Hillman James - Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jungs Red Book

Contents

In October 2009, James Hillman and I commenced a series of conversations taking as their point of departure C. G. Jungs newly published Red Book. In April 2010 we held a public dialogue, at the invitation of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. In the following autumn and summer we continued discussions in Connecticut and New York. This book arises from the transcriptions of those conversations. Recurring motifs and themes taken up from different angles have been retained. We both went over the text, finalizing the manuscript before his death in the fall of 2011. I added endnotes for the sources of the works referred to. Subsequent revision has been restricted to copy editing.

Sonu Shamdasani

J AMES H ILLMAN : I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead.1 It was a ritual and I think we dont do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.

S ONU S HAMDASANI : It takes blood. Thats what it takes. The work is Jungs Book of the Dead. His descent into the underworld, in which theres an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions.

JH: Their unanswered questions.

SS: We think were posing the questions but were not. The dead are animating us.

JH: But the questions... Jung says there that we think the figures we uncover in our dreams or in active imagination are the result of us, but he says we are the result of them. Our life should be derived from them. We just think of it wrong. We think whatever comes to us comes to us as something leftover from, as Freud said, Tagesrest , the residues of the day, images that are composite stuff, garbage from life. But Jung is saying these figures come to us in our dreams and even our thoughts derive from these figures, so the task would be uncovering the figures, which seems to be what the Red Book does. He allows the figures to speak, to show themselves. He even encourages them to.

SS: Descending into his own depths he finds images that, in a sense, have preceded him. It is a descent into human ancestry.

JH: Good.

SS: It is the ancestors. It is the dead. This is no mere metaphor. This is no cipher for the unconscious or something like that. When he talks about the dead he means the dead. And theyre present in images. They still live on.

JH: When I was doing therapy, back in another period of history, I always tried to escape the parents, which was the story that the person always wanted to tell mewhat their mother did and what their father did. You notice Jung hasnt a lot to say about them anywhere in the Red Book .

SS: Theres no Mommy, Daddy, me, as Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari would put it.2

JH: But to go and ask people about their grandparents and their great-grandparents and imagining all their great-grandparents sitting down at a table. That would be eight people. Could they eat the same food? Could they talk the same language? Could they even sit with each other? But the ancestors in the booksee the reason being that it shows the enormous complexities in human nature and the incompatibilities in human nature. And the fact that your actual parents whom you think caused everything are actually the result of those tremendous incompatibilities themselves. It frees them up too. But, in this story, in this book, the ancestors are more than his personal eight great-grandparents. What about, when you use the word ancestors there, how do you use it? Or how does Jung use it?

SS: Well, the question is, who are the dead? And this is a question that he poses and ponders within this text. There is a sense in which, in the broadest scope, it is the dead of human history. We are at an epoch where the dead outnumber the living. There is this one level of an anonymous stream of the dead, of the weight of human history and what it has left that we have to come to terms with. At another level it becomes more specific. Certain figures come out more prominently, differentiate themselves from the stream and present themselves in specific figures.

JH: They present themselves as figures of a historic moment, or of a historic period at least, but theyre not historic figures. Like Vico, who spoke to his historic figures. He had busts of them and he spoke to them and they were actual figuresGrotius and I forget all of them.3 There were four. And Jung had Voltaire in his study, didnt he? But Voltaires not in the Red Book . What I mean is the history, the historic figures are not actual. Hes not in a dialogue with philosophers of the past.

SS: Well, some. Zarathustra is there. Nietzsche is there. Goethe is there. So, in some instances, you have this reverberation of this specific legacy of thinkers, and then the troop of Anabaptists bursts into the kitchen one day saying theyre just off to pray at the holiest of places. Jung asked to go along and they say he cant go because hes got a body.4 And whats striking about this episode is Anabaptism was a movement that originated in the sixteenth century in Jungs neighborhood. The first adult baptisms, which were a prominent feature of the Anabaptist movement, took place down the road at Zollikon. So there is a sense of specific historical figures emerging as well.

JH: And they emerge. They were not as the result of his reading. Because you said the other day that his immersion in the reading of texts written by traditional theologians and writers and agnostics and other writings that he read eventually became part of the language he uses for saying what he wants to say.

SS: I think it fired his imagination.

JH: It fired his imagination, yes.

SS: A mode of utterance. A mode of fantasizing in a mythical and epic manner. In a ritualistic manner. This language, initially Id say, intoxicated him.

JH: So it also then became the language that was adequate for what he wanted. It was the rhetoric that allowed him to express what he wanted to express. Its not just that they influenced him, it suited him or it suited what he wanted to say.

SS: It also, in a way to take it back to what we were saying earlier, suited the characters. This was a language that was appropriate to what emerged. And at certain times, he indicates later, he felt uncomfortable. This was something forced upon him. This was not his normal tongue. But he was forced into utterance in a specific way that was adequate to the task. There was no other language that was appropriate.

JH: When did he first come on this language? Was it in the Seven Sermons or was it earlier?

SS: I take it to be in the summer of 1914. The first layer of the text, running from October of 1913 through to February, where he engages in introspective elaboration of his fantasies, the method that he subsequently calls active imagination, is not an elevated language. Its a precise depiction of what transpires. He maintains in that what I call a fidelity to the event.

JH: Fidelity to the event.

SS: Accurate notation, dates, precision, indicating that something of significance is taking place. There is no attempt to fictionalize it. Its quite fantastic but it is real.

JH: And he is recording.

SS: He is recording it.

JH: I wanted to ask you about that. Does he record as it happens? Or does he record after hes had the dialogues? Because when I did active imagination myself long ago most of it was done as it happened. So it was a writing, in a way. Some of it was not. Some of it was a conversation, interior, and then I would write itrecapture itby writing.