I found myself on the 27th of June talking to a homosexual history graduate about his own subject in his own university of Canterbury. The very likable young man was the son of a vicar and had no discernible understanding that his lifestyle (or chosen history period) related to anything more than personal preference and certainly not that it was an unconscious rejection of his father. I thought of Jung and the image Jung had of God shitting upon the church, in which Jung’s father was a pastor. I could not resist drawing the threads of my recent thoughts on Jung and The Old Wise Man archetype together in a teleological explanation of what the young man had studied and had hitherto only seen as causal. It was a brief encounter and feeling it was incomplete, I asked for his number and ended the discourse with the text: Man has created God in his own image. God is an alien intelligence that permeates everything, but has no consciousness apart from man's.
I had given a few examples of powerful synchronicity that had shaped history, including the classic of the double assassination attempt on the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, not knowing that we were on the very eve of the anniversary of the fateful day back in June 1914. It led me to thinking about Jung's encounter with the Germanic spirit in his dream of the river of blood and his subsequent psychosis, all of which occurred while Europe committed mass suicide around his neutral refuge of Switzerland. For me these events are so linked that I cannot think of the one now without the other coming into my mind as a corollary: spirit and nature, god and man, division and unity.
The fact that the anniversary day darkened, as if in mourning and that Gemma (like a disassociated Anima) had been dispatched to Germany, just to place her signature on a piece of paper and was anticipating sleeping in the airport, seemed only the more apposite, when I found she had contacted and was lodging with Nadine - the Berliner's heir, in an act of reconciliation after the Didi affair.
This synchronicity relinking with past events, reflects upon, what was for Jung, a major disunity in the spiritual host - leading ultimately to the incarnation of The Minor Yin, or The Antichrist in Adolf Hitler. The contemporary implications for my own state of being, now my Anima is more precisely aligned with the new unity of Old Wise Man archetype - through David and the incarnation of the Father archetype, demonstrably brings me into contact with the legacy of the Antichristian host left on earth - the effect of which divides and inhabits all those that are without, including he, that shook his fist, but did not hit, in defiance of The Father’s ultimate authority.
Wednesday 29 June 2011
Wednesday 8 June 2011
The Truthers and Jonathan Kaye
I am pleased to see this book appear, since although the 9/11 conspiracy is a largely American phenomenon, it has surfaced in the UK among some of the people that I come into contact with in respect of matters of mental health. Listening to the author this morning. I was struck by how he explained the ability of the conspiracy theorists to expand their theory to incorporate the rational arguments of those who would argue against them. It was also significant that he felt there was only approximately one percentage of individuals, among the conspiracy theorists, who were actually suffering delusional states brought about by mental illness.
At this point I might have expected something different from the author, but his preferred explanation, for the remaining ninety nine percent, was to explain the phenomenon as a product of an over active sympathy for a leftist, or alternative sociological and political system to the capitalist democratic U.S system. In short, those who would blame their own shortcomings and all else, would blame it upon, ‘them or ‘they’, in other words, ‘the system'.
He did not enlarge upon this point in the interview, so I am assuming his idea, that 'the ninety nine percent' were 'normal', remains his view. Whereas, I don't think anyone involved with psychopathology, would consider this a particularly rational standpoint in itself. There is obviously something going on that is not rational and in my experience it is far more widespread than those who would be prepared to disclose their viewpoint as a conspiracy. It is, in my experience, merely the tip of the iceberg. I do not think I have spoken to one person, who, when challenged about their conventional assumptions, will stick to their guns, when the matter of 9/11 is raised. Jonathan Kaye at this point conflates this particular conspiracy theory with many others and it is on this assumption that I wish to take issue and offer some alternative views.
In psychopathology we find certain states that are reflected in the population at large. In this particular case, I would suggest a generalised tendency to mild paranoia. In extreme forms, it can distort a persons emotional attitudes and rational standpoint to almost everything they experience. In the general state, it has the effect of colouring the subject’s point of view. There are many aspects to the phenomenon, but predominantly it arises out of a negative orientation to a parental figure - most often to the father. This is by no means a universal phenomenon, their are many conditional nuances in a child's development, but a critical irrational father almost always predispose the child to self doubt, since meeting such a parent’s demands will deliver the child into the same conflicted condition as the father. If this conditioning is introverted it can cause all manner of psychopathological conditions, more frequently though, and especially in men, the negative conditioning, is extroverted on to the objects of individual experience, which become coloured with a mildly negative tarnish.
The subject in these cases, will almost invariably and perfectly unconsciously, look for 'father figures'. The relation to these father substitutes will always be toned in an unnatural way, where expectation is exaggerated and disproportionate. The complexity of these relations and interrelations are the subject of many a psychologist and councillor's rooms, but for the conspiracists, this lack of empowerment and confusion caused by the parental relation, is reflected is a quite different way.
It is here we must depart from common sense and take the unlikely route of treating the fantasy as a reality and examine what it is actually doing for the subject. The child, a priori, cannot hold a conscious orientation, that simultaneously loves and hates its parent. In this condition, the State, which reflects the providence and the authority of the individual’s father, becomes a displaced substitute. The inconsistency of the father, then becomes the connivance of the State and the conspirasist, in taking up arms against this connivance, is empowered in a way that was impossible in the child’s direct relation to its parent. The infantile nature of the conspiracy fantasies, the preoccupation with futuristic technology and weaponry, as is almost universally the case and reflected by Kaye, demonstrate that we are dealing with the mind of a child, but transposed upon an adult conflict situation.
Anyone familiar with bringing up or teaching a young child, will recognise the ‘tall stories’ produced in a perfectly convincing way (at least so far as the child is concerned) to explain the strange goings on that have resulted, shall we say for example, in a broken vase or trinket. It is the adult’s assumption that the child is lying, but the reality of the child’s mind is quite different from that. The reality is, that a child does not differentiate its actions in the same way that adult’s do. It sees, for instance, the breaking of a treasured object as impossibly its own fault. The object reflects the love bound up with the parent, so it becomes impossible that the child should offend against that love, so a fantastic story is substituted, as tortuous in complexity as the love bond between the child and the adult is strong.
This going back to a world of fantasy when the going gets tough, is something that becomes reflected as a generality among the ninety nine percent…
This empirical explanation is in my view not an exception, but a generality and is shared by more than just the ninety nine percent of conspiracy theorists. There is at the root of our culture a deeply infantile state - we are all children who have grown old. The condition by which children develop, means that the rich world of myth and fantasy is ignored as the pressing demands of a material world make it impossible to sustain. This mythological complexity is our root and beyond it lies only the material. It is therefore a natural assumption of mine, as a Jungian minded person, that this numinous substructure to reality will find expression in our contemporary world, acknowledged or not. It is my understanding, that the same process that occurs to a child searching for answers to an inexplicable lapse in regard (for a parent), is the same process that inflates our conspiracy fantasies. In a way it allows a degree of control and empowerment in a situation that is inexplicable and beyond normal understanding, but it also opens the door to the unconscious.
Jung wrote a book on UFO phenomenon in which he looked at the mythological equivalents and historical precedents, to what was to him a modern set of mythological fantasies. I cannot imagine, because of his discovery of synchronicity, that he was not aware of the fact that he had succumbed to the unconscious in a personally momentous way during times of remarkable world upheaval. In my opinion, it will come to be understood how important was his work on the unconscious during and after these experiences - leaving a legacy, not merely of written work, but also of a universally valid psychical nature, (The Red Book).
The events that Kaye cites in his book, especially 9/11, are in themselves momentous in a way that I regard as a special category of history. This category of history is, as I understand it, more precisely mythological in origin than it is a causal contingency of preceding events. Meaning, that such events appear to come out of the blue and seem to be guided with precision by unseen hands, but the reality is, that these events are the result of a latent capacity for the unconscious to express itself collectively in a very precise way, at what one might regard as turning points in human history. The very ignorance of humanity to the effect of the will in amplifying the latent capacity of the unconscious to express the opposites is prerequisite to these ‘big events’. It is reflected in the homily: that the truth will out. More precisely, by holding back or twisting the truth, as mankind inveterately does (the grown old child), it inevitably leads to a moment when the opposite must take effect and it does so with momentous force and meaning, leaving the world to react and reflect upon its impotence in the face of fate.
The smallest of coincidences have given rise to the most remarkable events. The shooting of Prince Ferdinand is as classic an example as the shooting of Kennedy or of Lincoln and are equally mythological in form and outcome. The ignorance by the majority, to the mythological substructure of our world and to its effect in each individual life, leaves everything to fate. As a result of this, the secularists cling on to the will and the religious to an unseen god in a world that is clearly beyond man’s control. The only forward solution to the problems of the world, is that mankind, individually, must stop being a grown old child and re-assume a connection with the truth of his mythological life and by a process of differentiation become psychically objectified (as Jung was).
The alternative is that the unconscious will express the generality of the chaos of the wilfull world by a dramatic expression of the opposite - a single being embodied in maturity, myth and truth…
At this point I might have expected something different from the author, but his preferred explanation, for the remaining ninety nine percent, was to explain the phenomenon as a product of an over active sympathy for a leftist, or alternative sociological and political system to the capitalist democratic U.S system. In short, those who would blame their own shortcomings and all else, would blame it upon, ‘them or ‘they’, in other words, ‘the system'.
He did not enlarge upon this point in the interview, so I am assuming his idea, that 'the ninety nine percent' were 'normal', remains his view. Whereas, I don't think anyone involved with psychopathology, would consider this a particularly rational standpoint in itself. There is obviously something going on that is not rational and in my experience it is far more widespread than those who would be prepared to disclose their viewpoint as a conspiracy. It is, in my experience, merely the tip of the iceberg. I do not think I have spoken to one person, who, when challenged about their conventional assumptions, will stick to their guns, when the matter of 9/11 is raised. Jonathan Kaye at this point conflates this particular conspiracy theory with many others and it is on this assumption that I wish to take issue and offer some alternative views.
In psychopathology we find certain states that are reflected in the population at large. In this particular case, I would suggest a generalised tendency to mild paranoia. In extreme forms, it can distort a persons emotional attitudes and rational standpoint to almost everything they experience. In the general state, it has the effect of colouring the subject’s point of view. There are many aspects to the phenomenon, but predominantly it arises out of a negative orientation to a parental figure - most often to the father. This is by no means a universal phenomenon, their are many conditional nuances in a child's development, but a critical irrational father almost always predispose the child to self doubt, since meeting such a parent’s demands will deliver the child into the same conflicted condition as the father. If this conditioning is introverted it can cause all manner of psychopathological conditions, more frequently though, and especially in men, the negative conditioning, is extroverted on to the objects of individual experience, which become coloured with a mildly negative tarnish.
The subject in these cases, will almost invariably and perfectly unconsciously, look for 'father figures'. The relation to these father substitutes will always be toned in an unnatural way, where expectation is exaggerated and disproportionate. The complexity of these relations and interrelations are the subject of many a psychologist and councillor's rooms, but for the conspiracists, this lack of empowerment and confusion caused by the parental relation, is reflected is a quite different way.
It is here we must depart from common sense and take the unlikely route of treating the fantasy as a reality and examine what it is actually doing for the subject. The child, a priori, cannot hold a conscious orientation, that simultaneously loves and hates its parent. In this condition, the State, which reflects the providence and the authority of the individual’s father, becomes a displaced substitute. The inconsistency of the father, then becomes the connivance of the State and the conspirasist, in taking up arms against this connivance, is empowered in a way that was impossible in the child’s direct relation to its parent. The infantile nature of the conspiracy fantasies, the preoccupation with futuristic technology and weaponry, as is almost universally the case and reflected by Kaye, demonstrate that we are dealing with the mind of a child, but transposed upon an adult conflict situation.
Anyone familiar with bringing up or teaching a young child, will recognise the ‘tall stories’ produced in a perfectly convincing way (at least so far as the child is concerned) to explain the strange goings on that have resulted, shall we say for example, in a broken vase or trinket. It is the adult’s assumption that the child is lying, but the reality of the child’s mind is quite different from that. The reality is, that a child does not differentiate its actions in the same way that adult’s do. It sees, for instance, the breaking of a treasured object as impossibly its own fault. The object reflects the love bound up with the parent, so it becomes impossible that the child should offend against that love, so a fantastic story is substituted, as tortuous in complexity as the love bond between the child and the adult is strong.
This going back to a world of fantasy when the going gets tough, is something that becomes reflected as a generality among the ninety nine percent…
This empirical explanation is in my view not an exception, but a generality and is shared by more than just the ninety nine percent of conspiracy theorists. There is at the root of our culture a deeply infantile state - we are all children who have grown old. The condition by which children develop, means that the rich world of myth and fantasy is ignored as the pressing demands of a material world make it impossible to sustain. This mythological complexity is our root and beyond it lies only the material. It is therefore a natural assumption of mine, as a Jungian minded person, that this numinous substructure to reality will find expression in our contemporary world, acknowledged or not. It is my understanding, that the same process that occurs to a child searching for answers to an inexplicable lapse in regard (for a parent), is the same process that inflates our conspiracy fantasies. In a way it allows a degree of control and empowerment in a situation that is inexplicable and beyond normal understanding, but it also opens the door to the unconscious.
Jung wrote a book on UFO phenomenon in which he looked at the mythological equivalents and historical precedents, to what was to him a modern set of mythological fantasies. I cannot imagine, because of his discovery of synchronicity, that he was not aware of the fact that he had succumbed to the unconscious in a personally momentous way during times of remarkable world upheaval. In my opinion, it will come to be understood how important was his work on the unconscious during and after these experiences - leaving a legacy, not merely of written work, but also of a universally valid psychical nature, (The Red Book).
The events that Kaye cites in his book, especially 9/11, are in themselves momentous in a way that I regard as a special category of history. This category of history is, as I understand it, more precisely mythological in origin than it is a causal contingency of preceding events. Meaning, that such events appear to come out of the blue and seem to be guided with precision by unseen hands, but the reality is, that these events are the result of a latent capacity for the unconscious to express itself collectively in a very precise way, at what one might regard as turning points in human history. The very ignorance of humanity to the effect of the will in amplifying the latent capacity of the unconscious to express the opposites is prerequisite to these ‘big events’. It is reflected in the homily: that the truth will out. More precisely, by holding back or twisting the truth, as mankind inveterately does (the grown old child), it inevitably leads to a moment when the opposite must take effect and it does so with momentous force and meaning, leaving the world to react and reflect upon its impotence in the face of fate.
The smallest of coincidences have given rise to the most remarkable events. The shooting of Prince Ferdinand is as classic an example as the shooting of Kennedy or of Lincoln and are equally mythological in form and outcome. The ignorance by the majority, to the mythological substructure of our world and to its effect in each individual life, leaves everything to fate. As a result of this, the secularists cling on to the will and the religious to an unseen god in a world that is clearly beyond man’s control. The only forward solution to the problems of the world, is that mankind, individually, must stop being a grown old child and re-assume a connection with the truth of his mythological life and by a process of differentiation become psychically objectified (as Jung was).
The alternative is that the unconscious will express the generality of the chaos of the wilfull world by a dramatic expression of the opposite - a single being embodied in maturity, myth and truth…
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