Western Philosophy
INTRODUCTION This essay analyzes Sabina Spielrein’s most famous work, “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” (Destruktion als Ursache des Werdens, 1912) . It envisions her neither as a premature Jungian nor as a dissident Freudian, but as what she truly was: an independent theorist whose dialectic of creation and destruction in transformation occupies … Continue reading
A recurring thought in books about Jesus is the thought that every time created its own Jesus. Jesus, like the virgin birth, the crucifix and resurrection, is a major symbol in the Jungian sense of the word, an abstract archetype one can fill with our own multiple meanings recognized in very culture, even non-christian. Now if we look for the many faces of Jesus, we may get access to him as a person,scholarly (theologically), from contemporary views, from other main religions, from sworn enemies of any religion and from the father of symbols – C.G. Jung.
The historical Jesus almost gets buried under his construction, even the catholic church rarely refers to him as real historic person in recent writings. Sometimes it seems that Jesus in the Gospel was also such a creation realizing the striking similarity of New Testament symbols with the Egyptian pantheon and myths. Those faces is what this article is all about. The best I have read in that regard about Jesus is from C.G. Jung, so lets start with him. Warning, this is just an essay but a rather lengthy one. Continue reading
The most evil man in the world right now, seems to be a retired lieutenant colonel of the Russian KGB, who is determined to reestablish the Soviet empire, to invade world and was likened to Hitler by a leading politician of a superpower. To others, President Vladimir Putin is a judo-chopping, IMF-taming, U.S.-defying global hero. But according to the controversial biography of Stanislav Belkovsky, a star columnist at a Moscow tabloid, former speechwriter and insider, Putin represents the “Banality of the Good” (quote). The striking similarity with Hannah Arendt’s remark, one of the 20th century’s great political thinkers did catch my eye and let me finish his book, which has its weaknesses. Now if “being good” is all, after a string of rumours and dirty laundry, which may or may not be true, what Stanislav Belkovsky, sworn enemy of Putin, came up against him, there must be something unworthy with all of us, not belonging to the élite. I long fancied to write a psychological study of Putin, motivated by the C.G. Jung interview of H.R. Knickerbocker 1938 in the Cosmopolitan , reprinted in C.G. Jung Speaks (page 115-135). To qualify the banality of the good (or the evil) I will follow C.G. Jung’s method, the money flow and the little I really know about the person Putin – that is some minor direct account, my own remote observation, his own account and what his enemies say. Continue reading
We’ve all heard the phrase “the banality of evil”, coined by the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Her 1951 masterwork, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” about the parallels between Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalinist Russia, made her an intellectual celebrity. In her book, she argued that totalitarian regimes seek to dominate every aspect of everyone’s life as … Continue reading
Arguably no other notable figure in history was as wrong as Freud was about every important thing he had to say. He was a favorite of the avantgarde from the begin of last century until its sixties, but while the theories of his contemporary colleagues, C.G. Jung, Adler and Wilhelm Reich aged well, little of … Continue reading
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