Internet, Transparency, Transiency and the Shadow

This profound painting, The Geology of Time, by Susan Bostrom Wong, opened the article 'Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency', in The Jung Journal: Psyche and Culture.

The Internet is a dramatic manifestation of the rapid and enormous changes that humankind is experiencing in the world of today (or tomorrow, before the sentence is finished).

It is still in its very early stages, but who can imagine that less than two decades ago, practically no one had heard about that reality, however virtual, of our world.

In 2006, 18% of the world’s population had already access to the World Wide Web. Within five years it had doubled, reaching 35%.

If today there are private companies the size of countries, there are phenomena, such as Google and Facebook, that have become entire continents, in that alternative world in which we live, called the Internet.

While in many ways the expansion of the internet seems erratic, chaotic and associative, it may well be a self-regulating system, moving towards increasing similarity with what we still might call “the real world”:

The future of the Internet technological revolution will continue to be made in man's image.

Three dimensional graphics will become more sophisticated, and virtual reality interfaces such as viewers and tactile feedback systems will become more realistic. The technology will be applied to innovative ways to navigate the Internet's information universe, for hyper-realistic gaming, and for group communications. There will come a day when you will be able to have dinner with a group of friends each in a different city, almost as though you were in the same room, although you will all have to bring your own food.

Virtual reality applications will not only better and better reflect the natural world, they will also have the fluidity, flexibility, and speed of the digital world, layered on the Internet, and so will be used to create apparently magical environments of types we can only now begin to imagine. These increasingly sophisticated virtual experiences will continue to change how we understand the nature of reality, experience, art, and human relations.

Retrieved from The Future of the Internet

The assets, advances and advantages of the Internet are innumerable. Yet, everything has its shadow(s). Often the shadows that we have ignored and supposedly left behind, jump up right in front of us and obstruct our free forward movement; take for example how environmentalists of the time welcomed the automobile,

In cities and towns the noise and clatter of the streets will be reduced, priceless boon to the tired nerves of this overwrought generation. … On sanitary grounds too the banishing of horses from our city streets will be a blessing. Streets will be cleaner, jams and blockages less likely to occur and accidents less frequent, for the horse is not so manageable as a mechanical vehicle.[1]

While the car has become a crucial means of transportation in our world, we may now, a hundred years later, be more aware of its disadvantages; more than a million people are killed around the world in road accidents, and an estimated 50 million wounded per year (World Health Organization).

The speed with which we access information impedes the ability to digest it; digestion is needed to turn information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into wisdom.

Much of what takes place on the Internet becomes transient – one website leads to the next, as we swiftly move on to something else that attracts our attention.

The Internet enables greater transparency, which often is desirable. But with transparency comes a certain loss of privacy, when everything can be forwarded and mass-distributed with great ease, sometimes intentionally, sometimes provocatively, and occasionally by mistake.

One recent example is an email, by mistake circulated to the students, compiled by one of the teachers at a High School in Kfar Saba, in which one student is described as “selfish,” another as “not particularly bright,” and another as “a big baby.”

In this case, what pertains to simple gossip, unworthy of being put on paper, was not only printed, thus becoming ‘a document,’ but distributed to all students, making us wonder what really keeps these teachers occupied; clearly not valuable education. Gossip – a word which interestingly comes from ‘God-siblings’ – sometimes makes aspects of everyday a bit juicier, shouldn’t be taken seriously. It shouldn’t become a document, and it shouldn’t become public. The shadow of gossip should be relegated to the secrecy of dark corners of dining-hall tables or coffee-shop chatter. But now, with the ease of pushing buttons, shadows are easily thrown out right there in front of us, penetrating the weakening filters of the ego and ego-judgment, fusing with the face of our personae.

Read more, e.g. Self, Meaning & the Transient Personality, Recollection and recollectivization, Destruction of the Image and the Worship of Transiency here.

Technology is not only here to stay, but we would rather not do without it. However, rather than a future in which man and machine struggle against each other, with a doubtful outcome, modern technology can be combined with the mystery of life and the magic of childhood, as for instance in Gal Sasson's Make-a-Play, a finalist in the Engadget Insert Coin Competition.

[1] Appeared in Horseless Age, “a popular magazine for automobile enthusiasts” published between 1895 and 1918; from Ann Norton Greene, “Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America.”

Make a Play: Gal's high-tech puppet stage in semifinal

Update:  Make-a-Play has reached the final, which will take place in San Francisco, mid-March!

The Engadget website has announced a competition for the young, creative and innovative. The ten semifinalists have been elected, and now the public is invited to vote for the five finalists.

This is what Terrence O'Brien writes about Gal Sasson's Make a Play, which participates in the competition:

By Terrence O'Brien posted Feb 21st, 2013 at 2:00 PM

The students at ITP are constantly churning out creative projects that are unafraid to walk the fine line between art and tech. So its no wonder that Gal Sasson's Make a Play wound up as one of the semi-finalists in our Insert Coin: New Challengers competition. It doesn't hurt that the concept also combines two of our greatest loves here at Engadget: toys and Arduino. The name, it turns out, is actually quite descriptive. The microcontroller-driven stage allows anyone to quickly create a piece of miniature theater using handcrafted puppets and an impressive selection of buttons, knobs and switches -- all lovingly handcrafted out of wood on this prototype. The control panel can move the actors using two motorized carts, cue lighting, playback voice recordings and even activate special electronics embedded in the puppets, such as LED eyes in the demo video after the break. Any action can be recorded and fed to a companion computer program, where tweaks can can be made to the automation. Honestly, sounds like the sort of thing we wish we had a as kids.

You can vote here for Gal Sasson's high-tech puppet stage, or another competitor of your choice. Read more about the Engadget Expand Event in San Francisco, March 16, 2013.

פרויקט של גל ששון

Make a Play

משתתף בתחרות נושאת פרסים של אתר

Engadget 

ההצבעה מאוד פשוטה:

נכנסים ללינק:

http://engadgetinsertcoin.brightcontext.com

ולוחצים על

'Vote' 

Make a Play ל 

(התחתון הכי שמאלי מבין הפרוייקטים).

James A. Hall, M.D., 1934-2013

James A. Hall, M.D., 1934-2013

James Hall, M.D., who died on January 22 at his home in Dallas, was a prominent American Jungian Analyst. He graduated from the Jung Institute in Zurich in 1972., He was a founding member and first president of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts, and the author of important works on Jungian approaches to dreams and interpretation, as well as the introductory text “The Jungian Experience: Analysis and Individuation.” His writings span four decades. 

Following a stroke, James Hall suffered for the last twenty-two years from "locked-in" syndrome. With Patton Howell he wrote the book Locked in to Life, which is described the following way: 

“In 1991 while traveling in his professional capacity of Jungian psychiatrist, James Hall falls ill, beginning the rest of his life as a man who must deal with the limitations of being "locked-in," a form of stroke so devastating and complete that the resulting physical damage is considered a death sentence. In living his life with Locked-in Syndrome, Dr. Hall brings to bear the significant and formidable intellect of his professional training to consider questions, and answers, which only a man of his experience could entertain. James will begin a journey and over time, return to the Beginning of the Universe and find new understanding and his task of redemption. Written with his long-time friend Patton Howell, a forensic psycho-physiologist and President of PEN Texas, in eloquent text unhampered by ego or illusion, Locked in to Life is a book which will change your life in ways you cannot imagine.” 

Together with James Hall, I had the honor to write an article, ‘The Complex and the Object: Common Ground, Different Paths’ (Quadrant, vol. 36:2, Summer 2006, pp. 27-42). 

I pray that James, while bravely struggling when locked-in to life, will find some rest in the soul’s freedom from its earthly trap.

‘The Complex and the Object: Common Ground, Different Paths’

Abstract

While complex and object are part of everyday psychoanalytic discourse, the meaning of the terms varies with different approaches, and the relationship between the concepts is far from apparent. Specifically, in this paper the Jungian complex and the Kleinian internal object are compared. It is the view of these authors that the internal object is primarily related to the archetypal image, and the internalized object to Jung’s concept of imago. The complex is the central concept that in a well-defined model of the psyche dynamically unites the phenomena described by these concepts. Furthermore, while in neurotic conflict the struggle between the ego and autonomous complexes takes place on the battlefield of the subjective psyche, in the personality disorders the complex is projected ‘wholesale’ onto the external object, turning the other into a ‘complex-object.’

Introduction

The complex and the object have traveled along noticeably different paths through the history of psychoanalytic and clinical development.

While the complex was a central idea in the early conceptual space of psychoanalysis, it has since been reduced to a single core complex, carried by Oedipus. Even in Jungian psychoanalysis, which Jung at one point considered calling Complex Psychology, the complex has lost some of its vigor. Although Jung, in contrast to Freud, accounts for a large or even an infinite number of complexes, the concept is less in use today than in the early 1900s, when by means of the Word Association Test a plenitude of complexes were traced down and extracted from their hideaway behind every galvanic skin response. Since then, the complex has by and large been discarded in the shadow – which of course is the appropriate place for complexes, as they thrive and grow most significantly in the dark, outside of consciousness. Yet, the repressed tends to reappear, and as indicated by recent literature, the complex reemerges from the shadow (cf. Dieckmann, 1999; Shalit, 2002; Singer & Kimbles, 2004).

In comparison, the object has become a dominant in the collective consciousness of psychoanalysis. “‘Object’ was the term chosen by Freud to designate the target of the drives, the ‘other,’ real or imaginary, toward whom the drive is directed,” writes Mitchell (1981, p. 375).

While Freud did not use the term internal object, he did describe phenomena such as internal ‘voices’ and images (ibid.). Particularly in the aftermath of Klein, the term has become part of everyday psychoanalytic discourse.

We find that the two concepts, the Jungian complex and the post-Freudian internal object, while not identical, share common ground and embrace a shared space. James Hall says, “Object-relations theory is very close to Jungian theory in its conception of intrapsychic objects, which behave with some of the attributes of part-personalities. In this regard, the term intrapsychic object resembles Jung’s picture of a personified complex described in his doctoral dissertation in 1902” (1991, p. 49).

Does this mean that the complex and the object describe the same phenomenon, and are merely dialects of different psychoanalytic tongues? Are they manifestations of different perspectives on the same structure of the psyche? Or, are the complex and the object truthfully different psychic structures and phenomena?

Transference and the Individual in the Analytical Space

The three Israeli Jungian societies held their first joint conference, February 14, 2013 with more than 200 participants.

For details of the conference (in Hebrew), follow this link.

כנס שלושת האגודות היונגיאניות, 14 בפברואר. לפרטים והרשמה

Noah's Ark, oil on canvas painting by Edward Hicks,
1846 Philadelphia Museum of Art

"It is perhaps characteristic of the intellectualist bias of psychoanalysis that rapport should appear to it to be mysterious. The concept implies that the natural attitude of one human being to another is to observe him with detachment as though he were a thing and that some mysterious extra process has to take place if they are to communicate. But perhaps it is really the other way round and rapport occurs naturally unless it is inhibited by such factors as the absence of shared symbols, suspicion on the part of one or both parties, or lack of imagination on the part of the therapist."

Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

The cover image of Enemy, Cripple & Beggar is a painting by Susan Bostrom-Wong, an artist and Jungian analyst in San Francisco. 

With careful observation, you will find layers of images embedded in the human figure of this fine painting.

As with the human shadow, 'Emerging' represents the need to look within to find the vital symbols and hidden aspects of our evolving selves.

Another fine painting of Susan's, Out of the Fire, appears on the cover of Frances Hatfield's poetry book Rudiments of Flight.

Learn more about Susan Bostrom Wong's fine artwork

Ann Walker's Review of Enemy, Cripple & Beggar in Psychological Perspectives

Like a tree by the river: A journey through the land of worship and the wicked

photo by Yoram Bouzaglo

People have come and they have gone, often arriving with great hopes and grand ideas, with beautiful dreams and the promise of redemption, not infrequently leaving with broken hearts, disillusioned and dispirited.

The author Nikolai Gogol, for instance, having burned the two first versions of Dead Souls, believed a pilgrimage to Jerusalem would redeem his soul and relieve him from depression and writer’s block.

Great hopes and harsh falls. Gogol was shocked by the noise and confusion in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, discouraged by the scenery and the environs. “Not only were my prayers unable to rise up to heaven, I could not even tear them loose from my breast,” he wrote in despair to Tolstoy.

painting by Benjamin Schiff

One early traveler was Abraham, son of Terah, the first patriarch, founder of the Hebrew nation. Four thousand years ago he departed from his father’s house and crossed the lands of Western Asia, moving up the Euphrates River. At the Assyrian city of Haran – the name of which, by the way, comes from Sumerian and Accadian, and means ‘journey – caravan – crossroad’ – Haran is now in present-day Turkey; there Abraham was told to go forth into the land that God would show him, and eventually he arrived at and crossed the Jordan river into the Land of Canaan.

“Get thee out of your country” says God in King James, and Abraham responds to the hero’s call and starts out on his journey. But the inner meaning of the outer act is lost in translation... the uncany combination of two separate words spelled the same way, "lech lecha" (לך לך) may mean 'Go thee', as well as 'Go into thee'...

Excerpts from a lecture, January 7, 2013, at the New York Center for Jungian Studies' "Jung in Israel," Sheraton Tel Aviv.

photo by Yoram Bouzaglo

95-year-old letter reveals Kafka's mouse phobia

Haaretz journalist Ofer Aderet reported the following on December 9, 2012:

“A rare letter written by Franz Kafka 95 years ago has been purchased by the German Archive of Literature, at a public auction held this weekend. This letter was apparently part of the bequest of Kafka's friend Max Brod. A court recently ruled that this collection of manuscripts should be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem, as Brod had bequeathed in his will.”

“The sale took place last Friday at the Kaupp auction house in Sulzburg, Germany, with the German archive managing to raise the required 96,000 Euros from private donors, wishing to remain anonymous. The four-page letter was written by Kafka to his friend on December 4, 1917, in the Czech town in which he was residing with his sister Ottla while recuperating from tuberculosis. In the letter, Kafka describes his fear of the mice lurking in his apartment, admitting that his phobia is irrational, and that psychoanalysts should look into the source of this fear. He suggests keeping a cat as a solution that is preferable to using mousetraps.”

While the contents of the letter have been published, “in books as well as on the Internet, the letter had not been publicly displayed before. The letter had changed hands several times over the last 30 years, passing between different private collectors. The German archive has now added the letter to its large collection of Kafka writings, and will put it on public display in April, in a special exhibition.”

“In all likelihood, the letter was part of the Max Brod bequest, which has recently been contested in an Israeli court. The parties to the dispute were the German Archive of Literature, the National Library in Jerusalem and the daughters of Max Brod's personal secretary.”

“A family court in Tel Aviv recently ruled that the entire Brod bequest be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem. An attempt by lawyers representing Hoffe to obtain a temporary injunction to delay the transfer has failed, but they plan to appeal this ruling and the main decision.”

Mice generally refer to the powers of darkness, “gnawing at the root of the Tree of Life.” They evoke anxiety and “nocturnal worries,” as Marie-Louise von Franz says. Or, in Kafka’s words,

My reaction towards the mice is one of sheer terror. To analyze its source would be the task of the psychoanalyst, which I am not. Certainly, this fear, like an insect phobia, is connected with the unexpected, uninvited, inescapable, more or less silent, persistent, secret aims of these creatures, with the sense that they have riddled the surrounding walls through and through with their tunnels and are lurking within, that the night is theirs, that because of their nocturnal existence and their tininess they are so remote from us and thus outside our power.

Kafka provides a particularly touching and simultaneously powerful description of complexes in his (Never sent) Letter to Father. He was unable to uphold his own separate identity vis-à-vis his domineering father. It is amazing how in relationship to him the otherwise so highly cognizant Kafka suffered from a lowering of awareness, abaisemênt de niveau mental. Kafka says, in the beginning of his letter to father,

You once asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know, as usual, what to answer, partly out of my fear of you …,

And later he writes,

I acquired in your presence … a hesitant, stammering manner of speaking, and even that was too much for you … I could neither think nor speak in your presence.

Kafka is afraid and the fear paralyses him. The terrifying complex – Brod speaks of an “infantile complex” – directly attacks consciousness and detracts available energy from the ego. When in the grip of the complex, ego-consciousness and identity are impaired. Feeling is then no longer a value-judgement, and affect and sensitivity overtake us. We are overcome by fear, rage, or the like and tend to project.

Kafka feels his father exposes him by “indiscriminately” speaking about his son in front of others. He sees himself as the hardworking father who sacrifices all to his ungrateful son. The feeling of being exposed is common when a complex is activated, and complexes are activated by exposure.

Excerpted from The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego, ‘Frantz Kafka’s Letter to Father’ (pp. 92-103).

Kriegskindheit, War Childhood in Germany

Kriegskindheit, a new book by Helga Thomas

Helga Thomas is a Jungian psychoanalyst and writer in Germany, with whom I have cooperated for a decade. We have worked together with the Bulgarian Jung Society, where Helga teaches, supervises and gives analysis.

The Bulgarian Jung Society provides a forum for the study, training and development of Jung’s analytical Psychology. I consider myself fortunate to have been involved with this group of devoted professionals. As liaison person between the International Association of Analytical Psychology (a position now held by Joann Culbert-Coen), I have witnessed a tremendous development taking place over the years. [For those interested, below find a summary of my presentation on the subject at the 1st European Conference of Analytical Psychology, held in Vilnius in 2009]

During my visits once or twice a year, I have experienced the warmth and openness, coupled with insight and reflection, that characterizes the Jungian psychotherapists and the Bulgarian Jung Society. This has also provided an interesting meeting ground between Helga as a German and me as an Israeli, an example of which was a seminar on the shadow that we gave together a few years ago, which inevitably was held in the shadow of history.

Helga was born in Berlin in 1943, and spent her childhood, until the age of fifteen, in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Her new book, Kriegskindheit, recently published in German and Bulgarian, is an attempt to work through her personal war childhood.


Back Cover Text

The mere act of writing down my recollections, which in part are already a result of working through these recollections, will not suffice. It is important for Erel to hold the letter that is addressed to him in his hands and to read it from the beginning all the way to the end. Yet, even that does not suffice. As I am sitting here in Sofia, I realize it does not suffice either for me to keep telling about it. No, not at all. I don’t need a person to listen to my story. Other people need to read my letter to Erel so that through my story they will be able to reconnect with their own deeply hidden (family) stories. I am visualizing images of well protected, beautifully decorated inner spaces… A new process has begun - not only inside myself.


From the Epilogue

Dear Erel,

I realize I have to add an epilogue. Yesterday, after finishing the concept of the letter to you, I read further in Sabine Bode’s book Grandchildren of the war. Heirs of the forgotten generation. In my own report it becomes clear how parents were silent and now you cannot ask them anymore.

I am a child of the war, not a grandchild, but I feel the same, and so I stay silent just as well… I don’t know whether this causes suffering for my children. I think I have told them about it and I have read good children’s books on this subject to them… sometimes all the three of us wept…

And Stefan asked his Granddad whether he had ever shot anyone to death in the war. My father responded honestly that he didn’t know. Only at the very end of the war he was in combat at the front. He doesn’t remember anymore because he was so badly injured that he almost died. It could have been, but he hoped that it was not the case. The truth? Repression? Illusion? A response appropriate to a child? His honest endeavor and concern at his grandchild’s question were palpable. I would never have dared ask this question! Perhaps for fear of being told: Don’t ask such a stupid question, of course I did, it was wartime, you would have used your gun as well! – and I would have been silent, fearfully, ashamed. Later I was ashamed that I had not asked.

***************************

Erel Shalit: Analytical Identity and Culture - Bulgaria

At the First European Conference of Analytical Psychology, “Dialogue at the Threshold between East and West: Past, Present and Future of Cultural Identity,” held in Vilnius, Lithuania, Dr. Shalit emphasized the need “to account for social, cultural, political and historical factors; cultural complexes and social complexities, as well as the wisdom and the psyche of the particular geo-psychological location,” in the development of psychotherapy as a profession. He outlined five factors to be accounted for:

I. The first factor pertains to the change in collective consciousness.

Liberation from a totalitarian regime, from an oppressive Father as dominant of the social collective consciousness, as well as its internalization in the mind of the individual, is not only a political process.

The psychological process to free oneself from both fear as well as reliance on external authority takes longer than the actual change of regime.

The way the principle of Father dominates consciousness, is reflected in the transference on to visiting analysts, as regards for instance reliance, expectation, apprehension and idealization, ambivalence, dependency vs. independence, etc.

II. The second issue is related to the first: While the unconscious is, axiomatically, the antithesis of consciousness, when the ideology of a prevailing, oppressive social collective consciousness claims that “matter is the beginning and the end of reality,” the courage it takes to turn to the soul and the unconscious is particularly noteworthy.

This personal courage and individual path is something that deserves profound respect. Initially I did not realize the extent of their courage, in spite of my sense of affinity to my Bulgarian friends and colleagues, because it was hidden behind their humbleness, and perhaps their respect and reliance on foreign authority. No doubt, though, that the senior members of the Jung society have truly been pioneers – the brave founders of the enterprise of introducing Analytical Ψ, with visiting analysts like myself and others as devoted assistants.

III. Third factor: with freedom and renewal come loss and abandonment – as Jung has stated, abandonment is a necessary condition, not just a concomitant symptom, of development toward independence. Bulgaria suffers from emigration, many young are leaving, many of whom are extremely talented. This means that you experience not only loss, but also have to ask yourself, how come you stay. What is it that binds you, prevent you from leaving – is it fear and failure that hold you back, or does some sense of motivation and meaning beyond your personal welfare induce you with commitment and devotion?

I believe one is confronted with questions pertaining to the relationship between the individual and society, in a way that is qualitatively different from many Western societies.

IV. The fourth issue has to do with the proximity to dreaming and the unconscious. There may be less layers of asphalt, of seemingly sophisticated defenses, that cover and smooth the surface of Mother Earth. She lies barer than in so-called developed countries. Therefore, the access to deeper layers of the soul is often more direct, more immediate. Consequently, we need to consider diagnosis in its cultural context.

Many years ago, as director of a community mental health clinic, I realized the difference between someone who shares suicidal thoughts with the social worker or the family doctor, vs. someone who expresses suicidal inclinations at the psychiatric hospital’s emergency room – it should of course all be taken seriously, but it may mean and indicate very different things.

Likewise, what in one society may be a psychotic manifestation of an ego overwhelmed by archetypal material, this may in another cultural setting reflect an openness to the collective unconscious and the archetypal realm.

V. My last point is that providing education of a profession that previously did not exist in a particular society creates, among other things, narcissistic fear, inflatedness and confusion – for instance, how many pioneering therapists or analysts do not believe that they are impostors, with only the persona of a therapist, without the weight of the ancestors, the forerunners, the traditions and formal learning, lacking the trust in an ego anchored within one's Self?

Out of the massa confusa, a wide array of therapeutic approaches emerge, and there is a lack of clarity of concepts – e.g. as regards analyst vs. therapist.

In such a fluid state of affairs, it is important to enable the development of a firm basis of skilful therapists, with an identity rooted both in their own culture as well as in analytical psychology.