Erel Shalit

Turbulent Times, Creative Minds - A review by Ann Casement

2018-01-19T07:19:00.003-05:00

Turbulent Times, Creative Minds

Edited: Erel Shalit and Murray Stein

This reviewer of Turbulent Times, Creative Minds was introduced to the work of Erich Neumann decades ago by his close friend, Gerhard Adler, who thought highly of him.

In complete contrast, Michael Fordham was critical of Neumann’s thinking on the child and told this reviewer he doubted that Neumann had ever encountered an actual child – thereby enacting an actual experience of the opposites. In addition, the profound Jung thinker, Wolfgang Giegerich, has also written critically on Neumann.

In order to experience Neumann’s thinking at first-hand, this reviewer participated in the 2015 conference held at Kibbutz Shefayim to mark the publication of the correspondence between Jung and Neumann edited by Martin Liebscher. The current skillfully edited book arising from that conference is an homage to the exceptional personal and professional relationship between Jung and Neumann, including in its pages masterly chapters by Lammers, Mendes-Flohr, Shalit and Stein.

The book ranges over such vital topics as the New Ethic linked to the eternal problem of evil (Stein’s in-depth thinking is outstanding here), the ego-self axis, sibling rivalry, the German-Jewish experience, Eranos, religion, clinical issues and art. The Jung and Neumann families’ memories and contributions add noteworthy personal touches to this highly recommended volume.

Ann Casement,

Licensed Psychoanalyst/Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute

This volume of essays by well-known Jungian analysts and scholars provides the most comprehensive comparison to date between the works of C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann. Reflections are based on their extensive correspondence recently published, their differing cultural backgrounds, and the turbulent times surrounding their personal and professional relationship. Among the many specific subjects discussed are Jung and Neumann on art and religion, their views on the problem of evil, and clinical aspects of Neumann’s work. Also included are personal memories of both Jung and Neumann family members.

Sections:

I. The Correspondence (1933–1960)

II. Cultural Backgrounds

III. Troubled Times

IV. The Problem of Evil

V. Neumann and Eranos (1948–1960)

VI. On the Arts

VII. Clinical Contributions

VIII. On Religion

IX. On Synchronicity

X. “Memories from My (Grand)Father’s House”

Available on Amazon, Chiron and other book sellers.

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Jacob and Esau

On the Collective Symbolism of the Brother Motif (2nd printing)

by Erich Neumann

cover image by Meir Gur Arieh

title page image by Jacob Steinhardt

The Story of Requiem on YouTube

2017-12-22T09:22:00.000-05:00

Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

The razor-sharp edge of religious beliefs and national conflict, of shadowy projections and existential anxiety, that characterize Israel and its neighbors, gives rise to a particular blend of archetypal fate and personal destiny, of doubt and conviction, despair and commitment, of collective identity and personal choice.

However, I do believe that the essence of my wonderings reach beyond the shores of the eastern Mediterranean or Jewish tradition. I believe the tension between a sense of exile and return, belongingness and estrangement, are universal aspects, certainly in our post-modern world. While Israeli reality provides the external context, the story serves, as well, as a metaphor for the exile and return of the soul, which necessarily is a journey through shadowy valleys.

Requiem returns us to an eternal theme, a dialogue with Soul, and we know quite well what happens when one dialogues with Soul—we change, consciousness is enlarged, the impossible becomes possible and we no longer are compelled to blindly follow in the deathly path of our forefathers.

Requiem is a fictitious account of a scenario played out in the mind of many Israelis, pertaining to existential reflections and apocalyptic fears, but then, as well, the hope and commitment that arise from the abyss of trepidation. While set in Israel sometime in the present, it is a story that reaches into the timelessness of history, weaving discussions with Heine and Kafka into a tale of universal implications.

The Story of Requiem on YouTube

This YouTube presentation tells the story of Requiem, with brief quotes from the novella itself.

A review by Grady Harp

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: Grant them eternal rest, O Lord

The title of this meditative book, REQUIEM: A Tale of Exile and Return', seems inappropriate when the reader begins Erel Shalit's story: if these are the thought patterns that are seething through the mind of our narrator Professor Eliezer Shimeoni as he prepares a lecture on the fate of Israel and the fate of the Jews, why then open with a 'Christian' mass for the dead? But then we are reminded that this is yet another work by the author of Enemy, Cripple, & Beggar: Shadows in the Hero's Path, and his life's work is not only a Jungian Pyschoanalyst but he is also a man consumed with the great literature and the important writers of the world.

He begins this story simply enough as Professor Shimeoni reflects on the history of the Jews post WW II, the formation of the independent home state of Israel and then the gradual failure of that land to maintain. 'That very moment he understood why the passionate longing for home had anchored in the Jewish soul, and why the sense of the soul's exile wandered like a shadow behind every Jew.' He quotes the words of Chaim Potok 'To be a Jew in this century is to understand fully the possibility of the end of mankind, while at the same time believing with certain faith that we will survive.' Shimeoni has faith that the Jews will survive, given the history of the suffering of the Pogrom. 'His belief was that the Jews thrived at the edge of pathology - their individual pathology, but also their collective pathology as a people.'

Given his theme for investigation Shimeoni examines an imagined end of Israel and then pastes together his responses to that concept with post-modern thinking. 'He recalled the words of Ben-Gurion, that in Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles. "Was Israel not the miraculous realization and the triumph of the spirit of life, forever hovering over the primordial abyss?" he said in a loud and clear voice, adjusting the microphone. As the lights were turned on, he emerged from the shadow of catatonia, and began his lecture'. This is from the last paragraph of this novel.

But what Erel Shalit has accomplished in this very brief but intoxicating book is to provide a path for each of us to follow, wisely using the plight of the Jews during the last century as a matrix from which to judge our own individual exile and return. He is an accomplished thinker and he is also a very brilliant writer.

A review by Marcela London

Erel Shalit’s Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return touched me deeply, deep into the waters of my soul. From that ocean, I will choose to mention a few of the many emerging waves.

The book traces historical events, in which the longing for home can be felt: a real home, a collective home, and the personal and internal home that the author aims at, by means of the narrator of the book, Eliezer Shimeoni.

This is his private odyssey, but in distinction from Ulysses, he chooses not to relate to the siren’s song as merely a danger, but rather as a call to make the journey towards the soul’s home.

Erel Shalit’s narrative has a unique, fascinating and powerful style, which touches you strongly. Particularly, he has a way of leading the reader to grasp complicated historical processes with unusual ease.

Interwoven in a narrative of fiction and seeming non-fiction, we meet familiar figures from philosophy and literature, such as Kafka, who asked his friend Max Brod to burn his books after his death, a wish which, to the great fortune of humankind, the latter did not fulfill. In Requiem the author brings us both to Heine and the burning of books, and back to the fate of Hananiah ben Terdion in the second century.

The story of the second-hand bookshop reminded me of Borges’s famous library; Shimeoni also found refuge in the many old books: “The old bookshop granted an escape into a world of history books and timeworn atlases in which he could sail across the sea of time and continents, where fear and excitement and heroism were free and asked no price. It was a world of books that he could browse but never buy, an odyssey that could only be traveled, but never owned.”

I was carried away by the ruminations of the protagonist who wonders if he was “a mere actor in the play? What he believed to be his own, free and individual will, his personal determination, his choice and his decisions, his own peculiar thoughts, were they nothing but the manifestation of his allocated role, the text he had been given, none of his own creation?” And, “Without soul, there is no water and no liquid, no stream, no steam, and perhaps also no dream, he told himself, almost speaking out loudly. Soul does not have material substance,” says Shimeoni in the book, in his Zen-like reflections. And he is reminded of the film Smoke, based on a script by Paul Auster. The film tells the story of Sir Walter Raleigh who asked Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century, “How do you weigh smoke?” Clever as she was, she supposedly answered him, “How can you weigh smoke? It’s like weighing air or someone’s soul,” we are told. But the narrator contemplates and eventually provides us with the surprising answer.

In Requiem we are presented with two distinct styles of writing, so that we are almost led to believe that two different authors wrote the book. We find not only the narrator of a story, but also the spiritual and lyrical face of the author.

I highly recommend this fascinating and important book, which presents the reader with the simultaneously intellectual and emotional landscapes of Erel Shalit.

Marcela London, poet, author of The Beginning Was Longing (Hebrew, 2013)

A review by Junko Chodes

REQUIEM - The Tone of a Masterpiece

From the first pages of this book, the tone of a masterpiece emerges powerfully.

This book makes us realize that the "Israel problem" cannot be understood in a journalistic frame of mind. Politics, war, land, culture, and contemporary experience are expressions of the deep core of human life, the core of the human soul.

This is an important book for anyone who thinks about "cultural identity" and the love of one's own country and culture.

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Jerusalem, the Capital

2017-12-08T11:34:00.000-05:00

Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, the center of the Jewish people, whether the American President says so or not, and whether the Palestinians accept it or reject it.

Hopefully the Arab part of Jerusalem, what in Arabic is Al-Quds will, one day, also be the capital of a Palestinian State. Not instead of Jewish Jerusalem, but alongside.

The Palestinians and other Arab countries have tried to deny the intimate and historic link between the Jewish people and Jerusalem - rather successfully so for instance at UNESCO.

It would be conducive, if the Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, just like Israel needs to recognize the legitimate right of the Palestinians to establish a separate Arabic State alongside Israel – something which the present extreme right-wing Netanyahu government does not do.

Israel needs to recognize that today there is a national Palestinian identity, which requires the boundaries of statehood to crystallize in its collective colors, differently from a collective identity which relies on the denial of the other side's rights. Likewise, the Palestinians need to recognize Jewish, Hebrew and Israeli history - which includes not claiming that the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, is part of the Palestinian heritage, rather than Hebrew.

A one-state solution is not a viable option, only a prescription for never-ending violence.

There are many possible roads toward a two-state solutions even in times characterized by animosity and frustration, though it may not be carried out by the three limping leaders – Trump, corrupt Netanyahu, Abbas who hangs on to power though he was supposed to stand for re-election nearly a decade ago but hangs on to power.

Regarding the boundaries and borders of Jerusalem, one of the most practical suggestions has been presented by the Geneva Initiative:

The following is excerpted from the beginning of my chapter on Jerusalem, published in Tom Singer’s (ed.) excellent volume Psyche and the City: A Soul’s Guide to the Modern Metropolis.

Jerusalem

Human Ground, Archetypal Spirit

Unlike Rome, not all roads lead to Jerusalem, and those that do may all too easily lead the visitor astray in a labyrinth of divinity and madness. In the course of history, when Rome became the center of power, sanctity and glory, Jerusalem sank into spiritual ruin and peripheral oblivion.[1] Thus, even those modern roads that bring you smoothly to the city may force the pilgrim to pass “through thorny hedges…”^{^[2]} of his or her mind.

One may conveniently approach Jerusalem from the west, ascending the modern highway, which climbs eastward through the Judean Hills–like a Western mind moving toward the Orient.[3] By approaching Jerusalem driving on the comfortable asphalt that smoothly covers the ground and softens the bumps, one may arrive only to find a noisy and neglected city, tired by too much spirit and worn out by too much poverty. Slowly winding upward through the hills, parallel to the highway, runs the dusty old donkey path, burdened by archetypal history. Arriving this way, one may find the sparks of illumination that shine from within the dry stones, as well as the strife and conflict that cut through the rocks of Jerusalem.

Alternatively, one may proceed toward Jerusalem on the Route of the Patriarchs, from the desert in the east. This is the path on which the ancient Hebrews arrived, as they crossed the river into the land of Canaan, thus gaining their name and reputation as Hebrews, which means “those that came from across the river.”

One may capture Jerusalem by drawing the sword against evil spells, as did King David from the Jebusites three millennia ago, or enter the city humbly on a donkey, like Jesus did and any future Messiah is supposed to do as well, or like the Caliph Omar majestically riding on a white camel. In whatever way one arrives, the visitor must be ready to overcome the obstacles of Earthly Jerusalem, which far from always mirrors her Heavenly Sister’s image of completeness and redemption.

“Crouched among its hills,”[4] Jerusalem is immersed with mythological, religious, and symbolic significance. Yet, scarce in natural resources, the surrounding land is cultivated rather than fertile by nature, and the so-called Jerusalem stone, the pale limestone that characterizes many of the city houses, nearly cracks and shatters by carrying the burden of Heavenly Jerusalem. In its often shabby garb, terrestrial Jerusalem seems to want to shake off its Celestial Glory, releasing itself from the task of being “the gateway to heaven.”[5] At other times, when the light from above is reflected in her harsh stones, Jerusalem seems to embrace the presence of the Shekhinah, the earthly dwelling of the divine.[6] Especially at dawn and at dusk, the reflection of the light may bring that which is below and that which is above, earth and heaven, reality and imagination into play with each other–marble-like clouds weighing heavily above, and stones that radiate light.

Jerusalem wavers between the spirit that takes her to be God’s joyous garden, the fountain of the awakening love and beauty of the Shulamite, the bride of Wise King Solomon, builder of the Temple,[7] and her Godforsaken body, poor and neglected, a shameful and condemned whore, as she is described in Ezekiel.[8]

Significant Dates in the History of Jerusalem

Jerusalem dates back to the fourth millennium B.C.E. It became a permanently settled Canaanite city in the nineteenth Century B.C.E, mentioned in the Egyptian Execration Texts as Rushlamem.[9] The Bible first mentions Jerusalem in Genesis 14:18-20, when Melchizedek, “king of Shalem,” greeted and blessed Abram upon his arrival. According to the Biblical narrative, it was a small, fortified Jebusite city for about two centuries until captured and made capital by King David in the tenth century B.C.E., after he had ruled for seven years in Hebron. He brought the Ark of the Covenant, holding the stone tablets with the engraved Ten Commandments, to Jerusalem. The Ark was later placed in the Holy of Holies in the Temple built by his son, King Solomon. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, who with his one hand built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, destroyed Jerusalem with his other, and deported much of the population in 586 B.C.E. However, a few decades later King Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return and to rebuild the Temple. The Second Temple was completed in 516 B.C.E., and later enlarged by Herod in the first century B.C.E.

The Hellenistic period began with Alexander the Great’s conquest of Jerusalem in 332 B.C.E. Following the Maccabean revolt the Jews recaptured Jerusalem and restored the Temple in 164 B.C.E. However, a century later General Pompey captured the city. The Romans would reign until the beginning of the Byzantine period, 324 C.E.

Jesus, born ca. 6/5 B.C.E., towards the end of the great and cruel King Herod’s reign, was crucified at the hill of Golgotha, then outside the ancient walls, probably in 30 C.E. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, inside the present walls surrounding the old city, was built by Emperor Constantine early in the fourth century, likely at the site of crucifixion.

The Second Temple was destroyed, presumably on the same day as the destruction of the first Temple, on the ninth of the Hebrew month Av, late summer 70 C.E., which for the observant Jew is a day of fasting and mourning the destruction of Jerusalem. Yet, Talmudic legend raises the idea of transformation, suggesting that the day of destruction signifies the birth of the Messiah. After defeating the revolt of Bar Kokhba in 135 C.E., the Roman Emperor Hadrian renamed the destroyed city Aelia Capitolina. He prohibited the Jews from entering the city, and on the ruins of the former temple, he built one to the worship of Jupiter.

The Byzantine period lasted from the beginning of the fourth to the middle of the seventh century, followed by the Muslim period. The al-Aqsa–i.e., “the furthest”–Mosque was built at the Temple Mount during the Umayyad period, early eighth century.

The Crusaders ruled from 1099, barring non-Christians from the city, which then was captured by Saladin in 1187. Following the Mameluk period, Jerusalem and the Holy Land were conquered by the Ottoman Empire in the early sixteenth century. Sultan Suleiman I, alternatively called the Magnificent and the Lawgiver, rebuilt the city walls, which had been razed three centuries earlier.

Jerusalem remained desolate for centuries. The Zurich-born Dominican Friar Felix Fabri, who visited the Holy Land late in the fifteenth century, wrote of Jerusalem’s destroyed buildings, abandoned by its inhabitants. At the same time, Obadiah of Bertinoro, the intellectual leader of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, described the city as poor and largely desolate. While at the end of the Second Temple period the population of Jerusalem reached 100,000, it had been reduced to less than nine thousand in 1800. Only in the mid-1800s did the city wake up from its slumber, beginning to recover and grow again.

The Cities:

Bangalore • Berlin • Cairo • Cape Town • Jerusalem • London • Los Angeles • Mexico City • Montreal • Moscow • New Orleans • New York • Paris • San Francisco • Sao Paulo • Shanghai • Sydney • Zurich

The Contributors:

Paul Ashton • Gustavo Barcellos • John Beebe • Nancy Furlotti • Jacqueline Gerson • Christopher Hauke • Thomas Kelly • Thomas Kirsch • Antonio Karim Lanfranchi • Charlotte Mathes • Elena Pourtova • Kusum Dhar Prabhu • Joerg Rasche • Craig San Roque • Erel Shalit • Heyong Shen • Thomas Singer • Murray Stein • Craig Stephenson • Viviane Thibaudier • Beverley Zabriskie • Luigi Zoja

Psyche and the City is available on Amazon and other sellers.

[1] Cf. Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Vintage, 2008), for the history of the two cities and the civilizations they represent.

[2] Zev Vilnay, Legends of Jerusalem (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1973), p. 304.

[3] It is by facing the orient, the east where the sun rises, that we find our way, i.e., orientate ourselves.

[4] Yehuda Amichai, Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems (New York: Sheep Meadow, 1992), p. 49.

[5] “And Jacob awoke from his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How awesome is this place! this is no other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven” (Genesis 28:17). Rabbinic folklore (midrash) says that while the foot of Jacob’s ladder was in Bet El, the top, which reached the gates of heaven, was in Jerusalem.

[6] “And they shall call Jerusalem the Dwelling Place,” “At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord” (respective translations of Jeremiah 3:17).

[7] Isaiah 51:3; Song of Songs, e.g. 7:1. The eleventh century Rabbi Ibn Ezra interprets the Shulamite here to represent Jerusalem.

[8] Ezekiel 16.

[9] Menashe Har-El, Golden Jerusalem (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2004), p. 22.

Imitation and the Archetypal Adult

2017-12-01T02:38:00.000-05:00

In The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey, I mention five pathologies that I relate to the idea of the Archetypal Adult. In this brief presentation I mention an additional one, which Jung speaks about – imitation. In the Red Book he writes, “The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship.”

In Two Essays in Analytical Psychology he writes,

"The human being has one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility from the collective point of view, is immeasurably detrimental from the standpoint of individuality; the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology can never dispense with imitation, for without it the organization of the masses, that of the state and of society, is quite simply impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and moral contagion."

Imitation is a shadow-side of the self. The Self means authenticity, and in its wholeness it includes its opposite – imitation.

This beautiful ten-minute video, which you can watch here, was created by Karol Domanski and Adam Kosciuk.

The Sun and the Sword, The Moon and the Mirror

2017-11-24T03:32:00.000-05:00

The Sun and the Sword,
The Moon and the Mirror

by Erel Shalit

Besides the more commonly accounted for masculine, solar aspect of the hero’s journey, we may refer to a feminine, lunar attribute as well. They represent different attitudes vis-à-vis the unconscious.

The sun-hero has a dual relationship to the Great Mother, as exemplified by Heracles; his name means Glory of Hera, yet the goddess drives him to madness. He sets out on the mission to break free from the bonds of the Great Mother, to face her magnitude, ready to draw his sword in combat with her however awesome she seems to be, and to enhance his ego-consciousness. The sun-hero, while not always able to fulfill the entire mission of his journey, works towards replacing id and the unconscious with ego. He must abandon the comfort and the security of the kingdom of childhood, about which Jung writes:

For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides ... As such a condition must be terminated, and as it is at the same time an object of regressive longing, it must be sacrificed in order that discriminated entities - i.e., conscious contents - may come into being.(1)

On his way to consciousness the hero encounters monstrous and malicious obstacles that, as Jung says, rise in his path and hamper his ascent, wearing “the shadowy features of the Terrible Mother, who saps his strength with the poison of secret doubt and retrospective longing.”(2) He risks being devoured by the Earth Mother, destroyed by the gods, to burn in the flames of passion set afire by the nymphs, or die in battle with his competing Martian warriors. His world is patriarchal, goal-directed and lawful, thus he may lose direction and plunge into unconsciousness, teased and tantalized by the feminine seductress intruding from afar, as became the tragic fate of Samson.

It is the sun-hero’s undertaking to break away, to free himself from the archetypal world.

Cover image by @ Susan Bostrom-Wong

Simultaneously, as part of his mission, he must gather the strength required to bring the very same archetypal energy into the ego and human consciousness. Thus, the hero has one foot in divinity, one in the world of mortals. It is the hero’s task to dismember the archetypal energies and transpose them as increasingly human complexes into the personal world and the realm of the ego. This is what Prometheus does when he brings fire to man. His name means forethinker; the Promethean fire is the capacity to plan the use of that natural transformative energy, fire, for the benefit of mankind, to create consciousness and acculturation, heating and cooking, creating new materials and fresh ideas.(3) But also when the complex has become autonomous, split-off from consciousness and detracting energy from the ego, the hero is called for. The man who compulsively clung to a job far below his capabilities because of his fear of losing it was constantly threatened by dismissal until he gathered his strength to fight the complex that nearly destroyed him.

The sun-hero may be the obstinate two-year-old who repeatedly says no and no to being dressed, “I dress.” Or the five-year-old who pulls the hero’s phallic sword with which he fights the beasts within—as they are projected upon the little kindergarten-brutes of the real world without. The sun-hero is unmistakably masculine, a He, whether a boy or a girl.

The solar hero brings something new, something formerly unknown into the consciousness of the individual or that of society. By means of the adventures of the sun-hero, man has, for instance, accomplished scientific achievements and expanded geographical boundaries. The solar aspect of the hero pertains to patriarchal consciousness. With his sword, the hero cuts and divides, which is structurally essential for the establishment and expansion of consciousness.

But there is a lunar aspect or phase of the hero’s journey as well, which may likewise unfold when the hero abandons the conventions of the royal throne and the safe rule of ego, when he stands up against and turns away from collective consciousness. This is the case, for instance, with Buddha, whose way is enlightened by reflection rather than by the splendor of the sword. It pertains to conceiving, rather than “deliberate doing,” and, says Neumann, “time must ripen, and with it, like the seeds sown in the earth, knowledge matures.”(4)

This is the moon-hero. He, or in fact She, because it pertains rather to the feminine, whether in man or woman, ventures into the dangerous paths, the forests and the rivers, the hills and the valleys, the labyrinths and the netherworlds, the pandemonium, the chaos and the torment outside the boundaries of collective consciousness, beyond norms and conventions. She is maybe not the skillful goal-directed archer Apollo, but rather his twin sister Artemis, the hunter goddess roaming in the wilderness and the forest, armed with silver bow and arrows. This may be the sense of drifting around the outskirts of town, sneaking into backyards, to hike around in foreign places in the geography of the world or in the psychography of the soul, learning “how to observe nature, the way it grows and changes.”(5) It is dangerous; as happens to Artemis, by mistake, you may kill your loved one, or if you come too close you may be transformed into a stag, because it is an oscillating journey between death and rebirth, waxing and waning, appearance and disappearance, love and disaster, reflection and deflection, healing and wounding. The ground easily quakes, and on winding roads and behind thorny bushes the forces of love and madness, pain and desire, despair and anticipation struggle with savage ferocity. The lunar hero pertains to relationship and unification, but breakup and falling apart, as well.

The hero’s lunar quality refers to the mirror and reflection, rather than the sword and division. As we shall see later, Perseus is equipped with both.

In its lunar aspect, the hero does not attack the unconscious. It entails a conscious turning towards the unconscious, quietly and humbly awaiting what in the course of time arises and unfolds in the hero’s reflective mirror. As Campbell says:

The mirror, reflecting the goddess and drawing her forth from the august repose of her divine non-manifestation, is symbolic of the world, the field of the reflected image. Therein divinity is pleased to regard its own glory, and this pleasure is itself inducement to the act of manifestation or “creation.”(6)

The following is the dream of a sixty-year-old man, slowly finding his way home to himself after having “been away” for a long time, during an extraverted career:

I feel an urge to return home. I have been away for a long time. As I get home, I see that a man sits on a chair in the attic, watching the dark sky through a telescope—there is a big opening in the roof. He calls me to look, and I try to look carefully through the telescope, but I see nothing. I turn and turn the telescope, yet, I can’t see anything. He shouts and yells at me and I feel very embarrassed, and he tells me angrily to go and sit and wait next to a little girl who sits on a bench. She looks like she is in a dream state, just looking up at the sky. First I look at her, and then I lose the focus, and like her I just look at the dark sky, and then, suddenly, a very bright star shines far far away but very very clearly, and then I see the moon, so close, almost as if I could touch it.

Naturally, the lunar aspect of the hero is closely related to matriarchal consciousness, as elaborated in depth by Erich Neumann.(7) Queen Jocasta, Shining Moon, as representative of the feminine side of consciousness, has been discussed elsewhere.(8) However, Neumann is mainly concerned with matriarchal or moon-consciousness as something preceding patriarchal consciousness, pertaining to “enchantment and magic, ... inspiration and prophecy” rather than “its recurrence in the psychology of individuation, which is a reappearance at a higher level, as is always the case where, in the course of normal development, we again encounter something already experienced.”(9) I believe the lunar and the solar elements constitute complementary aspects of the hero and his/her journey, even if the one may precede or dominate the other.

In fact, as regards the lunar aspect of the hero’s journey, he naturally ventures into darkness only as the sun sets, rather than at dawn. Yet, the hero needs to be equipped with some of the day’s light to withstand the night’s depressive darkness, and with summer’s warmth for the cold loneliness of winter not to overwhelm him.

He travels at night-time, west to east, in the reflective light of the moon rather than in the unambiguous light of day. “The alchemical work starts with the descent into darkness (nigredo), i.e., the unconscious” says Jung.(10) Only thereafter “one arrives at the east and the newborn sun,” says Edinger.(11) Ayala, a forty-year-old woman, dreams:

It is midnight, midsummer night. I am barefoot, walking from the sea eastward, on a thorny field. My feet hurt, I am bleeding. Then, suddenly, a path opens up, crossing the field in the centre, dividing it in two, lit up by the light of the moon. As I walk along, still feeling the pain in my feet, a man suddenly appears from the dark and blocks my way. He is religious, completely shrouded in his Tallith [the prayer shawl], even his head is covered. He barely notices me, and he does not move to let me pass. I have to stop and wait, and listen to him reciting a prayer. I look at him as he prays, and very quietly he looks at me, in a warm and kind way. I feel his quiet prayer fills me up within, and he then blows the shofar [the ram’s horn], and I feel a wave of excitement.

While the dream was experienced during an afternoon nap, it takes place during summer’s brief night. The dreamer is guided along her path by the moon. The peripeteia occurs when her road is blocked, but she need not actively struggle with her adversary. Rather, this woman, who had experienced a deep narcissistic wound due to lack of adequate mirroring in early childhood, allows herself in the dream to be mirrored by the religious man’s chanting prayer. Jung says:

Christ, or the self, is a “mirror”: on the one hand it reflects the subjective consciousness of the disciple, making it visible to him, and on the other hand it “knows” Christ, that is to say it does not merely reflect the empirical man, it also shows him as a (transcendental) whole.(12)

The dream-ego, the I in our dreams, is our recurrent nightly hero, our messenger who ventures into dreamland, and returns home with a letter from the Self.(13) In the above dream, Ayala encounters her adversary who emerges from the shadow, not as an enemy to be fought, but as a mirroring or reflecting other. This is the hero’s lunar rather than solar attribute. It may even be that the dream ego will not really bring anything new into consciousness, but her soul becomes inspired and excited, i.e., setting the breath of life in motion. From the lunar perspective, the event, such as in this dream, needs less to be interpreted, but rather be libidinized by the moisture of the Self.

(1) C.G. Jung, CW 5, par. 646.
(2)“The Dual Mother,” CW 5, par. 611.
(3) Shalit, The Hero and His Shadow, p. 151.
(4) Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine, pp. 92, 94.
(5) Verena Kast, The Mermaid in the Pond, p. 55.
(6) The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 213.
(7) ‘The Moon and Matriarchal Consciousness,’ in The Fear of the Feminine, pp. 64-118.
(8) Shalit, The Complex, p. 55.
(9) The Fear of the Feminine, pp. 74, 92.
(10) CW 9ii., par. 231.
(11) Edward Edinger, The Aion Lectures, p. 116.
(12) CW 11, par. 427.
(13) The Talmudic dictum says: “A dream not interpreted is like a letter not read.”

This article is an excerpt from Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path.

For a review of the book by Ann Walker in Psychological Perspectives, please see here.

Erel Shalit is a Jungian psychoanalyst in Tel Aviv, Israel. He is a training and supervising analyst, and past president of the Israel Society of Analytical Psychology (ISAP). He is the author of the novella, Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return, and several other publications, including The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel and The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego.

Jung's Understanding of Schizophrenia -- Is it Still Relevant in the "Era of the Brain"?

2017-11-17T05:38:00.000-05:00

A presentation on YouTube by

Yehuda Abramovitch

M.D. Psychiatrist at Beer-Yaakov Mental Health Center and Sackler School of Medicine, Tel Aviv University. Senior Analyst, Israel Institute of Jungian Psychology.

Jung understood Schizophrenia as an "Abaissement du Niveau Mental", a similar phenomenon to the one encountered in dreams, and caused by a peculiar "Faiblesse de la Volonté". He contested that complexes in Schizophrenia, in contrast with neurotic disorders, are disconnected and can either never reintegrate to the psychic totality or they can join together in remission "like a mirror broke into splinters". Accordingly, a person who does not fight for the supremacy of his ego-consciousness and for the subjugation of unconscious forces, a person who lets himself be swayed by the intrusion of alien contents arising from the unconscious (or even is fascinated by regression) exposes himself to the danger of Schizophrenia.

Watch here

Kristallnacht and the Eternal Jew

2017-11-08T16:45:00.000-05:00

79 years ago, on the night between November 9-10, 1938, pogroms took place during the so called Kristallnacht, in which more than 90 Jews were killed, 30,000 incarcerated in concentration camps, 1,000 synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish business, schools, homes and buildings damaged and destroyed.

The Eternal Jew exhibition first opened in the Library of the German Museum in Munich on November 8, 1937, and ended on January 31, 1938, thus preceding the Kristalnight by exactly a year.. Billed as a degenerate-art exhibition, it was the largest prewar anti-Semitic exhibit thus far produced by the Nazi's. The exhibit featured photographs pointing out the typically "Jewish" features of political figures, such as Leon Trotsky, and international film star Charlie Chaplin. [who, btw, was not Jeiwsh]

The displays emphasized supposed attempts by Jews to bolshevize Germany, It did this by revealing an 'eastern' Jew - wearing a kaftan, and holding gold coins in one hand and a whip in the other. Under his arm is a map of the world, with the imprint of the hammer and sickle. The exhibition attracted 412,300 visitors, over 5,000 per day.

Read more here, also about the film of that name produced a year later.

The following are excerpts from the novella Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return:

Eliezer Shimeoni recalled the words of Chaim Potok, who so poignantly gave voice to that collective concern, “To be a Jew in this century is to understand fully the possibility of the end of mankind, while at the same time believing with certain faith that we will survive.” Living in Israel was certainly living at life’s edge, at the edge of survival.

Bitter irony turned into sour cynicism, as Professor Shimeoni reflected on the word “certain.” He was convinced that an eloquent writer such as Potok had purposefully used the ambiguous word certain. “Is there a word more uncertain than certain?” he asked himself rhetorically. “Did Potok mean that we could be sure, could be certain in our faith that we will survive, or did he mean that we may have some, a bit, perhaps a certain bit of faith that we will survive?”

Eliezer Shimeoni did indeed have a certain, a very certain faith that the Jews would survive.
....

"Peace in our time"

Had not the ordinary German, covering the gamut from willing collaborator to frightened compliant, been infected by years of indoctrination and selective information? “When I myself look into the mirror,” he said to himself, “it is somewhat embarrassing to admit that, perhaps, I may have wished Chamberlain success in his mission of appeasement. I have always had a soft spot for Neville Chamberlain. He pronounced himself to be ‘a man of peace to the depths of my soul,’ and I believed him, and I like to see myself as a man of peace to the depth of my soul.” ...

And Professor Shimeoni, for one, would have made his way to Heston Airport and applauded him upon his return, because he is a man of hope and peace.

Thus, he told himself, “I cannot blame the passively collaborating German, and can only admire and feel a deep love for those who dared to see and those that dared to act.” Particularly he thought of Wickard von Bredow, as the example of exceptional heroism: As County Officer (Landrat), he received the order, November 9, 1938, to burn down the synagogue in the East Prussian town of Shirwindt, just like all the synagogues in Germany that were to be destroyed during the next few hours. Von Bredow put on his German Army uniform, said goodbye to his wife, and, ...

Eli Shimeoni wondered, “Would I have dared to trespass the prohibitions, would I have dared to buy from a Jewish store? I hope so, but the honesty that fears evoke, makes me wonder. If I would have been a 1938 German, may I not have looked the other way, avoiding the shame and the guilt gazing back at me in the store owner’s eyes of shattered glass.”

And he knew very well that pathology is always stronger and more powerful than sanity, just like hatred settles into scorched ground, while love forever remains aloft, like letters written in the clouds. Does not Father Death eventually swallow every one of Life’s Children? ...

The following is an excerpt from “My European Animus,” a brief chapter in response to Joerg Rashe’s touching chapter “My Jewish Anima,” in the book he and Tom Singer edited, The Many Souls of Europe:

“Little wonder, then, that to me Jörg represents the best of Europe – its culture and enlightenment, as well as depth, reflection and integrity. But we live lives and worlds apart. The times we live in, the geography in which we dwell, the people and the tradition, the culture and the ancestry into which we are born is our fate, says Neumann. They do shape the contours of our ‘psychography.’

My parents never met in Germany. At thirteen, my mother was thrown out of the illusion of enlightened Mosaic assimilation. The light was turned off, crashing into the black hole of shattered glass at Kristallnacht, walking through the night in the streets of her childhood’s Hamburg. She never really arrived at morning’s light, perhaps because she didn’t meet Dr. Brod. For the rest of her life, she would wait for him, always prepared, dressed up for his arrival.

My father, a broken link in a long chain of rabbis, crossed Nazi-Germany on his way to work on a farm. He was saved by the unknown, righteous officer at the Gestapo HQ, who saved him by that German word, which otherwise evokes such horrendous connotations – herauss, get out! And so I learned that just like evil dwells in all of us, the spark of goodness may be found in evil’s cellar.

My father was a man who set out on his road but never arrived at his destination. Thrown into disarray by the losses, my grandmother turned into the ashes of Auschwitz, his grandmother dying in Theresienstadt’s shadows of deception, he tried to create a life for his offspring. On his way to the kibbutz in the Land of Israel, his wings had lost their wind, and his legs, stifled into clay, remained stuck in the charred earth of Europe.”

בין נפש לתרבות - סדרת הרצאות בתולעת ספרים

2017-11-06T08:57:00.000-05:00

המכון הישראלי לפסיכולוגיה יונגיאנית מזמין לסדרת הרצאות:

"בין נפש לתרבות"

הגישה היונגיאנית שמה דגש על רוח האדם, על יצירה ועל משמעות ועל התפתחותו של האדם לאורך חייו האישיים ולאורך התרבות. בסידרת ההרצאות המוצעת יביאו מספר מחברי המכון מיצירותיהם ויחברו ישן עם חדש, אקטואלי עם נצחי ומיתי.

ההרצאות יתקיימו בתולעת ספרים, מזא"ה 7 תל אביב
בימי חמישי בשעה 19:30.

עלות ההשתתפות בסדרה כולה: 180 ₪. עלות השתתפות בהרצאה בודדת: 40₪.
להרשמה: 03-5357907

תכנית ההרצאות:

21/12/17: פתיחה והצגת הסדרה: ד"ר יהודה אברמוביץ

"יוקסטה: גורלה של פנטזיית התיקון האימהית"

מרצה: פרופ' תמר קרון

יוקסטה, אמו של אדיפוס, היא דמות צל במיתוס ובמחזות. בעוד שסיפור חייו וגורלו של בנה, אדיפוס, הפך למיתוס מרכזי בפסיכולוגיית המעמקים, יוקסטה מצטיירת כאם המפתה, אשר בסופו של דבר מביאה להרס בנה. בספרות הפסיכואנליטית אנו מוצאים אפילו תאור של 'תסביך יוקסטה'. בכתיבה היונגיאנית מזוהה יוקסטה עם ארכיטיפ האם הגדולה הנוראה המפתה את הבן-המאהב ומביאה עליו כליה. בהרצאה זו ננסה לתת קול לאם המוכחשת והדחויה ולתאר את תהליך האינדיבידואציה שלה: מקורבן להתעללות מינית, דרך מאבקה ללדת ועד לנסיונה לתקן את הקשר אם-ילד הפגוע שנכפה עליה.

קשר ארכיטיפי זה עלול להיות מופעל גם היום: פגיעות של טראומות קודמות, של דחייה ונטישה עלולות לעורר את פנטזיית התיקון.

- דיון בהשתתפות הקהל

- קטע ג'אז: עילי אברמוביץ ועמית וולצקי

11/1/18: פותחת ומנחה: בתיה ברוש-פלמוני

"נמציא אויב!"

מרצה: ד"ר יהודה אברמוביץ

ההרצאה תעסוק בצורך ב"אחר" על מנת לסמן את גבולות ה"אני" ולאפשר תחושה של נפרדות וחיוניות. בד בבד תעסוק ההרצאה בתהליך הפסיכולוגי דרכו ה"אחר" הופך לאויב או שלחלופין נמחקת "אחרותו".

מוצע ניסיון להביט על חיי הנפש כעל דיאלוג מתמשך בין מבנים מודעים ושאינם מודעים – נפרדים אך משלימים אלה את אלה, מתוך עמדה של הדדיות ושוויון ביניהם.

הרחבות מהמיתולוגיה והספרות ידגימו תהליכים אלו.

- המשורר גיא פרל יצטרף בקריאת שירה

- דיון בהשתתפות הקהל

1/2/18: פותח ומנחה: יהושע זיו

"על הודו בחלומותיו, ביצירותיו ובמשנתו של יונג"

מרצה: נעה שוורץ-פוירשטיין

לק.ג.יונג שמורה זכות ראשונים ביצירת שיח פסיכולוגי משמעותי עם המזרח בכלל ועם הודו בפרט. בתחילת דרכו חווה יונג זיקה עמוקה והערצה לחכמת הודו, והיא שימשה לו מקור השראה לרעיונותיו פורצי הדרך. עם הזמן פינתה ההערצה את מקומה לרתיעה חשדנית, ויונג הפנה אזהרות נוקבות לבני דורו מפני אימוץ רעיונות מן המזרח, שראה בהם גוף זר בתודעת האדם המערבי. בהרצאה נתחקה אחר המפגש רב השנים של יונג עם הודו, מופעיה של הודו בכתביו התיאורטיים וחוויותיו המכוננות במסע בהודו. נסיים בתיאור חלומותיו ה"הודיים", על סף מוות.

דיון בהשתתפות הקהל

קטע ג'אז: עילי אברמוביץ

22/2/18 : פותח ומנחה: יהושע זיו

"אוצרות חבויים בעולם של שקיפות ונראות"

מרצה: מיכל טרודרט

הרצאה זו תעסוק בייחודיותו של הטיפול האנליטי כמרחב לאינטימיות וחלימה בהקיץ. תוך דיאלוג עם הפילוסוף הצרפתי גסטון בשלאר (Gaston Bachelard) נבחן את חדר הטיפול כמיכל לסודות ולמסתורין וכפינה חבויה לנפש. נדון בתפקידו המכריע של המיכל הטיפולי בשיקום מקומו של העולם הפנימי בעידן האינטרנט, הריאליטי והסמרטפון, עידן בו האינדיבידואליות והפרטיות נרמסות על ידי הטכנולוגיה של המדיה. ההרצאה תלווה בהדגמות (וינייטות) מתוך אנליזות ומטיפול במשחק בחול.

- דיון בהשתתפות הקהל

- קטע ג'אז: עילי אברמוביץ

15/3/18: פותחת ומנחה: בתיה ברוש פלמוני

"כל אחד והאיתקה שלו – ה'אודיסאה' כמסע הביתה בחצי השני של החיים"

מרצה: ד"ר אבי באומן

במחצית השנייה של חיינו מתחילה בתוך נפשנו מגמה פנימית חדשה. המסע הזה, שבו אנו מתחילים להשתחרר מהמלחמות הגדולות של ה"אני", מהקולקטיב התובעני, מהתפקידים שלקחנו על עצמנו או שהוטלו עלינו, הוא כמעין מסע הביתה אל המהות של עצמנו. הדרך הזו גובה מאתנו את הקרבת ההיבריס, את המפגש עם השאול ואת העמידה מול תוצאות מעשינו.

ה"אודיסיאה", מסעו של אודיסאוס הביתה לאיתקה, ההשתחררות הקשה שלו מתוצאות המלחמה, המפגש עם הבית שזנח, עם בנו טלמכוס ועם אשתו פנלופה, משמשים כמעין השראה למסע החשוב הזה, שמתחיל בחצי השני של החיים, לעיתים לאחר משבר, התפקחות ואפילו זעזוע.

- חברת המכון המשוררת חגית חוף תקרא מספרה "ברכבת לנהריה"

- דיון בהשתתפות הקהל

22 years to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin

2017-11-03T10:25:00.000-04:00

4th of November marks twenty-two years since the assassination of

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

A gathering is held on that day, 4th of November 2017, end of Sabbath,

at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv.

The blood-stained text of the Song for Peace
found in Rabin's pocket

For most of forty years the right-wing has ruled Israel, and the present Netanyahu government is not only the most extremist of them all, it bears far too many of the insignia of neo-fascism.

Netanyahu was one of the most visible and audible instigators prior to Rabin's assassination. Now, with a sense of safety in his position of power, he paranoically persecutes the institutes of democracy, such as the media, the legal system, and the police. In his fight to retain power in spite of allegations of severe corruption, he spares no means.

Netanyahu at an anti-Rabin demonstration

The present government is reluctant to reach out for serious negotiations with the (itself reluctant) Palestinian partner, it is a spearhead for settlements beyond the security fence, spending a fortune on what eventually will have to be dismantled or withdrawn, rather than enabling the young, creative, hard-working Israelis to attain affordable housing.

As a totalitarian inclined politician in power, he is a Prime Minister, who accuses and lashes out at big parts of the population, in the most vulgar of ways. He does not see the media as legitimate in its role as scrutinizing the regime, but adheres to media as his megaphone (the Sheldon Adelson owned Israel Hayom). Likewise, in his view, the Supreme Court should not be the independent defender of democracy, as it still remains, but be ruled by the Netanyahu regime - he is making every effort to subjugate the legislative and judicial arms of democracy to the exclusive rule of the executive arm.

The song for Peace, Nov 4, 1995.

The vulgarity of PM Netanyahu.

Netanyahu represents another Israel than Yitzhak Rabin, who wanted to unite the people around peace and saying no to violence, while Netanyahu lashes out at big parts of the population, calling them "sourpussies," and in a peak of vulgarity takes a picture of himself with a tin of pickles (both sourpussies and pickles are hamuzim in Hebrew). In spite of Netanyahu's present rule, the large segment of the Israeli population, Ashkenazi and Sefaradic, young and old, which is hard-working, creative and contributing to Israeli society, paying for the madness of a rule that many oppose, will inevitably return to lead politically, and not only carry the economics, technology, science and culture - the very well-fare of Israeli society.
Netanyahu does not miss an opportunity to brag about Israeli hi-tech and Israel as the only democracy in the area. That is exactly the Israel that he aggressively fights against and incites against.

But the winds of change are blowing. Polls are not to be relied upon, but for the first time since the early 1990s, the center-left is gaining enough strength to possibly form a government, when Netanyahu will have to leave, possibly. His indictments are coming closer, in spite of his attempts to prevent them by absurd and esoteric laws.

We mourn the passing of Tom Kirsch

2017-10-24T07:39:00.000-04:00

We mourn the passing of Tom Kirsch, after a long and courageous battle with terminal illness.

Tom was one of the leading torch bearers in the tradition of Jungian psychology. He was a Graduate of Yale Medical School, Stanford Department of Psychiatry and C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. He was president of the Jung Institute of San Francisco, as well as of the International Association for Analytical Psychology. He wrote The Jungians, and in 2014, Fisher King Press published his A Jungian Life, of which Irvin Yalom writes:

"This book is aptly titled. Thomas Kirsch writes not only a fine autobiography but also a fascinating profile of Jungian life in the last several decades. Thomas was the son of two psychoanalysts, disciples of Carl Jung. Thomas's father knew Jung well in Europe before fleeing from Nazi Germany and coming to California, where he and Thomas's mother practiced for many years. The younger Kirsch followed in the footsteps of his parents and became a highly influential scholar and leader of The International Association for Analytical Psychology for many years. His life story is both a personal tale and a wide sweeping panorama of Jungian thought."

The correspondence between Jung and his father, James Kirsch,was edited by Ann Lammers, and published by Routledge. From the back cover: The Jung-Kirsch Letters belongs to a category of literature where the thoughts and ideas of the psychoanalytic masters are revealed behind their more formal writings. We are here served an exceptional vista of ruminations, theoretical and clinical discussions, dreams and personal emotions, as they crystallize into meaningful ideas. Ann Lammers’ skillful editing renders this correspondence between Jung and one of his most prominent Jewish disciples into a masterful volume of great interest for readers, both professional and lay, interested in depth psychology. Erel Shalit

From Tom Kirsch's contribution to Turbulent Times, Creative Minds: The Relationship between C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann:

"Overall, this correspondence is of immense importance to the history of the Jungian movement. Neumann was considered by many, but by no means all, especially in Jung’s inner circle in Zurich in the 1940s, to be Jung’s intellectual and spiritual son. Jung certainly implies as much in his foreword to The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949/1954), where he writes, “he arrives at conclusions that are among the most important ever to be reached in this field.” In an interview recently available from the Library of Congress in the United States in which Kurt Eissler interviewed Jung on Freud in 1953, Jung discusses the difficulty of being a leading figure but then having a student continuing in a creative way one’s most important thoughts. Jung thought that he was doing that with Freud’s ideas of “archaic vestiges” into archetypes. Freud could not accept that. Jung has the same feeling about Neumann furthering his work. It is not easy when a student makes a real contribution to one’s own most cherished work, but Jung says, “I have a very talented student, Neumann, in . . . Tel Aviv. He is truly a significant person! And, he took hold of some of my material and did something with it. You know, when one is overtaken in this manner, it is not easy for someone who has been in front.” High praise, indeed!

...

On a personal note, when Erich Neumann was still in Berlin, my favorite aunt was engaged to his older brother Franz, before marrying my favorite Uncle Walter, my mother’s older brother. This is another piece of evidence that the German Jews in Berlin were quite involved with each other.

People may be interested to know that my parents always read Neumann, and I never heard a bad word about him at home! My mother read him avidly, and so did my dad. I have often wondered what my life would have been had my parents stayed in Palestine in 1935. I could have been a Sabra. Hebrew would be my mother tongue. What would I be saying today, at this conference, about Erich Neumann? A path not taken."

The Tom Kirsch memorial website

Jung`s Red Book For Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions

2017-10-17T15:36:00.000-04:00

Jung`s Red Book For Our Time: 

Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions 

by Murray Stein (Editor), Thomas Arzt (Editor) 

The essays in this volume are geared to the recognition that the posthumous publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus by C. G. Jung in 2009 was a meaningful gift to our contemporary world. Similar to the volatile times Jung confronted with highly turbulent and uncertain conditions of world affairs that found himself in when he created this work a century ago, we today too are threaten any sense of coherent meaning, personally and collectively. The Red Book promises to become an epochal opus for the 21st century in that it offers us guidance for finding soul under postmodern conditions.This is the first volume of a three-volume series set up on a global and multicultural level and compiling essays from distinguished Jungian analysts and scholars.

Contributions by: Murray Stein: Introduction

Thomas Arzt: “The Way of What Is to Come”: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions

Ashok Bedi: Jung’s Red Book: A Compensatory Image for Our Contemporary Culture: A Hindu Perspective

Paul Bishop: In a World That Has Gone Mad, Is What We Really Need A Red Book? Plato, Goethe, Schelling, Nietzsche and Jung

Ann Casement: “O tempora! O mores!”

Josephine Evetts-Secker: “The Incandescent Matter”: Shudder, Shimmer, Stammer, Solitude

Nancy Swift Furlotti: Encounters with the Animal Soul: A Voice of Hope for Our Precarious World

Liz Greene: “The Way of What Is to Come”: Jung’s Vision of the Aquarian Age

John Hill: Confronting Jung: The Red Book Speaks to Our Time

Stephan A. Hoeller: Abraxas: Jung’s Gnostic Demiurge in Liber Novus

Russell A. Lockhart: Appassionato for the Imagination

Lance S. Owens: C.G. Jung and the Prophet Puzzle

Dariane Pictet: Movements of Soul in The Red Book

Susan Rowland: The Red Book for Dionysus: A Literary and Transdisciplinary Interpretation

Andreas Schweizer: Encountering the Spirit of the Depths and the Divine Child

Heyong Shen: Why Is The Red Book “Red”? – A Chinese Reader’s Reflections

Marvin Spiegelman: On the Impact of Jung and his Red Book: A Personal Story

Liliana Liviano Wahba: Imagination for Evil

John C. Woodcock: The Red Book and the Posthuman

No Room for Small Dreams by Shimon Peres

2017-10-14T08:10:00.002-04:00

This book is so full of life that it should be read by everyone, especially the young, and the leaders of the region, particularly those on both the Israeli and Palestinian side who find and raise every obstacle possible to avoid what Peres so pertinently calls “the necessity of peace.”

"In 1934 eleven-year-old Shimon Peres emigrated to the land of Israel from his native Poland, leaving behind an extended family who would later be murdered in the Holocaust."

Toward the end of his memoirs he writes:

"I believe in the inevitability of peace because I understand the necessity of peace. Necessity ... drove the pioneers to settle the land. It pushed them to think creatively - to turn salted dirt into fertile ground, and transform a fallow desert into a community that could bear fruit. ...

I believe with all my being in the virtue of Zionism, and in the historic decision made by Ben-Gurion to accept the UN resolution for a partitioned Palestine. Even then, Ben-Gurion understood that in order to retain the Jewish character of our state, we had to uphold our values, and that our values are fundamentally democratic. Jews are taught that we are all born in the image of God. To believe this fundamental tenet, a Jewish state must embrace democracy, which demands full equality between the Jews and non-Jews. Democracy, after all, is not only the right of every citizen to be equal, but also the equal right of every citizen to be different. The future of the Zionist project depends on our embrace of the two-state solution.

... To give up on democracy is to abandon our Jewish values. We didn't give up our values even when we were facing furnaces and gas chambers. We lived as Jews and died as Jews and rose again as free Jewish people. We didn't survive merely to be a passing shadow in history, but as a new genesis, a nation intent on tikkun olam, on making the world aright."

Rabin and Peres at the peace gathering, Nov. 4, 1995

Netanyahu in a pre-Rabin assasination demonstration,
next to a coffin bearing the name of Rabin

Netanyahu the Hasmonean

2017-10-13T01:46:00.002-04:00

Joshua Sobol, the outstanding Israeli playwright and director, writes the following, after Benjamin Netanyahu's comment in a Bible class that he hopes Israel will last longer than the rule of the Hasmoneans:

"Bibi compares the life expectancy of the State of Israel with that of the Hasmoneans, which lasted a merely 77 years, while he wishes Israel to be able to celebrate its hundredth birthday.

In other words: let’s hope Israel will continue to exist another thirty years.

Those words by the Prime Minister of Israel uncannily recall the prophecy by Ali Khamenei, who gave Israel another merely twenty-five years until it will be destroyed in war and disappear from the map.

“After us the deluge,” said Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. Louis adopted her nihilistic statement, who after France’s defeat in the battle of Rossbach in 1757, reformulated it thus: “After me, the deluge.”

This is the spirit that now emanates from “Israel’s Royal House.” The message to the young is: Go search for a place where life expectancy is more than thirty years. And for those who remain in this place, and desire to raise their children, grandchildren and their great-grandchildren, the message is: Our Louis XV and Madame Pompadour have to be speedily replaced by those that ensure Israel’s existence over the generations, by its peaceful regional integration, rather than being sentenced to disappear within three decades of continuous conflicts and wars.

Who wants to live under rulers who say, “After us, the deluge”?"

It should be added that the fall of the Hasmoneans was mainly due to strife and infighting, rather than the external onslaught (which Netanyahu refers to). And Bibi, seemingly to defend his rule against the investigations carried out against him, has increased his attacks on big parts of the population, against the media and the State's democratic institutions, such as the legal system and the police.

The following is an excerpt from my novella Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return, referring to the defeatist view reflected by Netanyahu - which I personally do not share. I trust Israel's past, present and future capability to fight against external forces that aim at its destruction. Leaders like Netanyahu, who with hate speeches set the torches of extremism on fire, do have the capability of tearing up the social fabric.

...

True, not everyone had left. There were those who remained behind – he thought of the many poor who had no means to get away, and the baalei teshuvah, those Masters of Repentance who had returned to the fold of the orthodox fathers. It seemed to Eli Shimeoni that their return to the straight path of God had given them the freedom not to ask any questions. They always knew the answer so well, claiming that “in the War of the End of Days, the War of Gog and Magog, total defeat would precede the ultimate victory over evil,” as they knew to repeat by heart.

He had been fascinated by the fanatic obsession with the graves of holy men, whether those scattered over the country, prominently Shimon Bar Yochai at Meron, or those orgiastic journeys by the Bratslav Hassidim to visit the grave of Rabbi Nahman in Uman, or Uriah the Hittite in Iraq – what a thrill! Himself from a somewhat religious background, he often wondered about the fundamentalist need of doomsday fantasies, their need to split the world in good and evil, a “pure” world in which the “impurity” of the “evil other” will be persecuted and exterminated, without the simple realization that this means that if I succeed in my crusade, I will remain trapped as the evil exterminator.

…

First his children had left, gone abroad to study. One had taken up a prominent position at the University of Stamville, while the other was doing gender research at the Institute of Harback. Then his wife had followed, accusing him of being a fanatic and an archaic idealist, or derogatively calling him silly and stubborn, an obsolete Zionist. Friends and colleagues had discreetly taken farewell. Initially they would apologetically say, “if things ever change, you can be sure I will be the first one to return home. After all, there is nothing like Israel, and you can not really extract Israel from an Israeli.” But then, people became increasingly forceful and determined as they said goodbye. The cultured ones would say with bleeding hearts, “this is not the country we prayed for,” and the self-proclaimed prophets would plainly tell him, “everything is collapsing, there is no future here.” Some would reinforce their doomsday prediction, relying on historical evidence that an independent Jewish nation could not survive more than a hundred years.

But what struck him the most was, that everything was so everyday-like. Nothing special, nothing particular to notice. So similar to Elie Wiesel’s pastoral description, “I left my native town in the spring of 1944. It was a beautiful day. The surrounding mountains, in their verdure, seemed taller than usual. Our neighbors were out strolling in their shirt-sleeves. Some turned their heads away, others sneered.”

That’s all. Nothing unusual. Only the mountains were taller than usual. And yet, when as a young man Eli had read those few lines, which he had memorized ever since, the impact on him had been shocking. In lieu of immanent mass murder, there was an uncanny sense of the ordinary, sensed by the mountains that were moved more than people were. As man became smaller, the mountains became taller. The uninvolved, the willing or unwilling bystander, may, or may not, have struggled to wrestle himself out of the conflict that the disruption of the ordinary entailed. The victim, on the other hand, would already have been transported away from the reality of a beautiful day in spring, however, not yet fully trampled down by the boots of the octopus.

...

“From the first pages of this book, the tone of a masterpiece emerges powerfully.

This book makes us realize that the “Israel problem” cannot be understood in a journalistic frame of mind. Politics, war, land, culture, and contemporary experience are expressions of the deep core of human life, the core of the human soul.

This is an important book for anyone who thinks about “cultural identity” and the love of one’s own country and culture.”

Junko Chodos

Requiem: A Tale of Exile and Return

is available, in English as well as in Hebrew, at Amazon and other booksellers

Netanyahu's shameful government

2017-10-03T05:35:00.000-04:00

President Reuven Rivlin attends the state ceremony
marking 44 years since the Yom Kippur War. (Mark Neyman/GPO)

Not a single member of Netanyahu's government saw it fit to honor the memorial service to the fallen soldiers of the Yom Kippur War, held at the military cemetery at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl, on October 1, 2017. When contacted by the organization commemorating the fallen soldiers, the office of the PM responded that the ministers are very busy.

Ehud Barak expressed outrage at the ministers’ absence, “This is shameful and infuriating. This shames the soldiers who died. Where were Bibi and his ministers? Too busy making political appointments or at a political ceremony in Gush Etzion? This is a new low.”

Ehud Barak further noted that a government that "forgets the fallen soldiers, will eventually fall and be forgotten."

Labor leader Avi Gabbay said, “A government that does not respect its past and does not have an impressive present does not have much of a future.”

empty seats at the 10 million shekel
ceremony, Sept. 27, 2017

Netanyahu and his government did have the time - and the money, 10 million shekel - to arrange what they claimed to be a 'state ceremony', celebrating fifty years of settlements. They expressed outrage at the absence of the opposition, the High Court of Justice (as well as the President) from the ceremony, but managed to gather a merely 1600 attendees.

More than two thousand Israeli soldiers were killed in the Yom Kippur War, that began when Arab armies attacked Israel on October 6, 1973, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, and more than seven thousand were wounded. Considering that Israel's population in 1973 was 3,338,000, the number of killed would correspond to two hundred thousand in the US of today.

The following is an excerpt from The Hero and His Shadow: Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel:

Inflated Strength and Denial of Fear

Illusions of safety and self sufficiency were the result of excessive reliance on strength with concomitant denial of fear following the Six Day War. President Sadat’s attempt to initiate negotiations in 1971 72 did not elicit an unambiguous Israeli response, because there was no real feeling of need. The psychological frame of mind was such that no one seemed able to pose a threat to Israel, or even evoke fear. Thus, despite Sadat’s repeated declarations that the coming year would be one of either war or peace, the warnings were foregone and the 1973 Yom Kippur War erupted in complete surprise to the Israelis. As a consequence of such an illusion of self sufficiency and invulnerability, Israel’s leadership was unable to correctly interpret the intelligence at hand about imminent attack. Like the entire Israeli collective, the leadership was caught in the dangerous psychological condition of fusion between the individual ego and the extended national or collective self. Personal and collective identities had merged, they were as if inseparable. The individual could (and, in fact, social undercurrents encouraged him to) identify with the national image of strength, omnipotence and fearlessness. Even death was challenged. Nothing could inflict harm or injury. This state of psychological inflation affected the entire nation, including the political leadership, which was unable to differentiate itself from the collective process. The leadership had fallen victim to the collective self-image of invincibility, and was therefore unable to prevent the war. In striking contrast, following the Declaration of Independence, May 14, 1948, when the people rejoiced and danced in the streets, Ben-Gurion was gravely concerned with what lie ahead, contemplating the possibility of the Arab nations’ forthcoming attack. In 1973, however, the process of redemption, of the individual ego merging with the collective self, had attained its tragic peak.

The position of strength, force, and power, disconnected from its opposite pole of loss and fear of annihilation, collapsed following the Yom Kippur War. Since any trace of weakness might have threatened the sense of hubris, and therefore had been denied, the gap between reality and self-perception had reached unhealthy proportions. With devastating clarity, the Yom Kippur War brought to light the weakness that lingered in the shadow behind the persona of strength and self sufficiency, by which the collective ego had become possessed. The war brought forth the sense of loss and – again – the deeply rooted fear of ultimate destruction. This, in turn, generated the release of strength and the will to survive. The Yom Kippur War was the tragic outcome of a complex having taken possession of a nation’s collective consciousness.

The Yom Kippur War and Its Aftermath

From Ambivalence to Unconditional Ideology

The mood in the wake of the Yom Kippur War was entirely different than the triumph and euphoria that had followed upon the Six Day War. Israelis now found themselves depressed and in grief, the narcissistic illusion of grandiosity and invulnerability had shattered. …

Contents

Preface The Beggar in the Hero’s Shadow

Chapter 1 Return to the Source

Chapter 2 From My Notebook

Chapter 3 From Dream to Reality

Chapter 4 Origins and Myths

Chapter 5 From Redemption to Shadow

Chapter 6 Wholeness Apart

Chapter 7 Myth, Shadow and Projection

Chapter 8 A Crack in the Mask

Chapter 9 The Death of the Mythical and the Voice of the Soul

Dedication of The Hero and His Shadow

I dedicate this book to those, all too many, whose voices were silenced by man’s evil.

I dedicate it to those, all too few, who raise their voice against fascism, who speak up in the struggle for peace and reconciliation, especially between Palestinians and Israelis, incessantly on the verge of yet another cycle of violence and hostilities.

I dedicate it to those who try to hold the vulnerable balance in that ultimate conflict of Abraham between Father and Son, divine and human, idea and implementation, past and future, ego and self.

I dedicate this book to the daughters and the sons whose future is endangered.

The Rope on the Eve of Atonement

2017-09-28T14:02:00.000-04:00

A legend tells us that when a person is created, s/he is tied to God with a string. If s/he sins, the string breaks. But repentance during the Days of Awe brings the angel Gabriel down to make a knot in the string, and the person is once again tied to God. Because we all sin once in a while, our strings become full of knots.

But a string with many knots is, clearly, shorter than one without knots. Therefore repentance brings a person closer to God and, evidently, there is no repentance without a sin.

We cannot, so it seems, live a life without shadows, the completely pure, good and sin-free life. Such a life would be a clean and straight line. We spontaneously think of our string to God vertically, but if we imagine the line horizontally, the straight line characterizes life that has come to a standstill.

The knots of sin and remorse repair the torn rope and make it shorter. The knots show us the rope is no longer innocently unbroken. And the knots add width and curves and complexity to the string by which we are attached to the transcendent.

And the knots add knots – they link and connect, they bind and harden, they snare and ensnare, they complicate the passage but they enable holding on to the rope.

Not speaking about the professional sinner, sins are often committed unawarely, because we have not reflected well enough on our deeds, or when we have found ourselves torn by strife and conflict, or when “clouds have blurred our vision.”

Do the knots of sin and repentance really bring us closer to God, to the divine, to higher principles, to greater morality, to the Self as the messenger and seat of the divine in our souls?

Perhaps it depends on the manner in which we carry the burden of our sins, how we allow the sins we commit to affect us, to bring us out of innocence into greater complexity, how we reflect upon the sins we commit, how ably we respond – that is, what responsibility we take upon us, rather than the resolution and dissolution of crime and conflict.

The contact with our inner self may require the knots on the rope. Contact, relationship and knot are the same in Hebrew, kesher. The contact between human and transcendent, and the relationship between ourselves and others, upon which sins and shame, guilt and remorse are tied like knots, require, so it seems, that we hold the rope, in all its imperfection and complexity, with all its knotted tears.

אהוד ברק: הטקס בגוש עציון - גושי היישובים מול התנחלויות מבודדות

2017-09-28T13:14:00.000-04:00

יציעים ריקים בטקס ה"ממלכתי"י

מאמר בהארץ של אהוד ברק

הטקס בגוש עציון לציון 50 שנה לחזרתנו אל כל ארץ ישראל, ערש לידתנו כאומה וכנושאי שליחות אוניברסלית, הוא הכל מלבד טקס ממלכתי. זהו אירוע שעוצב כניסיון פוליטי זול ובוטה לנכס לימין בישראל את הישגי מלחמת ששת הימים ואת אהבת הארץ, ולעזאזל האמת והעובדות.

טקס ממלכתי היה מדגיש את המאחד והמוסכם ולא את המפלג והמפריד, שלא לומר המסית. טקס ממלכתי היה משקף את תרומת כל הזרמים בעם להישגי ההתיישבות ביהודה ושומרון ואף את המחלוקת הלגיטימית על מטרות ודרכים.

טקס ממלכתי היה מציין שמי שבנה את צה״ל והוביל את המערכה לשחרור חלקי ארץ היו יצחק רבין, חיים בר לב, מוטה גור ואחרים (שהתבררו לימים כ"שמאלנים" רחמנא ליצלן), ושמי שגיבש והוביל לאורך עשור את ביצוע ההתיישבות, בעיקר על פי שיקולים ביטחוניים, היה המערך השנוא כל כך.

טקס ממלכתי היה מעלה אל דוכן המברכים את אלוף (מיל׳) אלעד פלד, האיש שבגיל 21 בראש מחלקת פלמ״ח שחרר את צפת ובגיל 40 בראש אוגדה 36 שחרר את כל השומרון. איש מעשה חכם וצנוע, שמעולם לא דרש "כפיים!", ומעולם לא קיטר על "אפס כיסוי תקשורתי" של הישגיו, אך תרם לשחרור יהודה ושומרון יותר מכל המברכים והאורחים בטקס – יחד. או את דליה רבין, בתו של רמטכ"ל הניצחון ואדריכל השלום יצחק רבין, שנרצח על ידי בן עוולה, איש ימין קיצוני מוסת. או את יצחק הרצוג, ראש האופוזיציה ובנו של ראש אמ״ן והנשיא לשעבר, חיים הרצוג, שפוגג בהופעות ייחודיות בטלוויזיה שזה עתה באה לעולם את חרדות הציבור טרם ובמהלך המלחמה והיה מושלה הראשון של ירושלים המאוחדת. או את הילה אלעזר-כהן, בתו הבכורה של האלוף דויד אלעזר, דדו, שתבע מהיום הראשון והוביל מהיום הרביעי את כיבוש רמת הגולן בסערה.

טקס ממלכתי היה מעלה על נס את בהירות הראייה של "תכנית אלון" ואת ההיגיון הפנימי של תפיסת "גושי היישובים" ושכונות יהודיות במזרח העיר, לצד אחיזה התיישבותית לאורך הירדן - כממדי תפיסה ביטחונית מפוכחת ומוסכמת על כל חלקי הציבור; ולא מטשטש בכוונת מכוון את ההבדל הקריטי בין גושי היישובים - שבהם 80% ממתיישבי יו״ש ושערכם לביטחון מוסכם על כולנו - לבין ההתנחלויות המבודדות, שאפילו על פי ראשי ההתיישבות ייחודם איננו בתרומה לביטחון אלא בהיותם "קיום מצוות יישוב הארץ".

טקס כזה לא יתקיים, משום שהמטרה היא לנכס, לפלג ולאחז עיניים דרך טשטוש הקו המפריד בין מה שמשותף לכולנו - ביטחון תחילה, שלמות העם קודמת לשלמות הארץ וערכי מגילת העצמאות - לבין מה שמשרת אג׳נדה לאומנית ואפלה, נגועה במשיחיות, המאיימת על עתיד כולנו.

סיפורה המופלא של חזרתנו לציון והתיישבותנו בחלקי מולדת החיוניים להבטחת עתידנו, הוא המשך סיפור הלאומיות הישראלית הגאה. מחליף אותו בתודעת מנהיגי הימין חזון העוועים של "מדינה אחת" עם מלחמת אזרחים מתמשכת ו"אפרטהייד יהודי" או רוב ערבי. זהו חזון שבמוקדו כיום הניסיון לסכל כל סיכוי להסדר עם ביטחון בעתיד, באמצעות ההתנחלויות המבודדות, וזהו מרשם אסוני שחיוני לעצור.

צודקים לכן אלה האומרים: אנו גאים בחלקנו בשיבה אל כל חבלי הארץ ובמפעל ההתיישבות החיוני לביטחוננו. בה בעת אנו דוחים את הניסיון הזול והמביך לנכס פוליטית את ההורות על ההישג לצד אחד במארג הפוליטי תוך טשטוש מודע של ההבדל בין "אין ברירה", רגעים של אחדות מופלאה ומעשה ציוני גדול בעקבותיה, לבין לאומנות אפלה, שהעירה חזון משיחי, שיישומו מאיים על הפרויקט הציוני כולו.

Erich Neumann: The Roots of Jewish Consciousness

2017-09-24T08:24:00.000-04:00

With the publication in 2015 of the important correspondence between C.G. Jung and Erich Neumann (edited by Martin Liebscher), there has been something of a Neumann renaissance. A major international conference was held in 2015 at Kibbutz Shefayim, with participants from more than 25 countries, and in 2016 a symposium was held at the Pacifica Institute in California.
Neumann’s slim but brilliant book, Jacob and Esau: On the collective symbolism of the brother motif, was recently published by Chiron in collaboration with Recollections.
A volume of essays by prominent Jungians, as well as members of the Jung and Neumann families, has also een published by Chiron/Recollections. It is edited by Erel Shalit and Murray Stein, Turbulent Times, Creative Minds: The relationship between Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung (1933-1960).

Ann Conrad Lammers

Soon, in late 2018 or early 2019, Routledge will publish Neumann’s major treatise on The Roots of Jewish Consciousness in an impressive two-volume set (Volume 1 on the psychological significance of revelation, Volume 2 on Hasidism), edited by Ann Lammers, and translated by Mark Kyburz with Ann Lammers. This work, written between 1934 and 1945 but never published, is a treasure trove, a wealth of pearls. Although Neumann mined its themes in several of his Eranos lectures, the work as a whole holds a unique place in his opus.

Further announcements will be posted as the work of translation and editing progresses, but here is a taste of Neumann’s writing:

... for Hasidism the world consists of a great, diffusely distributed creative nothingness, whose points of concentration, in varying degrees of power, reshape and form this unformed energy and cause it to shine. These points of concentration are the world's individuals, created in the tzimtzum, having a smaller and greater circumference and varying energy charge. They can also diminish or increase the extent and intensity of their radiance, depending on the level they attain, that is, their ability to enter into contact with divine nothingness.

Read more about Erich Neumann's The Roots of Jewish Consciousness
Read more about Erich Neumann's Jacob and Esau: On the collective symbolism of the brother motif
Read more about Turbulent Times, Creative Minds: The relationship between Erich Neumann and C.G. Jung (1933-1960)

Cover painting by Mordecai Arnon

Cover image silhouette by Meir Gur Arieh

Etching by Jacob Steinhardt

On Kafka's short story The Next Village

2017-09-16T09:15:00.001-04:00

“The art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.”

C.G. Jung

Kafka's short story The Next Village illustrates two aspects of the cycle, or the stages, of life - the experience and the memory.

You are invited to watch an 8 minute video on YouTube, excerpted from a lecture on The Cycle of Life.

I am grateful to Adam Kościuk and Karol Domański who have prepared and edited this video, as always in the most wonderful way. (The video can also be watched with Polish subtitles here).

Topics explored in the book The Cycle of Life include:

I. The Journey

Stages and Seasons

Jung’s Stages of Life

All the World’s a Stage, and a Stage of Life

Being on the Way—A Way of Being

Hermes and the Journey: Being on the Way

The Crossroads

II. The Child

The Child in the Mirror

Psychotherapy and Childhood

The Divine Child

From Divine to Human

Eros, Psyche and Pleasure

III. The Puer and the Puella

Between Shame and Fear

Wine, Spirit and Fire

Prometheus—the Thoughtful Thief

IV. The Adult

King on Earth

Boundaries of Reality

Celestial Jerusalem—Terrestrial Jerusalem

The King who Refuses to Die

The Dried-up Earth

The Limping Ego

The Empty Shell

V. i. The Senex

V. ii. Homage to Sophocles

V. iii. The Last Chapter: Self and Meaning

Ancestral Roots

An Oak and an Acorn

We Are All Beggars, Are We Not?

The Cycle of Life is available on Amazon, Fisher King Press, and other book sellers.

Shana Tova - A Year of Health, Peace and Creativity

2017-09-16T06:25:00.000-04:00

אני מאחל לכולם שנת בריאות, שלום ויצירה

An excerpt from Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero's Path:

....

In Egypt the ram was a sign of Amon-Ra, the sun-god. In Jewish symbolism we find it in the Shofar, the ram’s horn, and its call for repentance and freedom, and in the bonding of Isaac, where the ram is sacrificed in exchange of Isaac, in Abraham’s act of submission to the male God.

The Shofar, in fact, is a symbol that unites the opposites. It represents freedom as well as repentance, triumph and suffering, the soul’s (and the nation’s) redemption, as well as exile. It has been likened to the contrite heart bent in repentance, as well as the trachea, the windpipe, the spiritual part of the body, as opposed to, but alongside, the esophagus, the gullet, through which the food or the earthly part passes.

The ram’s horn refers to two important Biblical events, the binding of Isaac and Moses receiving the Tablets at Mount Sinai.

Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, but Isaac, which means ‘he laughed,’ was not actually sacrificed. The Hebrew speaks of the binding of Isaac, indicating the dramatic cultural transition from actual deed to internalized faith, from the worship of stonehard gods to ideational images. In place of Isaac, the ram was sacrificed to God, and Isaac, son of Abraham, was spared and given to life. The sacrifice need not be complete: to make sacred is no longer engraved in stone; that is, it is not literal. Yet, to make sacred, to inspire the soul and ensoul the spirit, we need to sacrifice, renounce, give up the ego’s hubris, the belief that the conscious ego is all and be all. The centrality of this remarkable transitional event is reflected in tradition, which tells us the sacrifice of the horned ram instead of Isaac took place on Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount, on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year – which is when the ram’s horn is blown.

....

Available on Amazon, and right now at a 40% discount on Fisher King Press

War and The Enemy in the 21st Century - by Mel Mathews

2017-09-14T06:55:00.000-04:00

One of the greatest rewards of being a publisher is in reflecting and rejoicing in the many meaningful and timely Fisher King Press publications. It truly is a privilege to be the midwife of these newborns—many of whom arrive far ahead of their time—and to witness their maturing and assimilation into the collective consciousness.

With the wars being fought on many fronts, and with the posturing and possibility of yet more, I reached for Erel Shalit’s Enemy, Cripple, Beggar: Shadows in the Hero’s Path (which we published in 2008) and have been reading from Shalit’s chapter on The Enemy, which in the beginning of the chapter, states:

On [the journey], the hero initially meets the Enemy, because the previously unrealized and unconscious dark side, the shadow, is often first encountered in projection, as carried by the enemy.

In reference to the First World War, Jung wrote in 1916: "As events in wartime have clearly shown, our mentality is distinguished by the shameless naïveté with which we judge our enemy, and in the judgment we pronounce upon him we unwittingly reveal our own defects: we simply accuse our enemy of our own unadmitted faults." (C.G. Jung, Collected Works 8, 2nd ed., par. 516.)

The realization of the enemy shadow—whether persecuted by it, or when trying to flee or to fight it—provides a possibility of energizing the ego. In the inward process of finding one’s pain and resources, and in order to eventually find one’s way to the inner wounds that unsettle us if we do not attend to them, to find the wounded child in our soul, it is necessary to go through the projections of the shadow . . .

This is just the first few paragraphs of the chapter that explores many facets of the enemy archetype. If you have a copy of Enemy, Cripple, Beggar, I encourage you to revisit this timely publication. If you do not have a copy . . . well, here’s a link to purchase a copy of this rich and worthy book: Enemy, Cripple, Beggar - right now at a 40% discount!

As the publisher of Fisher King Press, I would also like to extend a heartfelt thank you to the many readers of our publications, and to our authors who have done the hard work of research, mining the depths of their inner worlds, and for bring back to us these timeless gems.

Fisher King Press publishes an eclectic mix of worthy books including Jungian Psychological Perspectives and a growing list of Cutting-Edge alternative titles. www.fisherkingpress.com

"סעיד" של רן כהן

2017-09-07T09:29:00.000-04:00

סעיד

/ רן כהן

מיהו סעיד הקטן, שהוברח לבדו אחרי הפרעות ביהודי בגדד אל מעבר לנהר שאט־אל־ערב לאיראן? מיהו הילד העירקי שהגיע לבדו לישראל הצעירה והוא רק בן עשר? איך הצליח ילד דובר ערבית, להיטמע ולהתערות באופן מלא כל־כך בלב ליבו של הנוער הישראלי של שנות החמישים? איך צמח עד שהיה מִבן מיעוט נרדף בגולת־בבל למנהיג של ציבור בישראל?

הסיפור המרתק הזה מחיה את דרכו של סעיד כהן הקטן עד שהיה לרן כהןהמוכּר כחבר כנסת ואף כשר בממשלת ישראל. לא סוד הוא שחייו הציבוריים של רן הובילו אותו הרבה יותר גבוה מבחירתו לתפקיד מזכיר הקיבוץ שאליו הגיע כפליט קטן, אבל בעיניו התפקיד הזה הוא בלי ספק פסגת התערותו בחברה הישראלית.

רן כהן משקף את מיטב המורשת שהביאה עמה יהדות עיראק לישראל.סעיד הוא יצירה מלהיבה המהווה נדבך נוסף ביצירותיהם של אינטלקטואלים ילידי עיראק, אשר עלה בידם לנתץ חומות של התבדלות ולהרבות גוונים בחברה הישראלית, ובכך מפליאים בתרומתם ליצירת תרבות עשירה, רבת־פנים וחיונית.
סמי מיכאל

סיפור ישראלי מרתק שמוסיף נדבך מרנין של בריחה, עלייה וקליטה נפלאה בארץ. רן זכה במה שאנחנו, ילדי חברות נוער בקיבוצים, לא זכינו, הוא היה למזכיר הקיבוץ ומנהיגו, חבר כנסת ושר שלאורך כל הדרך ניהל מאבקים חברתיים ומדיניים מרשימים שהביאו לו ולנו גאווה רבה. סיפור עוצר נשימה של מאבק והצלחה.
אלי עמיר

סעיד הוא סיפור מרתק, קולח ומרגש, שבד בבד עם היותו אישי מאוד, אינטימי מאוד, שופע חום אנושי ואהבה, הוא גם סיפור של תקופה סוערת, קשה, רוויית מלחמות ומאבקים פוליטיים, וזה גם סיפור של עם שנוצר מיוצאי קהילות אנושיות ותרבויות חיים שונות, שמתמזגות והולכות בתשוקה גדולה ובסבל לישות הישראלית המורכבת כל כך .
יהושוע סובול

ספר מרגש ומרתק של רן הכן, מנהיג, ח"כ ושר לשעבר. חובה לקרוא, וללמוד ממנו מהי ציונות אמיתית. שונה מהקיצוניות של ממשל ביבי

על רן בויקיפדיה

Herzl vs. Bibi

2017-08-26T08:45:00.000-04:00

The English will follow the Hebrew

.קונגרס הציוני הראשון התקיים בין 29 ל31 באוגוסט, 1897, כלומר, לפני 120 שנה

:לאחר הקונגרס, הרצל כתב בעיתונו, ב10 לספטמבר

מסתבר שלרעיון הלאומי היהודי הכח המאחד אנשים בעלי הבדלי שפה, הבדלים חברתיים, פוליטיים ודתיים לשלם אחד

בהסתתו, שממשיכה יותר מעשרים שנה, הן כמנהיג האופוזיציה בתקופת רבין בתחילת שנות התשעים, הן כראש הממשלה בהווה, נתניהו עושה כל מאמץ (מוצלח מבחינתו) להפריד בין חלקי העם ולהסית נגד כל מי שחושב אחרת ממנו

ללא רמז של יושרה או רסן, הוא עושה הכל כדי לפרק את המרקם העדין של החברה הישראלית, באמצעות שחיתות והסתה

לצערינו, חברי הממשלה, הן ממפלגתו של נתניהו, הן מהמפלגות הקואליציה, שותקים. כפי שאלי ויזל אמר, הצופה מן הצד, ושותק, רע יותר לקורבן מן התוקפן עצמו

למזלנו, ישנם אנשים, ארגונים ומוסדות שפועלים בארצינו הקרועה ואהובה כדי לשמור ולהגן על הדמוקרטיה והשפיות

כמה הערות ביחס להפגנות פתח תקוה:

היועץ המשפטי לממשלה מנדלבליט אינו חלק מהרשות השופטת, אלא מהרשות המבצעת, מינוי אישי של ראש הממשלה נתניהו. לכן הפגנה מול ביתו או במרחק מאות מטרים מביתו אינה דומה להפגנה מול בית של שופט.

בנובמבר 2016 מנדלבליט הכריז שאין חשד לפלילים בפרשת הצוללות. איך ידע?

הפגנות פתח תקווה החלו בנובמבר 2016 כדרישה ממנדלבליט לא לגרור רגליים ולהתחיל בחקירות או להתפטר.

היום יש חקירה ועד מדינה, לא רק בפרשה זו, אלא בפרשות נוספות שסיומן מתעכב.

עד כה, מי ומה השפיע יותר על היועץ המשפטי לממשלת נתניהו - נתניהו או העם שדורש חקירות יעילות של השחיתות?

בין 1984 ל 1987 דתיים לאומיים וחרדים הפגינו במוצ״ש נגד פתיחת קולנוע בשבת בפתח תקוה. גם כאשר בג״צ אסר על ההפגנות, המשיכו אלפים להפגין. היכן הם היום בהגנה על הזכות הדמוקרטית לחופש הביטוי?

Herzl on the balcony in Basel

The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, August 29-31, 1897, that is, 120 years ago.

Following the Congress, Herzl wrote a piece in Die Welt, September 10:

"[I]t turned out that the Jewish national idea possesses the unifying power to wield together people with linguistic, social, political, and religious differences into one united whole. . . . "

Netanyahu on the balcony at Zion Square

With his incitement, which has continued over twenty years, both as leader of the opposition during the premiership of Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s, and presently as Prime Minister, Netanyahu makes every possible (and from his point of view successful) effort to divide, instigating against those who think differently from him, rather than to bring "together people with linguistic, social, political, and religious differences into one united whole."

Without any sense of integrity or inhibition, he is doing whatever he can to destroy the fabric of Israeli society, by corruption and incitement.

Tragically, the members of the government, from his own party and his coalition partners, remain silent. They have turned into bystanders, who, as Elie Wiesel said, are worse to the victims than the aggressor.

Fortunately, there are people, organisations and institutions in this torn country who stand up to defend and protect democracy and the sanity of this beloved country.

The Hero and His Shadow

Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel

Contents

Preface The Beggar in the Hero’s Shadow

Chapter 1 Return to the Source

Chapter 2 From My Notebook

Chapter 3 From Dream to Reality

Chapter 4 Origins and Myths

Chapter 5 From Redemption to Shadow

Chapter 6 Wholeness Apart

Chapter 7 Myth, Shadow and Projection

Chapter 8 A Crack in the Mask

Chapter 9 The Death of the Mythical and the Voice of the Soul

available on Kindle ($9.99) and in paperback ($29.00)

When Bibi's bubble bursts

2017-08-20T06:54:00.000-04:00

PM. Netanyahu, leader of the most extreme and anti-democratic government that has ever ruled in Israel, has declared that he is no longer Prime Minister of the entire population, inciting against the left, the media, Arabs, and whoever does not directly swear allegiance to him.

The police was ordered on August 19 to prevent the demonstrations against his corruption, carried out hundreds of meters from the home of the Attorney General, and the arrest of leaders of the manifestation.

One of the reasons given by the police was "undue pressure" on the AG.

The AG is a political appointee, by Netanyahu, and not a civil servant in the Department of Justice. He has severely delayed the corruption investigations against Netanyahu, a great many of whose government ministers and advisers have been tried and judged or are under investigation for a variety of crimes, many of them on charges of corruption.

It is not the task of the police to determine if demonstrators exert due or undue pressure.

The photo above is from a demonstration against the policies of Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995, where Netanyahu marches in front of a 'coffin' that bears Rabin's name.

The inflamed atmosphere, of which Netanyahu as then leader of the opposition was partly responsible, led up to Rabin's assassination.

Netanyahu should be tried for this, as well as his present incitement and the crimes presently under investigation. The fact that 22 years have passed should at least not make us forget.

When Bibi's bubble bursts, and it will, sooner rather than later, the extreme right in Israel will have a harsh awakening. The more moderate right, which has collaborated by silence and participation, will have a shameful awakening that fascism can take grip of any society, if the watchdogs are not constantly on the alert.

The Hero and His Shadow

Psychopolitical Aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel

Contents

Preface The Beggar in the Hero’s Shadow

Chapter 1 Return to the Source

Chapter 2 From My Notebook

Chapter 3 From Dream to Reality

Chapter 4 Origins and Myths

Chapter 5 From Redemption to Shadow

Chapter 6 Wholeness Apart

Chapter 7 Myth, Shadow and Projection

Chapter 8 A Crack in the Mask

Chapter 9 The Death of the Mythical and the Voice of the Soul

available on Kindle ($9.99) and in paperback ($29.00)

Dedication of The Hero and His Shadow

I dedicate this book to those, all too many, whose voices were silenced by man’s evil.

I dedicate it to those who try to hold the vulnerable balance in that ultimate conflict of Abraham between Father and Son, divine and human, idea and implementation, past and future, ego and self.
I dedicate this book to the daughters and the sons whose future is endangered.

Erel Shalit's books on Amazon

The Human Soul (Lost?) in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era - Quadrant

2017-08-11T11:02:00.000-04:00

This essay, in the Spring 2017 issue of Quadrant, examines the liminal phase of society and interiority in which we find ourselves today and poses several questions to the irrepressibly optimistic inventors of a techno-utopian future: Can we really be and feel happy if we need to be informed about it by a cellphone app? Do 93 million selfies a day replace a single moment of true reflection? How can we remain relatively integrated individuals in the transiency of the present?

The essay will be part of a forthcoming book.

From the introduction:

Jung says, “Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices…,” and “In each of these images there is a little piece of human psychology and human fate, a remnant of the joys and sorrows that have been repeated countless times in our ancestral history…” (CW15, par. 129, 127).

The image, the images of interiority, cannot exist without the soul. In soullessness, in fundamentalism and totalitarianism there are no images.The existence of the soul, that elusive, purely poetical idea of anima, whether in man or woman, cannot be bound by earthly empires, neither by imperial rules nor by imperatives, but can only be poetically imagined, for instance, as that image of a mirror that mirrors the image.

But the soul also relies on the capacity of imagelessness, in the sense of an absence of externally generated images. In their discussion centered around Neumann’s manuscript on Jacob and Esau, Jung writes that “the ‘imagelessness’ [that is, of the God-image] is exceedingly important for the free exercise of intuition that would be prejudiced by a fixed image, and thereby rendered unusable.” (Jung and Neumann, 2015, p. 56).

While images take shape within our individual psyches, the image is not only within us, but we are also within the image, as Henry Corbin says (Cheetham, 2003, p. 71). We reside within an image of the world, within the world soul, and we relate to the world according to the images, ideas and perspectives that we have developed, and to a large extent, according to the views and the spirit of our times.

When listening to the brilliant young men and women at the forefront of progress, those that hold the trigger to the chips and the apps of the future, one cannot refrain from being amazed at the firm belief and complete conviction that technology is the remedy of all ills and the foundation of all future viruses – sorry! virtues, not viruses.

This essay is an attempt to cause a slight crack in the confidence of the young, and perhaps it is merely an old man’s pathetic envy of tomorrow’s triumphant heroes, to whisper in their ears, “you are also mortals.” .....

The Human Soul in Transition
an interview with Bonnie Bright on YouTube

Quadrant, Spring 17 - Volume XLVII:1

From the Editor

— Kathryn Madden

Featured Artist

— Shaun McNiff

The Human Soul (Lost?) in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era

— Erel Shalit

Meditations on the Birth of Self: Archetypal Revelations in Whitman's 1855 "Song of Myself"

— Brandon J. O'Neil

Black Holes & The Negative Mother Complex

— Elizabeth Colistra

Living Multiplicity: A Sideways Perspective

— Roger Peasley

Book Reviews

—
Beth Darlington, review editor. Reviews by Deborah Stewart, Mark Dean, and Chris Beach

Subscribe to Erel Shalit's Newsletter

Cykl życia. Archetypowa droga człowieka - The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey - now in Polish

2017-08-02T08:56:00.000-04:00

The Polish edition of The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey.

Translation by Karol Domanski and Adam Kosciuk.

Introduction by Aleksandra Szczepaniak

Design: Marta Rydz

From the introduction by Aleksandra Szczepaniak:

This is a journey leading us along the paths of human life. It is also an introduction to the art of amplification that being a method of broadening of the meaning through myths, legends, tales and stories from the cultural treasury of the world. It illustrates the river-like course of human life. It is only the image that can fully reflect the process and the interweaving of plots and motives of psychic life. This book is like a current of a river - sometimes it flows slowly and clearly, sometimes it speeds up falling into meanders of meanings and nuances. Its tone rises and falls - short phrases change into descriptions filled with silence. In a way, through its changing dynamics,it reflects the process of Jungian analysis –here, likewise, various stories mingle in the analytical vessel.The authour sometimes speaks with the voice of Puer, joyous and vivacious, sometimes he sounds like Senex and at other times he falls into a discourse so characteristic for Jewish culture of which he is a representative.

I would like to thank Aleksandra, Karol, Adam, Marta, and all those who have worked to enable the publishing of the book in Polish. They have all been incredibly devoted and done a wonderful job - THANK YOU!

Już w piątek ukaże się polskie wydanie książki "Cykl życia. Archetypowa droga człowieka" autorstwa Erela Shalita w tłumaczeniu Karola Domańskiego i Adama Kościuka.

Według teorii Junga życie człowieka składa się z kilku etapów. Faza pierwsza, obejmująca dzieciństwo i młodość, jest adaptacją do świata zewnętrznego; faza druga, dojrzałość, to adaptacja do świata wewnętrznego; faza trzecia, starość, jest adaptacją do śmierci. Erel Shalit podkreśla, że rozwój człowieka trwa przez całe życie i ma charakter nie linearny, a cyrkularny. W istocie jest cyrkumambulacją – okrążaniem znaczenia.

(...) Ta książka nie jest łatwa – autor prowadzi Czytelnika przez meandry życia i rozwoju, wprowadzając w świat znaczeń, których nie dostrzegamy w pędzie współczesnego świata. Wiedzie nas przez przestrzeń wewnętrzną, której portalami są marzenia senne, zapomniane opowieści, mity i dzieła literackie. Opisuje proces, którego nie da się w pełni przekazać, można go jedynie zobaczyć czy poczuć za pośrednictwem zmieniających się obrazów.

Z Przedmowy do wydania polskiego

Aleksandra Szczepaniak
analityk jungowski
Polskie Towarzystwo Psychologii Analitycznej

Książkę można nabyć tutaj

Watch Cycle of Life on YouTube, with Polish subtitles, part 1, part 2.

Watch Cycle of Life on YouTube, with English subtitles

Erel Shalit

Turbulent Times, Creative Minds - A review by Ann Casement

The Story of Requiem on YouTube

Jerusalem, the Capital

Imitation and the Archetypal Adult

The Sun and the Sword, The Moon and the Mirror

Jung's Understanding of Schizophrenia -- Is it Still Relevant in the "Era of the Brain"?

Kristallnacht and the Eternal Jew

בין נפש לתרבות - סדרת הרצאות בתולעת ספרים

22 years to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin

We mourn the passing of Tom Kirsch

Jung`s Red Book For Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions

Jung`s Red Book For Our Time:

Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions

by Murray Stein (Editor), Thomas Arzt (Editor)

No Room for Small Dreams by Shimon Peres

Netanyahu the Hasmonean

Netanyahu's shameful government

Labor leader Avi Gabbay said, “A government that does not respect its past and does not have an impressive present does not have much of a future.” empty seats at the 10 million shekelceremony, Sept. 27, 2017

The Rope on the Eve of Atonement

אהוד ברק: הטקס בגוש עציון - גושי היישובים מול התנחלויות מבודדות

Erich Neumann: The Roots of Jewish Consciousness

On Kafka's short story The Next Village

Shana Tova - A Year of Health, Peace and Creativity

War and The Enemy in the 21st Century - by Mel Mathews

"סעיד" של רן כהן

Herzl vs. Bibi

When Bibi's bubble bursts

The Human Soul (Lost?) in Transition, at the Dawn of a New Era - Quadrant

Quadrant, Spring 17 - Volume XLVII:1

Cykl życia. Archetypowa droga człowieka - The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey - now in Polish

Labor leader Avi Gabbay said, “A government that does not respect its past and does not have an impressive present does not have much of a future.”

empty seats at the 10 million shekel
ceremony, Sept. 27, 2017