March 17, 2022
I traveled to a memorial at the end of last week and was unable to compose a newsletter. But I’ve also needed time to collect my thoughts. The global news and grief are relentless. I feel I need two weeks of silence and reading and sleeping just to catch up with recent events, let alone… you know… continue to work and live.
I’ve been grateful for the writings of others these days. Anne Helen Peterson wrote a beautiful meditation on these times entitled, “What if This is Just the Way Things Are Now?” which captured my own fears about this endless onslaught of crisis and my complicated feelings about living in safety and privilege while the world burns.
Anand Giridharadas interviewed foreign-policy scholar Stephen Werheim in a piece titled, “How To Do What’s Right Without Starting World War III” which helped me to better understand the historical context of this war and make sense of the actions that the United States and European countries are taking.
And I was moved by the quote of Jung’s included in a recent newsletter from The C.G. Jung Study Center of Southern California, which I’ll include and expand on here. Their newsletter prompted me to re-read Jung’s essay, “The Development of Personality” from 1932, and was deeply moved.
“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Englightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. If anywhere, fear of God is justified in the face of the overwhelming supremacy of the psychic.” (CW 17, para 302)
Jung goes on to speak about the importance of the individual, just as he does in his passionate plea two decades later, The Undiscovered Self. It’s his core understanding of how to combat the tendency towards global warfare. While re-reading this piece, “The Development of Personality,” I reflected throughout on Putin and Zelensky, two great personalities who are deeply at odds both militaristically and existentially. I’ll share more on all of that next week.
Until then, please join me and Dr. Ayana Jamieson this Sunday for session 2 of her three-month seminar, or register for our upcoming seminar exploring myth and instinct with the brilliant Dr. Magda Permut, and for Carol Ferris’s exploration of the essence of these times via the new moon in Aries. We’d love to see you at one or all three!
XO, Satya
Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies