Quadrant 1989


A Journey Into the Woods: A Quadrant Interview with Playwright James Lapine

— Stephen A. Martin

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright James Lapine is well-known to Jungian audiences for his 1981 play, Twelve Dreams, in which he masterfully dramatized a case history described by C. G. Jung in Man and his Symbols. Using innovative staging, Lapine captured the archetypal mystery surrounding the strange dreams of a ten-year-old girl — dreams that foretold her death with cosmic and apocalyptic imagery. More recently, Lapine has collaborated with Stephen Sondheim in the productions of Sunday in the Park with George (1985), a critically acclaimed musical about George Seurat and the creation of his pointillist masterpiece, “A Sunday on the Island of La Grande Jatte”; and Into the Woods, a musical that just ended a remarkably successful run on Broadway, which explores the “human journey” by following fairy tale characters beyond the “happily ever afters.”

Twelve Dreams by James Lapine: Enactment as Creative Process

— Linda Huntington

During the Winter of 1981–1982, James Lapine presented his play Twelve Dreams at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York City. The “imaginal seed” for this production had been a case study outlined by C. G. Jung in Man and his Symbols. The case material consisted of twelve dreams experienced by a young girl shortly before her death. The girl’s father, an analyst, had received a handwritten booklet of the dreams as a Christmas present from his daughter, which he in turn shared with Jung. These dreams, consisting primarily of images of death and rebirth, were termed by Jung “the weirdest series of dreams I have ever seen.” They made a deep impression on him. In Man and his Symbols, Jung indicates that their archetypal nature reinforced his theory of the collective aspect of such unconscious images …

The Wounded Vision: The Myth of the Tragic Flaw

— James Hollis

Even in the most privileged of childhoods, life is experienced as traumatic. Connected as we were to the heartbeat of the cosmos, we are cast into the world as exiles who wander in search of that lost connectedness, suffer estrangement from self and others, and absorb “the thousand natural shocks which flesh is heir to.” Most survive as neurotic, merely, carrying with us the shock of childhood as a memory, a psychic reflex, and as a perception of self and world. One may even say that the unexamined adult personality is an assemblage of attitudes, behaviors, and psychic reflexes, developed before consciousness, to manage the anxiety that threatened the fragile existence of the child. Those behaviors and attitudes evolve before the age of five and are elaborated in an astonishing range of strategic variations, which are properly called neuroses, for they pit the progressive energies and “object desire” of the present against the regressive, but necessarily protective strategies of the past. …

Wagner from Lohengrin to Siegfried: “Elsa Taught Me to Unearth This Man”

— Austin Clarkson

Wagner was the most prodigious musical genius of the nineteenth century. His extraordinary skill in marshalling the elements of poetic diction, music, and staging to evoke the moods and feelings of his dramas revolutionized the European operatic stage. Wagner’s ideas, which touched on a host of fields — religion, philosophy, comparative mythology, depth psychology, Communism, historicism, evolutionism, and eugenics — form a background to his music dramas and penetrate their substance.… To look into Wagner’s development is to observe the ongoing interaction between an artist’s life and his work, whereby the products of the imagination take aesthetic form, are brought more or less into life, analyzed for their psychological content, re-assimilated by the psyche, and fed back into the creative act. …

Mimesis: the Healing Play of Myth

— Samuel Laeuchli and Evelyn Rothchild Laeuchli

Ever since the falling out between Freud and Jung, psychoanalytic writers have generally taken either a Freudian or Jungian position about the meaning and value of religious symbols and experience. The myth is no exception. The Freudian view is predominantly archaeological — every myth is a concentrate of protohuman horrors. The Jungian view is more teleological — myth is a testament to purpose larger than individual intentionality.

The mimetic enactment of myth, which serves the cause of both myth reserach and depth psychology, can generate experience that integrates the two viewpoints. The opposed ambitions of archaeology and teleology give way to very different levels of experience and explanation. …

Dorothy and Her Friends: Symbols of Gay Male Individuation in The Wizad of Oz

— Robert H. Hopcke

The Wizard of Oz is a movie that has enjoyed nearly universal popularity since its 1939 release, and within the American gay community, the movie is regarded with special affection and delight. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” the song perhaps most identified with the film has long served at Gay Pride Celebrations and parades as an unofficial anthem, and the use of the rainbow flag as a Gay Pride symbol appears to be partly derived from this association. The phrase “Dorothy’s friends” is commonly heard slang used among some gay men to refer to other gay men.…

The enduring popularity of any work of art suggests the presence of dynamic, collective factors at work psychologically. In modern times, given the decline of written and oral tradition, the rise of mass culture, and the advent of previously unimagined mobility, motion pictures have often served as modern myths, with performers becoming projection screens for archetypal contents. …

Les Misérables as Broadway Musical: Is the Medium the Message?

— Karin Barnaby

When Les Misérables, Victor Hugo’s 1,200-page novel, first appeared in 1861, it was an instant success, selling out 7,000 copes within twenty-four hours of publication. A popular illustrated edition was published in 1865 and sold over 300,000 copies. Today 50,000 copies are sold every year in England alone. The novel hs been published in thirty-five countries. It has been filmed by every film-making country in the world. It has inspired television series (The Fugitive and Kung Fu). Curretly a musical version of it is playing to packed houses in thirteen countries. …

Star Trek: In Search of the Essential John Lennon

— Aryeh Maidenbaum and Lenore Thomson

Type testing has long been a staple of career counselors and educational consultants. The client answers a series of questions about likes and dislikes and preferred behaviors, and the counselor determines by the range of responses the client’s most likely vocational direction. Many of these so-called personality tests are derived from the work that Jung did in his study of “psychological types.” Given the subtlety and complexity of Jung’s ideas in this area, there is some irony in the fact that typology has been so successfully adapted to pragmatic ends. The very adaptability of these ideas has tended to popularize them in ways that Jung never intended. This popularization has in turn made clichés that are congenial to our cultural stereotypes, but no longer faithful to their sources. …

“Lingering Shadows:” a Conference Report

— Jay Sherry

On March 28, April 4, and April 11, 1989, the C. G. Jung Foundation of New York sponsored a conference that squarely faced the issue that has long clouded Jung’s reputation — the charge that he was anti-Semitic and a Nazi sympathizer. Cosponsored by the Postgraduate Center for Mental Health and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the conference was held at the New School for Social Research and moderated by Dr. Jeffrey Satinover. The speakers included Paul Roazen, Geoffrey Cocks, Andrew Samuels, Arthur Williamson, Ann Ulanov, Hans Dieckmann, Micha Neumann, and Aryeh Maidenbaum. Among the respondents were Edward Whitmont, Philip Zabriskie, and Thomas Kirch.…

In Memory of Gerhard Adler (1904–1988)

— Werner Engel

I first met Gerhard Adler in 1930, when I became a member of a small group in Berlin that met to discuss the work of C. G. Jung. James Kirsch and Toni Sussman were at the center of this group. Gerhard had a special enthusiasm for the work and gladly followed James’s suggestion to continue his analytical work in Zürich with Jung.…

Gerhard was singularly influential in word and act in bringing the value of Jung’s work to the helping professions and to the general public. He paved the way for the understanding of the central position of the Self. His importance in this regard must be seen in light of the fact that he, along with Michael Fordham and Herbert Read, co-edited the English edition of Jung’s Collected Works and worked alongside of Aniela Jaffé to edit Jung’s letters. Such responsibility demonstrated the great confidence Jung had in him. …

Book Reviews

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939

– C. G. Jung. Edited by James L. Jarrett. Princeton University Press. 1989. Two Volumes. Reviewed by Thomas Kirsch.

Irreverent Iddendum: Memories of a Zarathustra Watcher. Background on Jung’s seminars [in full] by

Joe Wheelwright

The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration— Stanislav Grof

. State University of New York Press. 1988. Reviewed by June Singer.

A Little Course in Dreams: A Basic Handbook of Jungian Dreamwork— Robert Bosnak

Translated by M. Kohn. Shambhala Press. 1988. Reviewed by James Hall.

The Cassandra Complex: Living with Disbelief – A Modern Perspective on Hysteria

— Laurie Layton Shapira. Inner City Books. 1988. Reviewed by Angelyn Spignesi.

Sitting on A Tripod is Not What I would Call A-Musing!

A Response to Angelyn Spignesi’s Review of The Cassandra Complex. — Laurie Layton Shapira.

Personal Mythology: The Psychology of Your Evolving Self

— David Feinstein, Ph.D., and Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc. 1988. Reviewed by Clifford O. Smith.

Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View

— Bettina L. Knapp. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 1988. Reviewed by Estelle L. Weinrib.

The Wisdom of the Psyche

— Ann Belford Ulanov. Cowley Publications. 1988. Reviewed by Demaris Wehr.

Portraits of Temperament

— David Keirsey. Gnosology Books, Ltd. 1987. Reviewed by Randall E. Ruppart. [Review reprinted from The Bulletin of Psychological Type Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1989.]

The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan

— Hayao Kawai. Translated by Hayao Kawai and Sachiko Reece. Spring Publications. 1988. Reviewed by David L. Hart.