You make me feel so Jung

When I was at University I had a lot of time to read and I was studying History and Politics, which gave me a chance to read both Freud and Marx. Those beardy exiles were still the big boys back then. I read a lot of Freud because he is so readable and I liked Totem and Taboo (which is about the fact that incest is generally taboo in all cultures) and I liked Moses and Monotheism. However, I thought his clinical diagnoses were far-fetched. Generally, if someone says their father has molested them, it is because he has done so, not because he or she has an Electra complex and unconsciously desires this to happen. I think penis envy is plain funny. I also think that everyday repression does not lead to neurosis. Everyday repression is called civilisation.

(Probably I am not sure what repression is: I see that there is also something called suppression.) Freud's models of the mind were based on pure fancy, and there was no reason at all for anyone to believe in any of it - and yet people did! they totally bought it and I think it was because he was telling Americans what they wanted to hear - sex is good for you! Bin your inner puritan! Without a lot of sex you will be neurotic! and you can blame your parents for everything you don't like about yourself. Well, conveying that message certainly made a lot of psychiatrists wealthy.

But when we were in Vienna last summer I so wanted to see Freud's apartment and it was an absolute joy to be there, like a dream come true. I even used his toilet, though I am not sure it was his personal toilet. Maybe it was the maid's toilet.

That is my picture of Dr Freud's waiting room. 

Anyway, at one time he was venerated and now he has been knocked off his pedestal. 

I knew nothing about Carl Jung except that they were contemporaries and they were close at one time, and then fell out. Trendy people seemed to think well of Jung and that made me suspicious of him, as though he were a hippy guru, a bit alternative. But Anthony Storr has published several essays concerning Jung in his book Churchill's Black Dog and Other Phenomena of the Human Mind, all very readable and Jung's contribution so clearly relevant to our understanding of adults today. I have quoted from this book extensively below. In 1931 Jung wrote: 

the clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of psycho-therapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results. About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age. Fully two thirds of my patients are in the second half of life.

Jung did not share Freud's assumption that the events of early childhood were the prime cause of neurosis, and did not therefore believe that getting the patient to recall his first years was essential. This is significant because by the middle years of one's life all that early years stuff seems very distant and irrelevant.

Jung was interested in adult development. At that time people thought you did not change much as an adult, you entered a trade or a profession, you married and raised a family and you became set in your ways. But Jung had his own mid-life crisis after he broke with Freud, and found that many other people did too.

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many - far too many - aspects of life which should have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

Jung comments upon statistics which show an increased incidence of depression around the age of forty in men, rather earlier in women. He believed these changes indicate an important change taking place in the psyche. Jung considered that the first half of life was primarily concerned with the young person establishing himself or herself as a separate entity, with breaking the emotional ties with parents and home, with achieving a position in the world, and with beginning a new family.

Jung wrote, "the years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life - in them everything essential was decided." ... "His self-analysis convinced him that the most important thing in life was to discern and make manifest one's own, individual point of view."... "By listening to the inner voice, which manifested itself in dreams, fantasies, and other spontaneous derivatives of the unconscious, the lost soul could discover its true path."

Jung felt that personality could be distorted by one-sided development. Too extroverted, you lose sight of your inner world. Too introverted, you fail to cope with reality.

Jung defined personality as an achievement rather than as a datum of genetics. He called it "the supreme realisation of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being".

"The optimum development tends toward a goal called "wholeness" or "integration"; a condition in which the differentiation elements of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, are welded together indissolubly; a condition which might be described as the opposite of the fragmentation and splitting found in schizophrenia. The person who approaches this goal, which can never be entirely or once and for all achieved, possesses what Jung called "an attitude that is beyond the reach of emotional entanglements and violent shocks - a consciousness detached from the world."

This search for wholeness is essentially a religious quest, though not one that is concerned with any recognised creed. Jung:

If you sum up what people tell you about their experiences, you can formulate it this way: they came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to be reconciled to themselves and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. this is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: he has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God.

 "A critic might allege that the whole of Jung's later work represents his attempt to find a substitute for the faith which he lost when he was a child. He might go on to say that Jung substituted the analysis of dreams and fantasies for prayer..."Jung encouraged his patients to deliberately set aside part of the day for reverie; for what, in Jungian technique, became known as "active imagination." -" a state in which judgment is suspended but consciousness is preserved....In this way, the patient might be able to rediscover hidden parts of himself as well as portray the psychological journey upon which he was embarking."

"Jung's concentration upon changing dynamics within the individual psyche is interesting partly because it is so unfashionable" - Storr wrote in 1989. At that time the psychoanalytical big names were interested in interpersonal relationships ("object-relations").

Later Jung went transcendental - "Jung claimed that there were "sufficient reasons" for believing that that "the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a non-psychic nature." Pauli postulated "a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena." Jung wrote: "the background of microphysics and depth-psychology is as much physical as psychic and therefore neither, but rather a third thing, a neutral nature which at most can be grasped in hints since in essence it is transcendental."

I must say this last sentence makes me think of the mystery of quantum physics.

In summary, Jung looked at things generally as they were (rather than superimposing a fantasy map of the mind), and he looked at how people changed and adapted their lives to keep themselves sane, and because they needed challenge but could only cope with so much, how the unconscious told them when they were disengaged or frustrated and stultified and also sent them messages about the right way to proceed. I believe that there is a good deal of sense in all this and I feel that a lot of what he wrote about adult development is current in everyone's ideas, and in plenty of self-help books. We adapt all our lives and there is no easy time when something isn't happening that needs adapting to. As Anne Tyler once wrote, "we're travelling all our lives; we couldn't stop if we wanted to." Maybe we're all hippies now, looking for self-fulfillment. Hoorah for Jung.
Can't resist it - here's Frank at his peak, with Count Basie's band telling it like it is:
You make me feel so young

A microclimate

In this part of the stockbroker belt, as we used to be constituted, we have a very favourable climate, quite warm and sunny, and even when showers are predicted they often pass over us without much issue. The weather over the other side of the M25 is much worse, and so it is outside the M25. This is partly because we pay a lot of tax and so deserve better weather, and partly for geographical reasons.

Apparently my little corner of Surrey pays as much income tax as the entire city of Glasgow.

Cocaine, its effects in the City and elsewhere

Geraint Anderson wrote in the Guardian, 16/4/13, Was cocaine to blame for the credit crunch?

"Wall Street got drunk" was George W Bush's verdict on the emerging financial crisis in July 2008. Two years later the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, explained in his Mansion House speech that "the role of a central bank in monetary policy is to take the punch bowl away just as the party gets going" (something that he had admitted had not occurred). But  perhaps the wrong intoxicant was being blamed. The controversial former drug tsar David Nutt told the Sunday Times this weekend that cocaine-using bankers with their "culture of excitement and drive and more and more and more ... got us into this terrible mess".

I'm inclined to agree. Cocaine is ... a drug that results in intense bouts of over-exuberance as well as a tendency to talk convincingly about stuff you know nothing about. ...Furthermore, surely only cocaine-ravaged buffoons would actually buy billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities when they were so clearly doomed to explode.

.... Dr Chris Luke, an A&E specialist based at Cork University Hospital, who has studied the effects of cocaine on bankers, has stated that "prominent figures in financial and political circles made irrational decisions as a result of megalomania brought on by cocaine usage".

Greed, selfishness, ignorance and ruthlessness played their part of course, but I think it would be foolish not to see the role the drug played in creating the bubble. Herd mentality, which thrives in times of uncertainty, is certainly much more explicable when you factor in the trembling insecurity and depleted discernment that go hand in hand with a coke habit. 

 In my experience of knowing someone whose personality changed when he took cocaine, I can say that under its influence, empathy took a nose dive and he became someone whose selfish nature held sway over him. Morally, he was a nonentity.

It is also important to note that cocaine is illegal. Those who take it tend to think that the law does not apply to them, but only to the uninitiated, the little people. Therefore they do not regard the law or any other code of ethics. You never know what they might do. How city bankers could be allowed to take cocaine when we so needed them to be sober with our money is the hugest scandal. But everyone knew it was going on. Q. Why weren't the drug squad called in? A. Because they were all implicated. Pity the police didn't take the initiative. After all, the water in the drains was tested to find areas of cocaine use, and the City scored high!

I once read that Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written by Stevenson when he was in bed ill, and taking cocaine as medication. In its first draft, the story was about a doctor who took some chemicals that freed him from moral obligations. Ugly little Mr Hyde was the result. On reading the draft, his wife recommended that Stevenson make it less factual and more like an allegory of good and evil, which he did. Even disguised, some of the cocaine story is still there - for example, Jekyll is full of remorse after his moral transgressions, and what he likes about Hyde is that he feels no remorse. Hyde is stronger than Jekyll because of this omission, and the more Jekyll takes the potion, the stronger Hyde grows, and Jekyll's hold on his own personality becomes correspondingly weaker. Growing drug dependence is the story. Well, I think so! The truth will never be known.

Churchill's Black Dog and other essays -by Anthony Storr

Churchill had a depression that was entirely explicable. He was not loved, as a child, by his parents, and although he idealised them he knew that they did not return his love. Sent to boarding school as a small boy, his letters to his mother clearly express his hopeless longing for her interest. His anger with her (or them) turned to other targets, eventually it turned inwards and became depression.

The adult Churchill found ways of coping with his depression. One of them was to set himself challenges, like building a wall, and another was to focus on creative output - writing and painting. His painting is remarkable for the bright, sunlit colours he used - and it seems he consciously used these to cheer himself up. This is one example of his practical approach to his Black Dog.

Storr was a psychoanalyst, who admired Churchill for his courage in the face of this crippling woe, and also, he came from the same kind of background - the prep school, public school elite which has to cope with emotional damage without complaint because of its commensurate privileges. An admiring, empathetic analysis is the first essay in this fascinating book that looks into the possible sources of creativity and genius.

In old age Churchill no longer had the energy - physical or creative - to keep depression at bay, and he spent days sitting in front of the fire without speaking, sunk in a depression that lasted for perhaps five years or longer. Nobody would wish this on anyone and it was a particularly sad end of life for someone whose testing hour had not found him wanting in courage.

Storr also writes about Kafka, who suffered from having a very poor self-image which prevented him from forming close and happy relationships. His sense of identity was weak, and he felt threatened by the company of other people. But his writing transformed his painful personal experiences into something that still intrigues readers. He felt that he was "to be punished throughout his life for some unspecified crime". His life pre-dates the Holocaust, but he was a Jew in Prague, and soon that was to be crime enough.

Another essay deals with the strange temperament of Isaac Newton, although I am not convinced that Newton was depressed. Initially, he was well-nurtured by his mother, but when she re-married she sent him away to his grandparents. He may have felt rejected, but on the other hand he may have become an anti-social eccentric whatever had happened to him!

New class - Not what I was expecting

I have been given a class in the community which was described to me as Entry 2, which means, still beginners in lots of ways, and now turns out to be considerably higher level than that. I think they have been taught in a relaxed way which suited them, so I do hope that I can keep that going. They don't need to take any exams this year - next year may be another story and they won't have to take tests until the end of the year - but we have this term to tackle some topics in a fun way, and I shall give them plenty of speaking practice at the start of each class. And I must remember to give them a tea break!

Fab day

Warm! gosh, what a joy to be warm at last! We skiffed round the island this morning - not this island, which is Temple Island at Henley, but in one of these skiffs. We rowed hard and fairly sweatily,  and I have a right hand blister.

The trees are very late this year after many years when they have been early. So good to see a few leaves at last. I cheered! The irises are coming up by the water side.

In the garden, I have a few drumstick primulas flowering at last after about 5 years without flowers, 2 kinds of crocosmia coming up - one of which I moved and thought I had killed, so especially glad to see that one, sea holly hanging on in there, and a  new euphorbia, with lovely yellow bracts. Other people have flowers all over their camellias and mine is always late, but should be out this week. I chopped the magnolia back so it won't have many flowers this year, but it will recover. the earth is full of worms - lovely pink and mauve ones, so I don't know why things don't grow well. 

I have too much bulbous stuff I think - I nearly dug up an agapanthus not knowing where it was, same with some bluebells.

Champagne tasting evening

Went to this excellent social event at the rowing club last night. We tasted (drank half a glass and didn't spit it out) 8 different champagnes made of different grapes and of different levels of expense - one a particularly special champagne - they were surprisingly different - some quite bland, some yeasty, some rather sour. One was just horrible - all Chardonnay grapes and tasted of nasty Chardonnay.

In conclusion, we found that our favourite - complex but not too yeasty - was a champagne from a supermarket at £12.00 a bottle, which means our tastes are suitable for our modest income!

Prozac and other SSRI's

Will Self made a very good radio programme on this topic. He didn't suggest, as I have in previous posts, that the way we have organised our society is not healthy - too stressful, too competitive, not enough community activity - and therefore we are unable to cope emotionally with living in it without medication, but he did mention Aldous Huxley, so probably the thought had crossed his mind.

He talked to people who think this medication saved their lives, psychologists who prescribe it and those who don't, and one mum who lost her daughter to suicide although she (the daughter) was on Prozac, and people who think placebos work just as well!

Go here for the programme - bbc 4 Will Self has a great voice and he talks to people who should be experts in the subject - but it won't be available for longer than a week I think.

He mentioned a film called Prozac Nation that sounded very interesting.

Avebury neolithic henge

A henge is an earthwork - circular hill around a deep ditch. The Avebury one is huge - about a mile in circumference, and we are told that our ancestors built it 6,000 years ago with only the aid of primitive tools like antlers from the local deer. It must have taken a lot of stone age men a long long time to complete. It looks like a defense to me, but the orthodox idea is that it is a religious site.

This gives you an idea of the steep slope and the depth. 

This gives you an idea of the circumference.

But some time later, the fashion for putting up large stones caught on, and the ancient people added a large number of these - 150 when the thing was complete. They came from Marlborough Down, 3 miles away.

The stone circles are a long way from complete these days, I imagine people used them as building materials over the long centuries since they lapsed into disuse. It is possible that when the Romans came and took an interest in the native sights, the natives no longer had the faintest idea what the stones were put there for. also, perhaps due to the action of earthworms, a number of stones are completely buried under the ground and only recently were found using geophysics technology.

It is believed that when they were enjoying their heyday, the monuments looked like this.

Note the avenues of stones in and out of the circle.

But over the centuries a small village has spread into the middle of the stone circle, so the image of it is now - plenty of walkers detouring to have a look, and go for a beer or a cream tea, and there are also druids and pagans saying their prayers to the stones, and ordinary people feeling them to see if they pick up any ancient vibrations. 

And in short, I would recommend it to anybody. There is more to see in Avebury than Stonehenge, which is not very far away, and there are more sheep.

Dead wood - Woodland walks on National Trust land

We also walked down a white water stream called Watersmeet, to Lynmouth, and that was an excellent rocky river gorge with trees growing all the way down the sides, which sometimes are prone to landslides. The young ones walked down the river by jumping from rock to rock.

The National Trust cannot make up its mind what to do about dead trees. At Arlington Court they have made a bit of a fetish of keeping all the dead trees to rot on the ground. The idea is that they make a great habitat for insects. There is a fantastic amount of moss but I didn't see any insects.Is it too early in the year for insects? (Here in Surrey the ants are making their annual pilgrimages to my kitchen bin.) There is a terrible waste of perfectly good timber. Even lovely straight tree trunks lie around on top of the other dead tree trunks in a great mossy pile of jack straws. Maybe they need to think hard about the optimum amount of dead tree to keep. I think they are keeping an embarrassing amount.

At another NT property they were trying to sell some random bits of dead tree for people to carve. Also a few nicely sawn planks, but not in any bulk.

North Devon

Devon was great. Lovely bright sunshine, wonderful blue sea and dramatic cliffs. But I am not mad about walks that are really steep up and down and even have steps cut in the cliffs because it takes ages to walk even 5 miles, which is when I called it a day and we got a bus back.

However, we entered Ilfracombe harbour by the very best route. It's a beautiful fishing harbour and we got the very best (and unexpected) view of their brand new landmark statue, which is called Verity.

Verity is slightly reminiscent of Degas' Little Dancer of 14 years, who has always been especially touching to me, but this one is pregnant and half her skin is cut away, revealing muscles in her legs and back, and the foetus in her stomach. She carries a sword (of justice?) and the scales of justice are held in a careless way behind her back. She is standing on a pile of books (probably Law books). So, all this iconography, and what does it mean? I would quite like an explanation of how it's relevant to Ilfracombe, but the answer is probably that it's not. It's on a 20-year loan from Damian Hirst, who is the maker.
The Guardian critic hates it.

Pure brilliant white

I am very disappointed in this. I am using the Dulux brand because the cheap stuff is thin and grey, but the Dulux brand is not white either! It's dingey, and repainting a dingey ceiling with paint the same colour is confusing and pointless. What does one have to do to get the bright white we had when I was a kid? Did it have to be discontinued because it had something poisonous in it?  Grrr. By the way, I know the gloss goes yellow - really badly - but I'm using emulsion.

My Autobiography, by Charles Chaplin

I thought that this book would be long-forgotten, perhaps even out of print, but being very nosy, and having found out that Chaplin's story would be a very interesting one, I was determined to read it.

It's a Penguin Modern Classic! It's a wonderful read! I recommend it for the vivid account of Chaplin's early years and how he felt on his sudden rise to fame.  In the early part of the book a vanished London - small, horse-drawn and grimy - comes to life. The neglect of children in those days would astound nearly anyone. Charlie was homeless when his mother was taken to an asylum for the insane, and then a bullied workhouse boy. He had only his talent for dancing to save him, and thank God, it did save him.

Then there are the very early years of Hollywood when there was plenty of space and building a new studio was quite affordable. The fun and adventure of creating a new art form with lively-minded people in a great climate, with money coming in in an unprecedented fashion, feels as miraculous now as it must have been at the time.

I feel as though I have read hundreds of books of 20th century anecdotes of famous people meeting each other, so was not so interested in those, and they take up a lot of the middle part of the book. I find W R Hearst particularly boring, but I suppose you have to take him as an example of a big shot American, for whom all things were possible.

The difficulties of Chaplin's later years make the book interesting again. He had developed hugely since his slapstick clown days, when he worked without a script partly because he was "unlettered". Chaplin read voraciously in an effort to understand the world - including economics - and hold his own with anyone he met, and he clearly managed to do so. He wrote a script to a later film called Monsieur Verdoux which sounds very black and very modern.  The American film censors had a field day with it - and Chaplin's account of their efforts to change it both amuse and appall.

He was often a lonely soul, having been wounded in childhood by hardship and by loneliness he could not quickly recover, and spent a lot of time alone. Only in older age did he achieve personal happiness, and with a much younger woman.

Chaplin loved to learn new words, and in this book he displays his wide vocabulary, and the effect is sometimes too self-conscious. Oooh look, there's another posh word, you think. In the Reader's Digest, in the 60s and 70s, there was a new vocabulary section called It Pays to Increase Your Word Power, which was for the millions of people like Chaplin who wanted to make up for a poor education, or for being an immigrant with a different mother tongue.. I'm not sure you meet people with such aspirations very much these days and lack of aspiration is a problem. If I am wrong I hope someone will tell me so.

Recently I read an article about groups of London children who spend the nights on night buses. All they need is an Oyster card and they can ride all night, legit, and that's what they do, because their homes aren't safe to go home to. It would be great to think that things are better for children than they were, but we'd be deluding ourselves.

Please see further information in Modern Times

Annie Hall

Last night Stan wanted us to watch a film and I refused to watch just any film - they regularly seem quite boring and I start reading halfway through. So I chose what we should watch and we watched Annie Hall.
I am rather glad that my son (20) and daughter (17) had never seen it before. They are the right age to appreciate it. They have seen plenty of comedy that echoes Annie Hall and references Annie Hall, and at last, they have seen Annie Hall.

Compared with modern films it is more compact - quite short - and doesn't repeat itself, so every line is telling. The whole relationship is shown out of sequence, so it makes the audience do the work of putting it in order, but this is not a stupidly complicated exercise as it is in 500 Days of Summer, because it is always possible to view the relationship as a whole - something that has a particular, happy tone of its own - as well as something that has a rise and fall.

Allen is at home with the idea of reducing people to cultural stereotypes - in one scene he meets a woman who remarks that he has just done exactly that - but he also wants to play with them - juxtaposing them for comic effect, and noticing the influence we have on each other when we embark on a relationship, (mainly Alvy on Annie). He also notes how the elements of common culture - such as films and sport - enable and enrich the urban mix.

Woody Allen was like a silent movie director in that he loves to explore the fun possibilities of what's possible in story-telling - cutting the screen in half or using subtitles or taking modern people back to visit a scene from the past, and he loves a bit of slapstick in the form of car crashes or strange driving. In this way a film that is all about conversation is also full of gags and surprises.

Annie talking to her shrink while Alvie talks to his.

What I like about it is that it's an unapologetically clever film that young people can aspire to - they can take a load of references away from it and try to explore them - I know I did. it made me hungry to know more, like the Annie Hall character, so she could feel more confident with the know-it-all urban men. She wanted to be more than an endearing diversion from Alvy's long-time preoccupations with death and sex. The dynamic of the relationship is about a woman growing up and away. The subtext is about education and gaining the confidence to choose your path.