86/90 - beyond jung

new moon night three

sometimes i’m too slow and sometimes i’m not slow enough.

i’ve been teaching jung for years. shadow, anima, individuation, the collective unconscious, the whole vocabulary that allows a person to point at and name the different corners of the mess inside them. naming is a relief, the first thing we reach for when we’re going under. i’ve given courses on this man’s ideas, i’ve helped people analyse dreams with them, i still teach it, people write to me to say that the jungian framework has change their life and i know it’s true because it changed mine.

but shadow work is a worksheet now, a purchasable pdf, someone with a ring light telling you to journal your triggers between ads for magnesium. individuation has become a personal brand. the language made its journey out into the world and has come home neutralized, scraped out hollow, turned into content, into one more way to stay busy inside your own head while the world is on fire. so beautiful reader understand that when i say jung is not enough, i’m reminding myself, who studied his work for years, of just as much.

jung gave us a language for the inside, a helpful language, individuation as the long slow work of becoming yourself, of calling back the parts we’ve exiled, of sitting with the shadow until it morphs from a foe to a friend. i’ve watched jungian psychology save people but it happens almost entirely inside one’s own skull. the psyche talks to itself, the self integrates the self, the whole drama is staged between you and the parts of you, you are the protagonist putting on a show for yourself as the audience in a theatre with no windows. no windows meaning no landlord, no border, no systemic oppression, no one deciding decades before you were born which of your shadows you’d be permitted to have and which ones would get you followed down the street and shot. jung’s psyche floats free, you can read the collected works cover to cover and come away believing the only thing standing between a person and their wholeness is their own reluctance, as if everyone were handed the same opprtunities, the same freedoms in the same untroubled body always read as harmless or unthreatening.

jung was a swiss pastor’s son born in 1875, a christian european man of the early twentieth century and a comfortable class. systemic inequality was as invisible to him as water to the fish swimming in it. he didn’t theorize oppression because he didn’t experience it, the arrangement of the world felt like the given, a neutral backdrop that the real inner drama played out against. like any of us, he could not see past the edge of himself, and neither could his psychology, so we inherited a gorgeous machine for healing the individual that hasn’t built space for the *together* and does not concern itself with an external *because*.

freud, and jung after him in his own way, kept wanting to explain the enormous engine of human wanting through within the mommy-daddy-child triangle, supposing that the deepest truths about our longing were some variation of a singular incestuous myth. in anti-oedipus, deleuze and guattari, drag desire back out of the family living room and into the world where they believe it starts. they claim that our desire is social before being personal, it runs through factories and borders and money and history wired into the whole field of social existence before anyone funnels it through the oedipal triangle. the unconscious, for them, is a workshop, a productive machine with flows and breaks of flows that create new flows. desire is a political force. it wants to connect, to break, to push past the lines drawn around it, and the whole of the social world we live in exists to catch the spillover and code it, route it back into products you can buy, roles you can perform, a self you can privately improve: the capitalist machine. so a psychology that asks you to heal alone, in your own apartment, on your own schedule, that has no windows so as you never ask who benefits from you staying in there working on yourself, is not a neutral tool. it is the single most useful thing capitalism could have created to keep you plugged into itself. a psyche that heals alone shops alone, everyone alone in their own apartment doing their own shadow work.

jung’s great gift to alchemy, which i’ll always love him for, was noticing that the old alchemists were projecting their own souls, their own unconscious processes onto the metals and flasks and watching their own transformation happen in the matter. the blackening, the whitening, the reddening, every stage a phase of what a person moves through on the way to becoming themselves. jung gave alchemy its dignity back after centuries of everyone dismissing it as a pile of failed chemistry experiments. this i think is jung’s rubedo, jung’s great offering. but it is up to us now to take jung’s offering and put it in the fire, put it through its next nigredo. now the work is in the matter, the matter is the body, the kitchen, the rent, ice, gaza, the world jung floated above and dropped his offering down on.

unless a kernel of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it stays a single kernel of wheat: but if it dies, it brings forth many. the seed that refuses to die stays exactly one seed forever, perfectly whole, perfectly individuated, perfectly alone.

until tomorrow <3