About J. R. R. Tolkien's Fantasy Novel, The Lord of the Rings (REVIEW ESSAY)

Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) February 8, 2025: In my various recent OEN articles (some of which are listed, with links, in the "References" at the end of the present essay), I have been dwelling on the distinction that the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) makes in his book Symbols of Transformation, translated by R. F. C. Hull, second edition (1967; orig. ed., 1912) in the chapter "Two Kinds of Thinking" (pp. 7-33). The two kinds of thinking are (1) fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking, and (2) directed thinking involving logic.

Jung himself engaged extensively in what her terms fantasy thinking in his dangerous self-experimentation using what he came to refer to as active imagination. Joan Chodorow has collected Jung's various writings about active imagination together in the book Jung on Active Imagination (1997).

You see, the practice of active imagination is dangerous because it invites unconscious contents into one's ego-consciousness - and unconsciousness contents can overwhelm and overthrow ego-consciousness, resulting in a psychotic break. Jung understood this. To help safeguard himself from possibly being overwhelmed by unconscious contents in his psyche, he devised a twofold way to proceed to process the unconscious contents that he was experiencing in his psyche: (1) he wrote out highly circumstantial reports of the unconscious contents that he was experiencing in his psyche in his Black Books; and then (2) he made works of art and drawings of the unconscious contents that he was experiencing in his psyche in his Red Book. Consequently, Jung is one of the most unique and distinctive men to have ever lived.

In 2009, W. W. Norton and Company published Jung's Red Book: Liber Novus (Latin for New Book) as an oversized art book, edited by Soneu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.

In 2020, W. W. Norton and company published the seven-volume set of books titled Jung's Black Books: 1913-1932:C Notebooks of Transformation, edited by Sonu Shamdasani, and translated by Martin Liebscher, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani.

Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, Missouri.

The lengthy formation of Jesuits begins with the two-year Jesuit novitiate. During the first year of the two-year Jesuit novitiate, Jesuit novices make a 30-day retreat in silence (except for the daily conferences with the retreat director) following the famous Spiritual Exercises (1992) of the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order.

Now, Jesuit formation aims to produce in Jesuits what Jung refers to as psychological transformation. Jesuit formation begins with the two-year Jesuit novitiate. The two-year Jesuit novitiate is, in effect, an initiation process.

Now, in my various recent OEN articles in which I have discussed Jung's idea of fantasy thinking involving images and associative thinking in connection with the fantasy skits in mom-son porn videos on the internet and in DVDs, I have also discussed the thought of the late Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in psychology and religion, University of Chicago, 1975) of the Chicago Theological Seminary about the eight archetypes of maturity in the human psyche and their accompanying sixteen "shadow" forms.

In my judgment, President Donald Trump and his many male MAGA supporters are unfortunately manifesting certain "shadow" forms of the four masculine archetypes of maturity.

Now, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's 1992a book The King Within: Accessing the King [Archetype] in the Male Psyche, the authors refer to J. R. R. Tolkien's 1955 fantasy novel titled The Return of the King (p. 7) - the third volume in Tolkien's three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings. Indeed, it may be the case that Tolkien had learned how to access the optimal and positive form of the King archetype in his psyche by the time he wrote his famous three-volume fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings.

In addition, in their 1992 book The King Within, Moore and Gillette tell us that Jung "believed that the Libido is a generalized life force that expresses itself through imaginal and spiritual impulses, as well as through sexuality" (p. 35; their capitalization of the term Libido).

As I have explained in some of my recent OEN articles, I experienced feeling mildly euphoric for about ten weeks in the fall of 2024. But I stopped feeling mildly euphoric before the presidential election on November 5, 2024. Yes, in 20/20 hindsight, I today can see that my ten-week experience of feeling mildly euphoric involved my psyche being flooded with libido, making me feel intensely sexual during the ten weeks that I felt mildly euphoric.

Now, after Donald Trump was elected to a second term as president of the United States in November 2024, I felt deeply concerned about the future of our American experiment in representative democracy. My concern about the future of our American experiment in representative democracy has only grown and intensified after the inauguration of President Trump in January 2025.

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