Continuing in my series on up ...
Not long ago, in two posts on psychosis, I made reference to Jung’s personal “Red Book,” which was finally published in 2009 after lying in a bank vault for decades. One of my readers, Donna, gave me pause to revisit the topic. As you may recall from last week, Donna brought up the very important but totally neglected issue of the dark side of our manias and hypomanias. As she describes it:
Admittedly, I was far more creative then than at any other time. But it wasn't a beautiful creativity, it was a wild creativity painting huge grotesque masks ...
In a follow-up comment, Donna posted a poem, part of which goes:
Shall I risk becoming mother of yet another universe...is this our
God this woman still pounding out the words on a standard
Keyboard ...
Compare with Jung from his Red Book:
The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical. He robbed me of speech ...
And more Jung:
I hear steps on the stairway, the steps creak, he knocks: a strange fear comes over me: there stands the red one, his long shape wholly shrouded in red ...
Make no mistake, our dark side can be extremely frightening, but Jung also saw possibilities. In an article anticipating the publication of The Red Book, Sara Corbett in the NY Times Magazine put it this way:
Freud, who started as Jung’s mentor and later became his rival, generally viewed the unconscious mind as a warehouse for repressed desires, which could then be codified and pathologized and treated. Jung, over time, came to see the psyche as an inherently more spiritual and fluid place, an ocean that could be fished for enlightenment and healing.
In 1913, following an acrimonious split with Freud, Jung suffered a breakdown in which he expressed fear that he was “doing a schizophrenia.” He recalled, “I often had to cling to the table, so as not to fall apart.”
In 1914, mere months prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Jung commenced work on his Red Book. Instead of trying tune out the distractions in his head, he set aside odd hours from his busy life to immerse himself in his dark side, faithfully recording his impressions (with illuminating illustrations) over a period of 16 years. As the NY Times describes it:
The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.
Dark stuff, very dark, but he kept his thoughts to himself. Thirty years later, he appended:
