The first psychonaut?

I was reading Jung this morning and it came to me that Freud has became the father of advertising and social media, whilst Jung has the honour of being, in my view anyway, the first psychonaut. 

[LINK]

Psychonautics is - a term diversely applied to cover all activities in which altered states are systematically utilized to investigate, augment, or enhance the human condition. These activities include the ritual and ceremonial practices of traditional shamanism, various forms of meditation, trance, yoga, lucid dreaming, sensory deprivation, and the controlled use of hallucinogenic or entheogenic substances. A person who endeavors to explore altered states for such purposes may be called a psychonaut.

Jung's Red Book is a distillation of his Black Books, and he wrote those black books after the catastrophic end of his friendship with his mentor and teacher, Herr Freud. 

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Jung had challenged Freud, because in Jung's view; and clearly this is seen in Freud's writing, Freud placed the desire for physical, sexual release-satisfaction at the core of all problems. Jung wasn't alone in challenging this theory, but the sting for Freud was all the sharper because Jung had been Freud's chosen one, Freud's most favoured student.

The first problem arose when Freud failed to comprehend Jung's work. Jungian theory isn't reductive or simple, and Jung continued to search for a better version, a more accurate, a more elegant understanding of what happens, of what really is the truth in our understanding of love, and perception, until the day he died. Freud called Jung's work, confused and confusing. 

Jungian understanding of mind, isn't a monomyth...

For six years there had been a strong and positive collaboration and friendship between Jung and Freud. Their relationship had been intense. Everything about themselves had been brought to the process of psychoanalysis; their private lives, their relationships and conflicts, especially their emotional responses. They were both deeply intertwined with the processes of creating theory and writing. But as far back as 1909, Freud was interpreting Jung as wanting to kill him!

Freud attributed his episode of fainting to Jung's 'subconsciously murderous intent!'

Freud was of course, the psychoanalytic father to Jung, the son. But how realistic is it to believe in any subconscious intent? Freud's understanding of the Oedipus 'instinct' (my term) was conscious, and it was his understanding. Without doubt Jung would have known about the Oedipus 'instinct' and therefore would he not have recognised his own subconscious desire to kill, if it had been there? Would Oedipus have killed his father and slept with his mother if he'd known his own history, and recognised his parents?

In 1912, Jung's use of a word such as obsequious shows that their relationship had deteriorated beyond repair.

You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard.

(McGuire 1974, p. 535, Jung to Freud 18 December 1912)

The evidence that Jung did not desire Freud to be dead and buried is compelling. The loss of Freud's patronage had a complex and devastating effect on Jung, despite Jung's obvious independence and his robust sense of self. Despite the truth that their relationship was not kind, cooperative or 'healthy'. The first lesson I take from this is that we cannot know before hand what will break us; any awful thing may posses the power to split us into fragments, like a mirror shattered into shards of conflicting reflections. And despite the sufferer knowing what has happened, the awareness and knowledge of the events cannot touch the absolute agony of it, not for a second!

[LINK] The friendship became increasingly strained from 1909. Its dissolution “was foreshadowed in 1911, overt in 1912, and final in 1913” (Storr 1973, p. 19). After the split, the two men hated each other, and continued to hate each other for the rest of their lives. 

The second lesson is that the friction of their relationship created thoughts, words and action. Without that fierce heat and intense light there was only darkness and death for Jung - because that was how Freud played it.. And after the split, Jung only survived (in my view) because he dared the abyss. After the end of their collaboration and all hope of friendship was dead and gone, Jung became socially isolated as his psychoanalytic friends and colleagues dropped away. Jung had already suffered the loss of friends and colleagues when he had chosen to work with Freud, and now Jung entered a period of intense psychological distress.

So this is where Jung was, when he began writing the material that became The Red Book. And this courage is what makes him the first, real psychonaut in my view. He could respect the process of madness, because he had listened to his psychotic patients enough. He had found meaning, and offered meaning to the lost by daring to enter the complex labyrinth of symbols and twilight language that typifies a person's attempt to reconstruct a broken reality.  He hadn't succumbed to the desire to save himself from their madness; he trusted in his similarity of process...

I tend to view Jung's work as the recasting of a person's catastrophic, forbidden, or meaningless narrative into something that is linked to wisdom, wholeness and the future. But the truth is, not any narrative will do! I think awareness of one's own history can be a  false dawn, whilst a true sunrise occurs though honouring the 'titanic' forces within one's life. And the pathway of emotion must be evoked. Better narratives than any problem-soaked history, are two-a-penny! But creating one that flies - now that takes real skill and creativity. More than just a skilful weaving of someone's words back into a new structure. Luminosity (numinocity)  is core.

I think of Jung a lot whenever I seek the edge-of-awareness sensing/feeling thought Gendlin describes as focusing. I thought of Jung more when my husband's car played a random track that told me exactly what had been happening in that car. And when the poltergeist was more active than now (I think it just lives here, at peace with me). Yet I also appreciate Jung's concept of telos, that we have to keep on circumambulating around our selves, making mistakes, getting lost, stumbling upon wonders and atrocities, and yet we keep on asking for more; more truth, more wisdom, more reality...

In October 1913 Jung had visions that foreshadowed the horrors of war that were soon to unfold. 

[LINK]… I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about an hour…. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.”

Patten-detection and meaning making are what brains do. The cerebellum, home of the little crocodile, is hard at work casting possible futures, and weaving potential realities alongside all the other basic modus operandi of our cognitive and perceptual systems. Meanwhile any coincidence spotted in the incoming flow of data from the outer world is infused with hyper-significance; given meaning and often some agency. The brain constructs our model of reality by attempting to match incoming “bottom-up” data with “top-down” anticipations and predictions. Therefore the brain is constantly seeking coincidence. And yet...

[LINK] on the night of 12 November 1913. Jung's motivation was to conduct a difficult "experiment" on himself consisting of a confrontation with the contents of his mind, paying no heed to the daily occurrences of his ordinary life. The journal entries continue over several following years and fill the next six notebooks. In these notebooks Carl Jung recorded his imaginative and visionary experiences during the transformative period that has been called his "confrontation with the unconscious.

Over the last two years I've spoken with a lot of people who one could say were in a similar place to Jung before he began to write his way out. Covid was cruel, social forces played out at work are inhumane power trips, people are subject to arbitrary disciplinaries, sudden unexpected loss of loved ones and there is no security; add the social norm of 'ghosting. The familiar landscapes of the soul - our inner reflection of security and certainty, the landscapes of our life -  are destroyed; losing all sense of direction and confidence. 

Greif and loss shatter meaning and in loss of meaning we lose ourselves, hope is gone, certainty is destroyed. The need to find what is lost, to search for a loved one is an overwhelming need that cannot be over until it is finally over. And over is only over when we have created powerful and courageous new meanings for the horror show, and our place within it.

When the fabric of my life was being torn asunder, Jung was always a part of me carrying that small and constant light, protecting it, holding it aloft to guide my way through the dark, illuminating the otherwise unseen, especially the unseen, felt things I'd rather not have known were actually there.