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Tag Archives: Jung

Middle Age.

09-May-20

Biny Selo So much to do, most of it the necessary sort. Children, house, declining body. I think of the way Jung describes the middle of his career: With my work at Burgholzi life took on an undivided reality – all intention, consciousness, duty, and responsibility.  It was an entry into the monastery of the world, a […]

Soul/Self/Meaning.

09-Oct-15

furtively This probably says a bit too much too quickly for those who don’t speak this language, but the following set of paragraphs impressed me as deeply true: In his book, Myths, Gods, Heroes, and Saviors, Leonard Baillas writes, “The supreme achievement of the self is to find an insight that connects together the events, dreams, […]

The Game by Neil Strauss.

25-Dec-13

Generally if a book recurs in conversation time and again for years, I get around to reading it. As a single person who has never had any particular desire to be single, dating is a common theme of discussion, and one of the standard variants of that discussion occurs when I speak with my some […]

Freud and the Future of an Illusion.

19-Aug-13

A friend recently lent me a copy of Clive James’ book Cultural Amnesia – now that is a good friend – which I devoured over the course of a little over a week. The book is excellent, and what is particularly lovely about it is that it filled me with the desire to read everything […]

Apologia Pro Carolo Gustavo Jung.

08-Jan-13

There are some rules in the intellectual world which are pretty reliable for detecting bloviating stupidity, or blathering solipsism (or however you want to render b.s.), and one of them is this: if someone launches a five-thousand word attack on a noted author, and almost never quotes a line from the voluminous works of that […]

Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung, Death.

20-Dec-12

I had the sudden conviction that I should finally more fully explore the writings of Marie-Louise von Franz, a second-generation Jungian whose writings I have been impressed by in the past.  I am in general always partial to people who have some kind of redemptive salvific Messianic purpose in their work: ‘Like all of us, […]

Everything and Anything But Edifying.

05-Feb-12

“This expression, ‘God’s world,’ may sound sentimental to some ears. For me it did not have this character at all. To ‘God’s world’ belonged everything superhuman – dazzling light, the darkness of the abyss, the cold impassivity of infinite space and time, and the uncanny grotesqueness of the irrational world of chance. ‘God,’ for me, […]

Nicholas of Cusa, Theology, and Reason.

02-Sep-11

There’s a neat little article by Mark Goldblatt on reason’s relationship to the concept of infinity, and hence, to God; it is unfortunately given the idiot title “theology is dead” (the title is probably not the writer’s fault).  As with most modern writing, the best part is when he borrows the thoughts of a much […]

The Life of the Spirit.

31-Oct-10

One of the fruits of the past two and a half years in the woods has been a crop of writings about the inner life.  I have spent a great deal of time alone in nature; this kind of introspection has been unavoidable.  Mostly these reflections have taken the form of long-form essays.  Often there […]

Jung on Self-Knowledge.

31-Aug-10

The average civilized person considers much that is human alien to him – precisely the opposite of Terence’s definition of being human.  Once I was walking down a street in Manhattan with two (very smart) friends, and I started philosophizing about the pleasure of killing and eating one’s foes as a mode of revenge.  I […]