Gershom Scholem: Obituary for Erich Neumann

Gershom Scholem 

Erich Neumann died November 5th, 1960, not yet fifty-six years old. Two weeks later, Gershom Sholem published an obituary in Mitteilungsblatt. Wochenzeitung des Irgun Olej Merkas Europa 28, 47 (18.11.1960), p. 4. I am grateful to Dr. Martin Liebscher, editor of the forthcoming Jung-Neumann letters, for having made me aware of Scholem's obituary.

Gershom Scholem: ‘Erich Neumann (Obituary)’

Scholem writes:

Erich Neumann's untimely death has plucked from our midst an outstanding human being, of penetrating spiritual force, great integrity of character and an astonishingly wide range of interests. Not yet thirty, in the early days of the Nazi period, Neumann came to Tel Aviv, and worked there, ever since, as a psychoanalyst, and during the last fifteen years of his life, was engaged more and more in writing.

Neumann came from the Jungian school of analytic psychology and was one of its most renowned and gifted proponents worldwide. As a thinker, he was his own person, rethinking Jung's theories in his own way, and seeking to develop them further. I have often heard him described as the Jungian school's logician. He enjoyed a wide reputation and was well respected abroad, and at the end of the Second World War, was offered the position of head of the Jungian Institute then founded in Zurich. Neumann, whose Jewish identity was profound and unequivocal, knew his place and avoided murky situations. He often told me how pleasant it was for him, to spend time in Europe as a guest from Israel, who could be master of his decisions, and teach wherever and whenever he pleased, one who knew where he belonged.

It was this tremendous human freedom and dignity that made his participation in the Eranos conferences in Ascona so extremely valuable. Since 1948 Neumann lectured there every year, and for ten years was the conference's key speaker, who took it upon himself to develop his own fresh, comprehensive view of the yearly topic, based on his psychological thought. Along with his major work, Ursprunggeschichte des menschlichen Bewustseins, and Die Grosse Mutter, his wide-ranging contributions to the Eranos yearly publications are his most important spiritual legacy. His lectures became veritable events and were one of the highlights of these conferences (who's moving force was Mrs. Olga Froebe, with whom he had a wonderful rapport). In these lectures, in which he invested intense and time-consuming labour each year, it was always surprising to see the connection between the logical passion with which he structured his psychological ideas – each lecture reflecting his overall vision from a unique, new perspective – and his profound fascination with the world of human creativity, especially in the domains of art and religion. Usually, the second hour of his lecture was dedicated to an attempt at a new interpretation of a work of art or literature, along with an examination of its applicability to his psychological theory. After our many years together at these conferences, I do not recall a single instance in which Neumann, proud Jew that he was, failed to make reference to the Jewish heritage, to which he felt connected and committed.

Not surprisingly, given the seriousness and freshness of his approach to his subjects, there was something authoritative about his lectures. He spoke with profound conviction. Nevertheless, he was always open to discussion, and it was a pleasure to witness his interchanges with the circle of colleagues who raised questions and critique. His affinity with the arts, his sense of humor about the necessarily fragmentary human endeavor, indeed I would say, the moral compass which unerringly guided him in many difficult situations, all contributed to turn the doctor, scholar and logician into a significant human figure. In his prime, with all his plans and works in progress, an insidious disease took him from us.

—Gerschom Scholem
Translated from the German by Liron Nirgad
Permission to translate and publish translation of Scholem's obituary has been received from Suhrkamp Verlag.

Memorial Plaque at Pariser Strasse in Berlin

In a letter to Julia Neumann, in January 1961, C.G. Jung mourns the loss of Erich Neumann. Their creative relationship, as it comes across in the correspondence between Jung and Neumann, was celebrated at the Jung Neumann Conference in Shefayim, Israel, with the participation of more than 270 attendees from more than 25 countries.

Jewish Terrorists Murdered Palestinian Teen

PM Netanyahu has condemned the terrible murder of a Palestinian teen by Jewish terrorists.

He is right, but must take further steps.

Every society has its criminals, it's extremists, and it's potential terrorists, that need to be reigned in. The tragedy is that extremists and extremism, destructive to Israel no less than to the Palestinians, have not been reigned in, in spite of more than enough warnings and terrorist acts, such as the assassination of PM Rabin. No, they have been allowed to lead the way, leading government policies astray.

Negotiations with the Palestinians failed, no less because of the Palestinians than the Israelis. They will hopefully be resumed, but even prior to this, PM Netanyahu has to do the following (or similarly):

1. Declare the small area along the 1948 ceasefire line in which 80% of settlers live (and which in any peace agreement will be part of a land swap) to be part of Israel, 
2. Declare a complete settlement freeze beyond this area, where the majority of settlements, in which however a minority of settlers live; offer settlers who are willing to evacuate the possibility of compensation; the earlier they evacuate, the greater the compensation; at the end of the process, the settlements will be relocated into the remaining settlement blocs (state funds thus saved should be channeled to affordable housing for the young inside Israel), 
3. Declare willingness to swap land for the areas held on to, at a future negotiated peace agreement, but not until then, 
4. Unlike the full withdrawal from Gaza, military occupation (for instance to ensure that rockets are not fired from the West Bank into Israel’s Ben Gurion International airport) will remain until security arrangements and partial or full peace agreements are reached – only the civilian aspects of occupation, that is the settlements, will be evacuated until such times, 
5. Declare recognition of an Arab Palestinian State, whether independently in the West Bank and Gaza, or in (con-)federation with Jordan, and the willingness to establish joint financial and other projects to make such a state viable, in whatever shape the Palestinians themselves decide. 

The above as an intermediary prior to the resumption of negotiations, and in order to reign in Jewish extremism, that threatens the fabric of Israeli society more than an external enemy can ever do.

Bi-Polarity, Compensation, and the Transcendent Function in Dreams and Visionary Experience

Kathryn Madden, Ph.D., has contributed an important chapter, "Bi-Polarity, Compensation, and the Transcendent Function in Dreams and Visionary Experience," to The Dream and its Amplification.

The following is an abstract of her chapter:

Working with the amplification of dreams from a depth psychological process remains a central element of individuation, renewal of values, and restoration of a spirituality gone dormant, yet one that is intrinsically meaningful to understanding the contemporary diversity of our cultural traditions and our psychological inheritance.

Dreams offer an unparalleled revelation of the unconscious processes that govern our worldview, attitudes and behavior. In my chapter contribution to The Dream and Its Amplification, “Bi-Polarity, Compensation, and the Transcendent Function in Dreams and Visionary Experience,” I offer primarily symbolic and archetypal approaches to dream work by exploring a specific image recorded in Jung’s Collected Works that was created by the 17th century visionary, Jacob Boehme, which intrigued Jung, although he felt Boehme’s image to be an unresolved “bi-polarity.”  

I examine Boehme’s mandala, his image of the godhead, through the lens of compensatory amplification and the transcendent function. I find that Boehme’s “numinous” experience offers a prospective unfolding of the archetype of the Self, along with his unconventional view that good and evil exist simultaneously in this image. 

Boehme's "Philosophick Globe" 

The following are excerpts from “Bi-Polarity, Compensation, and the Transcendent Function in Dreams and Visionary Experience;”

In Boehme’s worldview,…dark and light are seen to be bi-polar co-inhabitants of the same ground. Light does not so much defeat the darkness—nor, for that matter, does the darkness defeat the light—but, rather, both are held in a coincidence of opposites to form a whole, in the world of nature as well as in the spirit. This is represented in the mandala by the opposing, co-equal, semi-circles, joined by the heart image. Significantly present, also, is the great circle encompassing both the opposing light and dark elements, giving the entire illustration an archetypal form as that of the Self which contains all opposites, or as a radically new God image, at least for Western Christianity. 

….Jung is critical of Boehme’s attempt to “organize the Christian cosmos, as a total reality, into a mandala,” saying he failed because he “was unable to unite the two halves in a circle.”[1] Jung goes on to say that the two halves  

…represent un-united opposites, which presumably should be bound together by the heart standing between them. This drawing is most unusual but aptly expresses the insoluble moral conflict underlying the Christian view of the world.[2] 

On the other hand, Boehme did contain the opposing elements, not by completing a circle with the two half-circles, but rather joining them with the symbols of heart and cross, and with the entire display—dark/light, vertical/horizontal, with the heart at the very center—contained by the great circle. The archetype of the self is that which holds all opposites. Boehme’s revelation was that so too does the Godhead, and his mandala—a new God-image—demonstrates that illumination.

Perhaps this image was also generated and utilized in unconscious compensation for what had been forcibly and violently suppressed by the Protestant Reformation that was already in full swing by the time Boehme was born in Eastern Germany in 1575. In other words, it was compensatory in this environment just because it was an image.

The symbology within Boehme’s mandala image is powerful and seems to emanate from a vision in which he received knowledge that was otherwise inaccessible through conscious, rational thought alone. So, we might say that, at the very least, this mandala acted to compensate for the collective psyche’s rejection of images during that particular time in the history of Western civilization—an attitude that was, itself, a compensation against what the Reformers took to be the idolatrous worship of statues, icons, paintings and relics of the Catholic Church.

One cannot overestimate the extent to which the iconoclastic, puritan Protestant movement had taken over Europe. Images were highly suspect. Images, after all, arose from extra-rational, non-linear thinking. Dreams communicate in images. Prophets have visions and revelations and speak of them in imagistic terms. The radical Protestant theologians during the height of the Reformation condemned not only images, but also the visions and revelations that preceded them, saying that revelation happened once and only once, and that it was blasphemous to suggest otherwise. Many European cathedrals that survive today are a testament to this recklessness. Many lost the beautiful stained glass windows and statuary that communicated visually the stories of the Old and New Testament because the Reformers wanted the illiterate laity to receive the Word of God (the interpretation of which could be controlled through “orthodox” Protestant preaching) rather than images that were open to individual interpretation through direct experience. Boehme paid a price for his heterodox ideas, however, by being excoriated from the pulpit of the Lutheran church he dutifully attended despite his dogmatic and doctrinal differences with it, and, essentially, was run out of town as a heretic.

Some 300 years after Boehme, Jung became convinced that messages from dreams, or the unconscious in general, are worth listening to and attending to on their own terms….

____________________________

[1] C.G. Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i (New York: Pantheon, 1959, ¶ 603

[2] C.G. Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i (New York: Pantheon, 1959, ¶ 704

Kathryn Madden, Ph.D., is a licensed psychoanalyst of Jungian/psychodynamic focus in private practice in New York City. She teaches at the Pacifica Graduate Institute and is a Lecturer at Union Theological Seminary of Columbia University. Kathryn is the Editor-in-Chief of Quadrant, author of Dark Light of the Soul (Lindisfarne) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (Springer). As President and CEO of the Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute, she offered a decade of executive leadership and administrative oversight to a psychotherapeutic training institute and state-licensed clinic. At BP, Kathryn was awarded the New York Association of Executives Distinguished Social Responsibility Award for the program "Project Care" that she developed for returning U.S. Veterans from Iraq. Her 15-year tenure with the Journal of Religion & Health: Psychology, Spirituality & Medicine was honored with The Distinguished Research & Writing Award presented by AAPC.

Kathryn’s current projects and research interests:

"My primary writing and research interests reside in dream work and experiential workshops where persons are guided to engage personally with the collective and cultural dream. I have been doing guest speaking engagements for Jungian societies and groups interested in depth psychology throughout America, Canada, and overseas. I also am very interested in the individual, group and collective phenomenology within the space of liminality in ritual, which includes dream work and active imagination. I am seeking to observe if and how new rituals are formed, and/or whether we are still repeating ancient symbolic resonances that reside in universal and archetypal images. Are ancient symbols still efficacious, or are we spiraling ever inward (and outward) in making the unconscious conscious toward the evolution of alive and new symbols? How does this vary in different cultures? How capable are we as complex-ridden individuals, many of whom are caught in a labyrinth of projection, in giving birth to new rituals? Is secularism, including the perspectives of postmodernism, a help or a hindrance in this context?" 

"Perhaps my most pressing interest right now is upcoming field work and study of the San Bushmen, the peoples in Namibia who have inhabited the earth for over 100,000 years. The San are considered to be the first of tribal consciousness in the collective. Their peoples are being displaced and relocated and their habitual hunting and gathering practices intentionally changed “for their own good” by governments in southern Africa. Beyond this socio-cultural crisis, I am delving into their archetypal and symbolic heritage through dream amplification and exploring this wealth of inheritance from a depth psychological perspective." 

___________________________________________________________

"The Dream and Its Amplification is a wonderful book for anyone interested in their inner life, their dream life and how the unconscious gives us a map to our lives. 14 different authors give us a peek into the everyday workings of an analytic practice and dream amplification. Each voice is unique, no two analysts work in exactly the same way, but a common thread runs through the chapters. They all tell us that dreams are important, we need to pay attention, we need to honor this gift from our psyches. If we pay attention and honor our dreams we will be rewarded with a deeper and more meaningful understanding of who we really are.

This book is for both professionals in the field of psychology and the general public. It is accessible, moving and informative. We are given new ways to think about our dreams. If you wake up and ask yourself, "What the heck was that dream about?" this is a book for you. If you have wondered what goes on in those 50 minutes behind closed doors, this a book for you. If you have a curious mind and an open heart, this is a book for you."

—Susan Bostrom-Wong 

The Red Cross visits Theresienstadt, 70 years ago

Pastoral Theresienstadt

The infamous Red Cross visit to Theresienstadt took place 

June 23, 1944, that is, 70 years ago

In the Coffee House - Joe Spier 

Theresienstadt was established as a 'model ghetto', "in order to save face in regards to the outside world" (Eichmann). The first deportation to the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto too place Nov. 24, 1941.

While the Jews in Theresienstadt gave manifestation to the height of spiritual survival in the shadow of evil, it was, and was meant to be a hoax from the beginning.

The perversity of deception in the service of evil compounded into the dust of the extermination camps, but on the way, “to the East,” as the Nazis deceptively called the transports to the death camps, Theresienstadt served as a model of deception.

The Red Cross visited the 'town' on June 23, 1944, prior to which the Nazis intensified deportations, and the ghetto was "beautified." Some inmates were dressed up and told to stand at strategic places along the carefully designated route. Shop windows along the route were filled with goods for the day, and the day's abundance in the candy shop window made life in Terezin seem sweet.

The day of the visit, the orchestra stage at the town square

Children playing - also the day of the visit 

Not the day of the visit 

The Red Cross reported dryly that while war time conditions made all life difficult, life at Terezin was acceptable given all of the pressures. The Red Cross concluded that the Jews were being

treated

all right.

Inmates in Theresienstadt - also not the day of the visit 

Approximately 158,000 Jews were brought to Theresienstadt. Approximately 90,000 were transported onwards to the extermination camps, of whom about 4,800 survived. About 35,500 died of hunger and illness in the ghetto (among them my great-grandmother).

Of the 12,121 children (born 1928 and later) brought to Theresienstadt, 9,001 were sent to the death camps. 325 survived.

When Helen Deutsch, the psychoanalyst who had left Vienna for the United States in 1935, wrote her important 1942 paper “Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to schizophrenia,” introducing the concept of the as-if personality, the poet Leo Strauss wrote, in Theresienstadt, what in its subtle simplicity to me is one of the most spectacular poems, ‘Als-Ob,’ As-If. The English translation from the German is mine, from Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return:

I know a little tiny town
A city just so neat
I call it not by name
but call the town As-if

Not everyone may enter

Into this special place
You have to be selected
From among the As-if race

And there they live their life
As-if a life to live
Enjoying every rumor
As-if the truth it were

You lie down on the floor
As-if it was a bed
And think about your loved one
As if she weren’t yet dead

One bears the heavy fate
As-if without a sorrow
And talks about the future
As if there was – tomorrow

The Moment of Historical Courage is Calling on Netanyahu

The negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority ended, when PA President Abbas quit the talks at the moment of truth. Presented with far-reaching Israeli offers, he turned his back, as he has done before. The settlement freeze that Netanyahu reluctantly accepted at the beginning of Obama’s Presidency to bring the Palestinians to the negotiation table did not lead to anything – anyhow, wouldn’t negotiations in themselves be in the interest of all concerned?

President Abbas (whose term of presidency in fact expired in 2009) took unilateral steps (though I believe Israel should have welcomed the independent Arab State of Palestine), and has now formed a unity government with Hamas. 

One might wonder about the motives of President Obama in favoring terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as part of governing bodies - naivete, shadow, tactics...?

It must be clear to all that the technocrats provide a façade (or a farce) of legitimacy of a Hamas backed government.

While both these groups explicitly have the destruction of Israel on their agenda, also the charter of Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Organization calls for the end of Israel.

And honestly, when repeatedly declared that peace is possible only with Abbas and no one else on the Palestinian side, I doubt the validity of a one-man peace.

In the absence of democracy, I believe such a Palestinian government is a more truthful reflection of Palestinian sentiments than one-man Abbas. If the different militias are disarmed, the thousands of rockets aimed at Israel are assembled, so that the Palestinian Authority has one security force, not allowing for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others to carry weapons or fire rockets, this would prove governing (if not elected) authority.

I am no great admirer of Netanyahu either. During the Oslo process, he participated in the incitement that took place against Rabin and the government, and during his terms as PM he repeatedly reaffirmed his right-wing and pro-settlement identity.

While on the one hand he punishes the Palestinians by allowing more building in settlements (much of which will fortunately not materialize, but merely serves as provocation), reports have it that he is contemplating far-reaching unilateral disengagement.

This may be your chance, PM Netanyahu! Unilateral disengagement fell in ill repute after the exit from Gaza, mainly because the illusion was that withdrawal from occupied territory would cause a positive response from the Palestinians, while it caused rains of rockets.

Just like Palestinian unilateral steps don’t bring peace, neither will territorial withdrawal. However, occupying another people, thus preventing the Palestinian Arabs from fully taking responsibility for statehood, causes chronic problems in Israeli society (cf. The Hero and His Shadow, Requiem).

My simple suggestion is thus:

1. Declare the small area along the 1948 ceasefire line in which 80% of settlers live (and which in any peace agreement will be part of a land swap) to be part of Israel,
2. Declare a complete settlement freeze beyond this area, where the majority of settlements, in which however a minority of settlers live – offer settlers who are willing to evacuate the possibility of compensation; the earlier they evacuate, the greater the compensation,
3. Declare willingness to swap land for the areas held on to, at a future negotiated peace, but not until then,
4. Unlike the full withdrawal from Gaza, military occupation (for instance to ensure that rockets are not fired from the West Bank into Israel’s Ben Gurion International airport) will remain until security arrangements and partial or full peace agreements are reached – only the civilian aspects of occupation, that is the settlements, will be evacuated until such times,
5. Declare recognition of an Arab Palestinian State, whether independently in the West Bank and Gaza, or in federation with Jordan, and the willingness to establish joint financial and other projects to make such a state viable, in whatever shape the Palestinians themselves decide.

I am convinced additional creative suggestions can be brought to your attention, Mr. Netanyahu, but do act now to a de facto withdrawal from occupied territory, and divert the enormous waste of financial resources from settlements to affordable housing for the young inside Israel. You have the support of an overwhelming majority of Israel's population, and this will give you a well-deserved place in the annals of the history of modern Israel.

Shared Realities - Participation Mystique and Beyond

Shared Realities will become the textbook on Jung’s (originally Levy-Bruhl) intriguing concept of Participation Mystique. This is how Mark Winborn, the book’s editor, beautifully describes his own experience:

“One of my most vivid experiences of participation mystique occurred while running one cool spring morning. The sun was low – still making its slow ascent into the dawn sky. About a mile into the run I was beginning to settle into my stride; my body awakening to the pulse of its internal rhythm. As I entered a familiar stretch of road, completely covered by its dense canopy of rich green trees, I noticed in the distance a single leaf had discharged itself from the verdant awning. The leaf seemed completely singular: vibrant green on the top and a bold yellow on the underside. I watched as it descended; spiraling like a slowly revolving helicopter rotor. Time and space seemed to collapse inward – ceasing to have meaning or weight in the moment. It was as if I’d entered a visual/cognitive tunnel in which time was arrested and only the leaf and I existed in some unseen communion. After a few moments, which seemed to exist as an eternity, the leaf found purchase with the earth and the enchantment slowly dissolved. The leaf once again became just another leaf. However, the feeling of communion I shared with that singular leaf has now persisted over a number of years and I continue to experience the sensation that the leaf ‘spoke’ to me in that moment and invited me to participate in its journey.”

The newly released book has already been widely acclaimed, for instance by Donald Kalsched:

"Jung's use of the concept participation mystique has always struck me as among his most original ideas and I could vaguely intuit its relevance to many contemporary developments in psychoanalysis, from projective identification to intersubjectivity to the mysteries of transitional space. Now, thanks to the extraordinary essays in this book, one no longer has to "intuit" this relevance. It is spelled out in beautiful detail by writers with expertise in many facets of our field. The breadth of these essays is truly extraordinary. Reading them has enriched both my personal and professional life. I highly recommend this book."

—Donald Kalsched, author of The Inner World of Trauma, and Trauma and the Soul.

And by Tom Kelly:

The concept of “participation mystique” is one that is often considered a somewhat arcane notion disparagingly equated with an unconscious, undifferentiated or “primitive” dynamic. This collection of outstanding articles from Jungian analysts of different theoretical perspectives and analysts from different schools of depth psychology redeems this concept and locates it as central to depth work, regardless of one’s theoretical orientation. What may seem like an ethereal notion becomes grounded when explored from the perspective of the clinical, the experiential and the theoretical. Linking participation mystique to the more clinical concepts of projective identification, unitary reality, empathy, the intersubjective field and the neurosciences and locating this dynamic in the field of the transference and counter-transference, brings this concept to life in a refreshingly clear and related manner. In addition, each author does so in a very personal manner.

Participation Mystique provides the reader with a wonderful example of amplification of participation mystique, linking many diverse threads and fibers to form an image, which, while it reveals its depth and usefulness, nevertheless maintains its sense of mystery. This book is a true delight for anyone intrigued by those “moments of meeting”, moments of awe, when the ineffable becomes manifest, when we feel the shiver down our spine, be it in our work or in a moment of grace as we sit quietly in nature. Shared Realities offers nourishment for the clinician, for the intellect and, most importantly, for the soul. I highly recommend it!

—Tom Kelly, President – International Association for Analytical Psychology

CONTENTS

Introduction: An Overview of Participation Mystique - Mark Winborn

Section I - Clinical Applications

1 Negative Coniunctio: Envy and Sadomasochism in Analysis - Pamela Power

2 Trauma, Participation Mystique, Projective Identification and Analytic Attitude - Marcus West

3 Watching Clouds Together: Analytic Reverie and Participation Mystique - Mark Winborn

4 Modern Kleinian Therapy, Jung's Participation Mystique, and the Projective Identification Process - Robert Waska


Section II - Experiential Narratives

5 Songs Never Heard Before: Listening and Living Differently In Shared Realities - Dianne Braden

6 Variants of Mystical Participation - Michael Eigen

7 Participation Mystique in Peruvian Shamanism - Deborah Bryon


Section III - Theoretical Discussions

8 Healing Our Split: Participation Mystique and C. G. Jung - Jerome Bernstein

9 The Transferential Chimera and Neuroscience - François Martin-Vallas

10 Toward a Phenomenology of Participation Mystique and a Reformulation of Jungian Philosophical Anthropology - John White


Conclusion - Mark Winborn

Shared Realities: Participation Mystique can be ordered from Amazon or directly from the Publisher, Fisher King Press.

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day

Mordecai Ardon, Kristallnacht (Missa Dura Triptych),
Tate Gallery, London (© The Ardon Estate, by permission)

Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, is held on the Hebrew date 27th of Nisan, which this year begins in the evening of Sunday, April 27.

The six million Jews that perished, out of whom approximately one and a half million children are remembered in ceremonies and services held all over Israel, in schools and the media. At ten am on Yom HaShoah, a siren is sounded across the country, which comes to a complete standstill, in silent commemoration.

Living with Jung: "Enterviews"
with Jungian Analysts, Vol. 3
by Robert and Janis Henderson 

The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Silence is the Center of Feeling," in Living with Jung: "Enterviews" with Jungian Analysts, Vol. 3 , by Robert and Janis Henderson.

Robert Henderson: As a Jungian what are some of the important lessons or observations you have of the Holocaust or Shoah?

Erel Shalit: This is quite a big question – profound and to me personally meaningful.

I feel I have to anchor it in my personal background, but before that, a word on etymology: Holocaust is an ambiguous word. In the sense “everything has been burned,” it is an apt denomination of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. However, considering its original meaning pertaining to religious sacrifice, as it was used prior to WW2, makes it a rather cynical term.

While I use both Holocaust and the Hebrew word, Shoah, I prefer the latter, which has no similar religious implications. It means catastrophe, destruction, to crash into ruins, to lay waste, to make desolate. It may possibly be connected to the Hebrew word for being amazed, to wonder, “to stand empty of thoughts.”

While many aspects of the Shoah have occupied my consciousness during much of my adult life, the repression and the silence about the Holocaust during my childhood is striking. The silence in the aftermath of the War was of course common among refugees and survivors, reflecting how the soul is at a loss dealing with catastrophe.

In contrast to less fortunate relatives – among them, my paternal grandmother who was gassed in Auschwitz – my parents found refuge in Sweden.

……

Silence about the war during those years was, I believe, a means to gain a foothold in an uprooted world, awareness that there were others so much worse off, and an effort at protecting the children. Only later did I hear for instance about the officer at a local Gestapo headquarters where my father had to report, who for some unknown reason told him quickly to get out and run away.

That is one of those big moments in life where something seemingly minor yet tremendously powerful, such as a friendly smile, or a smell of an unconscious memory, makes the wind of fate blow in an unexpected direction. I am forever grateful to that unknown Gestapo officer, and I often remind myself that he may be present in my greatest enemy. Just like evil resides in the soul of everyone of us, there may be light in the midst of darkness; where the shadows of horror cover the face of the earth, you may unexpectedly find the exceptional person.

My father, who came from a family of rabbis, had to set the spiritual and philosophical life aside, in order to gain a foothold and provide for his family in a surrounding that was not really his. I found it fascinating how the pile of books, with Goethe and Feuchtwanger and Heine on top, served as the fourth leg of his bed, finding relief from their prosaic task when my father occasionally pulled one of them out, perhaps trying to understand his own exile.

But as I said, what in retrospect has come to strike me most strongly is the silence. The Holocaust, which had broken the link to the immediate past, was not spoken about. There was a distant, Biblical past, and the efforts to secure an unknown future.

Silence served the repression of loss, and the sense of displacement. Silence was a barrier against memories that threatened to flood the island of survival, but it probably became as well an obstacle to live a full life; silence, like when you concentrate not to lose the grip of the rope you are hanging on to and fall into the abyss. A silence filled by the shadows of pain and fear that creep up just because you try to keep them away by not talking about them. A silence so oppressive that it threatens all the time to explode. This is the silence that holds both the fear and the instinctive warning, which Jung says we try to avoid by noise, since “Noise protects us from painful reflection, it scatters our anxious dreams.”

So at the center of my way of relating to the Holocaust is Silence.

There are different kinds of silence, from the meaningful silence, which gives birth to wisdom, to the freezing silence of trauma, both extremes of this duality pertain to the Holocaust, or the Shoah, for me filled with irresolvable duality.

But there is not only the silence of the victim. There is the silence of denial. As Elie Wiesel has said, what hurts the victim more than the cruelty of the oppressor is the silence of the bystander. We have rightly spent much effort to try understand the victim, as well as the psychology of the perpetrator. I believe there is much more that we need to learn about the bystander, because we are becoming a world of pseudo-involved bystanders. It is easy to identify a Holocaust-denier, but repression is more complicated – not being affected, not being touched, whereby we refrain from ascribing adequate meaning. To me, this is when we disconnect from the Self, the archetype of meaning. We are flooded by external, sometimes actively manipulated images (who looks carefully at a photograph these days, when hundreds can be produced digitally and you don’t need to develop a single one?), and we believe this is reality, while it is a map that often has only a weak or no relation any longer to reality. We believe that the flood of images and information makes us more knowledgable, but mostly it is a superficial preoccupation with stupidities, such as tracking what people you know are doing, finding out that they are tracking you tracking them, etc., as on Twitter.

And so we lose track of the meaningful images that by repression thrive underground. This is part of the “degenerative symptoms of urban civilization,” which Jung speaks about, and which produces all this babble-chatter, or noise in Jung’s words, which, he says, “stops the inner instinctive warning.” If we don not feel the tremor, we cannot identify what is boiling underground. This is where I feel we have not learned enough from the Shoah, and may fail the future, which may crash into ruins, become a desolate wasteland.

If to me silence is the center of feeling, or affect as regards the Shoah, duality is the axis that pertains to the aspect of thinking. Like any other totalitarian state of mind or movement, Nazism was based on splitting and projection. While consciousness is based on differentiation and separation, in its extreme, this becomes evil and diabolic (‘throwing apart’) – who shall live and who shall die, which race shall prevail and which shall perish. When the ego is in archetypal identification with Absolute Truth, the shadow is projected onto the Other, who “has to” be persecuted. We may easily see how this happened in the past, or how it appears in totalitarian regimes or fundamentalist thinking, but it is as nearby in today’s fragmented world, in which there is no longer one narrative, but anything is considered as truthful as everything else. Jung was so right when he said “man’s psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil.”