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.

[movingfinger]

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

[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

[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.

[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.

[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 ;-)