C. G. Jung and the Dead

Visions, Active Imagination and the Unconscious Terrain

Stephani Stephens, Stephani L. Stephens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815366140
• eBook ISBN: 9781351259873
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

C. G. Jung and the Dead: Visions, Active Imagination and the Unconscious Terrain offers an in-depth look at Jung's encounters with the dead, moving beyond a symbolic understanding to consider these figures a literal presence in the psyche. Stephani L. Stephens explores Jung's personal experiences, demonstrating his skill at visioning in all its forms as well as detailing the nature of the dead.

This unique study is the first to follow the narrative thread of the dead from Memories, Dreams, Reflections into The Red Book, assessing Jung's thoughts on their presence, his obligations to them, and their role in his psychological model. It offers the opportunity to examine this previously neglected theme unfolding during Jung's period of intense confrontation with the unconscious, and to understand active imagination as Jung's principle method of managing that unconscious content. As well as detailed analysis of Jung's own work, the book includes a timeline of key events and case material.

C. G. Jung and the Dead will offer academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, the history of psychology, Western esoteric history and gnostic and visionary traditions a new perspective on Jung's work. It will also be of great interest to Jungian analysts and psychotherapists, analytical psychologists and practitioners of other psychological disciplines interested in Jungian ideas.

PART I

Defining the terrain

1

INTRODUCTION

The unconscious terrain: setting the stage for the dead

Seeing the dead is as old as death itself. Whether in a dream, a vision, in the corner of the room or the corner of one’s eye, the dead return. The encounters are often significant, moving and life altering, and they demand something from both parties, what that is exactly is the mystery of their appearance in the first instance. Jung knew and understood as much.

When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections, it became clear the extent to which Jung grappled with his visionary experiences and how he struggled to understand the dead from a psychological perspective. His direct encounters with figures of the unconscious, some of whom he specifically identified as the dead, proved seminal to his experiences of the unconscious as a whole and appear to have assisted him in conceptualising both the unconscious and the figures who occupied the same psychic space as the dead.

This book arises from my fascination with Jung’s descriptions of the dead in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and The Red Book and is intended to guide the reader through the content of Jung’s visionary experiences as well as the methods by which he discovered the unconscious terrain. Active imagination assisted Jung in dealing with his own emotional and psychological imbalance. This process permitted him to mine visionary content that lay under the surface of consciousness and prompted him to refine and define a method that would include the interplay between the two. Yet, Jung also visioned in several other specific ways. In one sense, active imagination sits as the cornerstone of Jung’s entire psychological model.¹ The work here speaks to Jung’s ability to visualise material, describe these experiences and do something unique; determine a model of how consciousness and the unconscious exist as a dynamic in the personality. I argue that specifically Jung’s encounters with the dead assisted with his project. The premise here looks beyond the symbolic nature of the dead’s appearance, which signifies a departure from the traditional Jungian approach, and examines the implications of Jung’s psychological model as a result of considering the dead as a literal presence in the psyche. Offering an alternative to the symbolic approach allows the dead to point to themselves as psychic material and thus enhances the timing and psychological effect of their appearance. By formulating a picture of what Jung’s relationship with his dead actually entailed, this book argues the central yet neglected role the dead played in pointing Jung toward themselves and toward the formulation of the unconscious dynamic.

This work does not attempt to build an argument that the dead exist in se, parapsychologists have been at that for a while now. But rather to raise a question that if we understand the dead to exist literally, as I propose Jung did, what do we learn about the dead, the unconscious and how we live with both? What do Jung’s accounts of the dead teach us?

Where my focus in the article ‘Active Imagination and the Dead’² was to suggest and then attempt to support that Jung was experiencing a different type of unconscious material when he labelled the experience as being with the dead, my project here is different. Here, I wish to illustrate the variety and scope of Jung’s visual encounters with (and as a result of) the dead. These would later inform and expand episodes that he recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The assumption here is that Jung is speaking with the dead when he says as much, and thus the focus can now be on the skills he develops as a result of such encounters. This raises the fundamental question as to how the dead informed his understanding of the visioning process. I wish this question to stand apart from examining if Jung was a visionary because I feel this is a different question and one handled by previous authors.³ Rather, Jung’s experiences reveal he was skilled at visioning and in turn became even more so as he used it.

I have adopted the term ‘visioning’ because the word communicates both active engagement and interactivity. Jung did not simply ‘have visions’, as this would imply that he became distracted by flashes of visionary material. Rather, Jung engaged in a process of entering the space of the unconscious perceiving, seeing and then seeing more and further. This layered journeying entailed a type of sustained visioning/seeing/sight in which what he saw informed him further, not only in understanding but in process.⁴ When Jung came to understand what he witnessed, his ability to sustain visioning assisted him further. Thus, ‘The focus is not on what Jung sees or on his attempts to formulate what he sees, but rather on his manner of seeing, that is his approach and method.’⁵ Visioning therefore refers not only to Jung’s capacity to see, but also his ability to manage his unconscious content for further exploration.⁶

The theme of the dead began in Jung’s childhood, and manifested in provocative form in 1896 with the dream of his deceased father six weeks after his death and to brief resolution with the dead’s appearance when writing Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons to the Dead) in 1916. During this time it was the dead who showed Jung the nature of ‘figures of the unconscious’ in a series of death dreams and visions. He made this distinction in his chapter ‘On Life After Death’, when he speaks about both figures of the unconscious and ‘that other group . . . often indistinguishable from them, the “spirits of the departed”’.⁷ In their role, they not only pointed Jung toward the unconscious as a venue of exploration, but they also pointed to themselves as separate and distinct entities. They guided him to discover layers of the unconscious both personal and collective, and to the lively countenance of the unconscious itself. The dead remained a consistent presence in his discoveries and facilitated for him the ability to explore and define its workings.

The approach

The book’s approach is principally chronological and draws conclusions about the experiences of the dead themselves. The discussions treated here examine Jung’s personal material in visions and dreams in both Memories, Dreams, Reflections and The Red Book and includes the seminal dream of Paul Jung six weeks after his death in 1896 and continues to examine the death dreams occurring between 1911 to 1912, which served as a preparatory phase before Jung’s full confrontation with the unconscious between 1913 and 1914. This discussion sets the background for the emergence of The Red Book material. Much of the content here includes encounters with the dead as well as pointing to instances in which death is a prominent theme. As Jung recounted his dreams and visions with graphic descriptions of terrain, climate and even time, he reveals the unconscious as a process in which dynamic transformations occur and in which he became a more active participant.

It has been a challenge for the Jungian community to approach The Red Book as a text, its form seems to have dictated the way it has been discussed, argued, advocated and in some cases (perhaps few) dismissed.⁸ As such, previous scholarly approaches have attempted to tackle the work as a whole and in terms of a narrative, which have lent the work a broad appeal in an attempt to make it more accessible and understood. Attempts to determine what The Red Book is have fallen short in acknowledging specific details, which prove it masterly in terms of what Jung learns about himself and the unconscious as he describes it. Where Memories, Dreams, Reflections reveals the recurrent appearance of the dead in Jung’s personal material, The Red Book confirmed and in some instances elaborated these accounts.

Spirits and the dead

During Jung’s lifetime he vacillated as to whether spirits could be defined as split-off parts of a subjective psyche or whether they actually existed unto themselves, in se.⁹ This is best demonstrated when he asks if ‘the ghost or the voice is identical with the dead person or is a psychic projection’ and if what we attribute as information coming from the dead might be content that already exists in the unconscious.¹⁰ That is whether emerging knowledge is derived from a discarnate as such or if details remain in an unconscious readily accessible by some.

But, Jung’s professional position on after-death survival was indecisive not because personally he was unsure if there existed life after death,¹¹ but rather because of the challeng...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Concurrent Timeline
• Part I Defining the Terrain
• Part II Liber Primus
• Part III Liber Secundus
• Part IV Scrutinies
• Part V Beyond the Red Book
• Bibliography
• Index