis emerges from the continual play of humankind with its imaginary, that it is defined specifically by this surface of contact, that it is the game of games—this is the fundamental thought of Jung. In this game, the element is the thinking, heart, and desire of humankind. Of this thinking, heart and desire, one must become the royal partner.
In the game there is at once the creation and the resolution of a paradox: the utmost inattention and the utmost attention to the psychic situation.
For the structure of the most fundamental psychic game to become clearly comprehensible, Jung showed himself on several occasions as he played it, without the pretext of teaching it to any child. We have seen the game in which he gave concrete expression, even to the extent of feigning madness, the mental states that sunder individuals from themselves. We have seen how he wrote actual letters to the psychic region of subjectivity from which arise caprices and fascinations, which he includes in his notion of the soul to distinguish it from the Christian one. Writing to his own soul, as if someone had distanced him from it and placed it somewhere in the wide world. Writing the soul’s responses. Wasn’t there already the first sign of an insane gesture and at the same time a deep and true naivete? This game of correspondence with himself, literally going through the post, to which we have seen Jung give himself over, is not yet an image of the analytic game. Indeed there is still here too much personalization. We have not yet arrived at a kind of work carried out on raw material. There is a risk here of discovering, as in a mirror, the too-heavy presence of reality. There is not a sufficient degree of abstraction from the real; we are still far from the total mental freedom that children have at play.
On the other hand, in the games of construction (in the literal sense) to which he gave himself over, in the most infantile sense, we can see Jung’s method more clearly. The importance of these games of construction in the development of his method is that allusion is often made to them throughout his work, and that these games are connected with two critical dates from his biography: the rupture with Freud, in the years around 1912, and the period when he stopped corresponding with the anima archetype, in the 1950s. These two periods are themselves in relation, as we will see, with the first childhood dream that Jung recounts at the beginning of his autobiography: the recounting of this dream is tied to the context of Jung’s relations with Christianity. There seems to have been very early in his life a refusal to adore Christ on the cross; the dream is presented as its expression: his own church will have no monument placed above the earth, but rather a subterranean stone. There will not be a cross erected in the diurnal horizon, but a phallus worshipped underground. Jung never underlined the important of the phallic cult as the foundational imaginary with which he played as emphatically elsewhere as he did in his autobiography. In 1912, giving himself over to these famous games of construction, he noticed that among the different foundations of his theory, something was missing: the altar from a church. He noted his dislike at having to build a church, but, as the injunction to do so was stronger[2], he went out walking until he found a stone and decided that it would be his altar.[3] And he himself drew the connection between this stone and the phallic stone from his childhood dream.[4] The church, in its manner, covers the phallic dream. Everything happens as if the stone that was missing in his dream was a stone that contained two different religious logics, on which the subject carried out an unprecedented combinatory operation, made possible by his contact with the history of religions. That operation is to make turn together the cross of Christ and the Phallus of the mystery cults.
In 1950, almost forty years later, Jung tells us more or less the same story, except that he doesn’t go out looking alone for the stone that is missing in his game of construction, but rather giving orders to workers about stone blocs. In the end, because the workers make a mistake and bring a cube, he finds here the cornerstone of his building.[5] On this stone altar is engraved fragment 52 of Heraclitus: “Time plays, like a child.” This time the stone is neither phallic nor that of the Dionysiac Christ of 1912.[6] In this period, Jung sets against the mystic marriage of the soul and Christ, or of the Church and the Lamb, that is to say against the model of marriage itself, the image of the abandoned stone, which, in its solitude, shines out with singular strength.
Among these instances of the fantasmatic in Jung’s life there is something in common, which can be defined negatively by its opposition to the Christianity of the Church. The phallic stone is set against the Rock of Christ [Peter], as the alchemical stone is set against the wedding of the soul and Jesus. The final game—of 1950—does not cancel out the earlier ones. There is rather an addition that will constitute the game itself, a difficult game to represent because one must imagine a combination of intense figures[7] or even of several cornerstones, in order to have an approximate idea of his method: neither Christian, nor worshipper of the phallus, nor cultist of the White Goddess of the soul. Someone who is all of these at once, and capable of detaching himself from this multiplicity of possible gods. An operation that combines several religious positions even as it carries within itself a forgetfulness of them.
A little stone thus represents for Jung the foundation of personal religious truth. It’s the phantasm of the magic stone. A curious combination that honors both Eros and Christ. The linking of a moral agenda and a scheme for debauchery. A way of circumambulating two thousand years of Western ideology, as in those diagrams in which Jung tries to explain the imaginary avatars by means of the aspects of the Bible that contributed to this ideology….These diagrams, which represent the evolution of Western ideologies in relation to the centuries-long deviations of the archetypes take the shape of a series of interconnected crystals, the angles of which are formed by mythological figures taken from the Bible: Moses and Jethro, his adoptive father, Sephora, the Shulamite, Adam Kadmon, and Eden, the angel-serpent of Paradise, with the games of mirrors and inversions of representations from one figure to another. In order to understand the radical suppleness of identifications that is required, Jung has recourse to the figure of a female Harlequin or to the heterogeneity of the principles he takes to be constitutive of the Gospel.[8] He is one of the few who have divined what might call the mixed basis of the religious life, and particularly of Christianity.
Even considering it from a theological point of view, Jung’s thinking has the merit of making a thesis that seems to devalue Christianity (by showing its debts to the Alexandrine world) into a foundational thesis; what is called Christianity is in fact founded, according to Jung, on several distinct bases: the Bible, for one, and the different Semitic religions that can be half-seen within it, and, on the other, Anacreon, Horace, Sappho (until the 11th century), Virgil, etc.; a monk, when his order wasn’t intolerant, participated in ideologies that are, on a normative level, incompatible, but the Church knew how to skillfully combine them, unless it was merely chance. Hellenistic culture, transmitted at the same time and by the same hands as the Gospels, produced a text deliberate in its duplicity. You have, in your lectionary, an agenda and its counter-agenda.
Or rather: a mix of citations from the classical literature of Antiquity infiltrated the religious texts. We find Oedipus at Colonus in the story of the Passion and the Ascension; Medea who devours her child in the Virgin Mary; dismembered Osiris in the cutting of Christ’s tunic; Cassanda, the heroine of the most learned writers of Antiquity, Lycophron, would lend her words on the ruin of Troy to Christ’s laments for Jerusalem.
Attending to the multiple origins of Christianity, we can see how it offered Jung a safe-guard, in relation to the narrowness of religion: literature, with its vast universe of symbols, can cure any fanaticism.
But Jung responded to the heterogeneous substance of religion with a method by which he represented himself as heterogeneous in relation to his own imaginary. He can only represent it through the most extreme sort of disguise: Harlequin becomes the very figure by which the individual resists the utter stupidity of religion.
Jung’s experience ended in the lightening-up of imaginaries, in a kind of sublimation. But this lightening-up came at the end of a series of extremely concrete identifications with different religious systems, represented by the stones in his games. This lightening-up exemplifies a relation of self-forgetting, of ‘making unconscious,’ as it were, which is different from repression, even though it looks similar. Jung has often been critiqued for having obscured the relation between his biography and his imaginary. But, in fact, his path is only possible insofar as it is a path whereby the subject, through intense identifications, forgets his own biography. This is the necessary meaning of the collective unconscious. This is the movement into a zone of impersonality in which the individual can leave behind the resentment that adheres to his personal history.
His consideration of the relationship to the dead, to what traditional cultures call ancestors, lead Jung to grant an imaginary reality—for himself—to the ancient religious rituals he learned about (in non-European cultures, or at the margins of Western culture: alchemy, Gnosticism), in order to try to press their imprint onto his own life, just as a monk presses into himself the imprint of the Gospels or the Church Fathers. This requires a great degree of intellectual gymnastics, because the fact that he was using several different religious programs at the same time (being simultaneously mono- and poly-theist) could bring him close to a point of total skepticism. The importance of the figure of Voltaire for him can be explained in these terms. Thus for Jung the constant observation of himself and notably of anything that had to do with the memory or presence of intensity, ultimately reveals the point of contact between the greatest degree spirituality or the greatest degree of naivete in relation to the imaginary, and the greatest incredulity, a glance at one’s own nothingness.
The first zone of the imaginary that Jung encountered, that of the social mask, is also the last, which makes the individual, in his deepest identity, the mask of no one at all. I am no one: the mask and the experience of the void behind the mask.
He wishes to be a lunar eye, separated from its object and from itself, held prisoner by neither gods nor desires, neither love nor hate nor convictions nor prejudices… Detachment of consciousness, in both senses: this is, probably, the secret of the new conscience of the world upon which he calls.
Elijah, little canoe of folded paper sailing alongside the great boats. Each of the characters from the psychic unknown is an insurmountable reality, they cannot be otherwise; they walk along, as in a shared dream that has no beginning and no end, which exists only because an invisible ‘no one,’ Odysseus, dreams it (…) From the head of the yogi emerge twenty-five characters: his mental state at the moment when he is about to give up his ego, to pass from the most objective and complete stage of the self to a higher level, ‘the state of the lunar disk in its solitary rest’ the quintessence of being and non-being (…) A being that is not a colorless collective soul, one that is composed of an indeterminate number of stubborn individual souls with nothing in common, but also of houses, streets, churches, whorehouses and a folded paper headed out to sea…
[1] The imaginary is not only a product but also a producer of the unconscious. There is a relation between ‘the becoming (un)conscious’ and the productive imaginary. One has the impression that there is a project of self-fascination that is slowly carried out after 1913, the moment when he finishes writing The Metamorphoses of the Soul, as he himself says, “This work of 1913 was like a boundary marker set at the site where two roads diverged. Imperfect, incomplete, it became a project for the subsequent decades of my life.’ If the unconscious produces more than it speaks, then it requires pieces from which it can compose its products. It is necessary that the experience of the unconscious, in itself, be an experience of construction.
[2] Jung had read a story from the Caucasus in which an old wise man criticizes the work of the youngest prince, who was trying to build a perfect church for his father. The games of construction are contemporary with the active elaboration of the archetype Geist, Spirit/Mind.
[3] “I was determined to build a castle. But what was missing in it was a church. And a church needs an altar, but something in me objected to building it, so I went walking one day, as usual, along the lake and was gathering stones from the pebbles of the shores. Suddenly I saw a red stone, a kind of four-sided pyramid, four centimeters high. And soon as I saw it, I knew that I had my altar.” A passage of Psychology and Alchemy, concerning the mythic parallel between the creation of the stone and the birth of Christ, evokes one of the mythological axes of the delirium of Sabina Spielrein’s schizophrenic patient, in connection with her thesis: “The stones are resurrected, according to this patient a new man shall be created, Christ will be un-petrified,” the petrification, that is, of the institutional solidification of the Church.
[4] “While I was doing that I remembered the underground phallus of my childhood dream (…) all this didn’t happen without my thinking about the meaning of my games (…) The construction represented a beginning, it set off a whole current of fantasies that I later noted with great care (…) As soon as the last mouthful was swallowed, I ‘played’ until my patients arrived”
[5] “I was ordering stones from a nearby quarry (…) When the stones had arrived by boat and been unloaded, it appeared that the measures that had been taken for what should have been the cornerstone were all wrong. Instead of a cornerstone, they had delivered a cube. It was a perfect cube, larger than what I had ordered. The mason was furious and told the boatmen to take it away. But as I looked at the stone, I said, ‘No, this is my stone, I want this stone.’ I suddenly understood that it was perfect.”
[6] Cf. the enigma that fascinates Jung and which could be a signature of his work, “To the Di Manes, that which is neither man nor woman nor hermaphrodite, nor girl, nor youth, nor virgin, nor whore, nor continent, nor all of these at once, who did not die of hunger, nor was murdered, neither by iron, nor by poison, but by these three things, and is not in heaven, nor in the waters, nor in the earth, but everywhere. That which is neither its husband, nor its lover, nor its parent, neither sad, nor joyful, nor weeping, knowing and not knowing why it has placed this which is neither a monument nor a pyramid nor a tomb, that is, a tomb which holds no corpse, a corpse which is unburied in a tomb; but a corpse which is at once itself corpse and tomb” (mysterium conjonctionis)
[7] Jung (disguising himself as one of his patients) adds to one of his sketches an inscription from the Bhagavad Gita, alluding to the shining of the one who is in the chariot, in the wind, in the strength of the bull and in light: “I am the game of the gambler”
[8] The idea of composing one’s life through the juxtaposition of heterogeneous debris runs throughout Jung’s work, from the Metamorphoses of the Soul in which it is applied to Miss Miller, until his autobiography, in which his compares the different episodes of his own life to the heterogeneous fragments of the Gospels. If his own myth is no longer—taking his word for it—Christian, we are nevertheless forced to observe how close he is to the idea of a Christ who would be the perfect imaginary equation, a somewhat Mercurial Christ participating in both sexes. Christ, yes, but not Christian; Christianity emerged out of Christ through a sort of combinatory operation, but it is not, or is no longer, that combination which alone can open the lock of saint Peter.