I like this term “memoricide”. I have long had a passion for remembering and recollecting the forgotten. This is one of the reasons I regularly point out our victory in Vietnam, won at a high cost of lives, and life energy–not to mention American money–and then lost to frivolity, cynicism, and grotesque stupidity, not just then, but ever since, with Ken Burns merely being the most recent willing conspirator in this particular memoricide.
Be that as it may, Jung appears to have been a rapist and an intellectual thief. The notion of archetypes and the Collective Unconscious is, from my perspective, one of his most interesting, and it is NOT HIS IDEA AT ALL.
What is one to make of these chauvinist pigs–Freud and his not-disinherited progeny also being nearly uniformly ugly, and Jung in her estimation a “psychopath”–parading around as the wizards of mental health, the knowers of the unknown, the able tinkerers with our innermost realities and failings?
I have said before, and will say again: in my view, the institution of “mental health” is actually one of the worst things to hit humanity in its long and sorry history. Substantially all post-modernism, and therefore substantially all lunatic politics in the modern world, has a strong flavor of some version of psychoanalysis.
This women had some fantastic ideas. I really, really like this idea of a “death and rebirth” drive. You have Eros, as the urge to create new life. Then you have what we might call the Phoenix impulse–I think she would like that–which is the urge to create qualitative new life WITHIN ONE’S OWN SELF. Two, twin, life instincts, one merely passing through “death” as the cost of metamorphosis.
And could we not posit the urge to war as in some respects the urge to a new form of life? An urge to gallantry, sacrifice, endurance, patience, brotherhood, and the like? To be born again, in the crucible of fire? The mass dying is not the impulse: it is the desire for a new life, and the lack of a better means of finding it.
Sabina Spielrein: she is now on my radar. I will do what little I can to help the world remember she lived, and survived a great deal of grief and turmoil, to deliver to the world highly interesting ideas, one of which was much better than the diluted version Freud dished out to the world.