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?

Liminal spaces or bathing in the Styx

The walls of hospitals have heard more prayers than the walls of temple, mosque, or church 

claimed a recent social media post, emblazoned across a photo of a hospital corridor, no doubt hoping to provoke comment. Was it intended to invite condemnation of institutionalised religion? Or comments on the human condition? Or on our relationship with religions – press the panic button/ pull the rip-cord/ set off the distress flare – otherwise don't bother me?

My thoughts were "Ah! the liminal spaces."

liminal |ˈlɪmɪn(ə)l|
adjective technical
1: relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2: occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

What greater transition is there than that from life into death? Or lesser ones from able bodied to disabled? From having life threatening injury to being healed? From diseased to well? It is no wonder that they let patients sound a bell when their cancer treatment course is complete.

But, perhaps more importantly, they are spaces where our daily praxis fails – that web of expectation, action and result with which we order our day to day – where we are masters of events. We know how the day/week/month/year goes – except suddenly it doesn't. 

That's when we fall into a liminal space. 

The rules no longer work. 

It is very disorientating.

But it is also a rich source of wisdom. A space for potential growth. 

Rinzai Zen makes great use of catapulting the student into a liminal space where the student is dumbfounded. The koans are designed to twist the mind into capitulation because it is there that one's 'true nature' is encountered. 

The contemplative traditions of Christianity – largely denied to the laity –  likewise take the initiate into that liminal space.

Like Soto Zen, with its endless hours of sitting facing a wall, pilgrimages are intended not as glorified tourist trips, but to grind you down by physical exhaustion until you are nothing more than the pilgrim: they are intentionally liminal. No one should go on a pilgrimage with an iPhone! 

The meaning webs in which we spend our lives screen us from encountering the wilderness of the liminal; but they also confines us to culturally created comfort zones. 

The rationalist uses unimpeachable logic to cling to the safety of their web of meaning. The sharp edge of 'science' used as a sword to plunge into heart of any threat. Only science is not like that: it provides updatable answers depending on the best set of evidence available – it is a process. Sometimes an exquisitely honed tool – the gold standard of five sigma – sometimes little better than our current heuristic. 

Limply, those who would set religion off against science– you might as well say setting off irrationality against rationality – want to anchor their certainties in one or other received teaching – hallowed by time and no doubt deeply emotionally appealing and comforting – especially if you are 'born again' or 'saved' – but far too often contrary to testable fact. Belief is a poor substitute for hard earned knowledge, no matter how fervent the belief. 

There are those who, in the name of this or that faith, are only too ready to harvest people who are in liminality, posing as real life Charons ready to ferry the stranded to a safe shore on the other side, from one web of certainty to another: the real gift would be bathing in the Styx. 

Belief is a mistaken road if it is presented as a higher case of knowing. One should not believe. One should be open to experiences of the liminal – to its taste and feel – to the not knowing – to simply being in its raw state, shorn of intention. 

When people say they believe in the existence of God, it has never impressed me in the least. Either I know a thing and then I don't need to believe it; or I believe it because I am not sure that I know it. I am well satisfied with the fact that I know experiences which I cannot avoid calling numinous or divine.     Jung's reply to H L Philip's question about whether all we are limited to is knowledge of the God-archetype: H L Philip "Jung and the Problem of Evil": Rockliff, London, 1958