Bergson, Jung and the creativity of disruption

Exploring an archive will always take you on journeys that you had not anticipated. I first came across reference to Bergson in one document in Irene's archive: Proceedings of the discussions on belief, Geneva Study Group, Winter 1937/8.

Henri-Louis Bergson? I had no idea who he was or what he propounded, but two of the participants in the discussions referred to how important his ideas were to them – they were fundamental as a way of framing their beliefs. That gave me little option but to hunt up who he was, what his ideas were, how they related to my subjects, to the period they were living in, and to their fascination with Jung. 

It turned out that Bergson's ideas had considerable influence on Jung himself, so unpacking Bergson was going to be important. 

Researching an archive is a bit like archaeology: you are presented with incomplete and scattered bits and pieces and have to try to fit them into place. But there is an additional problem – time investment. As soon as you start researching a side-shoot there is a danger of that area ballooning and becoming a major endeavour in its own right. The challenge is, can you come up with a synopsis of the side-shoot that will contribute to understanding the spine? Knowing when to stop is almost as important as knowing what is worth following up – something you cannot know until you have followed it up! It is so easy to spend huge amounts of time trying to comprehend something abstruse and near impenetrable, being sucked further and further out in an effort to extract something tangible which would contribute to the main flow of the study. Bergson was one such side-shoot. 

Arriving at an adequate synopsis is always hazardous. It is a bit like taking a photograph of a landscape. The resultant postcard is a snapshot of how it appeared at one time, on one day, in one season, from one viewpoint, and that before some major feature was changed for ever. It can never do justice to the evolving complexity of the place, nor reflect the near infinity of view points from which it could be seen. It would be easy spending a lifetime studying Bergson and still to feel that you had not reached the bottom of what he was saying; but in terms of my study of Irene's archive, he warranted little more than a footnote. However, in getting to grips with Jung, he deserved far more. 

Here is what I came up with in trying to explain the import of Bergson in the context of the document resulting from the 1937/8 discussion group on 'belief':

It is interesting to note that several of the participants refer either directly or indirectly to Bergson. Russell may well have become the dominant public face of English language philosophy between the wars, but it was Bergson who had caught the imagination of the French speaking world, especially after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Bergson's philosophy was important to Jung, who built on Bergson's notion of élan vital when constructing his own view of the psyche after his break with Freud, shifting Freud's notion of the libido from being essentially a sexual drive to being the basic vitality of life. He agreed with Bergson's notion of enduring – that our vitality is experienced as persisting through experienced time – so that we live dynamically in the tension between our past and our expectations of our future – and at a deeper level we also live in the dynamic tension between the greater communal past and the communal expectations of the future. Expectations which Jung thought of as being encoded in what he termed 'archetypes'. Jung also agrees with Bergson about the importance of intuition; that in many ways it is more powerful in helping us survive than intellect. Intellect for Bergson is derivative, a secondary factor: its function is to solve problems when we encounter them. Direction in life is given by our intuition, which is more fundamental. For Jung the process of individuation was very much one of letting intuitions – psychic forces – often carried by symbols – emerge from the unconscious.

Bergson is the very epitome of French language philosophy in contrast to the analytic tradition of English language philosophy. It is as much about feeling right as being right. It is about making sense of life as lived, as experienced; not about reductive analysis and pairing down to what can truthfully be said. It is abstract – very abstract – and fits the thinker like good couture: flattering them as much as serving them: creating an effect that is pure affect. It is fundamentally about what it is to be alive, to be in the human predicament.

Here are my notes on Bergson most influential work, the one for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927: 

Henri-Louis Bergson: Creative Evolution: concepts cannot capture the world – concepts fail to touch the whole of reality, being only a sort of abstract net thrown on things – intuition alone engages fully with reality. Neither rationalism nor empiricism grasp reality – the empiricist ultimately resolves reality into no more than a bundle of bits, the measurables which it can be reduced to; the rationalist keeps accreting more and more properties onto the substance that underlays things, such that "A thing-in-itself is a property-bearer that must be distinguished from the properties it bears" [see: substance theory] until it become infinitely saturated and is equivalent to God or the universe; "Thus they transform it into an unknowable container in which properties reside. Trying to obtain the unity of the object, they allow their substance to contain more and more properties, until eventually it can contain everything, including God and nature" [see: Intuition]. By contrast, true understanding comes from intuition, which Bergson defines as "a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The absolute that is grasped is always perfect in the sense that it is perfectly what it is, and infinite in the sense that it can be grasped as a whole through a simple, indivisible act of intuition, yet lends itself to boundless enumeration when analysed”  [see: intuition (Bergson)]; Intuition is driven by the "élan vital" – the fundamental life energy, the vitality of all things.
(Does "boundless enumeration" prefigure Deridda's deconstructionism?)

Bergson's demotion of reason to the service role of problem solving, and his promotion of intuition to the primary role of direction-giving fitted well with Jung's observations of the human mind. Intuitions, Jung observed, arise from the operations of the unconscious and drive our intent: how we feel is more powerful than what we think. Rationalising is almost an epiphenomena, tidying up, enabling and justifying, even masking our drives. He found that those who became trapped by reasoning suffered. Those who connected more deeply with their intuition flowed through life better, unless that dominate instead. Either one-sidedness was a recipe for disaster!

Bergson was anti-determinism, anti-mechanicalism* in his thinking, emphasising the spontaneity and unpredictability of creation. A view starkly in contrast to the almost triumphant determinism of so many of his contemporaries, especially in the sciences and mathematics. David Hilbert, the outstanding mathematician of the age, contended that the completeness of mathematics would be accomplished; Einstein's contended that all of physics would eventually prove to be determinable, and, in consequence, so would human behaviour. Everything would be calculable and explainable. It would be the final triumph of the sciences. 

It is interesting to note how that certainty has crumbled. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, Turing's Halting Problem, and, ultimately, the development of Chaos Theory, have eroded that world view. It seems Bergson had a point. The future cannot be predicted: chaos begets creativity and novelty. 

Jung felt that the phantasmagoria of symbols – images – arising in our dreams, in our imagination, in our fantasies and fictions, are the creative font from which inspiration is derived. They are the true vehicles of human inventiveness and originality. To live a life fully is to live a life symbolically, to unleash those potentials. Bergson's philosophy underpinned Jung's psychology.

Disruption being creative – something of a mantra in Silicon Valley – is now taken almost as an axiom.  Both Bergson and Jung would have been delighted. Both held that mystics and creative people show us that the static world may be comfortable, but it is not ultimately maintainable. It will decay, allowing chaotic interruptions to emerge full of creative potential. For Jung, that was the essence of the mid-life and other crises, and the harvests of personal growth and development – individuation in his terms – that might be reaped from them. 

The arts and culture at a time of stability tend to be flaccid: those from times of crisis tend to be innovative. Religions and spirituality likewise. Bergson not only anticipated the modern view of the vitality of chaos, he also proposed a distinction between static and dynamic religion and their related ethics, those of closed and open systems, anticipating Karl Popper in the process. Dynamic religion and its related open system of morality were rooted, he thought, in mysticism. His book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion explored this at depth. Much like Jung, Bergson linked mysticism to intuition, to the creative non-rational, and to the symbolic and evocative.

Quakers understand how a time of chaos, the British Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century (The Wars of the Three Kingdoms), provided the creative space for the genesis of Quakerism; and they understand being rooted in mysticism: the ministry that arise from the germinating silence of Meeting is so often inspirationally metaphoric, allegoric, poetic, symbolic rather than deductively rational – so much in accord with both Jung and Bergson. They also understand Bergson's open system of morality, being alert to continuing revelation.

 
 

* The character of being mechanical; mechanical action or procedure; specifically, in philosophy, the mechanical interpretation of the universe.

Wotan

In 1936 Jung was trying to frame his understating of what was happening only about 30km away from his home in Zürich, over the border in Germany. A profound shift had happened in just three years and it was being reflected in what he was hearing from his patients during analysis, especially from his German speaking patients. Their dreams and dream symbols were worryingly disturbed. He wrote Wotan to explore his thoughts about what he was observing.

We are always convinced that the modern world is a reasonable world, basing our opinion on economic, political, and psychological factors. But if we may forget for a moment that we are living in the year of Our Lord 1936, and, laying aside our well-meaning, all-too human reasonableness, may burden God or the gods with the responsibility for contemporary events instead of man, we would find Wotan quite suitable as a causal hypothesis. In fact, I venture the heretical suggestion that the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all three reasonable factors put together. There is no doubt that each of these factors explains an important aspect of what is going on in Germany, but Wotan explains yet more. He is particularly enlightening in regard to a general phenomenon, which is so strange to anybody not a German that it remains incomprehensible, even after the deepest reflection.

Perhaps we may sum up this general phenomenon as Ergriffenheit – a state of being seized or possessed. The term postulates not only an Ergriffener (one who is seized) but, also, an Ergreifer (one who seizes). Wotan is an Ergreifer of men, and, unless one wishes to deify Hitler – which has indeed actually happened – he is really the only explanation. It is true that Wotan shares this quality with his cousin Dionysus, but Dionysus seems to have exercised his influence mainly on women. The maenads were a species of female storm-troopers, and, according to mythical reports, were dangerous enough. Wotan confined himself to the berserkers, who found their vocation as the Blackshirts of mythical kings.

Jung received his university education during the 1890s, a period when the second wave of Darwinians were trying to work out how evolution applied to the human species. Both ethnography and anthropology were thriving because of the opportunities for studying human diversity offered by the global extent of European empires. Was human kind a single species, or were there distinct races, each competing with the other in the battle of survival? Were some races more evolved than others, more adapted and fitter to survive and thrive? It was far from clear. Many people were happy to have 'scientific' underpinning to their racialist views. It suited countries with empires. It suited some in communities with ethnic minorities amongst them as a means of justifying discrimination. It suited those who felt 'good breeding' was something organic and conferred superiority: they had good genes which is why they were at the top. It justified eugenics. Social-Darwinism was to be very much part of the zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century.

Jung was not utterly immune. He was a man of his age. He did not embrace such theories, but it seems he did toy with them, allowing them to colour his thinking to greater or lesser extents during  periods of his long career.  He had developed his theories of archetypes and of the collective unconscious. He did wonder how far the archetypes were inherited, and how they might differ between peoples. He thought he could identify differences between the deep minds of German and Jewish peoples. His recommendation that Westerners do not adopt Eastern religious practices were based on his belief that the deep structures of European minds would attach themselves incorrectly to the symbols and practices of Eastern religions. Those had been evolved to suit different minds. It would be like trying to use an imperial toolkit to service an engine built using metric nuts and bolts.

There are eminent Jungian scholars, such as Andrew Samuels, who claim that Jung was antisemitic because of such thinking. Jung was a man of his age and there are certainly traces in his work, however, he did not behave in an antisemitic way: he had Jewish colleagues, Jewish patients, used Jewish businesses, corresponded with Jewish people as equals, and even had a Jewish mistress.

Jung felt he could detect the footprint of an earlier paganism in the German mind – in the collective unconscious of German peoples – as perhaps an organic part of their racial heritage? One that had been masked over by the Christian centuries, but one that lurked there waiting to be reawakened. He called that archetype Wotan after the Norse/Teutonic god. He was much concerned by what he saw as the mass-psychosis that had infected the German people; or, as he called it the phenomena of Ergriffenheit. It is possible to veiw his essay Wotan as an apologia for the intoxication of Nazism, excusing Germans because they could not help themselves from being carried away: being swept along by the symbolic power of the Third Reich was unavoidable because it awakened deep racial responses. The Gothic-romantic symbolism of the Nazi Party reached into the emotive brain, into the unconscious, into the non-rational. It connected with and activated the Wotan archetype – the dark potential of cataclysmic fury: the want to destroy all who oppose: the want to seek the glory of death in battle.

Questions are asked as to why Jung continued in contact with so many people in Germany, even within the regime, right up to 1940, suggesting that he sympathised with the regime to some extent. It can be countered by remembering that he was a doctor of the mind, and not only many Germans, but Germany itself he saw as his patient: if someone is sick you do not abandon them. As a native speaker of German he was exposed to, and engaged with, what was in effect his own wider native culture. It seems he hoped to help Germans, and maybe even Germany itself, escape their Ergriffenheit. 

To help Germany escape its intoxication – and to help explain it to the wider world – Jung felt that it was necessary to identify the component of the unconscious mind that was the source of the problem. The shift of the God-archytype from being expressed through the Christian-Judaic "God" to the older and more primitive and furry filled Wotan, and its projection over the person of Hitler would, Jung felt, account for much that he was witnessing. As he states, "But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces" – and, in his view, such psychic forces were largely at play in our lives unconsciously – those possessed by the intoxication of Wotan would not realise they were so afflicted. It would impel them from deep within. The pagan iconography of the Nazi regime, the appeal to Teutonic myths – tangibly as re-interpreted by Wagner in his Ring-Cycle of operas – the wide cultivation of a pagan völkisch-Norse aesthetic and the belief in Aryan superiority, all fed into revitalising Wotan as a living force in the deep, collective mind of the German peoples, and were outwards expressions of its vigour. Realisation of the fact of possession, Jung hoped, would help liberate from the affects.  

A mind that is still childish thinks of the gods as metaphysical entities existing in their own right, or else regards them as playful or superstitious inventions. From either point of view the parallel between Wotan redivivus and the social, political, and psychic storm that is shaking Germany might have at least the value of parable. But since the gods are without doubt personifications of psychic forces, to assert their metaphysical existence is as much an intellectual presumption as the opinion that they could ever be invented. Not that ‘psychic forces’ have anything to do with the conscious mind, fond as we are of playing with the idea that consciousness and psyche are identical. This is only another piece of intellectual presumption. ‘Psychic forces’ have far more to do with the realm of the unconscious. Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man.

Jung then suggests Hitler as the agent of infection which will inevitably lead Germany towards the destruction that it did indeed suffer, but only after having engulfed most of Europe in a blaze of its fury. He was certainly showing foresight in 1936 about what would take most of the next decade to unfold.

For the sake of better understanding and to avoid prejudice, we could of course dispense with the name ‘Wotan’ and speak instead of the furor Teutonicus. But we should only be saying the same thing and not as well, for the furor in this case is a mere psychologizing of Wotan and tells us no more than that the Germans are in a state of ‘fury’. We thus lose sight of the most peculiar feature of this whole phenomenon, namely, the dramatic aspect of the Ergreifer and the Ergriffener. The impressive thing about the German phenomenon is that one man, who is obviously ‘possessed’, has infected a whole nation to such an extent that everything is set in motion and has started rolling on its course towards perdition.    

Irene Pickard and the other of the Quaker-Jungian group in the Geneva Meeting felt that Jung held the keys to explaining much that was happening around them with the rise of fascist movements across Europe, especially of the Nazis in Germany. In addition to how his ideas illuminated their understanding of their own personal struggles and conflicts, it was one of the main motivating factors for their intense study of his ideas during the period between 1934 and 1936. They hoped that understanding Jung might provide them with tools to strengthen their peace-work in order to combat the rise of militarism and the lurch towards war.

All the quotes are from C G Jung's ‘Wotan’, in Essays on Contemporary Events (London: Kegan Paul, 1947; a translation of the 1936 original).

Hate had found respectable motives

Polarisation of opinion happens as soon as wars break out. Nuanced understandings of the issues disappear and taking sides becomes, not just normal, but a social requirement. Lining up with the mass opinion is not simply a matter of choice, but a defence reflex – no one enjoys being a pariah, or risking social censure or ostracism. We may not like the fact, but we are like iron filings in a magnetic field. We flatter ourselves that we are immune to such social pressures, but we are not.

Long before 1933, there was already a faint smell of burning in the air, and people were passionately interested in discovering the seat of the fire and the incendiary. And when denser clouds were seen to gather over Germany, and the burning of the Reichstag gave the signal, then at last there was no mistake as to where the incendiary, evil in person, dwelt. Terrifying as this discovery was, in the course of time it brought a certain sense of relief; now at least we knew for certain where all unrighteousness was to be found, whereas we ourselves were securely entrenched in the opposite camp, among the respectable people, whose moral indignation might well be expected to rise higher and higher with every fresh sign of guilt on the other side. Why even the call for mass executions no longer offends the ears of the righteous, and the burning of German towns was looked on as the judgement of God. Hate had found respectable motives, and had emerged from the state of more secret and personal idiosyncrasy. And all the time the highly respectable public had not the slightest inkling that they themselves were thus living in the immediate neighbourhood of evil.     [C G Jung: p.50, After the Catastrophe: in Essays on Contemporary Events: (trans - Welsh, Hannah & Briner) Kegan Paul, London, 1947]

The polarities in 1930s and '40s Europe were simple to observe. The more Germany under the Nazis was seen as the epicentre of evil, the more virtuous by contrast its opponents seemed; even Soviet Russia under Stalin was rehabilitated as a virtuous ally. 

The stark truth was that the British became blind to the horrors they were raining down on German civilians – women, children, infants, the infirm, the elderly. Being German, or even simply being in Germany was sufficient, regardless of whether that was by choice or whether it was as forced labour. The bombing of Coventry and other cities during the Blitz became a cause célèbre justifying the destruction of German towns and cities without compassion or remorse. 

I once met an Englishman from Jersey, who during the German occupation of the Channel Islands was deported to Germany as forced labour. Being skilled at horticulture, he was put to work as a field hand in the Eder Valley. He survived the catastrophic flood caused by the destruction of the Edersee Dam by the Dambusters' raid, but then was detailed to the rescue operation. 

He spoke of the horror of digging the bodies of children and babies out of the mud. Of the valley being clogged in places with bodies of people and animals, mangled in with uprooted trees and vegetation and the flotsam and jetsam from the destroyed houses. Even forty years after he still had nightmares. The work took months.

In Britain the raid is still commemorated. It has become legendary. It has been the subject of radio programmes, films, memorial flypasts, re-enactments, computer games, blog sites, and even been used in a Carling Black Label advert. 

As Jung pointed out:

And all the time the highly respectable public had not the slightest inkling that they themselves were thus living in the immediate neighbourhood of evil. 

Polarisation blinds. Societies have their own force fields that highlight what flatters their collective self-image and develops collective amnesia about uncomfortable truths: the ridges and troughs of belonging. Comforting and shared narrative lines about the past and present become communal folklore, heavily re-enforced by the media, and even built into school curricula, becoming a standard received version of history.

In researching about the Pickards and their circle I was of necessity dealing with a counter-culture: a community not in synch with the mainstream; pacifists when the dominant ethos was anything but pacifist, especially during the two World Wars and in their aftermath. Imperialism and militarism were closely allied to patriotism in the collective imagination. Questioning either was tantamount to being a traitor. The contempt felt for 'conchies' (conscientious objectors) was visceral. 

 

 

Ourea, or the numinous presence of Allt-fawr

 

Capel y Gorlan, Cwmorthin

Numinous this, numinous that, all I know is that sometimes we are forced out of our skin. A moment in time that is different, where we are knocked sideways whether we would or not. 

That is what happened to me in Cwmorthin, near Capel y Gorlan (chapel in the sheep fold). It is a stiff walk up into the mouth of Cwmorthin, and then along the cwm to the tumbled down remains of the chapel. A  remote place in a deserted valley where the stillness soaked through the skin along with the damp. A silence so deep that even the grazing of the odd sheep on the far hillside could be felt; and then a sense of presence overwhelming. Something ancient. Something that had taken form both of itself and of the communion offered in the chapel, and, who knows, of older offering long before time was counted. Allt-fawr – its name a tribute to its size – a presence by it sheer wall of endless hill stretching up beyond the cloud, and wrapping the valley in its curve to the exclusion of all else. No wonder the Greeks thought such mountains to be gods, 'ourea', their brooding presence being so tangible. 

I sensed a fluidity over time in the presence. The last imprint on it being the close harmony hymns of the slate miners sung on their one day off. Their one day not under the ground. Miners who had hollowed out that vast hill. A slate mine 1500 feet from the top level down 25 floors of stale caverns to its lowest. 50 miles of tunnels and tramways all inside Allt-fawr, the mountain. A mine as big as the vastness of its name. The scars of the mining now fading as the mountain reclaimed them, wreathing them in rain soaked moss, lichen, bracken and grass. The soft tread of sheep being all that disturbed them now, and the chapel itself fallen to ruin. 

But still the presence persists, tentatively described by a word from a tongue alien to those Welsh hills – god? – and that from one who is no theist; hills that were used to hearing the word "Duw" sung with confidence in their embracing fold. 

The theologian Rudolf Otto was in want of a term to describe what he felt was special about religious experience, so he created 'numinous' from the Latin numen, meaning "arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring."  Jung found Otto's term of great value, because he knew how such moments shone in the minds of his patients – they were touch-stones of religious experience; the access points where the safety and supposed sufficiency of the rational ran out and exposure to the spiritual happened. Once exposed the doorway was open to growth by incorporating the spiritual, the numinous, the religious, into the life of his patients, releasing them from their psychological malaise. They were suffering because they were shut off from deeper communion with life, often by their overdeveloped rationality, and their rejection of the mystical, the numinous, the religious.

In a letter to P.W. Martin (20 August 1945), the founder of the International Study Center of Applied Psychology in Oxted, England, C.G. Jung confirmed the centrality of numinous experience in his life and work: "It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character" (Jung 1973, 1: 377). If one holds the classical Jungian view that the only genuine cure for neurosis is to grow out of it through pursuing individuation, then treatment based on this model would seem necessarily to include "the approach to the numinous," as Jung states so firmly in this letter.   [ Jung - Martin letter 1946 "On the Importance of Numinous Experience in the Alchemy of Individuation" Murray Stein, Ph.D.]

P W Martin was one of the main members of the Geneva Quaker-Jungian group to which Irene Pickard belonged. Her archive included papers by Martin. He was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the group, often travelled to Zürich to see Jung during the 1930s, and maintained contact with him after the war, gaining Jung's support over the establishment of the centre at Oxted.

Spiritual experiences, religious experiences, are not rational. They are something else; divine intoxication; divine madness; opening of the being; being touched; stopping the world: they are a door into another way of relating to the world; to another dimension of being. They have the authenticity of the moment of transport; they need no validation because in that moment they simply are.

Jung was a complete relativist at this point. He did not believe that only one source of the holy could have a healing influence. He did not subscribe to the view, for instance, that only Jesus can give us the salvation we need. Jung believed that the numinous could derive from countless sources, and religious traditions, from mythologies, cosmologies, esoteric systems, and arts and science. Moreover, he believed that the numinous is present, at least potentially, in common experience, and can be felt and made known through meaningful coincidence, synchronicity and an ‘inner’ relationship with the facts of the world. He did not believe that institutions of faith or creedal doctrines could regulate the spiritual experience, but that such experience occurs spontaneously, as we enlarge life with depth and commitment.   [David  Tacey: How to Read Jung: Granta Books, London, 2006]

Nor did Jung think that belief, whether inherited, inculcated or otherwise acquired, was any form of substitute for honestly accepted experience, of openness to the numinous:

When people say that 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 in answer to Philp’s question #3: Is the God-archetype All?: H L Philp: Jung and the Problem of Evil: Rockliff, London, 1958]

Finding the narrative line

Irene Pickard (née Speller),  started her adult life as a personal secretary, one of the few occupations open to 'respectable' young women in 1911. The typewriter was a real instrument of female emancipation. Its mastery, along with the other secretarial skills, enabling a degree of income and independence, perhaps even entrée into homes and lives of the socially 'superior'. In the class ridden society of La Belle Époque it was one of the few opportunities for a girl to 'better' herself, to enter worlds which her birth might not have given her access to.

Fortunately for posterity, Irene never lost the secretarial habit of making copies and filing. That is how her archive came about. It was composed of a mass of documents created between 1911 and 1982, a library of over 100 volumes on Jungian related themes, a box of personal letters between Rendel Harris and herself, articles in two periodicals, one published on each side of the Atlantic, along with a number of pamphlets written by her husband, Bertram, and others. 

When I first encountered what Irene had referred to as her 'compost heap' it was obvious that hidden within was a remarkable story. The problem was finding a narrative line which would give it order.

First there was the biographic frame of lives lived in Britain, Switzerland and the USA, and identifying who the main persona were, their relationships, the nature of the work they were engaged with, and how Quakerism related to their lives. Then there was the task of identifying the chronology –  which document belong to when. But what was central was the story of Irene's infatuation with Jung as a complement and argumentation to her Quakerism. And not just Irene, but the other members of the Quaker-Jungian group in Geneva too. An infatuation that would prove to have traceable consequences on both sides of the Atlantic up until the present.

As I familiarised myself with the archive, what became apparent was that Irene and the others had gone through a learning process with identifiable stages.

First came a preparatory stage, which put them in Geneva in between the wars and explained why they were there. A stage dominated by the theme of peace-work, but also by how Irene and Bertram came together as a couple.

Then came their introduction to Jung, which led to an intense phase of exploration and assimilation of his ideas. A period which according to Irene produced "the most intensive and far reaching study group I have ever known".

What followed in the later 1930s was a period of accommodation as the impact of Jung's ideas on their lives and faith were worked through, set against the the deteriorating international situation.

That led to a stage of dissemination starting during the Second World War, as the now scattered group shared what they had learned with the wider Quaker community and beyond. Dissemination that continued for years in the aftermath of the war as Irene and Bertram once more returned to Geneva to pick up the threads of their peace-work.

Finally there was a stage of consequences as the wider Quaker world absorbed what was being shared and undertook their own explorations and discoveries, and evaluated the the significance of Jung to their lives and faith.

Following that pattern of development allowed chapters to emerge and take their place. 

All that was needed was to add a few chapters to provide context and to trace the development of the peace work Bertram was engaged with. No small matter for someone who became something of a hub for the efforts of so many of the NGOs in Geneva, and who played a part in the founding the the United Nations, and became one of the first members of its secretariat, mirroring the role he had created for himself before the war as the spokes person for the NGOs to the League of Nations. 

The interweave of the twin themes of living out the peace-testimony – the Bertram theme – whilst comprehending and deepening spirituality due to Jung – the Irene theme – formed the two voices of a fugue that was their shared life, and the two themes that run through the book.

Preliminary: (What is) Quakerism; Re-visioning Quakerism – Harris, Jones and Rowntree; 1914 – a World Ripped Asunder; Well met at Woodbrooke; The Peace Testimony; Quaker responses to the 'Great War' and its Aftermath; Peace-work in Geneva. 

Exploration and assimilation: Encountering Jung's Ideas; Tina Keller-Jenny's Exposition; Meeting with Jung in Zürich ; The Letters; Many papers were written and read; Reactions – H G Wood and Howard Collier.

Accommodation: The Rising Tide of Fascism; Reconciliation, Relief and Refugees; The Calm before the Storm; The Looming Storm; Belief in an Age of Analysis; The Last Gasps of the League; Escape. 

Dissemination: Peace-makers in a time of war: The Aftermath of War: The Road back to Geneva: The Women's International Forum and the Friday Club; After Aion – Irene's Dark Night of the Soul: Answer to Job: P W Martin and the Experiment in Depth: Elined, Irene and the Inward Light: Martin Buber, Marjorie Martin & Piet Englesman; The Various Light; Pierre Lacout – God is Silence: Peace as a Process; The Godmothers – Elined: The Godmothers – Irene.

Consequences:  Jungian Ripples in America: Jungian Ripples in Britain: The Living Myth.

Those are the working titles and the pattern of chapters.

The War in its Effects upon Women by H M Swanwick, August 1916

Three themes emerged from researching Irene Pickard's archive: Quakerism, Jung and peace-work. If it was not for the peace-work the Pickards would not have been in Geneva, and the Irene may never have been exposed to Jung's ideas with such intensity, and certainly would never have met the man himself, nor, one expects, ever been in correspondence with him nor been on friendly terms with his wife, Emma Jung, herself a significant analyst. 

Emma Jung's visits to Geneva to talk to the Geneva Quakers was one of the key events deepening Irene's appreciation of Jung's psychology and its importance to her Quakerism. For Irene, it opened up the inner workings of the mind and gave life and validity to her faith. It placed it on a 'scientific' footing as an essential part of being a complete and psychologically healthy individual. Contrary to the Marxists or to the Positivists – both prevalent philosophies at the time – religion was neither the 'opium of the people' nor vacuous nonsense: it was, according to Jung, essential to the process of successful individuation (to becoming an increasingly mature and balanced individual).

However, it was not analytical psychology that had brought Irene to Geneva but peace-work. It was where the League of Nations was which put it at the heart of the efforts to build a new way of working internationally that might prevent another catastrophe like the First World War. It was why the Quakers had decided to open a centre near John Calvin's cathedral in the old town, and why they decided to appoint Bertram Pickard as its first full time secretary, with Irene as the warden of a proposed student hostel for young Quakers studying International Relations at the University – the first university courses of this kind in the world.

What made the Quakers adamant that they needed to have a voice in Geneva was their experience of the war. Many had been so much at odds with mainstream sentiment, so much in conflict with the authorities over such issues as conscription, and had reacted to the war so much at variance with the dominant patriotism – working to alleviate the suffering caused rather than compounding the suffering by participation – that they felt impelled to aid, in any way they could, steps taken to construct a permanent peace. 

Living out the Peace Testimony under the duress of a world war had not been a comfortable experience. It had tested many Friends to breaking point and had led some to abandon the Society. Helping to construct a peaceful future would need considerable investment in the opportunities for collaborative working with those outside the Society. That was the model that had allowed the Quakers to have such an impact in the abolitionist movement: it amplified their concern by finding and working with allies.

Once such ally was Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939). She had been active in the women's suffrage movement, but resigned over the Suffragette's active support for the war effort, and particularly their decision not to take part in the Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in 1915. 

In 1916 she published her inflammatory condemnation of men, as makers of the war, for their blindness towards its effects on women, who suffered inordinately but had no voice. War was pre-eminently the doing of men. She also condemned her erstwhile companions in the British suffrage movement for their lack of compassion for the impact of war on women in the conflict zones: 

… although [British women] suffer like all the other women by the death and maiming of their men, they are curiously removed from the stunning effects of war on their own soil. Their grown men die, it is true, too young and very dear. But they do not see their babies killed by the thousands; they do not see their daughters outraged; they do not have their homesteads and fields defiled and burned and blown to atoms; they do not have to take part in those hideous retreats of women and children and sick and old, starving and dying on the cruel roads: they do not bear their babies to the sound of cannon … [The War in its Effect upon Women, August 1916]

She shared with the Quaker an understanding of war as tragedy and as a massive failure of human governance. She even suggest that women should ask themselves –

… whether men are so made that periodical wars are necessary for their bodily and spiritual health. Many people tell them so, and sometimes, in bewildered amaze at all the suffering brought about for what seem trumpery reasons, women will feel inclined to think that, after all, men fight because they like fighting; they always will like fighting; they always will do what they like. 

However, she thinks it is only a half truth, as:

… the mind of man should be equal to the task of directing and transforming this instinct (to fight) to the common good. By the prodigious development of mechanical and chemical resources, men have perhaps forged the weapons that will teach them that they must kill war. For it seems that unless man will kill war, industrial and military machinery will kill man.

Helena went on in 1919 to be a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. The league had grown out of Jane Addams's peace movement via the International Congress of Women. It appointed Emily Greene Balch as its first International Secretary-Treasurer, with its headquarters in Geneva.

Emily soon came into contact with the small Quaker community in Geneva, and became a member in 1921, saying: 

Religion seems to me one of the most interesting things in life, one of the most puzzling, richest and thrilling fields of human thought and speculation... religious experience and thought need also a light a day and sunshine and a companionable sharing with others of which it seems to me there is generally too little ... The Quaker worship at its best seems to me give opportunities for this sort of sharing without profanation.     [Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 60]

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the WILPF. One of three Nobel prize winners associated between the wars with that small Quaker Meeting in Geneva.

In 1924 Helena Swanwick severed as substitute delegate to the League of Nations on behalf of Britain, and between 1928 and 1931, during the build up to the disarmament conference, as part of the Labour British Empire delegation.

During both those periods Helena would have connected with Emily Greene Balch and others on the network of peace activists in the city, including many from the Quaker Meeting. During her second spell that network was joined by Bertram and Irene Pickard. Bertram in particular played a very prominent part in the network. In 1929 he was appointed as Honorary Secretary to the newly formed Fédération Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies à Genèva [FIIG] an umbrella organisation bringing together all the non-governmental organisations [NGOs] in the city. He also became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organisations in Geneva. He made himself very much the hub of the peace activist network. 

There was a fascination in researches springing from Irene's archive, to see how apparently diverse people interwove their lives because of the networks they became part of. How they gravitated towards each other because of their commitment to one or other ideal. The network of committed peace activists in Geneva was no exception. 

I first came across Helena Swanwick in Katherine Storr's book Exuded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914-15 whilst researching outwards from Irene's archive into its historical context. References in Katherine Storr's book led me to finding a copy of Helena's 1916 booklet, which I then used as an example of divergent attitudes to the war. It was only later that I discovered that she was connected to Emily Greene Balch via the WILPF, and had been involved in peace work in Geneva. Writing based on an archive is very much like fitting pieces into a jigsaw, but where so many pieces are hopelessly lost for ever, or others do not turn up until late.

Meeting the Messiah: 4 – Where am I now?

 The foundational story of Christianity – the story of Jesus, his ministry and death, and of how he inspired his followers to take the Gospel (the 'good news') out into an ever widening world – is the central pivot on which the faith hangs. It is what differentiates it from the other Abrahamic faiths. 'God', known by one name or another – or even as the unnamable – exists in them all. Jesus exists in two of them – Christianity and Islam – but Jesus Christ, the man-god, exemplar and teacher of the 'second commandment – "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." (Mark 12.31) – only exists in Christianity. The authenticity of his story and teachings are crucial to Christianity's supposed authority and allure; but therein hangs a thousand and one questions.

Through my school years I was exposed to the Jesus story both at the daily school assembly – the required "daily act of collective worship"  – and the required lessons of 'Religious Education'; and, for those unlucky enough to be sent to a boarding school, compulsory Church attendance on Sundays plus an act of "collective worship" every evening. Enough exposure to have some familiarity with at least the outlines of the Jesus story. Exposure, which if anything acted as aversion therapy: by fourteen I was a sceptic, by sixteen an iconoclast, and by eighteen a cast iron atheist.

What I had received was, we might say, was the standard version of the Jesus story – if fact, given the established status of the Church of England, the authorised version – framed within a lapsarian theology, which I had reacted to with vehement distaste. I found so much of it repugnant: it was antithetical to life, to joy, to drinking the substance of being, to celebrating each breath. I had to agree with Nietzsche, that the paviours of Christianity were life denying "afterworldsmen". Christianity fed on guilt: it induced it, and then it fed on it. Repentance and penance and falling on the mercy of an unseen and unseeable being who judges and weighs every second of your life, who might just admit you to the golden afterworld, or condemn you to eternal, unimaginable and unspeakable suffering, and who was so insecure as to require regular and repeated doses of praise and worship (I am a jealous God Exodus 20: 2-6) were the substance of the religion – and I was having non of it. You could not have put more distance between me and Christianity if you tried. 

The numinosity of life led me via the East – Buddhism, Daoism, Zen, Dzogchen – and back again to the West, where I found myself sitting in Quaker meetings and once again encountering versions of Christianity, but transformed by the journey I had been on. My eyes did not fall on it in the same way as the young man's eyes. I felt sorry for what it has so often become, but heard once again echoes of the far off teachings of that wandering Galilean rabbi. 

Researching Irene Pickard's archive forced me to reacquaint myself with the Jesus story – to meet the messiah – to update both my understanding of the story and my relationship with it. Her archive was full of reference to modern theological thinkers, ranging from her mentor, Rendel Harris, through Carl Barth, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer to Thomas Merton and Don Cuppit, with whom she corresponded about his television programme Who is Jesus? (1977). One thing they all had in common: their Jesus was not the one I had been introduced to and rejected. 

Carl Gustav Jung, whose works provided the lenses for Irene to see her spiritual questing through, detected in the human psyche a nodal point – an archetype – around which all our spiritual feelings, images, and ideas clustered, which he called 'the god archetype'. He suspected that it was universal, but the form it would appear in would vary depending on the cultural material available. He also thought that it was itself evolving, finding better fits for its expression, which is why religions came and went. The evolution of Christianity out of Judaism and its supplanting Paganism throughout the Roman Empire, being an example. Its emerging form being made by the transfer of pre-existing symbols from earlier religions, such as that of the god-man who undergoes a cycle of death and rebirth. He suggested that if a better fit for the archetype came along, then Christianity itself would be replaced.

So what versions of 'Jesus'  – according to Jung, the Christian manifestation of the archetype – are on offer? They seem to range from the Jesus of the evangelicals, based on assumptions of Biblical inerrancy, and the certainty of the coming judgement, and even something strange and apparently not in the Bible called the 'rapture'; through the long established Jesus of Catholic dogma, with the elevated role of his mother to that of divine interceder; on via various demystifying versions, such as those emphasising Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, to the entire thing being a fabrication, a fiction, a didactic vehicle, a myth. Take your pick. 

One thing I think can be observed. At the budding point at which new religions are born, almost invariably there is a charismatic teacher who is focussed on reforming the pre-existing religion. The reforms may be accommodated by the faith absorbing the reforms, or by the formation of a new sect within the tradition – think here of the birth of the Franciscans, or the Jesuits – or by a schism developing, and a new branch of the religion being formed – think here of Martin Luther and the Reformation resulting in the formation of the Protestant Churches, or later of the splitting off of the non-conformist churches and sects – or by the formation of entirely new religions. The rejection of the reforms, and often the death of the charismatic teacher – sometimes at the hands of defenders of the original faith – leads to their followers either having to abandon the reforms, or set off on their own, as is seen with the birth of Sikhism, the Bahá'í or the Mormons. In each case at the budding point there is an inspired teacher. It is their followers who create the new faith: it was probably thus with Christianity.

What do I think? I know we have the texts containing the Jesus story – a legend if you will. I suspect that the Gospels are woven out of oral traditions about the sayings and doings of principally one, but may be more, charismatic itinerant Jewish teachers. The Gospels, thus created, seem to chart a progress of increasing deification, starting with Mark, where Jesus is infused with the wisdom of God manifest as love at the moment of his baptism, who then tried to live that out; through Matthew and Luke where, as well as his resurrection and ascension, the divine and miraculous origins of his birth are added; to John where, in highly literate and educated Greek, the story is reworked to emphasise the Passion – the god come to earth to suffer and redeem.

In Christianity I feel there are two distinct voices: that of Jesus the teacher, and that of Paul the evangelist. The one teaching a here and now immanence of the Kingdom that is open to all seekers (Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: Matthew 7:7); of inner revelation that will transform life; of a Jew teaching Jews to stand and live in the immanent presence of their Lord in the hope of the imminent coming of his kingdom as a result (right living leading to right ordering of the world through mass alignment with the right living); and the Greek speaking Paul, racked with guilt because of his persecution of followers of Jesus, who postpones the kingdom to an afterlife, as he is unfit to live in the immanence. His Greek speaking heritage making tenable the notion of Jesus as a god-man and the existence of an afterworld: both grafts onto the original Jewish stock.

The evangelist Paul was mission driven. First to defend Judaism against the Jesus sect, then to spread the teachings of that sect as far and wide as he could, regardless of the distinction between Jew and Gentile. It is interesting that he received his transmission of the teaching in Damascus from a community with at least three degrees of separation from Jesus, who were transmitting via an oral tradition, the intent of which was to proselytize not to preserve historical accuracy. It contained what inspired them, not what was testable as historic fact. They were fired up by the revelation of spiritual truth. Paul did travel back to Jerusalem but fell out big time with Jesus community there, and took his version of the teaching to the Romano-Greek world as a result. The Aramaic speaking Jesus community in Jerusalem's influence was largely destroyed along with the destruction of Jerusalem and the expulsion of the Jews, hence Paul's version came to dominate. 

For me some of the words of the legendary Jesus of the Gospels resonate deeply. Fewer of Paul's. I cannot say I ascribe to the cosmology or eschatology that, following Paul, is inbuilt into so much of Christianity. For me Jesus is one of the great wisdom teachers, one not to be ignored, but just one. His teaching of immanence corresponds well with what I have from my wanderings in the Buddhist world. His ethic of love the real heart of the diamond: om mani padme hum! (The jewel at the heart of the lotus). 

But I dare say my views are heretical and an anathema to many.  

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".

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?