Have some people just lost it?

By lucidish via Wikipedia

Okay, I try to be open-minded about psychological differences. But today something happened that got me thinking.

I had an hour to kill and it was sunny and warm in Toronto, so I thought I’d walk up Avenue Road, north of Lawrence Ave.

Earlier this week someone had mailed a letter to our place with the wrong address. So with my RETURN TO SENDER envelope in hand, I scanned the far corner of the intersection, looking for a mailbox.

Suddenly I heard this British sounding lady cursing me violently. Although she wore nice clothes, the words she used were anything but nice.

“You f****** Canadian! You dirty trash… you’re ugly…” she said angrily, staring right at me.

Taken aback, I met her violent gaze for an instant and then, out of fear, kept on walking without saying a word. She then said something about “… Jew” that didn’t sound very nice. (For the record, I’m a Christian but was near a somewhat Jewish area.)

Now, the reason I mention the letter and my looking for a mailbox is to underscore the fact that I didn’t take note of this lady before she began her abusive rant. I only noticed her after she started hollering at me.

If by chance I’d looked at her first and thought an unfair thought about her, then maybe I could have supposed that she was some kind of mind-reader, had picked up my bad thought, and was ticked off about it.

If that were the case, then I’d probably have been humbled. But again, I never saw this lady and had zero bad thoughts when she lit into me. I was actually quite happy, thinking nice thoughts while heading out for my walk in the sunshine.

So what happened?

Did she have a fight with her Canadian husband? Or maybe her Canadian son-in-law upset her this morning, and she was venting to innocent me. Who knows…

Those two possibilities represent one kind of explanation.

Another possibility is that she heard voices and assumed she was reading my mind. This might sound a little nuts but I suspect it does happen with some people. Whether or not these voices are generated by the brain or the devil remains a mystery that I don’t think psychiatry can solve.

So either this lady was irresponsibly abusive, or she was just out of her mind. It’s hard to know. But if a cop were around, I probably would have reported her.

I was genuinely afraid for a moment. And that was one moment too long.

Mental illness in ancient cultures

Stamp of Moldova; Mircea Eliade via Wikipedia

Here’s a Q&A at AllExperts.com that probes the idea of mental illness in ancient cultures. Although I didn’t really discuss the ideas of mental illness/health in a social and historical context, I do hint at this in the bibliography listed.

I have a pretty good bibliography at my fingertips on this. My Ph.D. was in psychology and religion.

• Comparative Religious Studies/Mental illness in ancient cultures

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Jung Today: Reflections on Marion Woodman

Marion Woodman, Jungian Analyst and Author

Copyright © Michael Clark, 2010. All rights reserved.

Marion Woodman is an influential Jungian analyst and author whose publications include Addiction to Perfection and the popular The Pregnant Virgin.

Archetypes and Power

In a post-9/11 address about Jungian theory and terrorism, Woodman says the concept of the archetype is “bandied about” today and tries to clarify this elusive concept.

“As the chromosomes are to the body,” she says, “archetypes are to consciousness.”

Woodman draws an analogy by asking us to imagine we’re holding a magnet underneath a piece of paper which has iron filings on top. When the magnet moves, the filings move along with it.

And so it is, she says, with archetypes and ego-consciousness.

The magnet below the paper represents the archetypal forces that have a dramatic impact on our daytime outlook. Or they may have an impact if we don’t recognize and tame their power.

Jungians believe that healthy ego development entails learning how to come to grips with the archetypes, thereby increasing mastery over one’s entire inner-outer environment.

For Woodman, the vast majority of Western peoples are blinded by a limiting Freudian worldview. Jungians tend to see Freud’s theories as a product of constricted psychic energy, contributing to an inadequate understanding of self and others.

Once we become aware of the archetypes, Woodman says life takes us into entirely new realms. We leave the proverbial river of Freudian theory and embark on the sea of Jungian psychology.

As Jungian Daryl Sharp once put it, the new joys and dangers of the archetypal ocean are quite real but some succumb to its destructive forces if the ego can’t keep step with a host of mysterious, invisible powers.¹

Conflict, Projection and Difference

Einstein once said, “everything in our world has changed except our thinking.”

Woodman relates this aphorism to global terrorism. While it’s pretty clear that humanity is essentially one big family, in terrorism and times of war our limited attitudes, influenced by archetypal energies, insist on projecting the embodiment of pure evil onto some other person or group.

This is Woodman’s and the general Jungian take on conflict. But it might be a bit simplistic. Could not one person or political regime, for instance, be more destructive, imbalanced and oppressive than another?

A further point for debate arises with the perception, sometimes advanced within Jungian circles, that all spiritual paths are the same.

Jung, himself, stressed individual difference. He also saw important differences among Eastern and Western religions.² While Jung encouraged individuality and knowledge (as gnosis), many of his adherents seem to have fallen into a convenient Jungian paradigm.

Just like the Christian churches Jung once criticized, some – but certainly not all – contemporary Jungians tend to conform to ideas and discursive patterns established by the Grand Master, himself, almost as if Jung were a holy and infallible guru.

Jung, however, wrote in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections that he didn’t “have things fixed.” As a psychiatric pioneer, he blazed a trail through the psychological underbrush. And it’s a task for posterity to clear new conceptual pathways appropriate for the 21st century.

Along these lines, Jung apparently once said, “I am glad to be Jung and not a Jungian.” As a Jungian he’s restricted by convention. But as Jung he’s free to revise according to his ongoing thoughts and observations.

Watered-down?

Another impression I got from Woodman’s address is that she, like many Jungians, portrays a sort of watered-down version of Christianity.

Woodman implies that the supposed past glory of the Christian Church rested solely on the inspiration of sublime art and architecture. The Church, she says, once conveyed the numinous but only a long time ago. And she ignores all those who say God’s grace uplifts them within the framework of the Christian Church–not just 500 years ago, but today.

On this point Woodman seems to liken the aesthetic appreciation of statues, paintings and stained glass windows to the indwelling power of God.

But is appreciating created beauty really equivalent to encountering the power of God?

It’s easy to stereotype Christians as one great body of Bible-thumping fanatics or, perhaps, as regimented automatons too insecure to experience God outside of the authoritarian but reassuring confines of ecclesiastical structure.

But these common caricatures ignore the very real possibility that some Christians may be called into and flourish within traditional religious frameworks, as suggested by figures like St. Faustina Kowalska, St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Merton.

Moreover, we might ask if anyone can, indeed, exist without some kind of system in place. Perhaps the real challenge for our post-9/11 world is to understand and appreciate how various networks interact and potentially mirror our respective human strengths and weaknesses.

With this approach we might collectively identify and redirect the destructive, obsessed or deranged in the global community, thereby encouraging the much sought after qualities of progress, peace and love.

Notes

1. This reference is from an address by Sharp. If I remember correctly, the title is “Jungian Psychology Today: The Opportunity and the Danger.” When I recover the hard copy I’ll cite it fully–it’s currently deep within my library.

2. (a) Compare to Moojan Momen’s perspective as outlined in The Phenomenon of Religion: A Thematic Approach, p.114, posted at http://www.vexen.co.uk/books/momen_tpor.html. Momen overlooks the possibility that an actual being, Mary, chooses to appear in Portugal while another being, Kali, chooses to appear in India.
(b) And consider Geoffrey Parrinder’s comment: “The wise man may not practise the same [magical or religious] cults as his brothers, but he can regard them tolerantly as helpful at their level, while he himself seeks the truth about human life and the universe according to the best knowledge and insight available” (Parrinder, ed. Man and His Gods: Encyclopedia of the World’s Religions, London: Hamlyn, 1971, p. 21). Parrinder arguably doesn’t acknowledge the scenario where the outside observer knows next to nothing of the subtle dynamics, spiritual knowledge, graces and complexities of another person’s cult. Indeed, the person inside the cult may see the outside observer as a presumptuous spectator who thinks they understand when, in fact, they don’t.

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guru

guru, originally uploaded by earthpages.

This frog let us get really close to him. I have closer shots but this one most reminded me of those misguided gurus who are probably suffering from inflation (look it up… it’s a Jungian term).

Super Fast Book Review – James Hillman’s Re-visioning Psychology (Jungian and post-Jungian)

book review, originally uploaded by Michael Clark.

Is an iPod part of your mind?

If you had an iPod, would it be part of your mind? That’s one of the odder, but surprisingly most relevant, questions being discussed here in Seoul at the World Congress of Philosophy.

» http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/03/philosophy.ipod?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

That’s from an interesting article that I stumbled upon at another equally interesting blog » http://milindasquestions.com/

just another future song

just_another_future_song, originally uploaded by earthpages.

it’s time

it’s time, originally uploaded by earthpages.

I was in a coffee shop today and thought this was sort of interesting… most people don’t know it but coffee shops are actually places where people time travel… aided by that hallucinogen known as caffeine… just kidding, btw!

Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace – Bob Dylan

You know, as a practising Christian I try hard not to judge others.

But there’s always the reality of people who are not sane and really quite bent on evil.

If you think I’m being xtreme, just take a look at this document. It’s a letter of agreement signed by Adolf Hitler and the British PM Neville Chamberlain.

And we know what Hitler did shortly after.

As Bob Dylan put it:

Sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.

Note: Handwritten portions have been moved toward center to fit into this blogspace.

How to tell a great leader from an evil genius…

I was browsing through A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis and came across an interesting passage that got me thinking…

Jung’s main theoretical contribution to group psychology lies in his claim that it is the influence of insufficiently integrated archetypal tendencies that leads to mass phenomena such as fascism.

And that really is the bottom line.

A great leader weighs all the options and acts with his or her mind connected to the heart. But a tyrant doesn’t give a damn because he or she’s in the grip of some strange power beyond themselves, a power that Jung called an ‘archetypal influence.’

In short, the one is in control, whereas the other is controlled and wants to pass that lack of personal autonomy onto others… sort of like a disease.

Speaking of diseases, I wrote a poem called “The Disease” a long time ago, several years before 9/11. It was this kind of thing that I was alluding to.