As a matter of approach, it’s helpful to consider The Red Book as an account of an extended active imagination, that technique that Jung at times hints at, at times elucidates, whereby the conscious mind loosens it’s grip enough to allow the unfolding of a waken dream.
“Although previously he had made some attempts to fathom his own unconscious processes it was on December 12, 1913, that Jung began in earnest to undertake this task in a systematic way. As he actively stimulated the upsurge of imagery by writing down his dreams every morning and by telling stories to himself, he found that he began to converse with ’sub-personalities.’ In Jung’s terms, the complexes can ‘personate,’ i.e. they can be encountered as if they are people in a dialectic akin to a personal relationship.” R. Hobson, Imagination and amplification in psychotherapy, JAP, 16:1, pg.90.
As Jung continues to introduce his task in the Red Book, he questions his soul asking where it has been? Who it is? How can he attain the knowledge of the heart?
The spirit of the depths even taught me to consider my action and my decision as dependent on dreams. Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without you understanding their language. One would like to learn this language, but who can teach and learn it? Scholarliness alone is not enough; there is a knowledge of the heart that gives deeper insight. the knowledge of the heart is in no book and is not to be found in the mouth of any teacher, but grows out of you like the green seed from the dark earth.” Carl Jung, The Red Book, pg. 233.
All that unfolds across the many pages of the Red Book is in some way the answer framed in these simple questions.
Once in a while an image strikes us as poignant in a peculiar way. It’s as if the image offers a portal to an encounter with the objective psyche.
Jung shares the story of an analysand that was having trouble accessing the experience of active imagination. Upon looking at a poster of the alps, was able in his imagination to wander up into the scene until he came upon a small chapel, and upon entering and surveying the interior, was startled by the scurrying of a small being behind the altar. Shaken by the experience, and after first wanting to dismiss it, the analysand reapproached the scene a second time. Upon entering the small chapel, his internal dialogue expected the scurrying. And when it again took place, his attitude toward the experience shifted. He no longer had difficulty with the method.
As Whitmont points out:
“Dreams are not coherent myths, but rather flash pictures, as it were. In dreams mythological pieces are fitted into a great deal of personal material in an apparently irrational arrangement. The dream is thus a fragmented or personalized myth. On the other hand the myth (and we include also the fairy tale) could be regarded as a consciously molded or depersonalized dream. There are, however, instances when the unconscious presents a myth directly, when for example, fantasy production takes place, not under conditions of an absolute exclusion of consciousness but in half-awake or trance state, or under hypnosis, or by use of the technique which Jung called active imagination. Myths also appear naturally and spontaneously in yarn-spinning and storytelling, especially by children.” Edward Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, pg.76.
It’s also possible to re-enter a specific dream image if the threshold of consciousness is lowered. Of course these experiences remain closed off, essentially defended against, if the collective prejudice against the imaginal and the psyche is embraced.
The concept is never the experience. Often the theoretical approach to the archetypes tends to posit a system, which like a house of cards, collapses without a foundation.
Art on the other hand gives the experience of the archetypes expression. And the analytic encounter works from the archetypal contents manifesting in dreams. In both cases, the archetype itself is the basis of the activity.
The idea of the Anima/Animus, the counter-sexual soul figure, is easy to dismiss if the reality of the archetype remains unconscious. Though it seems simple enough, being aware of the idea is not the same as being conscious of the experience.
So… where is she?
That’s the question which opens this field.
“I mean this as an actual technique…The art of it consists only in allowing our invisible partner to make herself heard, in putting the mechanism of expression momentarily at her disposal, without becoming overcome by the distaste one naturally feels at playing such an apparently ludicrous game with oneself, or by doubts as to the genuineness of the voice of ones interlocutor.” Carl Jung, CW 7, par 323.
“The alchemical opus must be understood as a phenomenology of the objective, autonomous psyche enacting its drama of transformation on the stage provided by the material world, the objective nature of which must remain unknown in order for the play to continue.” Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel, pg.36
The subtlety of the wind, can you grab hold of it? Can you pin it down and so know it? Or do we encounter it as experience? The psyche will ever elude our attempts to define it by our rational concepts. Just as we become confident in our firm grasp, it will slip from our grip. Or like an opossum it will play dead so convincingly we will be sure all we hold is but a corpse of the sought after.
The mercurial analogies for psyche are accurate. The quicksilver is indeed quick. Yet like Cheetham’s claim above, we must need to champion the cause of the objective psyche. Collective consciousness is so trained to dismiss the realms of psyche and the imagination, or more accurately the imaginal, as a “nothing but.” It was just a dream. It’s was simply a crazy idea. It was nothing,…really.
Can we afford to move into the next dawn as a society with this prejudice closing us off from this aspect of reality? What do you think might happen if together, not just a few of us, but all of us helped each other take the blinders off? A hunch: it’s beyond our wildest imagination.
As a matter of approach, it’s helpful to consider The Red Book as an account of an extended active imagination, that technique that Jung at times hints at, at times elucidates, whereby the conscious mind loosens it’s grip enough to allow the unfolding of a waken dream.
The Point, Perhaps the Ocean
The Valley
Kindle a light in the darkness
Association vs. Amplification