A Sense of Doubt blog post #1310 - Jung and the Romantic Poets

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1310 - Jung and the Romantic Poets

Liesel and I went to this lecture last night.

Here's the nitty-gritty of it and my notes. Notes follow the stuff about the presentation.

Here's a link to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner poem:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

Dear Friend of Jung, Please join us September 21 and 22nd when Jungian Analyst Thomas Elsner returns to Portland to present: Active Imagination and the Romantic Poets   Why a program now on the Romantic Poets? We posed this question to Tom Elsner. He answers in an excerpt from his forthcoming book on Coleridge:   “Simply put, Romanticism is important for us today because the Romantic poets lived through and wrote about the very same process of death and rebirth that Jung felt was necessary for the survival of Western civilization. The Romantics are a mouthpiece for the great Dream, which is not a personal but a collective Dream. They show us what the abstract image of symbolic death looks and feels like in a modern context, and they give us a first-hand experience of living within it. [Martin Luther] King tells us that our current values must die for new values to be born; in the visionary art of the Romantics we experience how these old values die and how new values are born. It is no good to carry around dead stories like the Ancient Mariner carries the dead Albatross around his neck. We need new stories. And that is the point: new stories, new values, new myths, by whatever name we choose, are so grippingly true when they are alive they cannot simply be manufactured or consciously invented in a think-tank. Myth is an expression of the unconscious and it can only be created through the night-sea journey into the unconscious. That is the journey taken by the Romantics.”   "In Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), the Ancient Mariner dies a symbolic death out at sea and is reborn. He comes back to land carrying a new light. However, the blossoming and unfolding of the flash of golden fire he encounters at sea, is darkly unresolved, incomplete, even incomprehensible. And how could it not be? Writing in 1798 Coleridge had to leave his vision as a riddle for future generations to follow. The Ancient Mariner with his incomprehensible tale is a living figure dwelling in the borderlands of the Western mind. He is our Western myth, past, present and future, a myth that includes but is bigger than Christianity, a myth that includes but is bigger than scientific materialism." Visit our website for a complete description of Tom’s Friday Talk andSaturday workshop. Recommended Readings from Tom Elsner:   Abrams, M.H. (1973). Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Poetry. W.W. Norton. (A classic text in the critical literature and a rich source of material on the relationship between psyche and nature in Romantic poetry) Hughes, T. (Ed.) (1996). A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse. Faber and Faber. (I recommend the introduction by Ted Hughes) Woodman, R. (2005). Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism. University of Toronto Press. (Although not an easy read, this is a brilliant text that draws connections between Jungian psychology and Romantic poetry authored by Jungian analyst Marion Woodman’s husband Ross Woodman, a scholar of Romanticism) Elsner, T. (2008). The Voice that in Madness is Wanting: Review of Sanity, Madness, Transformation: The Psyche in Romanticism. Jung Journal 2:3, 98-108. (My review of Woodman’s book which will introduce some of the material to be covered in the lecture and seminar.) Chodorow, J. (1997). Jung on Active Imagination. Princeton University Press. (A great introduction to the subject using excerpts from Jung’s writings and an introduction by Jungian analyst Joan Chodorow.) Note: Joan Chodorow has presented several times to OFJ. We have audio recordings of her presentations and her book on Active Imagination in our library for checkout Remember, membership is discounted to $85 until Sept 19th! After that time the membership fee will be $95. Membership is a great buy - eight Friday talks, discounts on workshops, library access and an opportunity to be a part of a vibrant, diverse community. Purchase your membership online now, and avoid the rush at the first Friday Talk. We'll have your new membership card waiting for you when you arrive. Images are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. They are created out of the primal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-unique experience of divinity.                                               CW 9.1 para 11 We look forward to seeing you at the Friday Talks and Saturday Workshops.   For questions, email us at info@ofj.org,  or call us at 503-223-3080.

Copyright © 2018 Oregon Friends of C.G. Jung, All rights reserved.

FRIDAY TALK:

Through the contemplation of his inward nature, the art of writing poetry became, for Wordsworth as for many of the Romantics, a “dark” and “inscrutable workmanship”, in which the “discordant elements” operative between the “two consciousness” within himself might “cling together / In one society” and realize “a soul in the process of making itself.” Wordsworth’s experience of poetic composition will be familiar to those in the field of Jungian psychology as active imagination. When Wordsworth imagines his poetry as “spousal verse” announcing a marriage of the human mind “to this goodly universe / In love and holy passion” (Prospectus to the Recluse, 53-5), Romantic active imagination aims at healing the split between psyche and nature.

For those interested in a unified vision of mind and nature, the psychology of creativity, and the emergence of a new image of God beyond both fundamentalism and materialistic atheism, there is much to be learned from the Romantic poets and philosophers. This lecture will explore the practice of active imagination in Romantic poetry and Jungian psychology, and apply insights gleaned from both to contemporary debates on the nature of religion, politics, physics, and neuroscience.

RELATED WORKSHOP: Active Imagination and the Romantic Poets

Peake - rime

THOMAS ELSNER, J.D., M.A. is a Jungian Analyst, certified Psychoanalyst with the California Medical Board, the C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has taught courses on Depth Psychology and Folklore for over 10 years at Pacifica as well as internationally. Trained as a Jungian Analyst in Zurich, Switzerland, Thomas has been in practice since 1998. Prior to that he worked as an attorney. His upcoming book to be published by Texas A&M in early 2019 is on Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

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These notes are my notes and not a recap. Sometimes I just wrote down words I wanted to remember.

These notes are more for me than anyone else, though you might find them interesting, reader, if you have found your way here.

The speaker pronounced Don Juan as Don JEW-an like my grad school prof in speaking of Byron's poem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(poem)#Pronunciation

It is pronounced Jew-an, at least by Byron, for this poem. Life mystery solved.

Elsner started by invoking Elon Musk's publicity stunt of Starman driving a Tesla in orbit over the earth (above).

http://realitysandwich.com/56857/jungs_active_imagination/

Peake - Rime

Intuition
spiritual freedom

"psychological primacy of the unconscious mind..."

TRANSHUMANISM

"Change the being in human being..." - Al Gore

CHANGE OF INNER CONSCIOUSNESS

"A new set of values must be born." - MLK

Exchange "values" with "myths"

Many modern ideologies are missing something  -- missing mythopoetic imagination of the romantic poets

"Rime of the Ancient Mariner" - Coleridge

Albatross - image of God
lead out of the frozen wastelands

prenatal realm of eternal feminine

The witch represents all that's been banished from the patriarchal mind.

http://thedepthcoach.com/activeimagination/

Peake - rime

It's no good to carry around old, dead stories - we need new stories

A revolution of consciousness

"With what deep worship, I have still adored the spirit of divinest liberty"
- "France - an ode" (1798) Coleridge

"Fanatics have their dreams" - Keats
.... and so .... "dreams have their fanatics"

meeting of the inner and outer -- joy, beauty

https://rafalreyzer.com/active-imagination-in-practice/

PROCESS 
Active imagination - step into a dream - dialogue with a dream
- Romantics called this process poetry

"Know thy self" - Coleridge

"True knowledge of one's self is the knowledge of the objective psyche  as it manifests in dreams and in the statements of the unconscious" -- Marie Louise Von Franz

Peake - rime

"Make the darkness conscious" -- Jung

Pascal was terrified by the silence of the vast empty spaces.

Blake thought of his poetry as writing dictation

Wordsworth sensed another being -- another consciousness inside him

called it "soul making"

MERVYN PEAKE illustrated "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Imagination is the bridge between the inner and outer  - nature was a mirror of the operations of the mind, the inner realm - Wordsworth

Shelley's "Mont Blanc" - "The secret strength of things" "infinite dome"

Shelley essay to read "On Life" (1819)

Revolt against the mechanistic view that dominates science at this time

Einstein (1916) Relativity
Condemnation of scientific issues  - the tole of matter throughout the 20th c.

Eddington - "strange footprint on the shores of the unknown"

NUMINOUS

"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible" - Einstein

Peake - rime

Spinoza - very influential to the romantics

spiritual force in the universe - a spiritual consciousness in the universe

Wolfgang Pauli
"Even the most modern physics lends itself to the symbolic representation of physics down to the very last detail...."

https://stottilien.com/2012/06/19/c-g-jung-kepler-and-pauli-the-synchronicity-triangle/

Astrology and Alchemy

 C.G.Jung saw alchemy as continuation of Gnostic thoughts and wrote: “The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologies, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands”.

 In his book “Psychology and Alchemy” of C.G. Jung contains Pauli’s early dreams which provided Jung with a rich resource for theoretical exploration, and his own interpretations played a role in Jung’s theories. Pauli clearly believed that this effort was scientific; he said that “even the most modern physics also lends itself to the symbolic representation of psychic processes, even down to the last detail.” In his final version of the synchronicity essay (The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche Part 2), Jung wrote that the “archetype represents psychic probability”. Pauli wrote in his Kepler essay (published there as part one), that “pure logic” is not capable of establishing a “bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts.” Kepler himself thought that scientific ideas discerned by humanity exist eternally as archetypes in the mind of God, and Jung’s theories understand archetypes similar “as ordering operators and image-formers” in the symbolic. “It would be most satisfactory” said Pauli, “if physics and psyche could be seen as complementary aspects of the same reality.”

Kepler expressed also original ideas in relation to astrology almost like something the physical resonance theory like: the celestial bodies themselves exert no influence on the human fate, but fixed the angle between the rays toward the heavenly bodies the soul at the moment of human birth and later responds specifically to them. He used actually the term archetypes in his astrological work and not only his Wallenstein horoscope legendary. Kepler ideas, as Wolfgang Pauli observed, identify important intermediate stage between archaic, logical symbolic, and new, quantitative and mathematical description of nature. Much of what was later separated in scientific and non-scientific knowledge was at that time merged inseparably. Similar to representatives of scholastic science, Kepler relied on accuracy, allegory, speculative ideas, and mysticism, but unlike the Scholastics he tested constantly each theory and carefully compared the results with the rich observations of Tyco Brahe and calculations. C.G. Jung derived lekewise many of his insights from observation he made treating his patients.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1809.22 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1176 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

Mervyn Peake