Now, when we talk about learning how to access the optimal and positive forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity in the human psyche - and when we also talk about learning how to access the optimal and positive forms of the four feminine archetypes in the human psyche - we are discussing major shifts that individual persons experience in their psyches, shifts in their individual personal consciousness.
Now, the Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann synthesized C. G. Jung's wide-ranging work in his (Neumann's) book The Origins and History of Consciousness, translated by R. F. C. Hull (1954; orig. German ed., 1949).
Neumann's book The Origins and History of Consciousness is an impressive synthesis of Carl Gustav Jung's ambitious, and at times dangerous, work up to about 1949. The dangerous part of Jung's work took place during his self-experimentation with what he came to refer to as active imagination - but Jungian psychotherapists today no longer have their clients engage in the dangerous practice of active imagination.
Joan Chodorow has collected Jung's various statements about what he came to refer to as active imagination in the book Jung on Active Imagination (1997).
Basically, what Jung came to refer to as active imagination is a form of freewheeling meditation in which one allows one's imagination to be flooded with contents from one's unconscious. The danger involved is that the unconscious contents may overwhelm and overthrow one's ego-consciousness, thereby throwing one into a psychotic state.
Jung understood this possible danger. To safeguard himself again having his ego-consciousness overthrown by unconscious contents, he took certain steps to process the unconscious contents and thereby contain them - thereby avoiding having his ego-consciousness overthrown in a psychotic break. Jung processed the unconscious contents that he had experienced through the practice of active imagination by writing out account of what he experienced in his Black Books. In addition, Jung further processed the unconscious contents he had written about by also subsequently making works of art and drawings based on them in his Red Book.
In 2020, W. W. Norton and Company published the seven-volume set of Jung's Black Books: 1913-1932: Notebooks of Transformation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
In 2009, W. W. Norton and Company published Jung's Red Book: Liber Novus (Latin for "New Book"), edited by Sonu Shamdasani, translated by Mark Kyburg, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.
In any event, after Neumann's synthesis of Jung's lifework up to about 1949 was published in German in 1949, Jung undertook to revise his 1912 book about libido and re-title it in 1952 as Symbols of Transformation, translated by R. F. C. Hull, second edition (1967). In Part One, Chapter II is titled "Two Kinds of Thinking" (pp. 7-33), mentioned above. According to Jung, the two kinds of thinking are (1) fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking and (2) directed thinking involving logic.
Now, the two ways of thinking that Jung discusses are equivalent to the two ancient Greek mentalities that the classicist Eric A. Havelock discusses in his landmark book Preface to Plato (1963): (1) the Homeric Mind and (2) the Platonic Mind (i.e., the Western philosophical mind and directed thinking in the Western philosophical tradition -- and in the Christian theological tradition).
What Havelock refers to as the imagistic thinking of the Homeric Mind is the equivalent of what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking.
What Havelock refers to as the more abstract thinking of the Platonic Mind is the equivalent of what Jung refers to as directed thinking involving logic.
What Havelock refers to as the Homeric Mind involves what both Havelock and Ong refer to as primary orality, and what Havelock refers to as the Platonic Mind involves what both Havelock and Ong refer to as phonetic alphabetic literacy in ancient Greek philosophy exemplified by Plato and Aristotle and by our Western philosophic tradition of thought.
Now, for all practical purposes, what Jung refers to as fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking is characteristic of what Ong refers to as orally based thought and expression in his most widely translated 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (see esp. pp. 36-57), mentioned above.
Now, in Ong's 1971 book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (pp. 10-11), he succinctly summed up the eight stages of consciousness that Neumann delineates in his book The Origins and History of Consciousness as follows:
"The stages of psychic development as treated by Neumann are successively (1) the infantile undifferentiated self-contained whole symbolized by the uroboros (tail-eater), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, as well as by other circular or global mythological figures [including Nietzsche's imagery about the eternal return?], (2) the Great Mother (the impersonal womb from which each human infant, male or female, comes, the impersonal femininity which may swallow him [or her] up again), (3) the separation of the world parents (the principle of opposites, differentiation, possibility of change, (4) the birth of the hero (rise of masculinity and of the personalized ego) with its sequels in (5) the slaying of the mother (fight with the dragon: victory over primal creative but consuming femininity, chthonic forces), and (6) the slaying of the father (symbol of thwarting obstruction of individual achievement, [thwarting] what is new), (7) the freeing of the captive (liberation of the ego from endogamous [i.e., "married" within one's psyche] kinship libido and the emergence of the higher femininity, with woman now as person, anima-sister, related positively to ego consciousness), and finally (8) the transformation (new unity in self-conscious individualization, higher masculinity, expressed primordially in the Osiris myth but today entering new phases with heightened individualism [such as Nietzsche's overman] - or, more properly, personalism - of modern man [sic])" (Ong, 1971, pp. 10-11).
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
