Tuesday, 31 May 2016

All these psychic conditions influence a child profoundly.

A marked change occurs when the child develops consciousness of his ego, a fact which is registered by his referring to himself
as "I."
This change normally takes place between the third and fifth year, but it may begin earlier.
From this moment we can speak of the existence of an individual psyche, though normally the psyche attains relative independence only after puberty.
Up till then it has been largely the plaything of instinct and environment.
The child who enters school at six is still for the most part the psychic product of his parents, endowed, it is true, with the nucleus of ego-consciousness, but incapable of asserting his unconscious individuality.
One is often tempted to interpret children who are peculiar, obstinate, disobedient, or difficult to handle as especially individual or self-willed.
This is a mistake.
In such cases we should always examine the parental milieu, its psychological conditions and history.
Almost without exception we discover in the parents the only valid reasons for the child's difficulties.
His disquieting peculiarities are far less the expression of his own inner life than a reflection of disturbing influences in the home.
If the physician has to deal with nervous disorders in a child of this age, he will have to pay serious attention to the psychic state of the parents; to their problems, the way they live and do not live,
the aspirations they have fulfilled or neglected, and to the predominant family atmosphere and the method of education.
All these psychic conditions influence a child profoundly.
In his early years the child lives in a state of participation mystique with his parents.
Time and again it can be seen how he reacts immediately to any important developments in the parental psyche.
Needless to say both the parents and the child are unconscious of what is going on.
The infectious nature of the parents' complexes can be seen from the effect their mannerisms have on their children.
Even when they make completely successful efforts to control themselves, so that no adult could detect the least trace of a complex,
the children will get wind of it somehow.
I remember a very revealing case of three girls who had a most devoted mother.
When they were approaching puberty they confessed shamefacedly to each other that for years they had suffered from horrible dreams about her.
They dreamt of her as a witch or a dangerous animal, and they could not understand it at all, since their mother was so lovely and so utterly devoted to them.
Years later the mother became insane, and in her insanity would exhibit a sort of lycanthropy in which she crawled about on
all fours and imitated the grunting of pigs, the barking of dogs, and the growling of bears. ~Carl Jung, CW 17, Para 1071

Introduction to Mindfulness ..Asclepius Course Today starting at 2 today


Week 1-2 The benefits of Mindfulness being present in the moment, stilling the mind.  Breathing exercise finding your bodies natural rhythm, releasing any judgements on what may happen next.  Mindfulness Practice starting at 5 mins a day and building each week within a group Meditation practice which will be facilitated.
Week 3-4 The Body Scan Technique which is facilitated during the 10 week group session.  Learn how to recognise body sensations and increase awareness to allow your self time to just be in the moment without any cares or worries.
Week 5-6   Mindfulness and eating, walking, cleaning, experience a different way of looking at how you fill your day.  Exploring your dominant sense, visual, auditory, or by touch or smell.   
Week 7-8  Empathy and Compassion and taming the fire of anger and irritation.  Learning about training the tongue and how harsh speech and malicious speech affect all our relationships.
Week 9-10 Mindfulness and Pain Management letting go and how to deal with suffering and aversion.

The Angel of Death

[Carl Jung: As you know, the angel of death has struck me down too and almost succeeded in wiping me off the slate.]
Eleanor Bertine has already given me the news of your illness in a letter I received a few days ago.
I wish I could talk to you personally, but one is so far from each other and it is such a long time we are separated from the rest of the world that one feels quite hopeless about a communication.
We don’t trust even our letters to be capable of jumping over the abyss which yawns between us and the wide
world.
Still I hope that a good star conveys my letter to you.
As you know, the angel of death has struck me down too and almost succeeded in wiping me off the slate.
I have been practically an invalid ever since, recovering very slowly from all the arrows that have pierced me on all sides.
Fortunately enough my head has not suffered and I could forget myself in my scientific work.
On the whole my illness proved to be a most valuable experience, which gave me the inestimable opportunity of a glimpse behind the veil.
The only difficulty is to get rid of the body, to get quite naked and void of the world and the ego-will.
When you can give up the crazy will to live and when you seemingly fall into a bottomless mist, then the truly real life begins
with everything which you were meant to be and never reached.
It is something ineffably grand.
I was free, completely free and whole, as I never felt before.
I found myself 15,000 km. from the earth and I saw it as an immense globe resplendent in an inexpressibly beautiful blue light.
I was on a point exactly above the southern end of India, which shone in a bluish silvery light with Ceylon like a shimmering opal in the deep blue sea.
I was in the universe, where there was a big solitary rock containing a temple.
I saw its entrance illuminated by a thousand small flames of coconut oil.
I knew I was to enter the temple and I would reach full knowledge.
But at this moment a messenger from the world (which by then was a very insignificant corner of the universe) arrived and said that I was not allowed to depart and at this moment the whole vision collapsed completely.
But from then on for three weeks I slept, and was wakeful each night in the universe and experienced the complete vision.
Not I was united with somebody or something—it was united, it was the hierosgamos [the sacred marriage], the mystic Agnus [lamb].
It was a silent invisible festival permeated by an incomparable, indescribable feeling of eternal bliss, such as I never could have imagined as being within reach of human experience.
Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it.
But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return.
As a matter of fact, during the first month after my first vision I suffered from black depressions because I felt that I was recovering.
It was like dying.
I did not want to live and to return into this fragmentary, restricted, narrow, almost mechanical life, where you were subject to the laws of gravity and cohesion, imprisoned in a system of 3 dimensions and whirled along with other bodies in the turbulent stream of time.
There was fullness, meaning fulfillment, eternal movement (not movement in time). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I,
Pages 357-358

All we read is the chant OUT, OUT, OUT followed by personal abuse.......

An image stands out . We were in Neath on Saturday morning I glanced at the group campaigning to leave Europe. I saw a middle aged man holding up a Vote Leave Sign near him were young comfortable peple supporting the campaigbn to remain. I am a late middle aged man ashamed of the ignorance and fear so many men of my age are peddling. We have a responsibility to confront and challenge the inner “Victor Meldrew”. So few men do that how apt was that description by Michael Moore of the “Stupid White Men” Just look at farages tweet and you see it all. Stupid white men going om historically about a history they have never known or read about , talking about people they have never met. Moaning about unelected EU officials yet never raising a thought or an objection to the House of Lords. I repeat stupid is as stupid does......all we read is the chant OUT, OUT, OUT followed by personal abuse........


I am finding the sheer unpleasntness of vote leave increasinly disturbing. In Oxfordshire a group allegedly nothing to do with the official leave campaign is publishing leaflets and posters saying "stop ze German advance" ,Nigel Farage is promoting the theme from "The Great Escape" as the theme for the leave campaign. Plucky English prisoners sneak away from evil centralising authoritarians with German accents or is the implication that the EU is like the Nazi party.? And in particular the migrant debate has slipped into a far right model of "ranking them.Amn engineer or a doctor is seen as more wortny than a fruit picker. When did we start bei g the determiner and judge of human value? Contribution to society is not measured by occupation, anymore than by culture, ethnicity or religion or colour. I look at Nigel Farage pontificating and sorting out in his mind, his stockbroker attitude, his public school about who shouldn't be allowed to live here and why, while he eats a curry and no doubt being happy to eat vegetables picked by Polish workers or to be cared for by Spanish nurses . The debate has done much to highten racial tensions. We were told that Farage was the wrong person to lead or dominate a leave campaign and yet here we are with only three weeks to go and look what is happening.......its unpleasant,vile and increasingly racist and xenophobic......then I look at those who say nothing about this trend and I wonder when will they speak up and distance themselves from the leave campaign. I think of those who have principled objections to the EU based on economic and philosophical arguments different to mine that I can respect and yet they say nothing....Would it not be good to show how multicultural societies with mixed ethnicities work rather than promote these myths that your leaders are using...I am waiting to here your answers.....I am expecting the abuse, the swear words that challenges like this bring up from some but for the more aware I would like some reasoned comments and some distance from these crude dog whistle measures....... we have seen how the leave side claim that leaving will reduce VAT on heating. Its quite clear that vote leave is seeking desperate claims as their vote slips away. They have given no arguments , no explanations...look at the racist abuse on Port Talbot Debate and Argue if it is till there?. I read there a few days ago how one of their admins how she hated bullying and abuse...and yet she has done nothing to remove these comments or put her actions into what she believes. I am no saint , have been and will be a hypocrite again but I acknowledge that and struggle to be better........



Friday, 27 May 2016

Stupid is as stupid does

Last night I heard an interview with a Brexit voter who lived in Spain.She said her main motive was to stop immigrants buying up property in the UK. She seemed completely unaware that as she was the owner of a house in Spain she was a foreigner who bought property in Spain...oh thats different then...I am amazed how stupid some people are........what about all those 2,200,000 Uk residents living in Europe?...Br- exit. Do they know it's a latin word? Darned immigrants coming over here and enriching our language...we'll be saying 'curry' next 

The Remarkable Love Letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger


“Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves.”

The Remarkable Love Letters of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
The great German writer and political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), the first woman to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures, possessed one of the most piercing intellects of the twentieth century — a source of abiding insight intothe crucial difference between truth and meaning andtime, space, and where the thinking ego resides. But even Arendt wasn’t immune to youth’s impulse to relinquished reason for its counterpoint.
When she was a 19-year-old university student, Arendt fell in love with her 36-year-old married professor, Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889–May 26, 1976). A philosopher as influential as he is controversial, Heidegger made monumental contributions phenomenology and existentialism; he also joined the Nazi party and took an academic position under Nazi favors. Although he resigned a year later, stopped attending Nazi party meetings, and later told a student that he considered taking the position “the greatest stupidity of his life,” he never publicly repented. That he should fall in love with a Jew — Arendt saw the power and privilege of being an outsider as central to her identity — exposes the complexity and contradiction of which the human spirit is woven, its threads nowhere more ragged than in love.
arendtheidegger
Heidegger considered their romance “the most exciting, focused, and eventful” period of his life, and that creative vitality fertilized Being and Time — his most famous and influential work. “Nothing like this has ever happened to me,” he writes in one of their first love letters, collected in Letters: 1925–1975 (public library) — half a century of their electrifying correspondence, first as lovers and then as friends and intellectual peers.
In his first letter to Arendt, penned in February of 1925, Heidegger implores:
Dear Miss Arendt!
I must come see you this evening and speak to your heart.
Everything should be simple and clear and pure between us. Only then will we be worthy of having been allowed to meet. You are my pupil and I your teacher, but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us.
I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and it shall grow with you.
We never know what we can become for others through our Being.
From the start, Heidegger sets out to reconcile the intensity of his feelings with what he knows to be in Arendt’s best rational interest:
The path your young life will take is hidden. We must be reconciled to that. And my loyalty to you shall only help you remain true to yourself.
[…]
“Be happy!” — that is now my wish for you.
Only when you are happy will you become a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness, security, repose, reverence, and gratitude to life.
And only in that way will you be properly prepared for what the university can and should give you.
[…]
We have been allowed to meet: we must hold that as a gift in our innermost being and avoid deforming it through self-deception about the purity of living. We must not think of ourselves as soul mates, something no one ever experiences… That makes the gift of our friendship a commitment we must grow with… But just once I would like to be able to thank you and, with a kiss on your pure brow, take the honor of your being into my work.
Eleven days later, Heidegger’s infatuation swells to uncontainable magnitude and explodes into the philosophical. He writes:
Dear Hannah!
Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves. Then we want to thank the beloved, but find nothing that suffices.
We can only thank with our selves. Love transforms gratitude into loyalty to our selves and unconditional faith in the other. That is how love steadily intensifies its innermost secret.
Here, being close is a matter of being at the greatest distance from the other — distance that lets nothing blur — but instead puts the “thou” into the mere presence — transparent but incomprehensible — of a revelation. The other’s presence suddenly breaks into our life — no soul can come to terms with that. A human fate gives itself over to another human fate, and the duty of pure love is to keep this giving as alive as it was on the first day.
But just before the one-year anniversary of their romance, Arendt ended things abruptly, in large part because she wanted to focus on her academic pursuit of philosophy. In a reply to her from January of 1926, Heidegger makes an admirable effort to syncretize the two conflicting forces ripping him asunder — his own heartbreak and the sincerity with which he wishes the best for Arendt. He writes:
My dear Hannah!
… I understand, but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Still less as I know what my love exacts from you.
Although Arendt’s breakup letter doesn’t survive, it appears that in it she cited her need to withdraw from the romance in order to focus on her work — a perennial paradox of human satisfactions, which Heidegger addresses in his response:
This “withdrawal” from everything human and breaking off all connections is, with regard to creative work, the most magnificent human experience I know — with regard to concrete situations, it is the most repugnant thing one can encounter. One’s heart is ripped from one’s body.
And the hardest thing is — such isolation cannot be defended by appeal to what it achieves, because there are no measures for that and because one cannot just make allowance for abandoning human relationships… With the burden of this necessary isolation, I always hope for complete isolation form the outside — for a merely apparent return to other people — and for the strength to keep an ultimate and constant distance. For only then can all sacrifice be spared them, along with the necessary rejection.
But this tormented desire is not just unattainable, it is even forgotten — so much so that the most vital human relationships become a spring again and provide the forces that drive one into isolation once more…. Such a life then becomes wholly a matter of exigencies that have no justification. Coming to terms with this in a positive way — not taking a position exclusively as a kind of escape — is what it means to be a philosopher.
And yet however tragic the sacrifices of being a philosopher may be, Heidegger encourages young Arendt to make them anyway. His words radiate a testament to the notion put forth generations later by philosopher Martha Nussbaum — in many ways an intellectual heir of Arendt’s — that embracing our neediness is essential for healthy relationships. Even as Heidegger emboldens Arendt to go her own way, he articulates his longing for her and his need for their love to persevere:
It is clear — independently of you and me in this final point — that, in your youth and receptive stage of learning, you should not commit yourself here. It is always bad for young people to not summon the strength to go away. It is a sign that the freedom of instincts has died out, and as a result, when they stay they no longer grow in a positive way…
[…]
And perhaps your decision will become an example… If it has good effect, it can only be because it calls for sacrifice from both of us.
The evening and your letters have renewed my certainty that everything stays close to what is good, and becomes good… You, even in your situation, must be happy as only those with a young heart and strong expectations and faith can be at the prospect of a new world — new learning, fresh air, and growth. May each of us be a match for the other’s existence, that is, for the freedom of faith and for the inner necessity of an unalloyed trust — that will preserve our love.
My life continues — without my involvement or merit — with such uncanny certainty that I want to believe the new emptiness that will come with your departure is necessary.
And yet despite Arendt’s departure, the emotional intensity between the two magnetized them into continued correspondence and occasional meetings over the months that followed. By July of 1927, more than two years after their romance began, they were still very much in love. Responding to another letter of Arendt’s that doesn’t survive and that appears to have been particularly emotionally charged, Heidegger writes:
My dear Hannah!
[…]
Although you have remained as present to me as you were on the first day, your letter brought you particularly close. I hold your loving hands in mine and pray with you for your happiness.
[…]
Child, my dear, do you only “hope” I might trust in you? Ask the innermost part of your heart, which has shone on me so often from your wonderfully deep eyes; it will tell you: deep down I am completely and purely sure of this trust.
Your letter has shaken me as much as first being close to you did. Those days have returned with such elemental power, thanks to this word of your love.
Echoing Van Gogh’s beautiful reflection on the parallel necessity of giving and receiving in love, Heidegger adds:
Dear Hannah, for me it was as if I had been favored to give away something ultimate and great, so as to receive it, the gift and the giving, as a new possession. I still haven’t come to grips with it, much less comprehended the unsuspected things I saw in our existence in those hours.
In April of 1928, Arendt echoes Freud’s famed assertion that love and work are the two cornerstones of the human spirit, and ultimately chooses the work of philosophy over her romance with Heidegger. She writes to him, beseeching him to understand her choice — trusting, even, that as a philosopher himself, one wholly consumed by his work, he would have no choice but to understand:
I love you as I did on the first day — you know that, and I have always known it, even before this reunion. The path you showed me is longer and more difficult than I thought. It requires a long life in its entirety. The solitude of this path is self-chosen and is the only way of living given me. But the desolation that fate has kept in store not only would have taken from me the strength to live in the world, that is, not in isolation; it also would have blocked my path, which, as it is wide and not a leap, runs through the world. Only you have a right to know this, because you have always known it. And I think that even where I finally remain silent, I will never be untruthful. I always give as much as anyone wants from me, and the path itself is nothing but the commitment our love makes me responsible for. I would lose my right to live if I lost my love for you, but I would also lose this love and its reality if I shirked the responsibility it forces on me.
The following year, Arendt met a young German journalist and philosopher in Heidegger’s seminar. That fall, she married him. Writing on her wedding day, she sends Heidegger one final romantic reverberation, at once plaintive and proud:
Do not forget me, and do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life. This knowledge cannot be shaken, not even today, when, as a way out of my restlessness, I have found a home and a sense of belonging with someone about whom you might understand it least of all.
[…]
I kiss your brow and your eyes,
Your Hannah
Like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, who were onetime lovers and lifelong friends, Arendt and Heidegger remained in each other’s lives for half a century, until Arendt’s sudden death. Heidegger outlived her by six months. Letters: 1925–1975survives as the extraordinary record of this enduring relationship, brimming with timeless wisdom on nearly every aspect of life and culture.

The Sea close by.......Albert Camus

A beautiful video by Tom Beard (1965-2015) inspired by Albert Camus' "The Sea Close By".
"I always had an image in my head of a chapter from A Happy Death by Camus. It’s a sunny, rich portrait of his life growing up in Algiers—the heat, the sea, good weather; he paints an amazing picture. I wanted to try to do this in a very English way and create a sense of being transported through this extract", explained Beard.

"*Suspicion of scientific men*.

"*Suspicion of scientific men*. Out of the consciousness of their truth, both suspect truth in the naive form of scientific knowledge. They do not doubt the methodological correctness of scientific insight. But Kierkegaard was astonished at the learned professors; they live for the most part with science and die with the idea that it will continue, and would like to live longer that they might, in a line of direct progress, always understand more and more. They do not experience the maturity of that critical point where everything turns upside down, where one understands more and more that there is something which one cannot understand. Kierkegaard thought the most frightful way to live was to bewitch the whole world through one's discoveries and cleverness--to explain the whole of nature and not understand oneself. Nietzsche is inexhaustible in destructive analyses of types of scholars, who have no genuine sense of their own activity, who can not be themselves, who, with their ultimately futile knowledge, aspire to grasp Being itself."
--Karl Jaspers, from_Kierkegaard and Nietzsche_, Walter Kaufmann_Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre_

Thursday, 26 May 2016

Neurosis is nothing less

Neurosis is nothing less than an individual attempt, however unsuccessful, to solve a universal problem; indeed it cannot be otherwise, for a general problem, a “question,” is not an ens per se [thing in itself], but exists only in the hearts of individuals. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 438

A beautiful mind? and ways of thinking on Europe




On the train this morning i was thinking about John Nash,. He was the Mathematician who was killed a few days ago in a car crash in the USA. He was suffering from a paranoid psychosis when he produced his contribution to Games Theory. it was this branch of Games Theory that contributed most to America`s outlook during the Cold War and has probably in turn added to the nature of globalisation in the last 30 years. Is it not interesting that an academic suffering from a paranoid psychosis ( Watch Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind ). And that this branch of mathematics created in paranoia serves a superpower in the state of collective psychosis.and paranoia. Does our sense of how the world works reflect our inner psychological state On the European issue we find the following.The truth is in at least 2 out of 3 cases we always find that those people wanting to remain in Europe are better educated, more tolerant, more perceptive, deeper thinking, younger more aware of paradox and not knowing within themselves, more tentative and less sure. They are less easily fooled, see through scapegoating, reflect more on their life experiences and have travelled more and know more about other cultures and less likely to have a right wing outlook. of course there are exceptions but ......the truth is that our outlook is shaped by both our psychology and our experience and also the ability to reflect, change ones mind and to have the capacity to change our ways of thinking........and to be politically more progressive.

Wednesday, 25 May 2016

There is no left exit.....leaving the EU gives the Tories more power...



Nietzche on Daybreak 1881

Only if mankind possessed a universally recognised goal would it be possible to propose ‘thus and thus is the right course of action’: for the present there exists no such goal. It is thus irrational and trivial to impose the demands of morality upon mankind. – To recommend a goal to mankind is something quite different: the goal is then thought of as something which lies in our discretion; supposing the recommendation appealed to mankind, it could in pursuit of it also impose upon itself a moral law …. Up to now the moral law has been supposed to stand above our own likes and dislikes: one did not want actually to impose this law upon oneself, have it commanded to one from somewhere.
Nietzsche, Daybreak. 1881
Nietzsche’s far-reaching critique of metaphysics, of philosophy’s claim to provide access to a realm of objective truth and universal values, has placed him at the centre of debates on the nature of the postmodern turn in Western thought. It is only recently, however, that any attempt has been made to examine the significance of his deconstruction of the philosophical tradition for political theory. An impasse on the question of Nietzsche’s status as a political thinker was reached by commentators adopting the practice of reading his overt neo-conservative politics back into his philosophy of power in an effort to discredit the philosophical site on which he had constructed his political edifice. Yet for anyone aware of the pivotal role that Nietzsche’s writings have come to play in contemporary debates in critical theory, poststructuralism and deconstruction, his status as a political thinker poses an enigma in need of explanation and enlightenment.

Our Desire

"Our desire, all the more profound as it was often silent, was to liberate newspapers from money and to give them a tone and a veracity that would raise the readers to the level of what is the best in themselves. We thought that a country is as good as its press. And if it is true that newspapers are the voice of a nation, we were determined, insofar as our position and our modest capacity allowed, to raise the country by raising its language".
Albert Camus, editorial of Combat, August 31, 1944

The gateway

Therefore they had to learn what they did not know, that man is a gateway through which crowds the train of the Gods and the coming and passing of all times. He does not do it, does not create it, does not suffer it, since he is the being, the sole being, since he is the moment of the world, the eternal moment. Whoever recognizes this stops being flame; he becomes smoke and ashes. He lasts and his transitoriness is over. He has become someone who is. You dreamed of the flame, as if it were life. But life is duration, the flame dies away. I carried that over, I saved it from the fire. That is the son of the fire flower. You saw that in me, I myself am of the eternal fire of light. But I am the one who saved it for you, the black and golden seed and its blue starlight. You eternal being— what is length and brevity? What is the moment and eternal duration? You, being, are eternal in each moment. What is time? Time is the fire that flares up, consumes, and dies down.

The Party Member

The most dangerous party member. - In every party there is one who through his all too credulous avowal of the party's principles incites the others to apostasy.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE


Behind a man's actions there stands neither public opinion nor the moral code, but the personality of which he is still unconscious. Just as a man is what he always was, so he already is what he will become. The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents, but for the other and far greater part, of his unconscious, which is of indefinite extent with no assignable limits. It is quite possible for the ego to be made into an object, that is to say, for a more compendious personality to emerge in the course of development and take the ego into its service. Since this growth of personality comes out of the unconscious, which is by
Jung- Psychology and reflection- CW11


Tuesday, 24 May 2016

The animus has a bright and a dark side

"I would like now to try to present to you something about the psychology of women,
We may say that the real man is seen by the woman on his bright side, and that her relationship to the real man is a comparatively exclusive one— that in this respect, it is just the opposite of the average relation of a man to the real woman. In a man this relationship is not exclusive. When the average man permits comparison of his wife with other women he says, “She is my wife among women.” To the woman, though, the object that personifies the world to her (a in our diagram) is my husband, my children, in the midst of a relatively uninteresting world. This “unique” husband has a shadow side for the wife, just as we saw in the case of the man in relation to the real woman.
Similarly the animus has a bright and a dark side, but balancing the unique man in the conscious, we have in the unconscious of woman a multitude of animus figures. Man understands his relation to his anima as being a highly emotional affair, while woman’s relation to her animus is more in the Logos field. When a man is possessed by his anima, he is under peculiar feelings, he cannot control his emotions, but is controlled by them. A woman dominated by her animus is one who is possessed by opinions. Nor is she too discriminating about these opinions. She can easily say, “In nineteen hundred and so and so, Papa said this to me,” or, “Some years ago a man with a white beard told me this was true,” and so it remains true for her into eternity. It is felt as a silent prejudice by a man who meets this phenomenon in a woman. It is something exceedingly baffling to him, and irritating to a degree through its power and invisibility. Now then we come to the woman’s relation to the collective conscious. Since I have not a woman’s feelings, I am perhaps not competent to throw much light on what that relationship is, but inasmuch as the family seems the real basis of a woman’s life, perhaps it would be fair to say that her attitude toward the world of the conscious is that of a mother. A woman too has a peculiar attitude toward nature, much more trusting than that of a man. She is always saying, “Oh, well that will come out all right,” just when a man is ready to explode with anxiety. There must be something like this to account for the fact that there are three times more suicides among men than among women. But we can always find that, though there is not the marked split in the woman’s relation to the collective conscious that occurs in man, still there is enough of duality to permit us to make a symbol such as x’x. In other words, the woman sees that the dear old god who is going to make everything come out all right has moods of his own, so one must not be too trusting. This is the element of skepticism, the shadow side. Men tend to separate x and x’. Women tend to take them together. If you listen to an argument between men you can always hear them keeping the negative and the positive aspects of the subject distinct; they may discuss now the one, now the other. But begin an argument with a woman in which the premise carries in it this principle of discrimination, and in about two minutes she has shot through your whole logical structure by bringing the positive right into the middle field of the negative aspect and vice versa. Nor can you ever persuade her that she has thus destroyed the logic of the discussion. To her way of thinking, the two belong very close together. This struggle for a principle of unity runs through all her psychological processes, just as the opposite principle, that of discrimination, runs through those of man.

Now when it comes to the unconscious of the woman, the picture becomes obscure indeed. I think there again is to be found the figure of a mother, and again she has a dual aspect, but in a peculiar way. As we saw with man, he has the definite division into good and bad, Cosmos and Chaos, but in woman’s collective unconscious it is a fusion of the human with the animal. I have been tremendously impressed with the animal character of the unconscious of woman, and I have reason to think that her relation to the Dionysian element is a very strong one. It looks to me as f man were really further away from the animal than the woman— not that he has not a strong animal likeness in him, but it is not so psychological as in women. It is as though in men the animal likeness stopped at the spinal cord while in women it extends into the lower strata of the brain, or that man keeps the animal kingdom in him below the diaphragm, while in women it extends throughout her being. When man sees this fact in women, he immediately assumes that the animal nature of women is exactly like his own, the only difference being that she has more of it. But that is altogether a mistake, for their animalness contains spirituality, while in the man it is only brute. The animal side of woman is probably like that we would find in any such an animal as the horse, if we could see such an animal from within itself instead of just from the outside as we do see it. If we were viewing the psychic life of a horse from within, it would appear very strange to us. But a man is always looking at an animal from the outside— he has not the psychic animalness in his unconscious that a woman has in hers."
From Notes of the Seminars, 1925 C.G. Jung

It was as though someone had switched off the wireless,

"He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds – for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight."


“Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.” Evelyn Waugh
“Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
“My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited