Slender Threads: A Conversation with Jungian Analyst and author Robert A. Johnson
The logical thing to do would be to put it back in the church. But people don’t seem to be able to do that. It’s one’s religious function. And all the mechanisms in the church for receiving it but it’s not a language that seems tenable for modern people. (1:15:15)
Jung also said that Christianity is the best road map of the western psyche that exists. (1:24:08)
By turning [the Christian myth] into idolatry it exteriorizes it and depotentiates it. (1:29:14)
Religion, to take the word apart, means to put things back together again... That’s the job of the religious life. I think still in my life, if I found a good honest monastery or ashram, I would go. I’ve given up trying. (1:31:52)
[JPM] Psychologically speaking, the religious nature of psyche is those things that are disparate they come together, that’s the religious function of the psyche. [RAJ] The Garden of Eden split us apart and it’s the job of the church to put us back together again, simple as that. (1:34:00)
[RAJ] Asylums are full of people who got a glimpse of something bigger than they can stand. [JPM] ...The difference between a religious experience and a psychotic event? [RAJ] One’s capacity to stand it. Jung liked to point out: Nietzsche failed it, Nietzsche went psychotic and William Blake stood it. What is the difference between a psychotic experience and a religious experience - it depends entirely on one’s ability to stand or handle the experience. Such things happen frequently to people, much more frequently than our society would like to acknowledge. Some people side step it and evade the disaster of it, but that loses its beauty too. Or some people go fanatical with it, have to go out on a sandwich board and proclaim the second coming of Christ. But if one has the psychic strength to take it, it can be a religious experience of tremendous power. Jung liked to point out that Nietzsche failed it, he identified with it. Jung liked to point out the point in Thus Spake Zarathustra where Jung thought Nietzsche lost the battle. At one point Zarathustra comes to Nietzsche and insisted he take a frog and swallow it. The frog being the uninspiring reality. And Nietzsche tried, but he choked on it nd spat it out ...Jung felt he lost the battle at that moment because he wouldn’t take the earthiness of life. He wouldn’t take the just stuff, the boredom and mundane world. Jung liked to point out that William Blake having been offered much the same strength or power of revelation painted it and wrote it and related intelligently to it without identifying with it and thus became a great artist. Jung once said that William Blake went farther into the collective unconscious and lived to tell the tale than anybody else that he knew. Jung pointed out on the same subject that William Blake kept a very humble and ordinary and human life he married and he earned his life as an engraver, earned his living as an engraver and wouldn’t live in London, lived in a little village. Jung said William Blake saved his sanity in that manner. So the answer is: who can take it. (1:44:10 - 1:48:50)
I consider an analyst as a guide in the sense that he carries some tools and he’s trodden this path before, but he keeps two steps back of his patient. (1:54:50)
One’s dreaming one’s own mythology, and it’s extremely important to know one’s myth. One’s psychological myth is unique to one as one’s own genetic structure is. The latter is scientific fact, one’s DNA is unique as one’s fingerprint or the iris of one’s eye. One’s myth is unique and it’s important to know who one is, and that can be described in mythological terms. (1:58:01)
[JPM] Guilt means you’ve taken sides. [RAJ] Yes. I used to tease my Baptist grandmother, tell her that guilt was a sin. Well she’d get furious, because it was her chief comfort, if she wasn’t wringing her hands she wasn’t happy. (2:18:03)
[JPM] I don’t know when we will understand the simple admonition that certain things that we get from our myth, or sacred stories, fairy tales... When turned to the outer world it is superstition, when turned to the inner world it’s wisdom. [RAJ] Do I believe in the virgin birth of Christ? Outwardly, it’s foolish, superstitious. Inwardly, it’s the only possible explanation for the birth of the redemptive figure within one’s own, it has to be a virgin birth. That means of one parent, that means it’s a totally introverted process and it’s not the interaction of two things in the usual sense of the word. So the whole subject of incest which is taboo to the point where one can scarcely discuss it even is touching upon that experience which does not come from opposites. But our language can’t cope with that. But if they dream it they have to. [JPM] Jung said incest as an archetype is about wholeness but acted out in the outer world is horrified. (2:19:01-2:21:12)
There’s an alchemical saying: I mated with myself, I impregnated myself, I gestated myself, I gave birth to myself, I am myself. ... The psychological equivalent of incest is introversion. If you want to generate a new center of gravity of yourself, go off and be quiet. It’s that kind of generation which will create the Self in Jungian language. (2:21:14)
