Ann Belford Ulanov

The Self as Other

Many persons continue analysis at this point, at the same rate of inten sity, with the same number of sessions and the same arduous work writing up dreams, fantasies, and associations. Others continue analysis on a periodic basis; and still others engage in disciplined exercises of self-anal ysis. What is happening here? Psychoanalytic literature offers little in formation and scant guidance for patient or analyst in these later phases of treatment. We must depend here for guidance on our own experience as analysts. The aim of analysis is greater consciousness, greater contact with the unconscious. The question that presses in upon one as analysis proceeds is: What is the value of greater consciousness? What does it mean to move

The Danger and the Treasure of the Inferior Function

The inferior function really is inferior. It may be a source of transformation, but we do not know how. We encounter it, but we do not understand it. It is like opening a door and being confronted by a rhino, or, for some, coming upon a mathematician talking in numbers in the basement. Yet from this least expected place and in forms that have nothing to recommend them, may come new life, regeneration for ourselves and for the times in which we live.

Gifts of The Red Book

This article was first delivered as a presentation at Jung on the Hudson, July 2010, in Rhinebeck, New York. Jungs method in text and painting is presented, and his notions of incapacity, temptation to the good, the fettering of Satan, the help of the Cabiri and the Serpent, and his devotion to living ones own life are explored.

THE RED BOOK LIBER NOVUS. By C. G. Jung. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. Preface by Ulrich Hoerni. Translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani. 369 pp. New York: W. W. Norton. 2009.

Something happened to Jung, and when we read The Red Book, something happens to us. Jung describes this experience in his fortieth year as the pivotal one of his life: it took ‘‘forty-five years to bring these things that I once experienced and wrote down into the vessel of my scientific work’’ (219); this was ‘‘the numinous beginning, which contained everything’’ (Frontispiece). But the living of it was like an erupting lava of fantasies, characters, and overwhelming affects that ‘‘burst forth from the unconscious...and threatened to break me’’ (Frontispiece). ‘‘The first imaginings and dreams were like fiery, molten basalt, from which the stone crystallized, upon which I could work’’ (219). With what can only impress the reader as brute strength, Jung faced into these experiences, surrendered to the images, consented to the different voices, engaged fully in the drama that unfolded: ‘‘I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, that which rules the depths of everything that is contemporary’’ (229). And further, ‘‘the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant...of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it’’ (234). Despite his revulsion and the slanging matches that often occurred between him and those he encountered within, Jung found he lived far off from the depths and had to go looking for his lost soul who addresses him directly: ‘‘Within us is the way, the truth, and the life.... who should live your own life if not yourself?.... The way leads to mutual love in community’’ (231); ‘‘the other is also in you’’ (301). Jung says, ‘‘It cost me a great deal to undergo [the fantasies and emotions that erupted].... I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt...violent resistance to them...and distinct fear’’ (Jung 1963, 178). It also costs the reader to engage this book, for it is as if we descend into water, even under its currents, and the images and dramas float by, sometimes shocking in their negative power. As if in a dream, when closing the book it is hard to remember all that we read! That has to do, I believe, with the archetypal level at which the book proceeds; images bleed into one another, the paintings show motifs that recur, for example, the upturned shoes, the birds hidden in the tragacanth-like background, the reappearance of the young helper. An archetypal level of psyche is stimulated in the reader and one’s own drama and mysteries happen, verifying Jung’s adamant injunction: do not imitate my way, you have your own mysteries and your own way (246 n 163; 247 n 164; 254 n 138). I found I can only read about 3 pages at a time; the text sinks into a depth and takes you with it, stirring up your own images that begin to erupt. That is what The Red Book gives the reader who receives it with excitement and a matching fear. We do not become Jungians, imitating his images and problems. We become ourselves. The plan of the book is difficult in that one must turn pages backwards and forwards to link paintings to text, (which do not securely connect or all in the one place), and to link prior to later drafts, and footnotes to sections in the end of the book. Yet I cannot imagine an easier way to have constructed its whole. For we find in Appendix A some of the original lively images that

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Eros is like a huge spark that ignites our passion and then confronts us with the problem of living out this fire in ordinary space and time. What do we each know of this spark, this flame? Who or what was it’s object? Where have we felt this force for unity in ourselves, with another person, with life itself? Where are we unlived erotically? Where are the chinks in our erotic life? In focusing on the erotic in clinical work, we usually begin with the analysand’s transference. I want to explore eros in the life of the analyst for our relation to eros influences the clinical work we do. When eros is constellated, two possibilities of relationship present themselves: to an actual other who must be reckoned with as real, and to a psychic content, equally real, which we do not invent or control. How do we experience this electricity? What is our desire like? What does it take us back to, and toward what unseen purpose does it propel us? Eros brings with it a sense of purpose, of going somewhere important, something that enlists body, soul, and spirit.

Countertransference and the Erotic

Come now friends, let us give thanks for Barry whom God gave us and who now returns to God. He was a good man and a joyous person. He loved life and was a lover of life. Above all, Barry had a big appetite for life. He was at eighty-two just the same as the boy of ten walking home from school, stopping at each neighbors house for different kinds of food. At his bedside now the range of reading? and he read a book a day?reflects his wide tastes. Here are the titles I found: his old favorites Pascals Pens?es, Goethes Gespr?che, poems of St John of the Cross; in addition, a book about the Holocaust and German litera ture {The Language of Silence by Ernestine Schlant); Joyces Book of Memory by John S. Rikard; Inside Modernism, Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative by Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook; Reclaiming the Canon by Herman L. Sinaiko; Chants de la Belandrane by Ren? Char; Modern Times, Modern Places by Peter Conrad. In these last months he read a book about translat ing Rilke, one on Zero, and one on Non-Zero. Throughout his life he read poetry, mysteries, mathematics. He read all the available works of authors such as Shestov, Gadamer, Hildegaarde of Bingen, Lady Julian, Petrarch, Gregory the Great, Wittgenstein, Berdyaev, and, always, his beloved Augustine. We often went to look at paintings. Among his favorites were Vuillard, Cra nach (the Younger), Ubac, the Crevelli Annunciation because Barry liked the chubby little girl peeping out the window at this amazing winged stranger with his message to Mary. And music was important to Barry, most recently Sofia Gubaidulina, and of course Messiaen. Dizzie, Byrd, Louis, Billie, Len nie, Duke, and Teo were friends and geniuses he admired in jazz, the great American contribution to the arts. Barry learned from music to focus on the central question, the question at the center of his life: do you have the beat? Are you living according to your beat, your ownmost rhythm? He believed everyone had a beat. We need to listen for it, get in synch with it, dig it! The beauty of this world gladdened Barry. He was cheered by it. His recog nition of beauty extended to people too, and contributed to his power as a

Memorial Address: Barry Ulanov 1918–2000

We are sad to announce the death of Barry Ulanov, editor of the Journal of Religion and Health, and the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College for more than three decades. Barry died peacefully on Sunday, April 30, 2000, at 2:00 A.M. His wife and sons were with him reading prayers and scripture, and his daughters had been with him a few hours before. In Eastern Orthodox tradition, it was Easter, so Barry’s death-day was resurrection day. The family held a private Eucharist service at St. John’s Church in Connecticut, and have placed Barry’s ashes in a small burial yard on the Ulanov’s land. Barry is survived by Ann, their son Alex, and Barry’s children: Anne, Nicholas and Katie, and two grandchildren, Mark and Amy. The Journal of Religion and Health will present a memorial issue in Winter 2000, Volume 39, Number 4.

Editorial: Barry Ulanov 1918–2000

We all know what a short circuit is. We may be hazy about the exact technical details tha t characterize what goes by that name in the world of electricity, bu t we are aware that it means some interference with a fullness of connection. We know tha t when short circuits occur, appliances break down, lights go out, fires may start. We associate with the phenomenon, at least on some occasions, the smell of burning insulation, sparks in the air, smoke. What has happenedto be moderately technical about i t i s that a connection of low resistance has been effected between points in a circuit where usual ly there is much greater resistance. That, it seems to us, describes very well what happens in the worlds of psyche and spirit when quick connections are made where the joinings should come about instead with all deliberate slowness. When the circuits of relationship be tween parents and children, between lovers, between people in authority in institutions and their underlings are seriously abridged, the protective insulation, upon which all relationship depends, clearly begins to burn, sparks fly, smoke fills the air. The evidence is all around us. Are we paying at tention to it or have we become so accustomed to living in the fetid atmosphere of short circuits, and the accompanying threa t of burn-out, that we jus t do not notice it anymore? The articles and reviews in this issue of the Journal are replete with details of the short-circuit syndrome and those who are its unmistakable victims. You will not find it difficult to recognize these details of short-circuiting if you will jus t keep their identifying qualities at the forefront of consciousness, even if only for the briefest of moments, as you read on. See, for example, the way we have failed to use the altogether relevant insights of the life of the spirit, whether in organized religion or through other resources, in examining the vexing issues of health care or in dealing with children with disabilities. Think of how little time we have spent in analyzing the component parts of compassion, the stages that must be identified and endured if we are to bring something more than a long sad face or a simple-minded vocabulary of sympathy that amounts to little more than a series of grunts to people in distress. Think of the courtroom histrionics that fill our television screens and our newspapers and magazines, the worst of the dramas tha t arise from the

The short-circuit syndrome.

Urges toward the good may be hidden in bad acts. A case in point is envy, which is often motivated by desire for the good. Its ill effects can be counteracted by this realization.

Envy: Further Thoughts

Therefore remember that at one time you were Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands—remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh that law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you are also built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.Ephesians 2:11–22