For the Love of Tolstoy

Jungian psychology (or perhaps its representatives) has a little love affair with Russian literature. It was this discovery of mine that further sealed my love affair with Jungian psychology.

I have loved Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Idiot), Nabokov (Lolita), and Tolstoy (Anna Karenina, War and Peace) since I was in my teens. With each book, I appreciated them for their unrivaled ability to captivate my attention with humanness, not with drivel nor earnestness, but poetic arguments for the importance of empathy. In Crime & Punishment, readers are seduced into loving an ax murderer; in Lolita, a child molester; in Anna Karinina, an adulterer. But the brilliance of the authors is that we do not fall for them without remembering, and loving, their victims too. We do not give up the realities of the black in favor of the white, but are moved into a state of gray that is the human condition. Through their books, we can appreciate and better understand the complexity of the human experience of being alive. As Roskolnikov does not forgive himself, we as readers forgive him a little; as Humbert Humbert does not even understand his own crime, we acknowledge his childishness that led him to commit it -- stuck developmentally many decades in the past.

I recently came across some quotes from Tolstoy and was struck once more by his work's relevance for all of us, as well as its relationship to Jung's work.

For instance, the following quote from Tolstoy explains precisely why Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections is so extremely human and relevant, showing us not his accolades, but his inner life. Tolstoy wrote, "A writer is dear and necessary for us in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul." Of course, this quote might also suggest why The Red Book is so important as it could be argued that no other book better shows the inner workings of a man's soul.

And this quote from Tolstoy reminds me of the incredible importance of Jung's core message (albeit often overlooked in its broader application): "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." In my post on Jung's take on saving the world, I illuminate that indeed, perhaps the central tenant of Jungian psychology is that it is by changing ourselves that we change the world.

And finally, the opening lines of Tolstoy's beautiful book Anna Karenina remind us too why human suffering will always be a tangled web and why so many people visit therapists and psychologists to help them make sense of it. Tolstoy began his book like this: "All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Facing Problems

When we are faced with problems, life altering events or catastrophes that make us question life and its purpose, Jung suggests that we are struggling with "our Promethean conquest" (1933, p. 96): the growth of consciousness. In his essay entitled "The Stages of Growth," Jung wrote that problems, and perhaps decisions which feel gut-wrenching and impossible to make, ultimately lead us from pain into the birth of something greater.

Problems thus draw us into an orphaned and isolated state where we are abandoned by nature and are driven to consciousness. There is no other way open to us; we are forced to resort to decisions and solutions where we formerly trusted ourselves to natural happenings. Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness--but also the necessity of saying goodbye to childlike unconsciousness and trust in nature. . . . Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence is denied. We wish to make our lives simple, certain and smooth--and for that reason problems are tabu. . . .[But] the artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is called for to give us the certainty and clarity we need. (1933, pp. 96-97)

In what I call "the myth of vertical growth" inherent in our culture, we are often captivated by the notion that as we age, life will proceed in a manner of general growth and success and that problems are either avoidable or, when they occur, are only catastrophic impediments. It's a pervasive perspective on life that it is an affair of stair-stepped acheivement from childhood to adulthood, like the path of school where a lower grade naturally moves to a higher one. This view on the path of life might be diagrammed as a line beginning at the corner of the axis and progressing with a steady grade upwards. Vertical growth.

Jung, however, suggested that life is in fact more of a spiral path from birth to death. That we are, in fact, constantly moving towards the center, towards Self, and therefore passing new deaths and new births constantly. Problems in life lead us towards initiations, which lead us towards gestations of new perspectives, new identities, and then a rebirth of new parts of ourselves. We may circle the same problems, the same confusions; problems may not be dramatic drops but turns as we move further inward toward the center. The old adage "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" might apply: whatever doesn't kill you, ultimately births a widening of consciousness, our Promethean task. When problems arise, our work is not simply to "get back on top," but to stay on our path as it will inherently lead back towards rebirth again as we spiral further and further towards the center, the core of ourselves.

Visiting the Red Book in NYC

I returned home late last night from a trip to New York City to see Jung's Red Book at the Rubin Museum, a spot which should really not be missed on any trip to the city.

After running into a professor in the cafe (also having flown-in from California), my four classmates, my mother and four other family members, perused the Jung exhibit. I walked into the basement room a bit short of breath. There, in that room, is Jung's magnum opus, out of hiding for the first time in 50 years. I stood in front of the book in awe, the book open to a brilliant painting and his words written in beautiful calligraphy. Along the sides of the wall were his original sketches for many of his mandalas in the book, as well as his "black books," the books in which he recorded the original explorations of his psyche before documenting them so carefully in the Red Book.

Later in the afternoon, I attended a conversation between a poet and an analyst-in-training. I enjoyed the simple, free exploration of the image (seen above from page 55), but found myself thinking about how much is lost by focusing on the images instead of Jung's written word.

Throughout most of the discussion of the Red Book in the media, the focus has been on the exquisite look and feel of the book. The images are captivating, but they cannot be separated from Jung's writing. In fact, while it might be somewhat heretical to say, I would undoubtedly choose the text over the paintings if I had to make a choice. Perhaps this says something about my typology more than anything else, but the story that Jung tells, the journey he takes us on, may rival anything else he ever wrote and should absolutely not go unacknowledged by those who find themselves captivated by the beauty of the book itself. I long for a smaller version of just the translation that I can carry with me to the coffee shop or the couch to read with ease.

As I posted earlier, I want to record this wonderful quote here again. The Red Book's translator and introducer, Sonu Shamadasani, expressed succinctly the importance of the book for all of us.

The overall narrative of the book is how Jung recovers his soul, recovers meaning in his life through enabling the rebirth of the image of God in his soul.

In so doing, he created a psychology that created a vehicle for others to regain meaning in theirs.

The Red Book is an exploration towards understanding how to recover soul, in our own lives and in the world. A book that was well worth the journey to the other side of the country to see.