Stress/Ease

by Richard Reeve on September 30, 2009

in AziMuth

red books
Image by limonada via Flickr

As The Red Book gets celebrated with its publication during the upcoming month, it feels appropriate to spend some time exploring the psychological concepts which were seeded in its pages.

Carl Jung spent a decade as he neared the end of his life writing his masterpiece Mysterium Coniunctionis. The entire volume explores the psychic implications of the combination of the opposites.

“The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to the problem of the opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies, resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition.  The repression of one opposite leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words to a neurosis.  The therapist therefore confronts the opposites with one another and aims a uniting them permanently.” Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW XIV, pg. xv.

hot/cold – male/female – old/young – life/death…

Experientially,  these categories feel a bit elusive. Not so with stress/ease. Much of our cultural energy alternates between these opposing poles. What would the combination of both of these feel like simultaneously? Clearly, it would be a new thing.

Jung’s experience of the combination of the opposites is one of the plots which emerges in the pages of The Red Book.

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  • kateconroy
    Just saw this today:
    "NEW YORK, NY.- The preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) considered his Liber Novus, the famous Red Book, to be the “prima materia for a lifetime’s work.” Many contemporary scholars regard it as the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. Now this cultural touchstone—in which Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—is to go on public view for the first time in a special showing at the Rubin Museum of Art. Entitled The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology, the exhibition from October 7, 2009, to January 25, 2010, coincides with a major event in publishing: W.W. Norton & Company’s publication of a facsimile and translation of Jung’s original. "
    FOR FULL ARTICLE:
    http://www.artknowledgenews.co...
  • Thanks for adding this into the mix here...
  • Interesting. The combining of the opposites is a really interesting subject. I remember reading in the Book of Thoth (a book written by Crowley on the Tarot) how, through the combining of the opposites - a uniting of the opposites, a greater understanding emerges.

    I've only studied opposites from a linguistic perspective, which is interesting in itself. For instance, the question of language, in the sense of - what comes first, language or understanding - is something that has occupied me for a long time.

    Currently, I'm thinking about the differences between the metaphysics of presence - the metaphysics of absence, and how these opposites help inform our understanding of humanity, god, and the reason (or not) for our existence.
  • Jung's great insight was that the combining of the unconscious with
    consciousness through the emergence of the transcendant function
    brings forth the...(Perhaps best if left unsaid...
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