The Story of Carl Gustav Jung Laurens van der Post BBC 1972 – YouTube
Some of the most “normal” of people he had ever seen had come to him as patients and so appalled him by the abnormality lying underneath their worldly attitude that he refused to treat them, knowing that any attempt at healing could release vast forces of abnormality already mobilised below appearances and overwhelm them. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 131
Yet Freud in this particular work of his was so truly on the scent of a new truth, or rather the rediscovery of an ancient one, and so much more advanced on the trail than anyone else that Jung warmed to him instantly. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 136
Adler, as Jung himself said in a letter to R. H. Loeb, was always a sidelight, however important. Freud by contrast was the exponent of a real view. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 140
What of his [Jung] emphasis that “two thousand years of Christianity can only be replaced by something equivalent” and the addition of a great poetic statement of a fundamental element in Jung’s spirit: “An ethical fraternity, with its mythical Nothing, … is a pure vacuum and can never evoke in man the slightest trace of that age-old animal power which drives the migrating bird across the sea.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 141
“I found,” he [Jung] told me in a voice resonant with awe, “that the more I looked into my own spirit and the spirit of my patienti, I saw stretched out before me an infinite objective mystery within as great and wonderful as a sky full of stars stretched out above us on a clear and moonless winter’s night.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 146
To me it is miraculous that Jung could have got so far and retained not just his sanity but maintained his appetite for pressing on more deeply. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 150
As a boy Jung had read Froissart, Malory, and their Germanic and Wagnerian equivalents on the Holy Grail, and they had had a profound impact on him. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 152
Somewhere in Emma Jung’s remote ancestral background there was a family legend of a knight of her own kin who had failed the Quest and she felt called upon to set the failure right even in so late a day. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
The moment her special duties as mother [Emma] to five children were discharged she began a vast, imaginative research in the origin and meaning of the legend [Grail] and Jung felt he had to respect her sense of responsibility and not intrude upon a theme of unique meaning to her. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
Jung had been impressed by the fact that invariably, among the hundreds who swarmed towards him as patients, he found at the core of their neuroses a sense of insecurity and unease that came from a loss of faith, a loss of the quintessential requisites of personal religious experience. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
He [Jung] found that he never succeeded in what for want of a better word is called a cure, without enabling the patients to recover their lost capacity for religious experience. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 153
It was a nuance of Jung’s greatness that he did not hesitate to use his experience as a psychologist as a mirror for himself and set the task of knowing the averted face of his own nature reflected in this mirror before anything else. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 154
One thinks, of course, of Dante, who “midway through life found himself in a dark wood.” Jung himself at that moment was approaching the halfway mark of his own life and in a season of himself to which Dante’s metaphor was just as applicable. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 158
Yet this journey down of Jung’s too was essentially a Dante-esque journey, although the vehicle was not poetry and the object scientific, however religious the intent. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 159
One finds, for instance, at moments whenever Virgil, who was his immediate guide on the descent into Hell, was full of fear, Dante could declare without a tremour of doubt, “I have no fear because there is a noble lady in Heaven who takes care of me.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 159
Because the law of life in these matters is as timeless as it is impartial, Jung also was guided in this going down as he had been up to the edge of the abyss by a spirit that was essentially feminine. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 160
But the feminine spirits that led Jung on his first essays were not beautiful at all: We have seen one representative already described by Freud as a “phenomenally ugly female” and she was by no means the only one. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 160
The psalm which spoke of the stone that the builders refused becoming the head-stone in the corner, which as one has already. pointed out could serve as text for the main theme of Jung’s life and work, is rooted in the same earth as this story of Cinderella. Jung’s imagination was obsessed with Cinderella aspects of the mind and Spirit. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162
Already in the course of his work in his asylum and even more in his vast private practice, Jung had rescued many a Cinderella spirit from 1some ignominious and dishonoured state of itself and transformed it into a personality once more capable of walking, enlarged and reintegrated, in a way of its own. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162
Jung clearly had the capacity both to see and to act as a catalyst of transubstantiation and transformation, which are the magic the godmother possesses in the parable of Cinderella. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162
But only Jung in our day possessed the extraordinary capacity to see in advance beyond the dirt, the triviality, and even the banality of appearance and make it his most immediate and urgent task to reveal the vast potential of beauty suppressed and hidden underneath. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 162-163
Greece, not Rome, was the natural earth of Jung’s mind and it is significant that with all that immense interest of his in antiquity, and Rome, as it were, almost next door, he never went to it although he was to come close to it, twice by visiting Ravenna and once on a visit to Pompeii. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 164
As Jung let go” and fell, he came to an area of his spirit so dark and so deep that he stood where the source of all life gushed out as a fountain of blood, vivid, dazzling, red as the fire with which he was compelled later to paint it. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 164
Siegfried had represented too archaic a concept of the heroic.in man and not at all the illuminated modern one Jung’s imagination was after. He represented the German hubris whose maxim was, “Where there is a will there is a way.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
Above all, Jung had the clarity and honesty of spirit to recognis that Siegfried’s hubris had been his own too in regard to all this strange new material coming at him. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
Jung had painfully taught himself to give freedom to his imagination to go wherever it felt it had to. go on this December descent in o his own netherworld. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 165
From him [Philemon], Jung says, he was to learn real psychic objectivity. It was he who taught Jung how there was a dream, as it were, dreaming him, and that what he had regarded as his own thoughts were no more his own than tables and chairs encountered in a strange room. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 167
Just as Jung would not think of claiming that he had manufactured such pieces of furniture, Philemon would tell him, he could not claim that he had made, unaided and alone out of his own conscious self, the thoughts that were in his mind. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 167
It is the moment of the greatest danger in Jung’s encounter with his unconscious, the danger which accompanies all opportunities of renewal to such an extent that it explains why ancient Chinese uses the same symbolic ideogram for “crisis” and “opportunity.” ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 168
All our yesterdays contrived to determine that when Jung set out on this journey, it was in a context of life where what woman personifies was twice rejected, first in the shape of the feminine in man and then in her own masculine creative self. ~Carl Jung; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 178
I have known men and women who were hosts to Jung and Toni Wolff when they travelled on psychological missions outside Switzerland and these people have spoken of their dismay when in the intimacy of their homes they observed Toni Wolff repeatedly in the grip of great distress. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 17
Throughout these long years Toni Wolff stood fast and in the process not only sustained the full weight of Jung’s undiscovered feminine self, enabling him thereby to live it out through her into maturity, but inevitably became also the vulnerable intermediary between himself and his embattled shadow. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 176
An imperative of underground logic seems to have demanded that Jung should begin with something black if he were to proceed on his journey accurately. He had no choice in the matter. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 179
It is no accident that round about this time, in this netherworld of his imagination, Jung should have a vision of a fountain of blood rising up and spurting high and wide through the earth. For blood too is red and both fire and furnace, where new meaning is forged in the smithy of ourselves. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 180
One longs for the Red Book to be published in facsimile. It is Jung’s first and most immediate testament, and infinitely evocative. When I first saw it, my eyes were stung by its beauty. I thought there was something numinous about it. A kind of Merlinesque gift seemed to have determined the deep colour and grave proportions. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 180
Also, I knew that nothing Jung ever did ultimately was private or personal in any egotistical or formal collective sense. All that he did in this regard was on behalf of a gift which demanded that he should be one of the foremost servants of meaning in the life of his time. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 180-181
All in the Black Book is dark, and such light as there is dwells in the words. But in the Red Book all is light and colour and in the smouldering beauty the glow of new meaning caught and made visible. ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 181
It does not matter whether the material was stone, which Jung was to use again later, the word, colour, or even more mysteriously some movement or sound not seen or heard before, combining to produce an effect that rings out like some kind of trumpet call of Reveille to sleeping senses. . ~Laurens van der Post; Jung and the Story of our Time, Page 181
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