Psychology books I am getting rid of, Part II

[rachelmanija]

The Essential Jung. When people tell me Jungian stuff, I love it! And then I attempt actual Jung. Where are they even finding all those cool ideas? All I am seeing is (opening at random) Even though alchemy was essentially more materialistic in its procedures than the dogma, both of them remain at the second, anticipatory stage of the coniunctio, the union of the unio mentalis with the body.

And it's not just because I'm opening at random. When I was in school I started from the beginning. The effect was exactly the same as if I'd opened it at random. Has anyone here read Jung in German? Is this just a translation effect, or is he equally incomprehensible in the original? (And what if you do know German, but you don’t know Latin? WHY IS THE LATIN NEVER TRANSLATED?)

Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert Johnson

First sentence: The shadow: what is this curious dark element that follows us like a saurian tail and pursues us so relentlessly in our psychological work?

This is not Johnson’s fault but I was irresistibly reminded of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night (one of my all-time favorite books, by the way) in which she mentions a terrible sf story she read as a child which concluded with “And so they returned to the saurian slime from whence they sprung!” She and her brother created the jingle,

The saurian slime from whence they sprung
Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

No, okay, that is Johnson’s fault. That is a ridiculous sentence and it also deserves a mocking jingle. I know it’s a metaphor, but it is also an image. Please take a moment to picture a psychoanalyst being stalked by a disembodied lizard tail.

If you don’t know the concept of the shadow this book is a decent introduction to it, but you could do much better. Unimpressive.

Inner Work, by Robert Johnson. This is actually a pretty good book on working with dreams and imagination and the unconscious. I’m not keeping it because I get the principles and it’s not so well-written or uniquely insightful that I’d re-read. But if you’re interested, this will give you a lot of useful tools.

I don’t do a lot of dream work, either for myself or for my clients, but it comes up occasionally. (I do a lot of work with PTSD-related nightmares, but that’s a different thing. Those are not subtle.) When clients ask me what a dream means, I tell them that only the dreamer can know the meaning of the dream and ask them what they think it means. If they have no idea, I start asking what specific parts make them think of, if anything has a cultural meaning or how dreams are generally interpreted in their culture, etc. (“Is there anyone in your family who knows a lot about dreams?” Not uncommonly, there is.)

Treating Eating Disorders, ed. Werne. This is from 1996. I’d rather read something more recent. I think a lot of ideas in the field have changed since then.

Comments

[mme_hardy]

Could it be that Jung, like Birth of a Nation, is more relevant in the things that people have created building on it than in itself?

[the_rck]

I think the Latin thing is a bit of gate keeping snobbery. That is, there's an old idea that anyone who doesn't know Latin isn't a proper scholar and thus isn't entitled to the full text.

I first encountered this in college when I tried to read an old translation of a Chinese novel called The Golden Lotus. I didn't know when I picked it up, but it's relatively pornographic. The translator said in his preface that he didn't feel comfortable translating anything sexual into English but that the text makes no sense without those bits. His solution--? He put all the sexy bits in Latin because that way true scholars, who I suppose he thought were above porn or at least intellectual enough that porn was okay, could read them but people just looking for porn couldn't.

[ellen_fremedon]

Translators of Latin, meanwhile, put all the dirty bits in Greek.

[graydon]

There is a theory that this was done as an unacknowledged motivation mechanism; students, being students, would be able to identify where the dirty bits were and be thus motivated to study harder to understand those sections of the text. (Not a descriptive context in which to use "passages". :)

Or you get Sayers not translating the French or the Latin in fiction, in part because the viewpoint character certainly didn't need it translated and in part because that makes the text posh in a way that, in that time and place, certainly didn't hurt sales.


Jung isn't incomprehensible; Jung is a lot like William Blake. It will make sense if you start at the beginning and read all of it with close attention. Many people who have made that large effort believe it to have been worth it.

[kore]

Jung isn't incomprehensible; Jung is a lot like William Blake.

Heh, very true. //once had a summer session "Blake & Yeats" class taught by the guy who edited the Norton Blake that was so brutal the class nearly got T-shirts that said "I survived Blake & Yeats '92"

[graydon]

That would almost have to be a brutal class; I hope it was the edifying brain-expanded-too-fast version, rather than the soul-crushing one.

And I now have a mental image of the Rough Beast slouching up to Rintrah with a hopeful expression.

Oh dear.

[kore]

It WAS. First we did Blake, for about four or six weeks (can't remember which), and then Yeats, again for 4-6 weeks. Class was two hours long three times a week. Papers were due at the end of every week too. I got VERY familiar with Blake's cosmology and much better at analyzing Yeats's poetry, but it was really not an enjoyable experience. It was taught by John E Grant altho we had the First Edition of the Designs book. http://books.wwnorton.com/books/webad.aspx?id=9997

....come to think of it I now don't believe Blake and Yeats actually had that much in common. The Yeats of 'A Vision,' maybe, but Yeats's cosmology is almost Ptolemaic, very rigid and ordered and cyclical. Blake is the exact opposite of that. (Yeats would be Freud, sort of, more methodical and disciplined, if Blake is Jung.)

The class did introduce me to Blake's literary annotations, which I still love for stuff like "Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop." Seeing him tear into Bacon was also really satisfying, as I had to read Bacon as an undergrad and just loathed him. http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/erdgen.xq?id=b12

[graydon]

I'd think that sort of course was either "I want to teach Blake but they won't let me teach a whole course on Blake and the chair/dean/head-of-department loves Yeats" or "how do we fry stretch their brains? Polar opposite cosmologies!"

It's kinda like teaching Spenser opposite Chesterton (Or Houseman opposite Tennyson) in an "English Monarchy in Poetry" course. The faint smell of failing neurons is the point.

I have seen it unkindly suggested that Blake was a bit addled by poor workplace safety and the fumes from diverse etchants, but think it's more that Blake just decided to be the living avatar of Opposite Day and was smart enough to make it stick. (the one that sticks with me at this remove of time is the notion of morally salutary corrosives.)

[kore]

It was certainly stretchy! Boy, that teacher loved A Vision, too. And had us read the prophetic poems, oy vey. SADLY we did not read the Milton epic, because that sounds fun.

It's kinda like teaching Spenser opposite Chesterton (Or Houseman opposite Tennyson) in an "English Monarchy in Poetry" course. The faint smell of failing neurons is the point.

Housman and Tennyson sounds kinda GREAT, actually. Or Tennyson and Hardy! At the same school I did the Victorian poems (I was working towards a minor in Viclit but dropped it) and man, you could see people sink into depression after about ten minutes discussing one poem. I love his prosody but the actual meaning is so grim.

more that Blake just decided to be the living avatar of Opposite Day and was smart enough to make it stick.

HAH
YES

Also I don't think printer fumes or whatever could make anyone that coherently incoherent....then again fumes might explain some of his terrible terrible names, like Oothoon.

[graydon]

then again fumes might explain some of his terrible terrible names, like Oothoon.

I can't remember any of the specifics, but I remember being told that Blake didn't speak Received and that Blake scholarship wasn't, at least then, quite large enough a pond to get into trying to reconstruct how Blake would have pronounced the poems beyond being sure there were surprises.

Housman and Tennyson would be something, wouldn't it?

Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you've been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.

as contrasted

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story ;
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle ; answer, echoes, dying, dying,
dying.

I admit I have an acquired flinch response to Hardy, and far too much willingness to credit the idea that the explanation for the novels stopping -- Hardy felt another novel would make suicide inevitable -- despite its dubious antecedents. (Also faint hopes of obscure literary revenge if the Doorstop ever makes it out into the world.)

(I was sort of wobbling between English and CS, and staggered out with the CS flavour. I will always remember the Tennyson class on the Lady of Shallot with Gregorian chant coming through the walls (theology building...) or the poor prof's embarrassment at discovering having taught their (excellent) "mortality in Tennyson" lecture without knowing that was the day Challenger exploded on launch.)

[kore]

I will always remember the Tennyson class on the Lady of Shallot with Gregorian chant coming through the walls (theology building...) or the poor prof's embarrassment at discovering having taught their (excellent) "mortality in Tennyson" lecture without knowing that was the day Challenger exploded on launch.

Oh wow, that's pretty amazing.

The Hardy poem that seemed to induce depression in actually everyone in our seminar was "The Convergence of the Twain." We spent about half a class on that one. But apparently Hardy still gets sold as a RURAL NATURE POET, which is about as priceless as Housman being an Arcadian type. I keep picturing students thinking they're going to get fresh Woods and Pastures new, and getting smacked in the face instead with "Channel Firing" and God going LOL NOT JUDGEMENT DAY YET, ROLL OVER AND GO BACK TO SLEEP at the end.

[jesuswasbatman]

There's a British writer from the twentieth-century, I forget who, who claimed that a major stimulus to learning Latin for him and many of his adolescent schoolmates was so that they could read the case histories in Psychopathia Sexualis (which were similarly in Latin so that people who were looking for porn wouldn't be able to read them).

[rachelmanija]

Grad school was probably not the ideal place to start, given the sheer amount of reading I was doing. I may make another try while on vacation or something.

[graydon]

Jung is hard work. [1]

You also have to contend with Jung's revision habits; the terminology apparently mutated over his life.

I've seen it seriously suggested you should a)learn the appropriate flavour of German and b)read the editions of the major books in publication order.

That strikes me as unlikely to repay the level of effort unless you want to be a professor of Jungian thought somewhere.

I don't think any of Sabina Spielrein's work is in English, though there seem to be some meta-analyses. I was thinking that might be easier going. Or Marie-Louise von Franz, who I believe does have publications in English.

[1] I think Jung suffers terribly from trying to normalize and/or exculpate just how terrifically messed up he was and just how badly he behaved.

[movingfinger]

For me, Jung's writing on archetypes is the most relevant, but reading Northrop Frye may be as illuminating?

[kore]

I second the Northrop Frye rec, he's a very good stylist and often dryly amusing. Fearful Symmetry (parts of which I had to read in that Blake class I mentioned elsethread) was pretty good. Anatomy of Criticism was tough chewing, tho, and I don't think I ever finished the Great Code. (I got interested in Frye mostly because of Margaret Atwood's essay about being his student, altho I think I'd heard of him before then, probably because in my salad days I was v interested in poetic criticism.)

[rachelmanija]

Hmm, thanks. I have actually never read him.

[kore]

I've only read what's available of this on Google Books, but I liked what I read http://www.amazon.com/How-Why-Still-Read-Jung/dp/0415686482 'How and Why We Still Read Jung: Personal and professional reflections'

I think part of the problem is RFC Hull has had a lock on Jung translations, the way Strachey had a lock on Freud (and Constance Garnett had a lock on the Russian novelists/playwrights). So you're not reading Jung, you're reading Jung-in-Hull's-English.

I agreed that Jung is like Blake because both of them are mystical visionaries with a very particular personal system of symbols and myths. They're both occult writers, interested in religion, visions, symbolism and spirituality. It's too simple to say Jung is what you get if you take Freud and go all the way in the opposite direction from him, but there's truth in it.

IMHO it's really hard to get an idea of Jung's systems from reading just his stuff in English, without secondary material. Essential Jung is a really broad-ranging anthology of excerpts chosen by someone else (and translated by Hull IIRC). The first Jungian book I ever read, as a teenager, was Man and His Symbols, which is deliberately designed as an overview and has only one essay by Jung. There are also some good suggestions here https://www.librarything.com/topic/12134

[rachelmanija]

That makes a lot of sense. Hull's style is probably not the most congenial.

[kore]

Yeah, it really is like Strachey and Freud. (Or Jowett and Plato.) They use particular concepts that aren't necessarily in the work but are sort of implied, but then it winds up sounding different in English and people interpret those concepts and off to the races we go. It's a problem inherent in all translation, but since Hull and Strachey and Jowett (oh my) each did ALL of the work and so their editions became standard, you get the problem of having no other translations for comparison.

[staranise]

Oooh, the Johnson book sounds up my alley!

[naomikritzer]

Treating eating disorders has changed like 180 degrees since 1996. If you're looking for a book, seek out something on Family-Based Treatment or the Maudsley approach.

This is written for a lay audience rather than psychologists but I found "Brave Girl Eating" to be riveting and it also talks in some detail about this approach to treatment and how it worked for one girl and her family.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I will check it out. Honestly, sometimes books for laypeople are better. This is not my first go-round getting rid of useless books for therapists (and not because they were outdated, either. I have no idea why I have that ancient eating disorders book because it wasn't one of my school textbooks.)

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The image of the disembodied dinosaur tail following some unfortunate psychoanalyst is hilarious. It sounds like the start of a surrealist dark comedy. Hopefully eventually the whole dinosaur will manifest and the psychoanalyst will have to ride it into battle.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I would watch that anime.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

But it's not disembodied -- it's attached to the psychoanalyst's butt. At the brainstem. Animate that!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

THE PSYCHOANALYST WILL TURN INTO A DINOSAUR.

This is becoming more of a horror film than a comedy. Still into it.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Umm, it's not so much that Jung's easier to read in German, it's that having grown up in Germany makes it easier to read Jung, if that makes sense? Which is to say, I can understand him in German or English, but I totally get why non-German-speakers can't understand him in either.

Kant, now, is impossible in English but just about comprehensible in German, and Hegel is just about comprehensible in either but you'll wish he wasn't, when you get to the bit about how unbaptized people aren't really human if not before ;-)