Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nicknameJordan says: "Adoption of such a mask, according to Jung, allowed each of us – and those around us – to believe that we were authentic....Despite my verbal facility, I was not real. I found this painful to admit."
Having introduced Jung he begins to illustrate a dramatic change in his subconscious, as visions which had plagued him in earlier life, begin to re-emerge.
" My dream life, up to this point, had been relatively uneventful, as far as I can remember.... Nonetheless, my dreams became so horrible and so emotionally gripping that I was often afraid to go to sleep. I dreamt dreams vivid as reality. I could not escape from them or ignore them. They centered, in general, around a single theme: that of nuclear war, and total devastation – around the worst evils that I, or something in me, could imagine"
In describing one of these dreams, Jordan hints towards what might infact be a quite pivotal fact & influence in his psychic development thus far, not to mention the absence, in this otherwise candid account, of any accounts of teenage lust, pleasure, sexual activity or fantasies: " I was sitting in the darkened basement of this house, in the family room, watching TV, with my cousin Diane, who was in truth – in waking life – the most beautiful woman I had ever seen." The TV malfunctions, leading Diane to check the wires and having touched a cord she: "started convulsing and frothing at the mouth, frozen upright by intense current. A brilliant flash of light from a small window flooded the basement. I rushed upstairs. There was nothing left of the ground floor of the house. It had been completely and cleanly sheared away...
...The entire town and everything that surrounded it on the flat prairie had been completely obliterated"
I am by no means a professional shaman or psychoanalyst, but in such a vision what else can the basement stand for but the deep, hidden urges of the unconscious? [2] Reading it this way the TV could surely be (the apparently thus far unreal) Ego, the waking consciousness feeding and filtering into the subconscious where the dreamer is residing? The interplay with the TV's cord and Diane would therefore be an example of a fantasized occurrence, the description of her electrocution vaguely corresponding to her desired orgiastic response. If this is the case, it's no surprise any light being shone into this dark corner would inevitably send the young man running. What can this light be but the light of God, the superego formed by the internalization of the parental figures in infancy? Could we suggest that now, in His wrathful and judging gaze: that the desolation of all 'below a certain level', corresponding to the body, mind & dream scenario, could also be an example of a wish's fulfillment?
"A few distraught and shell-shocked people started to gather together. They were carrying unlabelled and dented cans of food, which contained nothing but mush and vegetables. They stood in the mud
looking exhausted and disheveled. Some dogs emerged, out from under the basement stairs, where they had inexplicably taken residence. They were standing upright, on their hind legs. They were thin, like greyhounds, and had pointed noses. They looked like creatures of ritual – like Anubis, from the Egyptian tombs. They were carrying plates in front of them, which contained pieces of seared
meat. They wanted to trade the meat for the cans. I took a plate. In the center of it was a circular slab of flesh four inches in diameter and one inch thick, foully {I believe this may be a transcription error of "fully" in the pdf}cooked, oily, with a marrow bone in the center of it."
Without digressing too far, there are some interesting elements here too. The dichotomy between the commodity & natural forms of food is interesting, as though there's something worthless in the manufactured version compared to the plated and appetizing sounding meat. Those bearing each type of sustenance, also reflect and constitute part of this dichotomy. The dogs seem to be a representation of the deep animalistic & instinctual urges, however in quite a refined position of service to Jordan and the huddled, exterior masses which seem to stand specifically for the outside world & people in it. The appeal of the type of offering delivered by each of the internally & externally originating figures, would therefore mirror his prior description of reacting with fascination towards his sadistic impulses[3], and the dissatisfaction he felt with his own external environment and attempts to participate in it: nothing seeming real, authentic or like it belonged to him, etc,: the "mush and vegetables."
"Where did it come from? I had a terrible thought. I rushed downstairs to my cousin. The dogs had butchered her, and were offering the meat to the survivors of the disaster. I woke up with my heart pounding"
The deep primitive instincts having butchered the object of his desire, offering it as sustenance to him and the people, could signify a healthy renunciation of the taboo of incest and it's sublimation into something appealing. However the terror he felt and macabre connotations could signify a darker meaning: the gratification of the masses and his own carnal desires at the expense of this object, enabled by allowing his instincts to take control. His cousin as beautiful yet unattainable, may simply have represented this object, which could have been his idealistic youthful aspirations, his sexual desire itself, or the embodiment of women in general. If he shared some of the common recurring themes and characters rather than one specific case, we could draw some more inferences.
He goes on
"I dreamed apocalyptic dreams of this intensity two or three times a week for a year or more, while I attended university classes and worked.....I was being affected, simultaneously, by events on two “planes.” On the first plane were the normal, predictable, everyday occurrences that I shared with everybody else. On the second plane, however (unique to me, or so I thought) existed dreadful images and unbearably intense emotional states.
This idiosyncratic, subjective world – which everyone normally treated as illusory – seemed to me at that time to lie somehow behind the world everyone knew and regarded as real. But what did real mean? The closer I looked, the less comprehensible things became. Where was the real? What was at the bottom of it all? I did not feel I could live without knowing."
This is the fourth example of splitting he's described so far. These two realms are portrayed in their particularity alone, there is no connection made between this internal subjective world, and the material, environmental forces which come to shape it. This metaphysical way of treating reality also becomes apparent in his attitude towards dreams, disavowing the intimate connection between the dream and the sexual, primal and contingent environmental factors posited by Freud, in favour of a mystical interpretation; metaphysical framework of true and false states etcetera. This recurring failure to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole, leaves me with little hope for his burgeoning desire for knowledge:
"My interest in the cold war transformed itself into a true obsession."
In pursuit of this knowledge, could Jordan have chosen a more convoluted and inherently inhospitable subject for consideration? May we not reasonably assume this was another externalized splitting process? The most obvious means of making sense and existing in a world, who's divisions & catastrophic potential ( existing in Jordan anyway) were being accentuated, demonstrated and enforced at every opportunity?
How could he not be drawn towards the side fighting for Individual 'liberty' against totalitarian, collective oppression?
"I thought about the suicidal and murderous preparation of that war every minute of every day, from the moment I woke up until the second I went to bed. How could such a state of affairs come about?
Who was responsible?"
The dream he describes next is interesting in two regards:
"I dreamed that I was running through a mall parking lot, trying to escape from something. I was running through the parked cars, opening one door, crawling across the front seat, opening the other, moving to the next. The doors on one car suddenly slammed shut. I was in the passenger seat. The car started to move by itself. A voice said harshly, “there is no way out of here.” I was on a journey, going somewhere I did not want to go. I was not the driver."
Obviously it parallels the material of his conscious mind, in terms of his being party to an anxiety inducing situation beyond his ability to comprehend, but it also shares a striking resemblance, to the earlier split he describes between his identity, and an internal critical voice. There is some overlap in motif's here that brings to mind the bright light shining through his basement window, and it's probable psychological origin in the parental authority.
We may ask like Freud, wherein lies the value of introducing an authoritarian message of all or nothing, dualistic thinking at a young age? To what purpose the ideas of judgement, apocalypse, war between good and evil, self denial, and so on, that weigh so heavily on the children of religious and non religious people alike?
It would seem to predispose the individual towards the adoption of and participation in hierarchically bestowed, dualistic moral frameworks, wherever they exist in culture in the form of 'Rules'. As Jordan highlighted earlier on, Judeo-Christian values were the bedrock of his own middle-class upbringing. Seeing the evidence all around the suburbs 'that it was good', the participant in this culture could only deduce that through traditional and continued adherence to these rules, regulations, norms and values, they would indeed reach their respective needs, and desires, and that this was pleasing to God, since he hadn't seen fit to subject them to the fates or punishments of less 'blessed' people, such as the Indigenous 'Canadians' they replaced.
These rules governing people's thoughts & behaviour, ensuring they exist in ever more pliable, predictable ways, as a considerable source of individual security, comfort and relief etc,. May go from the parental, or father figure in childhood, to, depending on the progress of the individual through adolescence, an ideal father figure, in terms of a God, or indeed a divine or semi-divine leader, who would similarly offer to re-inject some Order into an increasingly chaotic world.
But having proclaimed earlier the 'renunciation of ideology', what exactly was it that was leading him to his various rejections of economic theory, the political scientists, his congregation, comrades and now Sigmund Freud's theories on Sexuality?:
" I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and found it useful. Freud at least took the topic seriously – but I could not regard my nightmares as wish-fulfillments. Furthermore, they seemed more religious than sexual in nature. I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth and religion, so I started through his writings."
Something seeming more comfortable, or merely not regarding something as true, are not the most watertight arguments, and seem to confirm my pessimism regarding the prospects of his proclaimed quest for knowledge.
At around this point the internalized religious images and his emotional, libidinal investments in them began to seep into consciousness through art, which Freud associates in his early writings, with the activity of the unconscious in dreams:
" I found my awareness of things unbearable. I came home late one night from a college drinking party, self-disgusted and angry. I took a canvas board and some paints. I sketched a harsh, crude picture of a crucified Christ – glaring and demonic – with a cobra wrapped around his naked waist, like a belt. The picture disturbed me – struck me, despite my agnosticism, as sacrilegious. I did not know what it meant, however, or why I had painted it. Where in the world had it come from?I hadn’t paid any attention to religious ideas for years."
Doesn't this outpouring of religious imagery confirm my theory, that religion, -the architecture of reality implanted into him as a child,- although superficially rejected was still playing a decisive, almost primal role, in young Jordan's psychic world?
Despite having not paid them any mind, they were always there: moving over the surface of the waters of his mind, exerting their inexorable influence on the development of his objects, relations, and subjectivity, neatly demarcating the confines and direction of his general development.
Melanie Klein greatly developed the theories of Freud in regards to the development of a Child, and highlighted the significance of authoritarian, religious upbringings in this pretty stark manner:
"The 'powerful religious inhibition of thought' as Freud calls it, hinders the timely fundamental correction of the omnipotence-feeling by thought. It does so because it overwhelms thought by the authoritative introduction of a powerful insuperable authority"
"The complete development of the reality-principle as scientific thought, however, is intimately dependent upon the child's venturing betimes upon the settlement he must make for himself between the reality and the pleasure principles. If this settlement is succesfully achieved, the omnipotence-feeling will be put on a certain basis of compromise as regards thought, and wish and phantasy will be recognized as belonging to the former, while the reality-principle will rule in the dphere of thought and established fact."
"This idea of God can so shatter the reality sense that it dare not reject the incredible, the apparently unreal, and can so affect it that the recognition of the tangible, the near at hand, the so called 'obvious' things in intellectual matters, is repressed together with the deeper processes of thinking."
"To introduce the idea of God into education and then leave it to individual development to deal with it is not by any manner of means to give the child its freedom in this respect. For by this authoritative introduction of the idea, at a time when the child is intellectually unprepared for, and powerless against, authority, his attitude in this matter is so much influenced that he can never again, or only at the cost of great struggles, and expense of energy, free himself from it."[6]
This over-arching, implicit conception of right and wrong, derived from authoritarian and hierarchical religious indoctrination from birth, inhibited the natural development and expansion of his Ego, beyond the confines of it's own limited understanding and self gratifying narcissism.
By comparing the space devoted in the text to Jordan's internal life so far: his awareness of himself, of his mental state, fears, intricately remembered dreams, neuroses etc,;- to the space & mental energy dedicated to economic or socialist theory, the reader get's the impression that the narcissistic impulse exerted a substantial amount of influence on Jordan from a young age. One may also suggest there is a particular narcissistic attraction to this period, His narrative assumes a kind of mythic air as he describes what would, in different epochs have been defined as a spiritual awakening, but in our own, -as he preempts with his assertion "I wasn’t schizophrenic" on page 11;- would be considered a symptom or expression of an ailment.
What is it "that makes symptoms seem strange to us and incomprehensible as a means of libidinal saisfaction."? Freud of course has an answer:
"They do not remind us in the very least of anything from which we are in the habit of normally expecting satisfaction. Usually they disregard objects and in so doing abandon their relation to external reality. This is a consequence of turning away from the reality principle and of returning to the pleasure principle. It is also a return to a kind of extended auto-eroticism, of the sort that offered the sexual instinct it's first satisfactions. In place of change in the external world, these substitute a change in the subjects own body: they set an internal act in place of an external one, an adaptation in place of an action." [7]
"For me, history literally was a nightmare. I wanted above all else at that moment to wake up, and make my terrible dreams go away."[8]
From this point on two paths present themselves,the one leading 'upwards', toward the Olympian heights of abstraction, as Nietzsche says: "the land of ghostly schemata; of abstractions"[5], the Apollonian promise of order implanted in youth; or down, to Earth, the carnal, material world and the shattered remains of that 'crystal palace' scattered upon it. [4]
His fragile, persecuted Ego coming into relation with the world, encountering the chaos of global social relations, (which although transcending our initial helplessness before the world, have reproduced a condition of alienation & destructive capabilities comparable to those of Nature); lacking institutional or communal reinforcement & support, external to those with whom he felt an affinity, loathing himself and those who's company he kept, young Jordan was left broken and defeated, much like Christ when he said "Eli, Eli lama sabachthani?".
How could he then choose any other path than towards divine logos? The 'methodos' or path corresponding to his already existing, internalized ideological framework consisting of a dualistic morality; alienated relation to reality; metaphysical conception of order, etc,.
Realization of his helplessness and fragility in the face of reality, -this specter haunting his awareness: the world and it's "insanity",-forces him to flee into the ideal, and regress towards the mystical world view, now being recolored and reinvigorated by Carl Jung.
"Much of the time I could not understand what Jung was getting at. He was making a point I could not grasp; speaking a language I did not comprehend. Now and then, however, his statements struck home"
It would appear he is encountering less internal resistance in Jung than he has in any intellectual subject so far, surely Jung's basis in mystical, religious thinking, & imagery; disavowal of Freud's theories on sexuality & trauma; etc,. are more than incidental?
__________
[1] Selected works of Carl Jung (1970a). Vol. 7. Two essays on analytical psychology
[2] It's no surprise Robert Bloch in his 1959 novel "Psycho", -famously adapted for film by Hitchcock the undisputed master of psychological thrillers,- situated the corpse of Norma Bates in the cellar, where she torments and continues to exert tremendous pressure on her son's behaviour though dead. Is this not merely the continuation of the framework of meaning & values which were inculcated into the young man by her in life, embodied in terrifying form?
[3] "I concentrated on this task for days and days – and experienced a frightening revelation. The truly appalling aspect of such atrocity did not lie in its impossibility or remoteness, as I had naively assumed, but in its ease. I was not much different from the violent prisoners – not qualitatively different." pg 10
[6] Love, Guilt and Reparation, and other works 1921-1945, Melanie Klein. Development of a Child.
[7]Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis, pg 413.
S. Freud. "General Theory of the the Neuroses: Paths to symptom formation"
[8] " Everything I had once believed about the nature of society and myself had proved false, the world had apparently gone insane, and something strange and frightening was happening in my head. James Joyce said, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”"pg 12
[5] "That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard — of combinations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
[4] The point of the apollonian and dionisian or preferably: Olympian/Chtonic dichotomy Chaos vs order is that: in one order is instituted by the hierarchical affirmation of values, ie culturally; once by the gods, then god, then by the religious state ("that cold god" Nietzsche?) & in the other manifested in the human body first, in the impulses, behaviour, needs & instincts of the organism & thus reflected in a gradual development of order, from the liberated human first. This has afterall been the manner in which human evolution has proceeded thus far, and it would never have got to the stage of urban civilizations without some mammalian disposition towards cooperation. That said, as Nietzsche often remarked, we owe the great errors in the history of human existence a considerable amount of gratitude.
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