In my 20s and early 30s I read a great deal of Carl Jung’s work, often in a haphazard way, often without much comprehension. I got through the major tomes and even many works by other Jungian analysts and practitioners, but about one-third into the Mysterium Conjunctionis I petered out. At one point I went to a release party for Jung’s The Red Book in New York where there was an exhibition of his paintings. Although I excitedly bought my copy, it has languished on the shelf for 15 years, barely perused. I suppose I felt I was saturated enough by Jung and his thinking.
But suddenly on Monday evening I took down Volume 18 of the Bollingen Collected Works, The Symbolic Life. I’d purchased this years ago and shelved it.
Why the sudden renewed interest? On Monday my wife hosted a small dinner party for some friends who’d helped her with a project in our garden. We live currently in rural France in a small village. One of the guests was a young German woman who’s lived locally for most of her life. She is 30 and a mother and is marrying a young man who is not the father of her child (a complex love story).
In conversation we stumbled somehow on the topic of Jung-I believe because she’d seen my library?- and she was immediately interested to discuss Myers Briggs results. I shared that I was INTJ and she became quite excited to share a lot of her knowledge of Jung and how his ideas have been influential in her relationships. She stood at one point and lifted her shirt while pulling down her skirt a bit, revealing blue tattoos running from the dantian upward to between her breasts.
“Now I know why you are so secret, and so calm,” she says. “When your wife is hosting events you are never there until you are needed and suddenly you are there and then you disappear. It’s the INTJ!”
She shared how Jung has helped her use symbols and ritual to structure her life and function in relationships, and to communicate ideas she can’t put into words despite fluency in 3 languages.
In our 90 minute conversation about Jung and the structure and functions of consciousness in his theories I realized how soft my understanding had become over the years. I’d drifted completely from the ‘scientific’ Jung and was wholly saturated by the ‘mystic’ Jung.
Fortunately, the Tavistock Lectures, featured first in The Symbolic Life, offer a clear and summative refresher of Jung’s basic theories about the practice of analytical psychology and how consciousness functions. Also in Lecture 2 Jung discusses how Germans have a strongly differentiated thinking function whereas the French have a strongly differentiated feeling function, and this is why the French and Germans have historically been at odds. I wonder how my young friend would feel about this idea, being a German who moved to rural France at age 12 with a soul rooted in each place.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 