March 23, 2023

For our first class on Jung’s Red Book last Friday, we read through and discussed editor Sonu Shamdasani’s introduction, in which he explores the historical and personal context of the work, as well as some of Jung’s relevant ideas. A particular passage has stuck with me this week as we mourn the 20-year anniversary of the start of America’s wholly unjustified war in Iraq—a time during which I experienced my most significant psychological crisis.

Jung “differentiated between two situations in which the collective unconscious became active. In the first, it became activated through a crisis in an individual’s life and the collapse of hopes and expectations. In the second, it became activated at times of great social, political, and religious upheaval. At such moments, the factors suppressed by the prevailing attitudes accumulate in the collective unconscious. Strongly intuitive individuals become aware of these and try to translate them into communicable ideas. If they succeeded in translating the unconscious into a communicable language, this had a redeeming effect.” (pg. 58)

I was a junior in college when my country began the “shock and awe” bombing campaign in Baghdad. I vividly recall watching television in anguish as little bursts of fire lit up an otherwise dark city scene; all signs of actual life had been hidden from American viewers until a bird flew across the sky and my heart skipped a beat. The protests I was organizing on campus and joining regularly in downtown Portland seemed to have no effect. I felt entirely helpless and hopeless and filled with almost unbearable grief. My country, my country, was killing people and destroying the environment for the capitalist desires of a small group of men and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I now understand that my psyche in those years felt porous in the way that Jung reflects in his Red Book journey before and after the start of WWI. Amidst my almost constant inner despair, there were also prophetic dreams and a sense that whatever was happening for me psychologically and personally was not at all just personal. Somehow, the collective unconscious and my personal unconscious were weaving together, forcing me to carefully differentiate what was mine and not mine, as well as what was time-based and what was from another time entirely.

I was only 19 when the war began, and 18 during 9/11, but I’m clear that those years laid the foundation for the rest of my life and work since. As Jung wrote in his epilogue to The Red Book: “My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.”

So it feels particularly poignant, I’m realizing, to explore The Red Book again right now. Our times are no less painful. Every day there is news that threatens to break any of us. But somehow, always, I find medicine in seeking “the redeeming effect” in it all.

xo, Satya

Satya Doyle Byock, Director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies