Video of Carl Jung's famous statement, "The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man...." (The complete transcript of the video is below.)
Jung: The world hangs on a thin thread, and that is the psyche of man. Nowadays we are not threatened by elementary catastrophes. There is no such thing [in nature] as an H-bomb; that is all man's doing. WE are the great danger. The psyche is the great danger. What if something goes wrong with the psyche? You see, and so it is demonstrated to us in our days what the power of the psyche is of man, how important it is to know something about it. But we know nothing about it. Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever. One thinks, "Oh, he has just what he has in his head. He is all from his surroundings, he is taught such and such a thing, believes such and such a thing, and particularly if he is well housed and well fed, then he has no ideas at all." And that's the great mistake because he is just that as which he is born, and he is not born as "tabula rasa," but as a reality.
Interviewer: Jung had a vision at the end of his life of a catastrophe. It was a world catastrophe.
Marie-Louise von Franz: I don't want to speak much about it. One of his daughters took notes and after his death gave it to me, and there is a drawing with a line going up and down, and underneath is "the last 50 years of humanity." And some remarks about a final catastrophe being ahead. But I have only those notes.
Interviewer: What is your own feeling about it, the world situation?
von Franz: Well, one's whole feeling revolts aginst this idea but since I have those notes in a drawer, I don't allow myself to be too optimistic. I think, well, we have always had wars and enormous catastrophies, and I have no more personal fear much about that. I mean at my age, if you have anyhow soon to go— so or so egocentrically spoken. But the beauty of all the life— to think that the billions and billions and billions of years of evolution to build up the plants and the animals and the whole beauty of nature— and that man would go out of sheer shadow foolishness and destroy it all. I mean that all life might go from the the planet. And we don't know— on Mars and Venus there is no life; we don't know if there is any life experiment elsewhere in the galaxies. And we go and destroy this. I think it is so abominable. I try to pray that it may not happen— that a miracle happens.
Interviewer: Do you find that young people that you see now are aware of that? That it's in their consciousness?
von Franz: Yes it's partly in their unconscious and partly in their consciousness, and I think in a very dangerous way, namely, in a way of giving up and running away into a fantasy world. You know, when you study science fiction, you see there's always the fantasy of escaping to some other planet and begin anew again, which means give up the battle on this earth, consider it hopeless and give up. I think one shouldn't give up, because if you think of [Jung's book] Answer to Job, if man would wrestle with God, if man would tell God that he shouldn't do it, if we would reflect more. That why reflection comes in. Jung never thought that we might do better than just possibly sneak round the corner with not too big a catastrophe. When I saw him last, he had also a vision while I was with him, but there he said, "I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth. But, thank God it's not the whole planet." I think that if not more people try to reflect and take back their projections and take the opposites within themselves, there will be a total destruction.
(From the film, "Matter of Heart," directed, edited, and produced by Mark Whitney, conceived and written by Suzanne Wagner, executive producer George Wagner.)
Since July, a nonprofit called the Nashville Jung Circle has hosted discussions and community events focused on the precepts of Carl Gustav Jung, the father of analytical psychology and a pioneering explorer of the relationship between the conscious intellect and the realm of the collective unconscious. Tonight at 7:15, the group hosts a screening of the 1986 documentary Matter of Heart at The Belcourt, followed by a Q&A with its producer, Nashville resident and Jung Circle board member Michael Whitney. One of the founders of the Jung Circle is Sherry Cothran, a veteran of the local club scene — notably as former lead singer for the popular act The Evinrudes — as well as an ordained United Methodist pastor. Why the screening, and why the renewed interest in Jung’s ideas about the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of our selves? Cothran answered our questions by email; click here for a longer version.
What is the purpose of the Nashville Jung Circle, and which of Jung’s ideas do you find especially relevant now?The Jung Circle just formed as recently as July of this year, so we are very much still figuring it out, but our hope is to provide opportunities for connections to form around educational events rooted in the works of C.G. Jung. We’re facilitating some opportunities for that to happen around Jungian related themes such as this movie, produced by one of our board members, Michael Whitney; and various study groups, lectures and gatherings, such as a current study group based on the book by Erik Goodwyn, The Neurobiology of the Gods: How Brain Physiology Shapes the Recurrent Imagery of Myth and Dreams, led by another board member, the Rev. Donna Scott, and John Eley. We will also be offering an upcoming workshop on dream work by board member Linda Odom, a clinical psychologist, and a workshop on Archetypal Analysis. We are also hoping to offer some opportunities to explore the use of archetypes in the arts with guest authors, performers and speakers.
I feel there is an urgency to Jung’s work in our time, particularly the work of integrating the darker parts of ourselves into our personalities. Jung felt that most of the conflicts in our day and age, including conflicts that lead to the destruction of the planet, violent relationships between nations and races, and the violence we do to ourselves, are rooted in our refusal to take on the responsibility for the shadow within. We live in a day and age when we are very good at visiting our shadow upon others — that is, projecting it outward so that we don’t have to do the painful, fearful work of looking inward too deeply. Anger, hatred, shaming, blaming, domination, control, manipulation, violence, all of those ways of being in the world that we can’t seem to stop doing because they are habituated in us, like addictive behaviors, they have simply become reflexive in our time.
Twelve-step programs (developed by Bill Wilson, a patient of Jung’s) have been very successful in helping people to integrate the shadow side into their lives rather than running from it. For many reasons, these programs have been successful on a very large scale, but I think one of the most important reasons is that there is a community of trust, honesty and care that is based in the principle of corporate poverty, not profit or gain. Churches, at their best, seek to be this kind of community, but pastors are often under pressure to perform, just like everyone else, according to the standards of the marketplace and usually end up having to spend much more time on marketing, promotion and maintenance than developing authentic community.
To do the work of the integration of the shadow requires a supportive and loving community, where one can risk honesty and trust, necessary ingredients for the self to develop. We are community-anemic in our time. So the Jung Circle hopes to be an organization that provides some meaningful connections for people, not the only one but one of many, and hopefully inspire others to do the same. This is something we will all learn together as we go along.
