"Jung's radical view of mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, as primarily psychogenic, had the important clinical application of viewing psychological symptoms not just as evidence of pathology to be cured (as Freud thought), but as meaningful personal communications, potentially capable of being understood through psychotherapy, and of being accepted and integrated, thus ridding the symptoms of their numinous power. This view surely underpins the Jungian analytic goal of individuation. It is also very seriously at risk in mainstream psychiatry today, with its increasingly genetic or biochemically-based view of the aetiology of mental illness, its emphasis on drug treatments as 'cure' and its demand for brief models of therapy, again judged by swiftness of symptom relief. While post-Jungian medical research has established that there are undoubtedly biochemical and genetic contributing factors to much psychopathology... again I would argue that this is only a partial, incomplete way of understanding the workings of the psyche." --Metaphor, mysticism and madness

Journal of Analytic Psychology Forum

Cryptic Cartoons

"The preeminent authorities on modern Gnosticism are Eric Voeglin, the political philosopher, and Hans Jonas, the existentialist philosopher and Gnostic scholar. For Voegelin, modern Gnosticism encompasses 'Such movements as progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism, and national socialism.' Voegelin goes so far as to define modernity per se as 'the growth of gnosticism.' Moreover, modernity for Vegelin is no recent phenomenon. It begins 'perhaps as early as the ninth century.' Leading modern Gnostics for him include Joachim of Fiore, More, Calvin, Hobbes, Hegel, Comte, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hitler. Modern Gnostic individuals and movements share six characteristics that Voegelin calls 'the gnostic attitude': dissatisfaction with the world, confidence that the ills of the world stem from the way it is organized, certainty that amelioration is possible, the assumption that improvement must 'evolve historically,' the belief that humanity can change the world, and the conviction that knowledge--gnosis--is the key to change.

Where Voegelin seeks to show the Gnositc nature of modernity, Jonas seeks to show the modern nature of Gnosticism. Jonas draws parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern, secular existentialism to prove that Gnosticism is existentialist, not that existentialism is Gnostic. For Jonas, both philosophies stress above all the radical alienation of human beings from the world.

Initially, Jonas assumed that existentialism was the key to Gnosticism because it was the key to all worldviews. Gradually, he came to see existentialism as a particular worldview and consequently to see Gnosticism not as the ancient version of existentialism but as its ancient counterpart: 'There is one situation, and one only that I know of in the history of Western man, where... that [existentialist] condition has been realized and lived out with all the vehemence of a cataclysimc event. That is the gnostic movement.'" --"The Gnostic Jung" by Robert A. Segal

"Aliens Made Me Kill"

"The eternal Tao or great Tao had many names representing the idea that there is an eternal law or principle at work, underlying what appeared as a perpetually changing world in motion. Taoists referred to it by many names, including the Primal Unity and Source, the Cosmic Mother, the Infiite and Ineffable Principle of Life, the One. Tao has been referred to as the right, the moral order, the principle, the nature of life forces, the idea of the world, the method, ofr the way. Some even have translated it as God. Richard Wilhelm, the sinologist and translator fo the I Ching translated Tao as 'meaning.' In many respects, the concept of Tao resembles the Greek concept of logos. In modern translations of the New Testament into Chinese, logos is translated as Tao; the Gospel of St. John then opens, 'In the beginning was the Tao.'" --The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self

Artifacts of mass murder for sale.
(Thanks to Mike)

"...each individual person is unique and inexplicable in terms of any scientific or philosophical system. The individual has freedom of choice, which makes his or her future unpredictable and a source of anxiety. A central theme... is the inevitability of death. This fact found the most articulate expression in Martin Heidegger's _Sein_unt_Zeit_ (1927). According to his description, human beings are cast into an unfreindly world, desperately trying to achieve goals the relevance of which will be mercilessly annihilated by death. They might try to avoid the thought of this final destiny by living in a superficial and conventional way; however, this gives life an inauthentic quality. The only way to be true to oneself is to be constantly aware of one's eventual death."

Grotstein offers "a model of the psyche in which there is a phenomenal subject (our conscious experience of ourselves as 'I') and an 'Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious.' The latter term is intentionally ambiguous in that it represents a subject who is a reflection of itself and is known (and knows itself) only indirectly... psychological health might be thought of as the degree to which an individual has been able to create a generative tension between the phenomenal subject and the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious.

...the mystery of dreaming... is a critical way we have of communicating with ourselves and of processing that unconscious communication in the very act of dreaming. The remembering of dreams and their verbal narration in the analytic setting are secondary and tertiary phenomena. The dreamer who dreams the dream works in concert with the dreamer who understands the dream in their effort to give visual, narrative shape to psychic pain that can be viewed by an internal audience. That audience (the dreamer who understands the dream) understands and bears therapeutic witness to the truth of the experience that is brought to life in the experience of dreaming. This internal therapeutic dialogue, like the stars in the sky, is continuous, but visible only at night (that is, in sleep). The dreamer, never represented in the dream, is the 'Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious.' In this context, the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious might be understood as a quality of being that is forever creating metaphoric reflections of itself: Dreams are among its most creative, magnificent, terrifying, enigmatic, unlocalizable creations. It could be said that we are most fully ourselves in the dreaming of the dreams that dream us...

The analytic quest... involves the voluntary 'unconcealment' of private, pain-ridden aspects of self. To achieve this, the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious and the phenomenal subject join in an effort in which the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious serves as a metaphorical 'playwright of the analytic text.' The Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious communicates (in the form of symptoms, dreams, actings-in, actings-out and so on) to the phenomenal subject formerly unexpressed and inexpressible pain. The phenomenal subject brings to the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious the pain of current life experience (which is saturated with its historical antecedents). The Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious 'reworks' current experience, for example, in the form of dreaming, and tus makes it available in its altered form to the phenomenal subject..."

Also,

"Bion believed that the most basic driving force for human beings was not the Freudian libidinal and aggressive drives or the Kleinian death instinct, but the 'truth instinct' that involves an ability to achieve a resonance with 'O.' O is the symbol Bion used to refer to 'ultimate Truth,' which is unknowable in any direct way. O is beyond words and beyond sensory perception. The infant has a need for Truth that is as strong as his need for food. In early development, the infant projects unbearable (unthinkalbe) truth into the mother who converts it into bits of knowledge (K), which can be used by the infant for purposes of thinking and feeling that which was formerly unbearable to think or feel. This mother-infant relationship serves as a model for Bion's conception of the analytic relationship... transference itself is ultimately directed, through the analyst as object, toward the analysand's own unconscious (the Ineffable Subject of the Unconscious). The analyst in a state of reverie (a state of receptivity free of memory or desire) attempts to live with the truth projected into him by the analysand and, in a sense, 'becomes it' before transforming it into symbols (K)..."

From "Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?" by James S. Grotstein

"For about three years in the early 1970s I was exploring, in a rather on-and-off manner, my own subpersonalities. It started off from two or three experiences in Gestalt therapy, and some research work I was doing on roles, reference groups, situations, and social frames. And my first step was to write down, over a period of two or three months, all the seperate aspects of myself I could discover. For example, No. 1 was 'Enthusiastic project-doer; intense absorption for short period. Very sensitive in this phase, but very selectively.'

After a certain point, I didn't seem to be adding any more. And one day it suddenly occured to me that these were aspects, rather than personalities. At first I grouped them together into five personalities, and then one of them seemed to split more naturally into two, to make six in all. I gave each one of them a name, which at first was quite arbitrary, having to do with how they had appeared; but later I gave each one a more explicit name, making it clearer to me what function it was performing.

Then I took an LSD trip (perhaps more common then than now, but in any case something familiar to me -- I regarded myself as something of an astronaut of inner space), with the explicit object of getting into each of these personalities in turn, and asking the same eleven questions of each of them. This was an extremely useful exercise, which made anumber of things very much clearer to me, and made me feel that here was something quite powerful, which could be pushed quite a long way interms of self-understaing and self-acceptance.

The next step was to ask the question, if this works for me, does it work for anyone else? So in 1974 I got together fourteen people who wanted to explore this thing with me, and we held six meetings (for evenings and two whole days) for the purpose..."

"Subpersonalities: the people inside us" by John Rowan

US government may have known about the Anthrax attacks.

Bush endorses aggression.

Henry Darger

Peter Birkhauser

The FBI, working covertly with the CIA and then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, spent years unlawfully trying to quash the voices and careers of students and faculty deemed subversive at the University of California.
(Thanks to Mike)

Alleged NSA knowledge of 9-11 attack.

Buglight art

A Hermeneutic and Rhetoric of Dreams

"I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment
on my life" --David Ignatow

A lieutenant with balls.