The harvest of Individuated Jackasses.

Ironweed Bloom

Freud died of mouth cancer in London, two days after Germany invaded Poland. For those in doubt or who may have been persuaded otherwise by conniving and devious men in suits sitting behind desks, the invasion of Poland occurred on the First of September 1939, it was the beginning of a World War that ended on the Second of September 1945 with the surrender of Japan. Oh Goody! In 1961 Karl Jung finished his last book, "Approaching the Unconscious," and in that same year, in Switzerland, on the anniversary of D Day, he died of heart problems. I was about nine or ten when he died and he was 85. Why now? The answer lies in the following sloppy précis of Jung's work:  "...integrating the unconscious into the conscious to raise a well balanced authentic self...." Worth noting that this account, for Jung, the authentic self was to be realized by integrating the unconscious self into the conscious self. But at the same time Jung probably never used the words authentic or well balanced. Those words may have come when the clear and rather obvious employment opportunities in head doctoring became more and more apparent. A name, a glass framed certificate, a title, an office with a leather couch, a pretty word and bang goes the unconscious self in this search for a happy and sterile authentic. There is nothing authentic about a well disciplined, hard-working mind managing something like a Department of Health and Human Services or anything else. No sir! Banjaxed, half witted and kettle drum crazy, that's closer to the free willed authentic of the unconscious and woe unto ye should such a deranged individual sit behind a resolute desk. What Jung suggested was, the unconscious self and the conscious self were engaged in a process of individuation. Freud didn't mess around either. He offered no cure, like a boarding school matron what Freud gave you was a couple of bandages before he kicked you back to the front lines. All the same, if we live long enough, happy days will be here again for us old people when casting a net across the political and theological spectrum fails to yield a rich harvest of individuated jackasses

Der Individuationsprozess.

Cat in a Grump

In 1916, Karl Jung wrote an essay, called The Structure of the Unconscious, in which he discussed his version of a collective unconscious. This collective unconscious wasn't a field, like a Higgs Field, it was inherited through the genes and was lodged in the mind, it was common to all people, it contained the building blocks of Jung's universal unconscious archetypes which contributed to the totality of a human mind, or what Jung called the Psyche. Jung's psyche and its outer world connection engages the idea of a constant interaction, interpreting and reinterpreting, a self regulation which attempts to produce a balance between the conscious, the unconscious mind and the Ego. The Ego is the raw experience of being in the world, or more gently, the Ego is your sense of self, the thing that says what about me. Also, and worth keeping in mind, the archetypes from the inherited unconscious self are sources of patterns for what Jung calls the Persona, the social mask we wear, the Shadow, our repressed side as well as the Anima and the Animus, or the female and the male side of our psyche. So there's a whole set of invisible things happening in our minds and when it comes to something like a field such as the Higgs Field, Jung sees an underlying layer, the Collective Unconscious, which doesn't encompass the universe, we inherit and share this layer with all other people, nowhere else. Life for us people, Jung argued, was a life long process of achieving a balanced integration of the personal and collective unconscious with that self centered jackass Jung called the Ego.  This process of integration Jung called Individuation, a word that comes directly from the Jung's book 'Der Individuationsprozess.' Got to love German Language. With us people, especially in the Western World, the idea of a consciousness that encompasses the universe as well as us people, can sometimes produce psychic upset which can lead to delusional as well as unfortunate behaviors.