Meeting the Messiah: 3 – it's all in the mind

In researching Irene Pickard's archive, ignoring the foundational myth of Christianity was simply not an option. It was far to important to her, to the others whose papers were in her archive, to the Quaker and other circles in which she moved, and to Jung, who became her guide in trying to make sense of the phenomena.

Jung was first-most and foremost a psychologist. He was clear about the boundaries beyond which his speculations should not stray: he was an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – as informed by his clinical practice. This applied just a much to his understanding of religion, as it did to any other aspect of human life. Ultimately for Jung, psychological life is human life as lived, as experienced: all we know, we know via mental phenomena.

That is why whenever we speak of religious content we move in a world of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how clear or unclear these images, metaphors, and concepts are in respect of their transcendental object. If, for instance, we say “God” we give an expression to an image or verbal concept which has undergone many changes in the course of time. We are, however, unable to say with any degree of certainty — unless it be by faith — whether these changes affect only the images and concepts, or the Unspeakable itself. After all we can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape just as easily as we can imagine him as an eternally unmoved unchangeable essence. Our reason is sure of one thing: that it manipulates images and ideas which are dependent on human imagination and its temporal and local conditions, and which have therefore changed innumerable times in the course of their long history.    C G  Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

I love Jung's referring to 'God' as the 'Unspeakable' – I suspect the connotation in English is not quite the same as the original German! I think he literally meant 'cannot be spoken about'. But he is right, all we can speak about first hand is our experience. That is the psychological experience of 'God' – the 'God' we encounter, if we do. The other is the shrivelled construct of theology – a verbal shuttlecock batted between players in the game of god-talking. 

What are profound, and Jung knew this, are numinous experiences. They are capable of utterly altering life. In the theistic framework of the Western mind – being touched by God; in the framework of the Eastern mind, satori – sudden awakening, liberation;  to the post-modern mind – being awestruck, overwhelmed with wonder, dumbfounded; even in the probably fictional teachings of Don Juan as told by Carlos Castañeda – much loved in the New Age circles – it plays the fundamental role of 'stopping the world'. 

I think the rise of the New Age movement, with its syncretic appropriations – a pick and mix approach to spirituality and religion – would have fascinated Jung. It would fit with his suggestions that the age of Christianity was coming to an end, and that people would start searching for spiritual replacements. The term 'New Age' itself owes a lot to borrowings from Jung, who suggested the process in Aion (1951).

I think he would also have found the attraction of so many people to the range of many quite bizarre conspiracy theories that have arisen in recent years, as another symptom, just as he did the emerging belief which he wrote about in Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (1958): all are examples of the yearning of the human soul for a centre, a point of gravity around which all those otherwise discomforting and confusing feelings that comprise the vitality of spirituality can circulate.

But what of the founding hero figure of Christianity – the messiah? The failed god nailed to a cross. 

A sense of wider meaning to one’s existence is what raises man beyond mere getting and spending. If he lacks this sense, he is lost and miserable. Had St. Paul been convinced that he was nothing more than a wandering tent-maker he certainly would not have been the man he was. His real and meaningful life lay in the inner certainty that he was the messenger of the Lord. One might accuse him of suffering from megalomania, but this opinion pales before the testimony of history and the judgement of subsequent generations. The myth that took possession of him made him something greater than a mere craftsman. Such myth, however, consist of symbols that have not been invented consciously. They have happened. It was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the god-man. It existed for many centuries before his birth. He himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter.  C G Jung: Man and his Symbols (1964)

Irene had already encountered the idea from Rendel Harris – her employer and mentor – that the man Jesus became infused with God's wisdom at the time of his baptism by John. Jung takes that idea further, suggesting that pre-existing god-man symbol was projected over the man Jesus, perhaps by himself taking on that mantle, but especially by subsequent generations, starting with Paul. 

For Jung the god-man symbol had existed for a long time before Jesus, being embedded in myth and projected over different candidates: but he felt that it had stuck so strongly with Jesus because the myth had evolved with the absorption of Sophia – the wisdom of God manifest as love – making Jesus a new and transformed version of God – God 2.0, if you will – as he tried to explain in Answer to Job: 

Just as the decision to become man apparently makes use of the ancient Egyptian model, so we can expect that the process itself will follow certain prefigurations. The approach of Sophia betokens a new creation. But this time it is not the world that is to be changed; rather it is God who intends to change his own nature. Mankind is not, as before, to be destroyed, but saved. In this decision we can discern the “philanthropic” influence of Sophia: no new human beings are to be created, but only one, the God-man. For this purpose a contrary procedure must be employed. The Second Adam shall not, like the first, proceed from the hand of the Creator, but shall be born of a human woman. … C G Jung: Answer to Job (1954)

Jung goes on the explain how the myth has evolved by the absorption of the female, in the form of Mary, as an aspect of the divine, as part of the celestial. Mary's immaculate conception does not occur in anywhere in the New Testament, but was confirmed by Pope Pius IX in 1858, whose commission stated that neither scriptural proof nor ancient tradition were necessary for this. Her assumption into heaven was then confirmed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. Yet further evidence of a living and evolving myth – of myth making – at a very deep and spiritual level: the church having to concede to the popular process of progressive enthronement of the female as a fourth denizen of heaven. A process that was manifest in the increasing devotion to Mary over the proceeding millennium. The human need to have a female as an integral part of heaven being a projection of developments in the collective unconscious – evolution at work in the deep mind.

… Thus Mary, the virgin, is chosen as the pure vessel of the coming birth of God. Her independence of the male is emphasised by her virginity as the sin qua non of the process. She is a “daughter of God” who, as a later dogma will establish, is distinguished at the outset by the privilege of an immaculate conception and is thus free from the taint of original sin. It is therefore evident that she belongs to the state before the Fall. This posits a new beginning. The divine immaculateness of her status makes it clear that she not only bears the image of God in undiminished purity, but, as the bride of God, as also the incarnation of her prototype, namely Sophia. Her love of mankind, widely emphasised in the ancient writings, suggests that in this newest of creations of his Yahweh has allowed himself to be largely influenced by Sophia. For Mary, the blessed among women, is a friend and intercessor for sinners, which all men are. Like Sophia, she is a mediatrix who led the way to God and assures man of immortality. Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man’s bodily resurrection. As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she hold the place of the Old Testament Sophia. (ibid)

 Jung's profoundest suggestion is that myths are externalisations of the structures and processes of the deep mind. As humans have evolved, so have their myths. Their function is is to act as programming algorithms – as we might say these days – affecting the deep mind and helping the individual to adapt and mature. They model what is needed, and act out in symbolic form the maturation processes required within. They are essential ingredients of human growth and individuation (as he called the process of self-actualisation, of becoming an independent and evolving adult). They are only truly affective in so far as they are engaged with and believed.  

Any attempt to deconstruct a myth destroys its magic – our participation with its mystique – and blocks its effect. That is a cause of much of the modern malaise which he detected: our over rational brains had deconstructed the dominant myths of the West so that it can no longer play its part in maturing the soul – in the spiritual maturation of the deep mind. 

However, the deep mind still yearned for meaningful myths to attach itself to, as was evident in the passion with which people bound themselves to the myths of Nationalism or Communism; each resulting in tragic loss of life on an unprecedented scale. Incidences, in Jung's estimation, of mass psychosis: collective delusion that can powered appalling acts of cruelty, violence and destruction.  

Perhaps the only way for modern man to return to realising the efficacy of earlier myths is to suspend disbelief, and engage with their narratives, as would we would with an enthralling book or film? Such re-engagement with the myths should, according to Jung, help shape and encourage maturation at a deep level. 

However, such re-engagement will not be as before, because the myth will be seen with new eyes – eyes that have known the disenchantment. It will need to evolve by being infused with new elements if it is to re-enchant. Jung's own fascination with the Christian mystical tradition of alchemy led to his suggestion that the trinity would need to evolve into a quaternary in order to reflect more accurately the structures of the deep mind. Such an evolution would re-empower the myth's ability to invoke the processes of individuation, of maturation. 

For Jung, religions were not just alternative entertainments, distractions, competing in the attention market place. They encoded pathways of maturation in their symbols, and so were essential to human need; which is why they had evolved in the first place, and why they had been so passionately engaged with, why they have had such an central place in human societies: they encode the vitality of life's growth pathways – they orchestrate and evoke maturation. They are alchemic. 

Christianity, the cultural manifestation of the Western mind, and therefore the one that best suits the Western mind according to Jung, will continue evolving if it is not to wither away. If it does not evolve, then it will simply be replaces by some new symbolic system, just as Christianity itself replaced the Paganism of the Roman world. Its ability to answerer to the needs of  the deep mind will determine its fate. 

So how is Christianity evolving? What are its rivals that it must accommodate or be replaced by? It may be that evolving in a New Age direction, or perhaps by absorbing components from other faith tradition in a universalist direction, or by unearthing the perennial philosophy that is supposed to underlie all faiths, or by adopting a non-theistic, or possibly post theistic, guise. Or it may be retrenching into a more dogmatic, literalist fortress, answering to the needs of a diminishing but trenchant minority.

So, once more, what of the messiah? What have I understood from Jung about the god-man whose life, real or otherwise, has been so fundamental to the Western mind? If nothing else it must be to focus on the potency of the symbol of the god-man set within its cosmic drama – within its narrative – rather than any questions of its historicity. To ask such analytic questions is to step outside the myth and destroy it. There is a need to become re-enchanted.

Meeting the Messiah: 2 – Rendel Harris's christology

Rendel Harris (1852 – 1941) is largely forgotten these days. Some Quakers know of him because of the room named after him at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre, where his bust proudly surveys the room that bears his name, and because of the interpretation board on the walls in the main corridor which tells of his being its first Director of Studies. To Irene Pickard he was far more.

One of the problems in un-packaging her archive was to come to an understanding of her relationship with Dr J Rendel Harris, both at a personal level and as an influence on her spiritual and intellectual development. 

She worked as his secretary for over a twelve years, moving into his home after the death of his wife, becoming his general factotum as well as his private secretary. Even though he explicitly instructed that no biography about him should be written, she did just that in her retirement, privately publishing her Memories of J. Rendel Harris (1979).

She says of him, quoting and echoing W E Wilson's words:

The Doctor's academic many-sidedness is not half of the tale. A wonderful personality, full of humour, delighting in the society of all sorts of persons, a saint and mystic, utterly approachable. A man of immovable principles and strong prejudices. Delighting in fighting for great moral causes, yet charitable to opponents, and a personal friend of some whose principles he detested. Filled, even in old age, with the joy of living, radiating the love of Christ. To talk with him was stimulating, to enjoy his friendship was an education, to be his pupil for years was a privilege for which one can never be thankful enough.

For Irene, Rendel Harris functioned as a latter day John the Baptist, preparing the way for her immersion into Jung's vision of what the function of religion was and how it worked on the deep mind. She may not have been receptive to Jung's radical and challenging ideas without the preparation she received by being intimately exposed to Rendel Harris's thoughts and reflections on how Christianity evolved, and how its teachings might be understood – he was, according to Irene, particularly inspiring and adept at hermeneutics, the craft of understanding the relationship between a text and its reader. 

Rendel Harris also laid the foundation to her evolving understanding of Quakerism and Christianity, moving her on from her somewhat evangelical and literalist beginnings, as much by example as by any direct teaching. She was not his pupil, but, as his personal secretary she was very much looking over his shoulder and witnessing his mind at work. She would have typed up all of his later works and correspondence.

Coming to an understanding of Rendel Harris's beliefs about Christianity was very much an essential stepping stone in exploring Irene's archive. It was also a another step in my somewhat reluctant confrontation with some of the fundamentals of Christianity: the veracity of its foundational stories. Like it or not, researching materials like those in Irene's archive has consequences for one's own beliefs because it confronts your own prejudices and limitations by expanding the range and depth of information that underlie your opinions; it exposes you to different ways of thinking; it opens new vistas to the mind. You are necessarily affected by what you research.

Rendel Harris was a radical thinker for his age. As a scholar, he came to realise that Christianity had evolved, initially in a Jewish context, but with the addition of something new:

So long then, as nascent Christianity is making its way in a Jewish environment, it does so as a sect of Judaism, accepting the whole of the inspired Jewish documents, and re-interpreting them in the light of what it holds to be a larger revelation. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity: Rendel Harris, 1919

He appears to have thought that it then evolved on through the convolutions of the early Church, until it reached a much more defined and stable state in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, when the creeds were created, and the early Christian texts were codified to form the New Testament, and then added to agreed versions of those Jewish books which formed the Old Testament, with, in the eyes of the Church, the teachings of the New superseding those of the Old.

He strongly suspected that the writers of the four Gospels used note books full of proof texts, traces of which survived in some of the ancient documents recently discovered in his time: his two volumes on Testimonies published in 1917 and 1920 suggested such traces. He thought that the proof texts were drawn from oral and written traditions about the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as from the Jewish scriptures. Their disappearance being much like the disappearance of an artist's cartoon or an architect's drawings when the finished work is complete.

He also accepted the scholastic arguments that Mark's Gospel was the primary Gospel, that is it was written before the others. This took him to a realisation of the importance of a discovery with which he was intimately involved – that of the Sinaitic palimpsest. The version of St Mark's Gospel in the palimpsest was both older and shorter than the canonical version, ending with the discovery of the empty tomb, and lacking the verses about the resurrection and ascension.

As a Quaker, Rendel Harris was at ease with the notion of the inward light, 'that of God in everyone' from which revelation sprang: a charismatic living presence within each and every person, if only they had the steadfast patience to wait upon it. As George Fox is reported to have said:

'The Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it from the Lord’. And said, ‘Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. …'   Margaret Fell, 1694

According to Fox, even Christ's words came from that inward wellspring: a radical thought that did not sit well with the orthodox belief in the Trinity, which asserted that Jesus was one with God from the beginning of time (that is identical with God). Fox's claim led to accusation that the Quakers denied the Trinity and were thus heretics, justifying much of the persecution they suffered.

Rendel Harris thought he understood what had happened. If St Mark's is the most authentic account, then the man Jesus had become infused with the wisdom of God at the moment of his baptism, which is where St Mark starts, so we should not wonder that there is no trace of Jesus after he was laid in the 'sepulchre hewn out of rock' with no resurrection and ascension, as is the case in the version of St Mark found on the palimpsest. Christ was that wisdom, accessible to all and universal, not the person Jesus. Testimony to its pre-existence and universality was to be found in other ancient wisdom writings. The emergent Christian churches of the late Roman Empire had welded it onto the man Jesus, rather than understanding its universality. The man Jesus simply exemplified its wonderful depth and brilliance more fully. He was the paradigm, the vehicle through which it was best exhibited. 

… Indeed we may say boldly, that Christianity as a dogmatic system is founded on two things: firstly, the identification of Jesus with the wisdom of God, and second, the description of Christ as identified with wisdom in terms borrowed from the Sapiential literature. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Or, as he is reported in Irene's Memories to have said:

‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

It is interesting that Rendel Harris's Testimonies have been republished in 2011. Those works are still considered relevant to biblical studies as demonstrated by Alessandro Falcetta's paper on The Testimony Research of James Rendel Harris.

Rendel Harris's view of the Jewish nature of the first stages of the evolution of Christianity would be very much in accord with the views of such modern biblical scholars as Bart D Ehrman, Reza Aslan and Gésa Vermes, as would his view that the 'ecclesiastical Christ' being an artifice of later ages; although they have gone much further in developing both the understanding of Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, and of the evolution of Trinitarian Christianity.

The debates about the Sinaitic palimpsest and the problem posed for Christianity by the missing verses still continues.

Meeting the Messiah: 1

In researching Irene Pickard's archive it is inevitable that confronting the fundamental issue of the authenticity of Christianity was unavoidable. Hide as I might, investigating and challenging my own relationship to that vast two thousand year old tradition was not something I could duck out of. Inevitably, the very nature of the contents of the archive meant confronting my own understanding of what spirituality might be, what religions are, what role they have, and perhaps must have, in our lives, at a psychological level, if not also at a cultural and social level. 

I have for much of my life been a secular atheist, detached from involvement in any religious practice, believing myself immune to whatever appeal religions might have, protected by my intellectual training in the cannon of analytic philosophy. Religions were, ultimately, absurd, and their claims easily dismantled by the progressive application of ruthless logic. They had no useful part to play in life. They were at best delusions, at worst positively harmful. They were full of pre-scientific understandings of life, that necessarily melted away as the range and depth of our collective scientific understanding expanded. It was inevitable that they would be discarded into the dustbin of history, to borrow phrase much loved by Marxists. A lovely, clinically clean, brave new world was emerging due to intellectual advances, in which, no doubt, everything would be reducible in the end to a series of elegant mathematical formula or algorithms: intellectually satisfying in a mechanical sense, and sterile.

Only, that's not quite the truth about what happened to me. At about the age of thirty I collided with Zen Buddhism in the form of koans – intricate, logic destroying verbal Rubic cubes. Turn and turn them as you might, logical solutions are simply not possible. They twist the mind until eventually you are forced out of the comfort zone of your everyday frames of reference. Whoops! Bang! There goes the security of logical reduction used in defence of the frames of reference that you did not even know you had, but which had held your life in place until then. 

It was a bit like being plugged into Douglas Adam's Ultimate Perspective Vortex. You, naked and raw, are plugged in at one end and the vast complexity of the universe at the other. It is pretty clear which is going to win. Exposure to Zen induces a certain intellectual humility thereafter, and an openness to exploring what seemed intellectually off limits before. 

Having passed through the bowels of Zen, and on via Tai Chi and Qigong, where I encountered other meditative traditions, I have for the last decade been under the guidance of a Dzogchen practitioner from the Tibetan tradition: but I have also become a Quaker. I learned a little about them from my time teaching History, and I wanted to take a risk and try out going to a Meeting. What I did not expect was to fall through the silence into a place of honesty and welcome where I felt at home. It was whilst dipping my toes into the Quaker pond that I encountered Irene's archive.

As a researcher you are supposed to try to maintain some sort of objectivity in order to report on what you have found, however you are inevitably affected by exposure to your subjects' milieu of spiritual influence – you have to walk the same paths as the people you are studying – if in no more than you have to read what they read, read their comments as they digested what they were exposed to, read what they themselves wrote, and try to understand their understanding: you have to get inside their heads. It is a bit like wearing somebody-else's clothes and vicariously living aspects of their life whilst vainly trying not to be affected. You are inevitably changed by the experience.  

Historically, whether we like the fact or not, Christianity has done more to shape European culture than any other tradition, and via Europe, due to the technological and imperial explosion of the last three hundred years, the world. As a result an otherwise obscure Palestinian Jew of the first century CE has become the most influential spiritual teacher in history. Some influencer! Some obscurity! 2.382 billion followers (according to Wikipedia) beats anything on social media. It was clearly time to come to terms with the leviathan.

In the ten years since encountering Irene's archive, I have absorbed a very great deal that has deepened and widened my understanding. It has taken me places I would not have otherwise chosen to go, including having to come to some sort of terms with Christianity. Not my natural inclination. My early exposure to Christian piety had, I thought, inoculated me against having anything to do with 'faiths' – I do include them all – and led me to what I thought was a non-faith way: Buddhism. At least, that how Buddhism is often presented to the West, as being principally composed of meditative practices focussed on liberating the mind from the shackles of attachment. I now know that it is much more than that, and at bottom is just as much a faith-way.

Whatever my own views of Christianity, as a researcher I had to try to understand the Christianity of my subjects. Firstly there was Quakerism, at least that of the time of my subjects, which in itself meant delving into Quaker history. Then I had to try to understand Rendel Harris's Christianity – Irene's one time employer and mentor – and, the biggest ask of all, that of Carl Gustav Jung – the greatest intellectual influence on four of my subjects – Irene Pickard, Elined Kotschnig, P.W. and Marjory Martin – and significant in the life of the fifth, Bertram Pickard.

My subjects also met and were influenced by a number of the more prominent theologians of their time: Carl Barth, Adolf Keller, Visser 't Hooft, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, among others. I had to develop at least a nodding acquaintance with their thoughts and even those of theological thinkers such as Kierkegaard.

It has been an interesting journey. It has made me realise that my early rejection of Christianity was based on a very simplistic understanding – but that vision is, after all, what I had been fed by the compulsory religious education and attendance as required in UK schools when I was young. I now know it to be a vastly more complex spiritual path. One that has left its footprint all over European thought, even those supposedly post-Christian traditions such as Humanism or Marxism, both hugely influenced by the Christian ethic, and in some ways being simply Christianity with God sucked out.

Ah, God – that's another problem, and one I still haven't come to terms with yet: the universe seems to get along perfectly well without. According to Jung I may be stuck at the 'death of God' stage. He may be right.

La Belle Epoque

 One of the problems when writing a history that spans across more than a hundred years is to find the right description for the periods involved. Sometimes centuries and decades do nicely, but sometimes they can be clumsy. Victoria died in 1901, bringing to an end the Victorian Age, and replacing it with the Edwardian period, yet there was so much cultural, social, economic and political continuity that the division is almost meaningless.

Then came 1914 and the world changed. Six empires went to war. Only two survived. The cultural, social, economic and political continuity was shattered right across Europe. 

When we look back on the time before 1914, we seem to be living in a different age. Things are happening today of which we hardly dreamed before the war. We were even beginning to regard war between civilised nations as a fable, for surely such an absurdity would become less and less possible in our rational, internationally organised world.  Carl Jung: Essays on Contemporary Events

Terms like 'the long century', referring to 1800 to 1914, try to do service, but they lack the focus I was looking for. My problem of writing about Irene Pickard's archive is that its roots lay in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and on until the massive fault line of 1914. I needed a term to spanned that period. There is no such convenient term in British history, however, there is in French history – la belle epoque – so I borrowed it. 

It fits so nicely a very special period when the fruits of the industrial revolution finally radically affected peoples' lives. Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days summed it up in that what Phileas Fogg boasts that he can do – circumnavigate the globe in less than a quarter of a year. Steam ships, Steam trains, and the electric telegraph had welded the world together as one place. It seemed an age of the triumph of science, progress and reason. The shock of 1914 destroyed that illusion.

It is difficult for generations that have come to maturity since 1914 to realise fully the impact of horror and betrayal which the war made on people's minds. A few here and there, it is true, had seen it coming, had realized that, as Rufus Jones wrote "Beneath all overt acts and decisions the immense subconscious forces, charged with emotion, had been slowly pushing towards this event".     Elizabeth Grey Vining:  Friend for Life, a biography of Rufus M Jones

But that cataclysmic event set the scene for an age that would have to come to terms with those 'immense subconscious forces', and in Carl Jung, the cartographer par excellence of those forces, Irene Pickard found a guide, not just to understanding the dark potentials within that could be so destructively and collectively unleashed, but in understanding how all the forces within us might be brought into less destructive balance, or even constructively used.  

Jung: psychobabble or mapping the mind?

For Jung, the meaning of life could be found in the realisation of the self, which for each individual holds a different meaning and a different destiny. The driving force behind the individuation process is the archetype of the self. In this sense, the individuation process does not culminate in a life lived only for its own sake as has been determined by the ego, or even in a realisation of the “divinity of life,” but in an experience of the “divine” within oneself. And here is the heart of the matter: in the individuation process the ego — experienced for the most of one’s life as the centre of personality— comes to the realisation that it is not as absolute as it has seemed to be, and it is superseded by an experience of the archetype as a balancing or cantering force in one’s life, moving one beyond the constraints of ordinary ego consciousness. One outcome of this is the capacity for self-reflective consciousness, which functions to direct our attention away from the ego as the centre of awareness, values, and meaning, thus creating a new transcendent perspective of consciousness. Another possible outcome is that the experience of the self restores a balance to the experience of ordinary consciousness, overcoming the ego’s tendency to one-sidedness.   Loren E Pedersen: Dark Hearts. The unconscious forces that shape men’s lives: Shambala, London 1991, p.206

In order to make head or tail of Irene Pickard's archive, I had to get to grips with Jung and his theories. There were possibly helpful but complex texts like the one above, however, there were other writings about Jung which presented a very different and somewhat antagonistic picture. This is because Jung is so very annoying! He can be obscure and opaque with long and convoluted explanations which make considerable use of his own idiosyncratic nomenclature. To unpackage it you have to get to grips with what on earth he was saying. 'Individuation', 'archetype', 'realisation of the self', 'ego', 'ordinary ego consciousness', 'transcendent perspective of consciousness', as in the above, being only a few of his menagerie of terms.

As a result there are those who claim that he is deliberately obscure because he is in fact saying nothing: a tangle of words in which he trapped – netted – his admirers. That he created a cult with himself as the shaman at the centre. Foremost amongst such critics is Richard Noll (The Jung Cult: The origins of a charismatic movement). Noll points to the way in which Jung restricted dissemination of his ideas to an inner circle of acolytes who needed to have undergone his style of analysis to be fully initiated. A structure not unlike that of apostolic succession, with his inner circle acting as the equivalents of bishops. Indeed, may of the women of that circle became almost guardians of his teaching, as is described by Maggy Anthony in her The Valkyries: the women around Jung.

It is possible to view Jung as pre-eminent psychobabble: a web of words to be thrown over people's actions and intentions trapping them into a world of dark hidden forces emanating from within their own minds, from which they can only escape through years of analysis with a trained and expensive therapist. A world in which analysts are the high priests initiating the vulnerable and gullible by degrees into the inner sanctums of the self-enlightened. The ultimate prize to be won is that of liberation from the dark forces within that frustrate and distort our lives – not entirely unlike the medieval practice of exorcism with its aim of driving out 'demons'. The cure, a twentieth century application of the Delphic maxim "Know yourself", or Socrates's claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" taken to the extreme.

Certainly, much that Jung says, and he wrote a lot and gave many seminars and lectures, is seeped in his own psychoanalytic language – although he preferred the term 'analytical psychology' to describe his version, in order to differentiate it from Freud. Rather like the European 'discovers' of the New World, Jung named the features he found in order to place them on a map. Unlike those explorers, who were mapping real places, the existence of those features would seem almost entirely dependent on acceptance of his terms – his vision of the architecture of the mind. Psychoanalytic maps of the mind – be they Jungian, Freudian, or whatever – are a bit like phrenological maps. They depend on acceptance of the suppositions made about how the human psyche works. At worst, their resemblance with any map emerging from experimental psychology or neuroscience may be as little as an astrologer's map has to an astronomer's map.

Jung's work could be seen as an attempt, in part, to create a taxonomy of the mind, although, for the good doctor, that was subordinate to treating his patients. If his theories served to release them from their suffering, then, like any medicine, they had achieved the objective. Their proof was their clinical effectiveness, not their scientific validity. Effectiveness would suggest they has some validity but not confirm it. Validation would depend on a different approaches to clinical method, which is ultimately pragmatic and sometimes heuristic. It only establishes what works, not why it works. Jung always believed that his theories were provisional.

In order to understand his patient's minds, Jung developed a map of the human psyche and its mechanism. The healing process, he suggested, was achieved by shifting the centre of being from the 'ego' to the 'self' – a fulcrum point between our conscious world and the unconscious. That led to the incorporating of the unconscious forces at play into our conscious lives, diminishing the harm they could do, and finding a new equilibrium. Mental distress, he noted, was almost entirely due to a lack of equilibrium between the forces at play within us.

The notion that Jung had developed a map of the mind in order to understand its working, is very much the theme of Murray Stein's books, Jung's Map of the Soul and Minding the Self . Stein is a training analyst at the International School for Analytical Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland. I found Stein very helpful in demystifying Jung, and own a lot to his explanations.

My experience of psychology before starting on unpackaging Irene Pickard's archive, was mostly in applied social psychology, much of which used elements of behaviour modification. A far cry from anything remotely psychoanalytic! Getting to grips with Jung meant trying to understand a very different way of conceiving human psychology. My initial approach was through trying to comprehend his map of the mind. I found it helpful to take the notion of a map literally, and to try to produce a crude representation of how I thought such a map might look. You could call it "Jung's Zoological Garden".

Sinaitic Palimpsest again

I must thank Richard Pickvance (The Friend 29 October) once more for his correction. 

Oh dear. David Lockyer’s letter (15 October) contains an endlessly repeated factoid. Constantine I did not establish Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. He simply stopped the persecution of Christians.

Christianity progressed (not without some setbacks) and several more emperors came and went before Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion. It is the difference between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Edict of Thessalonica in 380.

Richard Pickvance

Mea culpa: I over simplified and repeated a 'factoid'* (as he termed it) in place of a much more complicated truth. However, Constantine did give the religion a degree of prominence and privilege in the Empire and was instrumental in encouraging the definition of an emerging Christian orthodoxy, even on occasions enforcing it; a version of Christianity that Rendel Harris referred to as containing 'an ecclesiastical Christ' who was very much a product of that later age.

The edifice of theology constructed by the emerging 'state' church of the Empire was what Rendel Harris felt had obscured the inspiring clarity of the original message: a clarity that spoke to one's inward condition as a guiding light. Prominent among those theological layerings obscuring the light was the concept of the incarnate divinity of Christ.

In Origin of the Doctrine of the Trinity he suggested that the divinity actually rested on the identification of Christ with the Divine Wisdom who was with God in the creation, not, as the Church taught, as a physical incarnation. That is why Rendel Harris was not perturbed by the discovery that the Sinaitic Palimpsest version of St Mark lacked both the resurrection and ascension. For Rendel Harris those omissions confirmed the gap that had grown between the 'ecclesiastical Christ' and the original.

*An item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. (Oxford Languages)

D.Lockyer

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Irene Pickard, whose archive is the basis of Jung, The Quakers and Hitler, was Rendel Harris' personal secretary and would have typed the texts of all of his later works, including the Origins; an experience which readied her for engaging with Jung's ideas about the evolution of religions as projections of developments deep within the collective psyche.

The Pronoun Dance

It is so much the fashion now to not just give your name, but your preferred choice of pronoun. This is supposed to be more inclusive. What right do I have, if and when I speak about you, to categorise you as male or female? Unless I know you intimately, how should I know how I might be transgressing against your sense of identity? Perhaps male, perhaps female, perhaps something other? There is a rainbow of hues possible – so we are told. The pain of those who struggle with their identity testifies to the suffering caused by attempts to conform to the binary identities imposed by society – a simple 100% M or 100% F – branded onto you at birth. Why should I corral you into one or other sorting pen, conferring on you the appropriate privileges or strictures as a result? I do not wish to injure you.

Even if you are happy with your classification as F or M, it does not follow that you are happy with the cloud of expectations that accompany it: you may not want what is on offer in the pink aisle or in the blue aisle. There are as many ways of being male or female as there are men or women.

Mostly we signal identity externally: this is how I dress, so this is what I am. This is the body shape I have, so this is what I appear to be. Sometimes those are in harmony. Sometimes not. The use of 'he' or 'she' follows the appearance, almost as an ingrained reflex: the two tribes being discovered so early in childhood; each with their own way of being, reflected in speech, mannerism, dress and approved choices. A girl acting girlishly get adoring looks, a boy acting like that soon earns a reprimand. Exhibiting the behaviour of the opposite sex has always risked provoking repression. Societies police the sex boundary with varying degrees of severity.

Sometimes people play with this, knowing and enjoying the confusion and discombobulation caused. Long live drag! The gender bending as performance has a long history. There is much that is tolerated on stage that is pillared in daily life, as boys in the UK who tried to attend school in skirts found out. Cross-dressing for fun is tolerated, even celebrated, but cross-dressing in daily life is problematic and even risky. The existence of male and females codes of dress only serve to emphasise how deeply embedded the binary is, how it shapes so much of our culture and expectations of what is to be accepted. It invites and even enforces conformity. There are always those prepared to police the boundary, and enjoy the licence and power they think is conferred on them.

Non-conformity is discordant. It jars. It challenges. It may provoke reaction, invited or not. Those of us who are to a greater or lesser extent androgynous know the dangers, and too often have tasted its bitter fruits. You learn how to duck and weave, to camouflage, to anticipate and dodge the blows. Societies self-appointed police savour the opportunities proffered by the non-conforming. Socially tolerated coercion is an opportunity for the sweet indulgence of much that is normally denied and repressed: the joy of bullying, the ecstasy of violence. It is a catharsis of liberation for socially manacled.

The more we stretch the boundaries of tolerance the more we invite explosive reactions. 

Jung was deeply aware of the dark potentials in people, lurking in the unconscious waiting for ecstatic release. It was witnessed only too clearly in the popular embrace of the cruelties and excesses of the regimes of his times. Most obviously in the Third Reich, but with a polite veneer and deniability in British and French empires, or the cold logic of the Soviet gulags; and since his times in the hysteria of the Cultural Revolution, the madness of Pol Pot's killing fields, the Rwandan genocide or the Srebrenica massacre.

And the pronoun dance? It invites yet another stretch of tolerance and acceptance; a blurring of the boundaries; a suspension of policing – conscious or unconscious – an effort to accommodate those who do not fit easily or comfortably into the binary of male or female; but it also poses a double problem. 

Firstly, many people are happy and comfortable with the binary, they embrace and live it for they are living out their maleness or femaleness as they feel it – it is authentic for them. That is why there is so much unease with the claim that 'gender is a social construct'. It would be more honest to say, for a huge number of people it is an organo-social construct – they are organically the construct they feel they are. Being male or female is their organically authentic selves. It is not a superficial, acquired construct like being a Manchester United supporter – a voluntarily acquired association. Those who try to pull sex and gender too far apart, making them not deeply interwoven but detachable, play a largely intellectual game to win a space for building a language more accommodating to diversity, but less aligned with lived experience.

Secondly, is there a right to require of other that they use words that do not arise naturally and spontaneously in response to what they encounter? Here is a conflict between what happens when someone externalises their inner difficulties with their identity and the perception of others. Should attachment to a self-ascribed pronoun preference take priority over the spontaneous and authentic responses of others? 

To know that how you see yourself is significantly different to how you are seen is essential to personal growth and maturation. Jung was acutely aware that people were largely blind to their shadows: not just to what lurked in the depths of their psyche, but to how they appeared to others. As Robert Burns wrote:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

(Oh, would some Power give us the gift
To see ourselves as others see us!)

People's pronoun choice about us is their authentic response to how we appear to them, no matter how uncomfortable that makes us feel. 

Being 'out and proud' may challenge others to accept you as you see yourself, but that may not be what they are confronted with: they will see your shadow and that may be far from how you see yourself. That is what they will respond to. We all run the risk of wearing the Emperor's New Clothes!

Some of the recent furore over male to female transexuals 'invading' female spaces is because of the dichotomy between how the would be woman sees herself, and the shadow he still casts.

Even a superficial understanding of Buddhist psychology would warn that attachment to how others speak about you is a cause of suffering; liberation would be in indifference to the choice of pronoun used by others about you – in wholehearted acceptance of what is proffered. 

Quakers did away with the heirs and graces of title that implied hierarchy, understanding the attachment to rank was a delusion best dispensed with. Are we now substituting self ascribed pronoun titles in place of those of rank and not seeing them as being a modern equivalent? The same desire to bind others with how we wish to be addressed? We are plainly what others would see us as being, and that should determine their words, not our need for confirmation of the peculiarities of our chosen identity. The discordance between what we have chosen and how we appear may not allow the words to flow naturally.

As one who lives biologically on the boundary between maleness and femaleness –  androgynous as a birth-right – or birth infliction – I have no wish to control others choice of words about me. At best, a label stating my preferred pronoun would only achieve superficial compliance in my presence, and confusion and discomfort on part of others. 

Pronouns are usually used in the person's absence, so what compliance is likely anyway? Is it an aspiration that a not externally obvious identity might predominate even in your absence?