Reality-Food
Recently, I have been reading James Hillman, who is probably best described as “neo Jungian.” Without a doubt, Hillman was a genius of the first rank. While he explained Jung’s teachings with extraordinary clarity and brilliance, he was never afraid to disagree with Jung. In some respects, he even extended the implications and speculations that we still ponder as a result of what Jung discovered in those years of his courageous inner search and journey. No one escapes his or her historical milieu, not even the Buddha, and Jung was hardly an exception to history’s stern rule. Thus it is hardly surprising that Jung’s insights have been “revisioned” by more than one psychologist. In The Myth of Analysis, Re-Visioning Psychology and Anima: Personification of a Notion, Hillman not only serves us Jung in huge “meals,” he offers glimpses of where psychology can possibly go beyond both Jung and Freud. But true confession, James Hillman makes me angry! I have this sneaking suspicion that he knew just how brilliant he was, and that self-knowledge led to a certain condescension when it came to teaching ordinary people (such as VB) in two, three or four syllable words.
I used the word “meal” with intention. It seems to me that we have forgotten why a mother bird chews the food first before putting it into a baby chick’s beak. It’s called “premastication.” Hillman says that experience is “food for the soul.” I love that. It never occurred to me that the answer to “why do this or why go there?” might quite simply be answered by remembering that experience is food for he soul. But I tend to prefer saying that Reality is food for the soul, which is why I have repeated “Lead us from the unreal to the Real” as a daily mantra since I first read it in one of the Upanishads. Many of us have found ourselves hating “reality” at one time or another, but just where does one go from that attitude?
It has always seemed to me that a human chick (excuse the metaphor) - whether child, teenager, young adult or mature adult - can only digest “reality food” in small bites (or bits). Viewed from this perspective, the metaphor is complex indeed. If a personal psychic system (not to mention a group or culture) is not developed sufficiently to digest complex food, this means that we still have chick digestive systems. This is regardless of how mature our bird-bodies may appear to others. And who is the “Mother,” who premasticates the food we needed in order to thrive and develop psychologically and spiritually? I tend to think that She is none other than what Jung called called the Objective Psyche: something impersonal that transcends duality. This “Mother ”never stops trying to feed us its reality-food as long as we live. Sad to say, we never seem to tire of spitting it out.
“Dr. Byrd, (and we do understand why you are enamored of the chick metaphor), if you are going to make up a word like ‘reality-food,’ can you give us an example? Okay, how about the Buddha’s teaching that suffering is an intrinsic part of living?” We’ve been spitting that one out for twenty six hundred years.
So allow me to repeat Jung’s seminal paragraph.
“If tendencies towards dissociation were not inherent in the human psyche, fragmentary psychic systems would never have been split off; in other words, neither spirits nor gods would have ever come into existence. That is also the reason why our time has become so utterly godless and profane; we lack all knowledge of the unconscious psyche and pursue the cult of consciousness to the exclusion of all else. Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it coupled with a fanatical denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems.
I call this reality-food.
Jung speaks of “our time” as having become utterly godless and profane. Do you agree? His description of this time as utterly godless and profane, has a religious tone, does it not? The accusations from psychologists influenced by Freud and positivistic scientists deeply grounded in the late eighteen hundreds mindset (there is nothing that science will not and cannot eventually discover and prove) dismissed Jung’s insights as those of a “mystic,” or of a fuzzy metaphysician, who was out of the mainstream of accepted scientific and philosophical thought. But something within asks each of us to enquire into our own hearts: “ Is it possible that Jung was correct? Do we live in a godless and utterly profane time? If his words are nothing more than the rantings of a misanthrope, or the bad humor of a brilliant but pessimistic old man, we can breathe a sigh of relief and get on to the “next paragraph!” Yes? But what if we are unable to truly comprehend or digest the page in front of us? What if this is the theme song of our culture? “Never mind what I don’t understand, I’ll think about it later,” says the chick with a weak digestive system.
Fortunately or unfortunately, skipping over the hard parts means that we do not need to worry about wrestling with this extraordinary and dark analysis of the human condition. But if we suspect that there is truth to Jung’s insight, what else can we do but try to “stay with it Sally,” and wrestle with his words carefully? One caveat: We know that Jacob ended up with an injured hip when he presumed to wrestle with God’s angel, so we need to mind our hips as well as lips as we continue.
Previously, we saw that Jung recognized from his empirical observation of patients in his clinic in Zurich, tendencies toward dissociation that seemed to be inherent in the human psyche. Freud came to the exact same conclusion by the way, and with the same method of empirical observation. So Jung tells us that the psyche can split into fragmentary psychic systems which, as I suggested earlier, is precisely what happened with little Tom. So, Dr. Jung,“What is this psyche that contains split-off entities (“gods or spirits”), and why does the ego “fanatically” deny that they exist in our unconscious?” These are fundamental questions that motivated Carl Jung throughout his life.
Remember that he said psyche cannot see itself because it cannot find an archimedean point outside itself. This conclusion did not suddenly pop into his brain one fine day in college. Clearly, he spent decades trying to “see” psyche, and I believe he eventually concluded that the best one can do in order to describe something that cannot be seen is to personify it, that is, to help it exist in the imagination. After realizing that psyche, whatever it is, cannot be seen, he added, “psyche is existence itself.” It’s a bold statement, for sure. But I wonder, what other word we can imagine that captures the sense of what existence really is. Is it “Life”? Is it “Being”? Perhaps these words come close, but can you really feel the power or livingness in a word such as “existence?” There’s no “there” in it. In truth, there’s no “there” in most of the words that we use. “Familiarity breeds contempt” might be retranslated as “repetition kills the life of everything,” and what do we repeat more relentlessly than the words that we use?
So Jung borrowed a word that still has a little life or “juice” in it ever since the time of ancient Greece. To describe “existence” or even “soul” which was synonymous to him, he called it “psyche,” that ephemeral, ungraspable “thing” that is just beyond the border of our intellect. Personification gives the heart a handle on the incomprehensible, invisible things that we encounter every moment of our lives.
Someone gave me a poem his daughter had written about her little girl. I loved and felt it immediately, because it captured precisely the first magic of words, before we lost it.
“First Words
Rock:
a solid word formed
between tongue, ridge, and palate.
a word she knows she knows.
it dwells in her mouth so familiar, so good
she means to possess it entirely,
to literally hold as much of this knowing as she can.
Our house now an odd museum of stones
(the word finally escaping, but never the thing)
each one named again and again
in the clutch of her fingers,
each one becoming precious there.”
“Psychology” is the study of psyche. We will continue in the following post.
