Quadrant: The Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation

Volume XXXIX, No. 1, Winter 2009

From the Editor — Kathryn Madden

The stimulating discourse between Joseph Cambray and David Tresan in the past three issues of Quadrant has expanded our understanding of the historical and philosophical impact upon democracy and organizational life and has illuminated our understanding of ethics and ideals in the context of groups and culture. With Cambray’s response, “Reply to David Tresan’s ‘Zabriskie’s Point: Democracies and Other Systems,’” we come to a point in which we hope that the visionary ideas of both of these fine thinkers rekindle and resurface with new perspectives from which we might approach conflict at all levels of being. Is any claim to certainty inevitably reductive and incomplete by virtue of the tendency of the rational mind to restrict and to foreclose? How do we locate and continue to explore that sensitive encounter between chaos and order? How can we continue to explore the paradigm of emergence inherent to experiencing the possible impossible of synchronicities? Will a polycentric view remain the most nurturing perspective for democratic forums, for the integrity of groups and for collective and global identities? Certainly the discourse will continue to be pertinent to a changing world in which inter-relational connectivity needs to be embraced on ever more intricate and complex levels of communication.

History has shown us all too often that the very container needed for emergence can crack under the inflated ideology of even one dictator, destroying humankind in the name of an ideal. An alternative paradigm of psychology such as arose in the split between Jung and Freud, could not help but fuel the projection of condemnation that Jung was victim to in a frayed post-World War II Europe. In the second article of this issue, “The World War II Attacks on Jung: Eleanor Bertine’s and Ester Harding’s Perspectives,” William Schoenl illustrates how Jung’s break from Freud was misconstrued into claims that Jung was a Fascist. Schoenl offers fresh and seminal research documented through unpublished manuscripts and letters, primarily the correspondence between Eleanor Bertine and Esther Harding. These two analysts kept Jung informed of FBI investigations and media attacks in the U.S., especially in New York City, accusing Jung of being pro-Nazi. Bertine and Harding worked intensely to clear Jung’s name against what they claimed was a deliberate campaign to prevent Jung’s work from being circulated.

The third article, “Heinz Westman (1902-1986),” serves as a natural counterpart to Schoenl’s piece. Price attests to how Westman, a holocaust refugee, collaborated with Jung and brought Jung’s influence to his own practice of analysis in the United States, especially to the East Coast. Price, who was Westman’s patient, confirms his unique devotion to the psyche in the context of biblical myths. Much like Jung, Westman viewed the psyche as two worlds — psyche and spirit — a theme that illuminated the darkeness from a world torn apart by war. Not allowed as a Jew to study at the university, Westman found through his interchanges with Jung a richness of dialogue on the feminine principle, dreams, the personality types, alchemical studies, and meaning in the psychic urge toward wholeness. At the end of Westman’s life, when universities and institutes had become too “exclusive,” it was the C. G. Jung Center for Studies in Analytical Psychology in Brunswick that honored him with a lecture series.

Dennis Patrick Slattery’s article “Boxing Piety,” follows forth from the implicit projective implications of Price’s observations. Slattery scrutinizes the notion of piety and reveals its shadow elements, emphasizing how an “axis of evil” can exist as the “shadowy underbelly” of archetypal piety. In contrast to a “boxed” piety of fundamentalist ideologies, Slattery emphasizes an “un-boxed” piety, the conscious awareness of the activity of the shadow.

Beth Darlington reminds us that archetypes lie behind every complex including that of obesity. Related to the first four articles, Darlington demonstrates with scholarly aplomb how human indulgence can mobilize upon unconscious desire while ignoring conscious insights. When power is the end goal, gluttony leads to obesity. If we swallow our own tail in an uroboric feed, we tend to remain regressed, tied to a maternal bond, which can lead to death in unconsciousness. Instead of being controlled blindly by the instincts, Darlington encourages striving toward consciously holding the tension of opposites and living through the purgatory of suffering toward hope. Underlying hunger and appetite is the possibility of conscious individuation. Offering ourselves genuinely to relinquish our own identity and life for another life becomes an act of transformation, a transmutation of substance. This act makes possible ongoing germination and, as the wisdom of the ancients have so often depicted, the reproduction of the “life of the grain itself.”

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