Jung in the World | When Carl Jung Met His Soul: Confronting the Unconscious | George Bright, Red Book scholar

work. About 40 minutes in, George Bright said something about the famous Freud-Jung breakup that many of you have probably read about.

I’d never heard this framing before. And he discusses what it was like at the dawn of an entirely new discipline known as psychology and what it was like for those professional rivalries. There were people who were apprenticing, in this case, Jung to Freud. And these young clinicians were trying to build a life for themselves. They were trying to make a living out of a brand new discipline. And so as these professional rivalries sort of roiled, naturally there were going to be tensions. And this is it gives you a history of the very early roots of the discipline of psychology. That and there’s something at the end I I really learned from this because George Bright tips into this moment in the Liber Novus, the Red Book, where he mentions Carl Jung’s transcendent moment when he encounters what he believes is Jesus Christ. And it’s ethereal and lovely, and I wished I had had 15 more minutes to talk about it. But we’ll have him back to hear the rest of the story. For now, here’s George Bright, Jungian scholar from London, talking about Carl Jung’s Liber Novus, the Red Book.

Patricia Martin (02:22.712)

George Bright, welcome. It’s great to have this opportunity to interview you while you’re here in Chicago from London. And I’m I’ll introduce you all, give you your background. George Bright is a co-founder of the Circle of Analytics Psychology, a London based group engaged in the study of Jung’s Liber Novus and Black Books. He was educated at the Cambridge University and the London School of Economics.

He works in private practice in London. And he’s a training analyst of the Society of Analytical Psychology there. And also, you are a member of the Chicago Society of Jungian Analysts. Well done. It’s good to have you here. So I I wanted to talk with you, George, about the history of

George Bright (03:08.846)

Thank you very much.

It’s good to be here.

Patricia Martin (03:22.056)

of Carl Jung’s Red Book and sort of the the literary our literary understanding of it, not as a piece of literature so much, but the literary organization of it and and and the story that that tells. So that’ll be my focus for these questions. And I just have to say I always look forward to talking with you. I’ve ha I’ve talked with you before on the podcast, and one of the things that I so admire about your work is because you teach that rigorous course, that two-year course in Carl Jung’s Red Book, you you know, you’re very pliable. We can cover a lot of territory, so I’ll I’ll I’ll try to be a little bit disciplined in where I take you. Me too. Okay. We’ll do our best.

So I there seems to be a recurring pattern in the history of depth psychology. There’s a younger thinker and is he or she is working sort of in an apprentice archetype to who would be considered the dominant authority at the time. And the young the younger thinker comes with a set of insights maybe that they’ve gathered from clinical work or observations or just experiences. And I’m you know when I think about this I think of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. I think of Robert J. Lifton and Erik Erikson. You know, this story there were other stories like it. And I I wonder if it’s correct to read Carl Jung’s questioning of Sigmund Freud’s method as rooted in what he was actually observing in the consulting room as an inception point that sort of triggered the creation of the Red Book and also larger than the journey itself that Carl Jung took.

Patricia Martin (05:40.298)

it really kind of opened the door to a new system of psychoanalysis. Is that how you see it?

George Bright (05:47.374)

Well, if we’d been talking maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I think I would have pretty much followed that pattern. And really what you’re proposing is a kind of template that we could use to organise the information that we’ve got to try to discern some kind of pattern. Is this a typical pattern of a young man learning, as it were, from the master and then having some kind of young man’s rebellion? and taking over. That would have been, I could have probably agreed to most of that a few years ago. I what’s happened in the meantime is there’s been a vast amount of serious historical investigation on early 20th century psychoanalysis, analytical psychology. We used to rely on analysts for all of the history. There are now serious historians doing it and the picture that they’ve come up with is a very different one. First of all, was Freud really the leading authority? We’re talking about the early 20th century now, 1905 to 1920.

Looking retrospectively through the lens of what psychoanalysis achieved and became in the rest of the 20th century and what to some extent it still is, one is inclined to think of psychoanalysis as the leading model. That was simply not true at the beginning of the 20th century. Well, psychoanalysis, well, you can, if you look in the Freud-Jung letters,

Patricia Martin (07:36.43)

Was

George Bright (07:43.226)

There’s a fold-out photograph of the Weimar Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association and that was in, I think, 1912. If you fold it out, the International Psychoanalytic Association consists of 55 people. That’s all. It’s tiny. And if you look at those 55, there’s Freud in the centre, elevated to give him, you know, status. He’s standing on an orange box or something, so he’s quite a bit higher than Jung, who was, I think, six foot four. But of those 55, about 11 are Jung’s colleagues from Zurich. So it’s very small. Freud was not a leading authority in the early 1900s by a very long way.

The field of depth psychology hardly existed as a field, and I’m not sure that it’s even really accurate to talk about it as a field in any of the period of Freud and Jung. I think it was more like individual practitioners mutually hostile to one another, if you like, small market traders, each setting up their own stall for a patent remedy. not really interested in what each other were doing, certainly not reading each other’s work very much, but mainly trying to attract a clientele. The economics of it, certainly on Freud’s side, was mainly doctors in private practice in towns, the lowest tier really of the medical profession at the time, trying to drum up trade for specialities.

If there was any kind of leading authority in that field, in the little tiny group that we’re looking at, I’d say that probably the dominant authority there was the place where Jung was working, which was the Burghölzli Hospital. And that was a university research hospital, and it was the leading psychiatric center, probably in Western Europe at the time.

George Bright (10:07.982)

It had had two very eminent medical directors, Auguste Forel and at the time that was working there, Eugen Bleuler. Bleuler was the man who invented the term schizophrenia, so a pretty significant psychiatrist, and that was the main place of psychiatric innovation at the time. So, for example, Jung’s work there on the word association tests was sort of leading number crunching scientific psychiatry as it was understood about then. When Jung and Freud were invited to the States in 1912 was it, Jung was the better known name. Certainly in the States, I Jung was being quite widely read in the States then. He’d published a major

Patricia Martin (10:57.256)

Is that right?

George Bright (11:05.612)

publication on dementia praecox which was the name of schizophrenia at the time and that was being widely circulated in psychiatric circles in the states.

Patricia Martin (11:16.354)

I the one anecdote that sticks out and you would know if it is true is that moment that they’re on the boat, they’re at you know looking out onto the harbor as they’re coming into the United States and and Freud turns to Jung and says they don’t realize it yet, but we’re bringing them the plague.

George Bright (11:38.478)

Yes, I mean sadly it’s very unlikely that one is true. It’s an extremely good story and I hope the story doesn’t go just because it isn’t true. Because there’s an underlying point to it.

Patricia Martin (11:42.724)

it’s such a good

Patricia Martin (11:51.436)

Yes, consciousness. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yes.

George Bright (11:55.372)

And also something that, you know, once it takes hold, it’s going to be very difficult to get rid of.

Patricia Martin (12:00.79)

Right. And and so this idea that y you know, I framed up in my question that there was this tension between the master and the student, y y you’re really saying that th there was a completely different story here. There was a young profession that was burgeoning and and these these psychiatrists, psychologists i they needed to create a way of life for themselves.

George Bright (12:27.534)

I think that’s the main thing. I mean when Jung There’s something in what you’re saying. It’s I certainly wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand when Jung gave Freud his copy of Symbols and Transformations of the Libido But she finished in 1912 The inscription to Freud says laid at the feet of the master by a grateful but disobedient pupil and I think that’s probably about right for 1912. In 1912, and Freud broke off friendly relations. So the association lasted just over six years, which in anybody’s professional life is a relatively short period. And I know you can’t measure importance just in time.

I think the…

The important thing is to try to get away from what is still very common, which has been called the Freudicentric location of or the Freudicentric mislocation of Jung. In other words, to see Jung as if he were mainly rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis.

Patricia Martin (13:45.486)

Yes, and I you know, I will admit that a as I was thinking about this interview, I was thinking down that pathway as well. It I was thinking more about Jung being the rebellion away from from strict Freudianism. But you’re you’re painting a very different picture, but that brings me back to the Red Book as if to say, Well, wait a minute, George, there was a breakup.

And the Red Book has something to do with that moment. So bring us to that.

George Bright (14:21.88)

Well, it’s chronologically similar anyway, or at any rate overlapping. So they break off friendly relations in early 1912. Jung begins the active imaginations that make up the Red Book in November 1913. He finishes them in April 1914 and on the 19th of April.

And on the 20th of April 1914, he resigns as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. So he’s been president of the IPA. No, he didn’t founded it. Freud founded it. That’s Freud’s association.

Patricia Martin (15:02.028)

Didn’t he found that?

Patricia Martin (15:08.238)

I see. So that was also part of the breakup?

George Bright (15:10.862)

Well, I’m not, you see, even the term breakup I wonder about, that makes it sound like a marriage to me. I’m not sure that it was quite like that. And Jung treats this himself. You could look at Jung’s own account in a seminar that he gave in 1925. And in that he said that he and Freud parted for three reasons on Jung’s side and one reason on Freud’s side.

And Jung’s reasons were first of all authority, that he said that Freud insisted that he, Freud, had the last word about what was the truth in psychoanalysis. Jung’s boss, Bleuler, had already left the International Psychoanalytic Association for the same reason a few years earlier. He said that as a scientist it was impossible for him to subscribe to something where the proof of right or wrong was whether Freud thought it was right or wrong. So authority was one reason. The second reason is Jung said Freud falsified his case histories, which we now know to be true, of course. For example, compare Freud’s account of the Wolf Man with the Wolf Man’s own account. Interesting. In which he said he didn’t even remember dreaming about wolves.

And he said he certainly didn’t recover from his gastric troubles as Freud says he did. He also said, by the way, that Freud was a great and good man. So there was the question of authority, there was the question of falsification of cases on Jung’s side. On the side of Freud, was disloyalty that Freud regarded Jung as in his own word, treacherous. So it looks to me as if there was an important association. In terms of exchange of ideas, I don’t think it was actually fantastic. If you read the Freud-Jung letters, there’s not a lot of exchange of ideas in it.

Patricia Martin (17:33.102)

So then how do we really kind of unravel or rethink this idea that there there was a a a parting of the ways that that parting of the ways led to sort of a an exile for for Jung because he did retreat

George Bright (17:57.602)

Let’s have a look at this. What happened in 1913 in November is Jung went on a quest to re-find his soul. I think the bit of Freud-Jung that is worth retaining is that Freud was essentially secular and Jung as we know, well as he described it in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, had a number two personality as well as a number one. So he had a scientific personality, but he also had the personality of, let’s say, a mystic. In the period he was at the Burghölzli, the mystic, I think, got squeezed out. He became a number-crunching scientific psychiatrist. He became closely involved with Freud and secular psychoanalysis, in which, as we know, religion is, if you like, a pathology, it’s not a valid category.

Patricia Martin (19:03.694)

Also working on the typologies. Right, which is a beginning chip. It’s it’s its own rigor. Yep. You’re it’s it’s a it’s a gauge, it’s a measurement of personality.

George Bright (19:12.724)

Certainly, certainly in the way he was doing it in 1912-13, yes. So what I think happened is that Jung, personality number two, got squeezed out and in 1913 comes back with a vengeance. Jung, I think, regarded himself as having lost his soul. And once he had freed himself from at any rate, discipleship to Freud. Once he had freed himself from the master, then he felt able to go and try to re-find his soul. And that takes us to 13th of November, 1913, and the first entry in the Red Book, where Jung writes, my soul, my soul, where are you? He invokes his soul, and then he continues over a series of nights invoking his soul and writing down in his black notebooks as he’s invoking her what he’s thinking. He’s kind of thinking aloud on paper. And after a while his soul responds. And that begins the dialogue that continues in the black notebooks right up until the early 1930s. So the way I’d frame it in the terms that you’re suggesting is that once freed from an association with Freud, Jung felt able to go and reconnect with, if you like, his more mystical and spiritual self. And in that sense, Freud plays a part in the genesis of the Red Book, in the sense that if you like, Freud and the kind of scientific and secular attitudes that Jung was engaging in his association with Freud, that really needed to be left to one side if Jung was to reconnect with his soul.

Patricia Martin (21:20.046)

Well clearly there was a lot of time spent during those early Red Book days where he invokes his soul and th there’s this journaling that occurs. And then and then there’s the you know, attiliation, the the the the the how the manuscripts art gets created and that’s part of the active imagination that he’s using to to to reach into his unconscious. But I also wonder if he had any interlocutors at that time. Was he or how how alone was he in this process? This ps what some people would call, you know, a John of the Cross dark journey of the soul.

George Bright (22:13.198)

I think essentially on his own, the one person who may be involved or was involved to some extent in his what he later called active imaginations was Toni Wolff. And in the black books where he makes his contemporaneous notes of active imaginations, in the black books there are two very short entries in Toni Wolff’s handwriting.

One of them is a quote from Dante and another one is a poem. So Toni Wolff was involved in some way. It’s useless to speculate in what way because there’s simply no historical record. So the sky’s the limit as to where your imagination can go with that. I think Emma Jung was also involved.

The recently published book of Emma Jung’s own writings and painting at the same time show very, very similar things. I mean, clearly, Jung was talking to her about what was going on, and at one point a few years later, in a letter to her in 1917, he writes that she is his anchor.

She is what’s kind of holding him to the ground whilst he’s going through this. So Toni Wolff and Emma Jung were both certainly involved with some closeness. Other people were involved, you really have to wait till 1916. From 1916 onwards, Jung is involving a lot of people.

Patricia Martin (24:02.222)

In what ways?

George Bright (24:03.886)

When the Zurich branch of the International Psychoanalytic Society Association, to which Jung belonged, took a vote on whether to remain, they voted almost unanimously to leave. So that meant there were about 13, maybe 20 people in Zurich who were Jung’s closest colleagues. mostly working in the same field. One or two like Adolf Keller were clergy. Some others like Rebecca Beagle, who was an astronomer and mathematician. But they were all working on the same sort of material. Toni Wolff was involved, so was Maria Moltzer.

I these are the people with whom Jung from early 1916 onwards is dialoguing and the minutes of the Union for Analytical Psychology are available and they’re being studied by historians and some of them we already know. The papers on adaptation, individuation, collectivity, they began as talks that Jung gave there. Rebecca Beagle gave a talk on some mathematical parallels to psychoanalysis in early 1916 in which she pointed out the mathematical term the transcendent function. Really? Which she said relates real to imaginary numbers. Well Jung of course pricked up his ears. You know the relation of the real to the imaginary. Exactly. Yes. And he takes over the whole term transcendent function and then as we know

Patricia Martin (25:50.955)

Well that’s what he was about at that.

George Bright (25:57.622)

make something of it. So there was a group of people from sixteen onwards. I think from end of thirteen to the beginning of sixteen I doubt he was confiding in anybody much other than Emma Jung and Toni Wolff.

Patricia Martin (25:59.18)

Yes.

Patricia Martin (26:21.038)

Interesting. So I I have been conceiving of this as a dissent story. Mm-hmm. Because I took it as such. Wrong. Okay. Okay, good to know because it’s been my whole framing. And and and then I you know, I’m I’m imagining because Carl Jung was

George Bright (26:32.99)

That’s not… That is certainly not wrong.

George Bright (26:40.184)

I

Patricia Martin (26:48.202)

making so much of this transcendent function and making so much of this idea of integration, right? That we do this difficult internal work, and it is part of how we grow into wholeness. We we integrate the the parts of us. repressed or otherwise just unconscious parts of us. And you know, that is that is the journey of life. Mm-hmm. So as I think about this and I and it’s good to know that I’m not completely wrong about this dis descent story, I I’ve been fascinated with this idea that well, okay, what happens after the descent? Well, the hero I’ll we’ll use that word. The hero begins to rise and has to return to the world. And there’s an a a a process that doesn’t get written about very much in other literary forms, in other literary eras, you know. In in mythology, the the action is on y Initiation. There are you know, that arc is juicy and there’s a lot of there are wars and you know, people leave town and new people come to town and there’s a there’s a lot of story in that. There’s not so much storyline in the unglamorous work, the quieter journey to rise after the descent. What what what do you have to say about that in terms of Carl Jung’s experience as described in the Red Book.

George Bright (28:37.324)

Right, well let’s start off with the descent. As I said, you’re not wrong about that by a long way. There’s a descent in the sense that in the first book, Liber Primus of the Red Book, the first 12 chapters, that sketches out something very much like you’re describing. I mean, almost anybody familiar with the Western tradition reading that would read it as a characteristic initiation process. Jung first of all goes into the desert for purification, then he descends into hell, and it’s not the Christian hell, this is more like Dante’s Inferno, that kind of hell. After the descent into hell comes the conception of a new god, and then Jung goes through a mystery play in which as he puts it in a part of the text that he left on the cutting room floor when he put the red book together, he was initiated into the mysteries of the underworld. And that’s where you get to really at the end of book one. So, as you say, a classic descent story. And I think descent is also relevant in a wider sense of the whole book. Because one of the main themes about it is the re-valorizing of the below. Well, by the below we mean what is traditionally in the West at any rate seen as down there rather than up there. So, you know, in our kind of cosmology, heaven is up there and good things and spirit are up there and down there is matter and hell and bad things. And what Jung is saying in

Patricia Martin (30:08.526)

Say more.

George Bright (30:32.002)

the Red Book repeatedly is that in the new age that is to come, it is no longer any good to try to attain the good and avoid evil. He’s saying in this era we have a whole new possibility which is to re-engage with the below. So re-engage with matter is one thing. not just spirit, and the more challenging is re-engage with evil.

Patricia Martin (31:05.934)

This is where the shadows

George Bright (31:08.574)

Exactly. come from that. Yep. Yep.

Patricia Martin (31:11.838)

So let’s spend a moment on Shadow. Tell me about that relative to the Red Book, how how does Jung explore that in the Red Book?

George Bright (31:23.704)

Yeah. I think, just to clarify to begin with, the Red Book is not purely about Jung. Jung wrote the Black Book material certainly up to mid-1914. In other words, all the material that goes into Books 1 and 2. Jung wrote it unsure of what its status was. Was this about him? or not. When the war broke out in late 1914, Jung was quite convinced that what he had experienced was not purely of personal significance. He was convinced that it was also of significance universally, generally. In other words, that this visionary experience was not just from him and about him, it was for him to communicate to others. because it was of importance to everybody.

Patricia Martin (32:23.31)

So is that to say he was conscious that there would be an audience?

George Bright (32:29.012)

He was very conscious. In fact, if you read the text of the Red Book, it’s quite often addressing the audience.

Patricia Martin (32:36.268)

I don’t think people view it as such. I think people view it as a very personal right. It’s almost like these here were my personal journals from a a difficult time in my life. Right. And yes. However, if there’s an intention that there is an audience

George Bright (32:41.238)

I think that was

George Bright (32:53.282)

Yeah, you are guessing.

Patricia Martin (33:05.022)

Any writer will tell you if you are writing with the intent of a readership, it changes the way you write. Exactly. And so I I’m curious now, you have to talk about it

George Bright (33:17.26)

Well, you can see this in the making. You can see what Jung is doing for himself and what happens when he puts it out there for an audience. Because we’ve got two texts. There’s the black books and they are, as I say, the contemporaneous notes that he writes out as he’s having what he calls active imaginations.

Patricia Martin (33:19.958)

Is there’s a little self consciousness?

George Bright (33:45.868)

So there’s no audience in them. That’s Jung, you know, Jung and his black notebook.

Let’s talk about books one and two of the Red Book. The material for them is completed by April 1914. And thereafter, the war breaks out in the middle of the summer, in the late summer. And at that point, Jung goes back and adds a second part to pretty much every night’s active imagination. And the second part is sometimes lyrical and poetic. It’s sometimes in the form of incantation or prayer. It’s sometimes quite clearly addressing the reader and it’s got a kind of explanatory, hermeneutic quality to it. It’s a commentary, if you like, on the active imagination. And the first layer and the second layer go together in each chapter in the Red Book when he comes to put it in there.

So you can see very exactly what is Jung’s personal material, you know, was simply an account of what was going on in his mind, and then secondly how he’s written that up for an audience. And I think that makes a very interesting study.

Patricia Martin (35:17.23)

Well I at some point w you know, as he’s writing these, filling these red books, right? These red leather bound books, hence and the black ones. Are they really? So at some point he sets them down. Mm-hmm. And my understanding is

George Bright (35:30.35)

The black ones. Which are actually brown, unfortunately. But yeah.

Patricia Martin (35:45.77)

At that point his journey, his his descent and his r rise back to he he he returns. The hero returns, which is would be the classic over

George Bright (35:58.862)

I think it’s worth expanding it a bit beyond that. As I say, that’s not inaccurate. It’s the truth, but it’s not the whole truth.

Patricia Martin (36:09.336)

But he does bring something out of himself and into the world as a result of the Red Book and Black Book records, correct? Certainly. And and my understanding is at this point then he has a vision, he has an understanding of depth psychology as a practice, as a set of methods that are unique to him.

George Bright (36:15.736)

certainly.

Patricia Martin (36:37.842)

And as a wider understanding of the psyche.

George Bright (36:43.96)

Well look, let me tell you what I think. I mean, I’ll try to do this in a few sentences. What I think the gist of the Red Book is. What the plot is, as it were. This is a kind of synopsis like you might get in a theatre program before you go and see a… Go and see Hamlet. And it’ll be equally sketchy. But roughly speaking, Book One…

Patricia Martin (37:03.75)

yes, we love a gist.

George Bright (37:12.942)

Jung is initiated into the mysteries of the underworld and has the information that a new God has been born and that the place of the birth of the new God is in his psyche. In other words, he has brought the new God to birth in himself. That’s book one.

Patricia Martin (37:31.842)

I have to pause you there. Yeah. Because I think there would be listeners who wouldn’t understand what you just said.

George Bright (37:38.018)

Well, I’m not sure I do, but I’m not going to try to explain it as I go along.

Patricia Martin (37:43.95)

Okay, okay. I’m sorry to interrupt you. That was a big claim, George Bright.

George Bright (37:48.802)

It’s a huge claim, but it’s not my claim, it’s Jung’s. And it’s a claim that he makes with not pride, but trembling. And I’m going to… Perhaps I should also say that the language of the Red Book is not the language of depth psychology. You you will look in vain even for the word unconscious in it, it’s not there. The language is the language of myth.

Patricia Martin (37:51.63)

Okay, fair enough.

George Bright (38:16.972)

poetry and religion and symbology to some extent but essentially it’s drawing on the symbology of the Jewish Christian era. So the main names in it are God, Christ, Satan, Elijah, Salome, soul. This is not depth psychology language, this is the language of religious

Patricia Martin (38:18.784)

And symbology as well, right?

George Bright (38:46.094)

myth and Christian, the Christian era largely.

Patricia Martin (38:51.18)

I think I distract distracted you from your gisting.

George Bright (38:54.208)

Right, so by the end of Book One Jung is aware of the birth of a new God and has been initiated. As he says right at the end, the last line of that book is that now he has to earn the benefits that he’s been given. He said he can’t yet realize the benefits because he hasn’t yet earned them. So what happens at the beginning of Book Two is he immediately meets various shadow parts of himself.

To go back to your question about shadow earlier. So book two is again it starts off as Jung as it were working through some of his shadow, you know, in other words, he’s having to reach down and embrace and welcome what he has hitherto found either shameful or trivial So at one point he finds himself playing a part in a kind of story that you might get in pulp fiction from a lending library. At another point he meets a shadow figure called the Red One who teaches him to dance. So Jung is integrating what he’s personally ignored.

By the end of Book Two, though, things have gone quite a lot further. Jung has clearly earned something because he’s now been given the gift of magic. And what magic means in this context, I won’t try to say now, but it’s nothing to do with conjuring tricks.

Patricia Martin (40:36.96)

It does invite a sequel though.

George Bright (40:39.348)

It does, yes. Or two. The third book consists of… It’s quite different. is in the third book using his active imagination technique to investigate the nature of the cosmos. He’s trying to construct a cosmology which he’s able to do with the help of various…

interlocutors. Once he’s constructed a cosmology, he has a sense of the name of the new God, or at least of the identity of the new God, or the new God’s nature. And it’s a God whom he later calls Abraxas, which he says is the uniting of the Christian God and Satan.

Patricia Martin (41:30.894)

This is important because not many people know this part of the shadow theory. So I y I wanna hover here just for a minute. Okay. Okay? Say more about this.

George Bright (41:32.982)

It is.

George Bright (41:47.54)

Right. Well,

Patricia Martin (41:50.774)

The God, the Satan, the the the question of Christianity, the casting out of Satan. Mm-hmm.

George Bright (41:59.566)

As Jung puts it, and this does get into Jung’s collected works later quite considerably, as Jung puts it, the Christian account of God is now inadequate. The Christian account of God involved two things. One is the definition of God as good, and the other, is that love is seen as being at the heart of the Godhead. And those are two of the major, major characteristics of the Jewish Christian Islamic God image. Jung says that the birth of a new God is taking place because the old God image is now fading away. We are in a new eon, a new age.

At any rate, in the intermediate period from one God-image to another, what we get is what in Freudian terms you might call the return of the repressed. In other words, everything that’s been kept out of the Christian God-image is now attempting to get back into it. Now, this is analogous, I suppose, to you know, one’s personal shadow and attempt to integrate one’s personal shadow or to engage with it. But I think it’s a bit more than that too. Roughly speaking, the cosmology and the god image that Jung gets to by the end of book three of the Red Book is that the gods, and it’s now more than one god, The gods are totally amoral. They are pure energy. This feeds into his idea of archetype later. So forget the idea of a god who is moral and good. These gods are pure energy. They have purpose, they have intention, and they engage the human. But they are not gods of love.

George Bright (44:15.022)

Love is now seen as uniquely the property of the human. It’s we who can love, the gods can’t. And also, morality is seen as the human property. The gods are amoral, it is humans who can tell the difference between good, evil, constructive, destructive, and so on.

Patricia Martin (44:20.182)

Yeah.

Patricia Martin (44:37.558)

So the departure here is a departure from an entire Western canon of which functioned as an organizing princip of principles for civilizations. So this n not only might might one say, and I think fairly, this is a little heretical. of of Jung. But my d other question is w how how does this view of God for a new era help a civilization function? How does it make a civilization because really that’s the job.

George Bright (45:26.466)

Well, as Jung puts it, it is now, man has now, man is no longer a child. The idea is now, and this is challenging, I think, but I think it’s a challenge worth facing. It is, yeah. The challenge now is that it’s up to each of us, as it were, to take the full moral responsibility.

Patricia Martin (45:44.001)

It’s existential.

George Bright (45:54.968)

There is no longer any pleading with a god to atone for what we’ve done. There’s no helpful god in this cosmology. It’s rather similar to what Jung’s contemporary, the German theologian Paul Tillich, called man come of age. The moral responsibility now sits on the individual. Nobody is going to tell you what is right and wrong.

You are being trusted with having the capacity to make moral choices yourself.

Patricia Martin (46:28.514)

Well that’s very difficult work and I can imagine this didn’t immediately ignite across Europe as a way of seeing the world.

George Bright (46:38.826)

Well, I mean, and that it didn’t immediately ignite across Western Europe is, I think, in some ways, Jung’s fault. Because although Jung does put all of this into his public material, one place or another, it is so, so, well, indirectly put, frequently, that it’s very easy to miss the point.

I mean I think for myself I had a bit of a sense that Jung had this kind of edge to him but it was only when I began to engage with the Red Book and see what Jung was really saying that I realised how important and direct and challenging this is.

Patricia Martin (47:31.02)

Yes, I and it

George Bright (47:33.439)

I don’t think this has yet really got into the public domain, to be honest.

Patricia Martin (47:40.372)

Well, but what’s interesting about the moment that we’re in and it you know, sometimes in America we think it’s our moment. I guess we always do, but it’s it’s really now a global moment where we have cycled through enough wars and we’ve depleted enough resources and the future is becoming more abstract, not less And we’re facing the moment when it another understanding of what it is to be human is about to be born. And it will be born against the pressure of a heightened form of technology that is in some regards a threat and in other regards a an assistance. And so this pressure to grow up, you know, to mature our ideas about what it means to be a moral human, it’s it’s really becoming relevant, I think.

George Bright (48:49.866)

Look, I think this is exactly the point. What made Jung think that his visionary material was not purely personal was the First World War. The idea had been that technology was the solution and that man could be constantly improving, in inverted commas, through technical solutions to human problems. So, huge improvements of the 19th century.

And what do they lead to? A war in which technology is used to slaughter millions.

Patricia Martin (49:24.874)

And and doesn’t this seem to be the repetition compulsion? Yeah. Exactly.

George Bright (49:29.018)

Well, it hasn’t stopped. There was another war a few years after that and and

Patricia Martin (49:34.702)

And and and

George Bright (49:37.166)

And now it’s quite possible to use technology to blow the human off the planet. Literally.

Patricia Martin (49:44.726)

So so th this is that moment where I feel when we’re talking about Carl Jung and we’re talking about this understanding of what the psychic energy invested in imbued in every human really means and how we as humans understand it and and wield it for good, wield it for betterment.

You know, I feel like I’m boiling the whole ocean. Like I there’s so much to understand here. And rather than get overwhelmed, what I I I wanna kind of ground us and I’d I’d like you to identify a single passage from the Red Book that you could say best captures Jung what he was actually doing during those years. Do you have a favorite?

George Bright (50:39.438)

Well look, you very kindly forewarned me about this question and something came immediately to mind. What was it? And I haven’t, I’ve thought about other ways of doing it, but this is just what came to mind. And it comes from, it’s right at the end, it’s within a few pages of the end of the work. And I’ll just give the context for it a bit.

This is in Scrutinies and if anybody wants to check it in the Reader’s Edition, it’s on page 543. So what’s happened is that Jung is describing a figure called Philemon, who’s a figure of his active imaginations, and Philemon has just had an interview with Jesus Christ in this.

And in the interview, Jesus has been silent throughout. And Philemon has begun, my master and my brother, praise be your name, you did the greatest thing for us and so on. A couple of pages later, Philemon is concluding. And this is the context, this isn’t the quote. Philemon says, but my master and my brother, I believe you have completed your work.

Since the one who has given his life, his entire truth, all his love, his entire soul, has completed his work, what one individual can do for men, you have done and accomplished and fulfilled. The time has come when each must do his own work of redemption. Mankind has grown older and a new month has begun.

And then Jung says to Philemon, My father, you spoke of men, I am a man, forgive me. But Philemon dissolved into the darkness and I decided to do what was required of me. I accepted all the joy and every torment of my nature and remained true to my love to suffer what comes to everyone in their own way.

George Bright (53:08.012)

and I stood alone and was afraid.

Patricia Martin (53:10.798)

Thank you. George Bright, as always, a profound pleasure to talk with you. Thank you for being on the podcast.

George Bright (53:23.19)

Thanks a lot for inviting me.

Patricia Martin (53:26.338)

That’s this episode of Jung in the World, delivered as always without ads. To help us keep it going, please subscribe wherever you listen. Until the next time, stay conscious.