The Taproot Podcast - 💀Lament for the Dead Psychology After Jung’s The Red Book Review; By James Hillman Sonu Shamdasani - www.GetTherapyBirmingham.com

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

📚💡 Exploring the Profound Insights of Carl Jung's "The Red Book" and the Essence of Jungian Psychology 🌌🔑🔮 Delve into the captivating world of Carl Jung's "The Red Book: Liber Novus," where the depths of the human psyche and the realm of the unconscious come to life. Jung considered the years he dedicated to pursuing inner images as the most crucial time of his life, from which everything else flowed. This enigmatic stream from the unconscious flooded him, leading him on a transformative journey of self-discovery and integration. 📖💭 "The Red Book" represents Jung's personal descent into the underworld, akin to the ancient Egyptian practice of opening the mouth of the dead. It is his "Book of the Dead," requiring the sacrifice of blood and the confrontation of unanswered questions from the realm of the deceased. Through this process, Jung realized that coming to terms with the dead is essential for true living, as our lives are intricately entwined with their unresolved queries. 👥🌌 The publication of "The Red Book" in 2009, almost a century after its inception, sparked both intrigue and debate. Although opinions vary on whether Jung would have chosen to publish the book during his lifetime, its significance to the psychologist cannot be understated. Revealed to only a select few confidants and family members, it was a formative period for Jung, exposing him to the depths of the collective unconscious and the forces of the deep mind. This experience profoundly influenced his subsequent work, shaping his theories and concepts concerning the unconscious and the repressed aspects of the human mind. 📚🔮 Jungian psychology, at its core, has two fundamental goals. Firstly, it seeks to integrate and understand the deepest, most repressed aspects of the human mind, paving the way for individuation—the process of becoming aware of and embracing one's true self. Secondly, it aims to navigate this profound exploration without being consumed by the unconscious forces uncovered along the way. It provides a psychological container and lens through which the self can be comprehended and clarified. 💡🔍 While not intended to be a religion, Jungian psychology serves a similar purpose by addressing the functions of the human need for religion, mythology, and the transcendental. It acts as a bridge to religion, encouraging psychology to explore and understand these aspects consciously. Jung hoped that by bringing awareness to the role of religion within humanity, his psychology could help foster a healthier and more mindful relationship with religious and transcendent experiences in our culture. 🌟🌍 Immerse yourself in the rich tapestry of Jungian psychology, where the exploration of the unconscious meets the quest for self-discovery, integration, and understanding. Uncover the transformative power of "The Red Book" and the enduring legacy of Carl Jung's profound insights. 📚🔑💫 🌌📖 #TheRedBook #CarlJung #JungianPsychology 💭🔮 #UnconsciousMind #CollectiveUnconscious #Individuation 🌟🌍 #Religion #Mythology #Transcendence 🔍💡 #SelfDiscovery #Integration #PsychologicalInsights Source: https://www.podbean.com/eau/pb-q9gf3-132ff80   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirminghamPodcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail] The resources, videos and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency to a provider in your area. Our number and email are only for scheduling at Taproot Therapy Collective are not monitored consistently and not a reliable resource for emergency services.

Hello, this is Joel Blackstock, and you're listening to the Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast. Today we're going to be doing a review, but I try and write all of the book reviews in a way that makes it not necessary for you to read the book, because I know that most people are not going to read any of these books. You can and should. There's some interesting things in a lot of the books that we review, but I try and do the book reviews in a way that gives you the context to understand the book, and then also help you translate some of the, in some cases, antiquated language, in other cases,

just highly academic or kind of out of touch writing into a normal concept that a normal person could pick up and use. So the book that I have written a review of today is called Lament of the Dead, Psychology After Carl Jung's The Red Book. And it is a conversation between James Hillman and Sanu Samshadani, and the book is presented like a dialogue. Before I jump into that review, I want to read two quotes. One is from the first page of the book, and the other one is from Carl Jung's The Red Book, of which The Lament for the Dead book that I'm reviewing is a discussion of.

So this is from The Red Book by Carl Jung. The years of which I have spoken to you when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. 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. That was the stuff and the material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.

Carl Jung, preface for the Red Book. And this next quote is the first page of Lament of the Dead. James Hillman. I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual, and I think that we don't do that with our hands, but opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual, and I think that we don't do that with our hands, but opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead. Sanu Shamsadani. It takes blood. That's what it takes. The work is Jung's Book of the Dead, his descent into the underworld in which there was an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. And he comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead, we simply cannot live,

and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions. Lament for the Dead, page 1. And so with that, I'll begin the review now. Begun in 1914, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's The Red Book lay dormant for almost 100 years before its eventual publication. Opinions are divided on whether Jung would have published the book if he had lived longer. He did send drafts of it to publishers in early life, but he seemed in no hurry to publish the book despite his advancing age. Regardless, it was of enormous importance to the psychologist, being shown to only a few confidants and family members. More importantly, the process of writing the Red Book was one of the most formative periods of Jung's life.

In the time that Jung worked on the book, he came into direct experience with the forces of the deep mind and the collective unconscious. For the remainder of his career, he would use the experience to build concepts and theories about the unconscious and the repressed parts of the human mind. In the broadest sense, Jungian psychology has two goals. One, integrate and understand the deepest and most repressed parts of the human mind, and two, don't let them eat you alive in the process. Jungian psychology is about excavating the most repressed parts of self that Jung called the shadow, and learning to hold them so that we can know exactly who and what we are.

Jung called this process individuation. Jungian psychology is not, and should not be understood as an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt to build a psychological container for the forces of the unconscious. While not a religion, it served a similar function as religion. Jungian psychology serves as both a protective buffer and a lens to understand and clarify the self. It helps us grow, and it helps us contain the things that we are not yet ready to hold. Jung described his psychology as a bridge to religion. His hope was that it could help psychology understand the function

of the human need for religion, mythology, and the transcendental. Jung hoped that his psychology could make religion occupy a healthier and more mindful place in our culture by making the function of religion within humanity more conscious. Jung did not dislike religion. He viewed it as problematic when the symbols of religion became concretized and people took them literally. Jungian psychology itself has roots in Hindu religious traditions. Jung often recommended that patients of lapsed faith return to their religious traditions of origin in order to reclaim them by understanding them as metaphor. He has case studies encouraging patients to resume Christian or Muslim religious practices as a source of healing and integration. Jung did have a caveat though. He recommended that patients return to their traditions with

an open mind. Instead of viewing the religious traditions as prescriptive lists of rules or literal truths, he asked patients to view them as metaphors for self-discovery and processes for introspection. Jung saw no reason to make religious patients question their faith. He did see the need for patients who had abandoned religion to re-examine its purpose and function. The process of writing the Red Book was itself a religious experience for Jung. He realized after his falling out from Freud that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework of the time was not enough to help contain the raw and weathering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him then. Some scholars believe

that Jung was partially psychotic while writing the Red Book, and others claim that he was in a state of partial dissociation, or simply use Jung's term of active imagination. The psychotic is drowning while the artist is swimming. The waters that both inhabit, however, are the same. Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, the Red Book has a religious and transcendental tone. It is written on vellum, in heavy calligraphy,

with gorgeous hand-illuminated script, and Jung took inspiration for mystical and alchemical texts when he made its full-page illustrations. It is easier to define the Red Book by what it is not than by what it is. According to Jung, it is not a work of art. It is not a scholarly psychological endeavor. It is also not an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt for Jung to heal himself in a time of pain and save himself from a madness by giving voice to the forces underneath his partial psychotic episode. The Red Book was a kind of container to help Jung witness the forces of the deep unconscious, in the same way that religion and Jungian psychology are containers

for the ancient unconscious forces in the vast ocean under the human psyche. Lament of the Dead, Psychology After Carl Jung's The Red Book is a dialogue between ex-Jungian analyst James Hillman and Jungian scholar Sanu Shamdasani about the implications that The Red Book has for Jungian psychology and psychology at large. Like the Red Book, it was controversial when it was released. James Hillman was an early protege of Jung, who later became a loud critic of parts of Jung's psychology. Hillman wanted to create an archetypal psychology that would allow patients to directly experience and not merely analyze the psyche.

His new psychology never really came together coherently, and he never found the technique to validate his instinct. Hellman had been out of the Jungian fold for almost 30 years before he returned as a self-appointed expert advisor during the publication of the Red Book. Hellman's interest in the Red Book was enough to make him swallow his pride in many previous statements to join the Jungians once again. It is likely that the archetypal psychology he was trying to create is what the Red Book itself is describing. Sanu Shamdasani is not a psychologist but a scholar of the history of psychology.

His insights have the detachment of the theoretical, where Hillman's are more felt and more intuitive, but also more personal. One gets a sense during their discussion in the book that Hillman is marveling painfully at an experience that he had been hungry for for a long time. The Red Book seems to help him clarify the disorganized blueprints of his stillborn psychological model. While there is a pain in Hillman's words, there is also a peace that was rare to hear from such a flamboyant and unsettled psychologist. Sanu Shamdasani is the perfect living dialogue partner for Hillman to have in these talks that make up Lament. Shamdasani has one of the best BS detectors of maybe any Jungian,

save David Tacey. Shamdasani has definitely avoided the fads, misappropriations, and superficialization that have plagued the Jungian school for decades. As editor of the Red Book, he knows more about the history and assembly of the text than any person save for Jung. Not only is he also one of the foremost living experts on Jung, but as a scholar he does not threaten the famously egotistical Hillman as a competing interpreting psychologist. The skin that Shamsudani has in this game is as an academic, while Hillman gets to play the prophet and the hero of the new psychology that they describe without threat or competition. Presumably, these talks were recorded as research

for a collaborative book to be co-authored by the two friends, and The Death of Hillman in 2011 made the publication as a dialogue in 2013 a necessity. If that is not the case, then the format of a dialogue makes little sense. If that is the case, it gives the book itself an almost mystical quality and elevates the conversation more to the spirit of a philosophical dialogue. We are only able to hear these men talk to each other and not to us. There is a deep reverberation between the resonant implications these men are seeing the Red Book have for modern psychology. However, they do not explain their insights to the reader, and their understanding can only be glimpsed intuitively. Like the briefcase in the movie Pulp Fiction, the audience sees the object only through its indirect effect on the character. We see the foggy outlines of

the ethics that these men hope will guide modern psychology, but we are not quite able to see it as they see it. We have only an approximation through the context of their lives and their interpretation of Jung's private diary. This enriches a text that is ultimately about the limitations of understanding, because the limitation of this dialogue enriches the theme. One of the biggest criticisms of Lament when it was published was that the terms that the speakers used are never defined and thus the book's thesis is never objectivized or clarified. And while this is true if you're an English professor, the mystic and the therapist in me see the limitations as the book's strengths. The

philosophical dialectic turns the conversation into an extended metaphor that indirectly supports the themes of the text. The medium enriches the message. Much like a Socratic dialogue or a film script, the authors act more as characters and archetypes than essayists. The prophet and the scholar describe their function and the limitations as gatekeepers of the spiritual experience of each of their roles. Reading Lament, much like reading the Red Book, one gets the sense that one is witnessing a private but important moment in time. It is a moment that is not our moment and is only partially comprehensible to anyone but the author.

Normally, that would be a weakness, but here it becomes a strength. Where normally the reader feels that a book is for them, here we feel that we are eavesdropping through a keyhole or from a phone line downstairs. The effect is superficially frustrating, but it also gives Lament a subtle quality to its spirituality that the Red Book lacks. Many of the obvious elements for discussion that one would assume would be in a conversation about the enormous Red Book are completely ignored in the dialogue. Hellman and Shamdasani's main takeaway is that the Red Book is about the dead. What they mean by the dead is never explained directly, and this was a major sticking point for other reviewers, but I think that their point works better undefined. They talk about the dead as a numinous term.

Perhaps they are speaking about the reality of death itself. Perhaps about the dead of history. Perhaps they are describing the impenetrable veil that we all see others enter but never see past ourselves. Maybe the concept contains all of these elements. Hellman, who was 82 at the time of having the conversation in Lament, may have been using the Red Book and his dialogue with Shamdasani to come to terms with his feelings about his own impending death. Perhaps it is undefined because these men are feeling something, or intuitively seeing

something that the living lack the intellectual language for. It is not that the authors do not know what they are talking about, they know, but they are not completely able to say it. Hellman was such an infuriatingly intuitive person and writer that his biggest downfall in his other books is that he often felt truths that he could not articulate, and instead he would retreat into arguing the merits of his credentials and background, or into intellectual archival of his opinions on philosophers and artists and history. And in his other works, this led to a didactic and self-righteous tone that his writing is largely worse for. In Lament, Hillman is forced to talk off the cuff, and that limitation puts

him at his best as a thinker. In his review of Lament, David Tacey has made the very good point that Jung abandoned the direction that the Red Book was taking him in. Jung saw it as a dead end for the experiential psychology and retreated back into analytical inventorying of archetypes. On the publication of the Red Book, many Jungians celebrated the book as the culmination of Jungian thought, when instead, as Tacey points out, it was merely part of its origins. The book represents a proto-Jungian psychology, as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration while he was directly experiencing the things that he was directly experiencing when he that he was directly experiencing when

he wrote the Red Book. Hellman and Shamdasani probed the psychology's origins for hints of its future in lament. Hellman and Shamdasani's thesis is partially a question about ethics and partially a question about cosmology. Are there any universal directions for living and behaving that Jungian psychology compels us towards? That would be ethics. Is there an external worldview that the notoriously phenomenological nature of Jungian psychology might imply? That would be a cosmology. These are the major questions that Hillman and Shambhasani confront and lament.

Their answer is not an answer as much as it is a question for the psychologists of the future. Their conclusion is that the dead of our families, society, and human history foist their unlived lives upon us. It is up to us and our therapists to help deal with the burden of the dead. It is not us that live, but the dead that live through us. And Hillman quotes W.H. Auden several times to serve his point. The quote that he prefers is, we are lived through powers that we pretend to understand. This was definitely true of Hillman if you've read his other work. A major tenant of Jungian psychology is that adult children struggle under the unlived life of the

parent. The Jungian analyst helps the patient acknowledge and integrate all the forces of the psyche that the parent ran from and so they are not passed down to future generations. A passive implication of the ethics and the cosmology laid out in Lament is that to have a future we must reckon with not only the unlived life of the parent, but also the unlived life of the dead, our civilization, our history, and our humanity, and the people who have failed at the projects that we are picking up. It is our job as the living to answer the questions and face the contradictions that our humanity posits in order answer the questions and face the contradictions that our humanity posits in order to discover who and what we really are.

The half-truths and outright lies from the past masquerade as tradition for tradition's sake, literalized religion, and unconscious tribal identity, but that must be overthrown. The weight of the debt of history can remain immovable if we try to merely discard it, but it drowns us if we cling to it too tightly. We need to use our history and our tradition to give us a container to reckon with the future. The container must remain flexible if we are to grow into our humanity as a society and an aware people. If you find yourself saying, yes, but what does the dead mean? Then this book is probably not for you.

If you find yourself confused by this review, but humbled by this thesis, then perhaps this book is for you. Instead of a further explanation of the ethical and cosmological future for psychology that this book posits, I'll give you a tangible example about how its message was liberatory for me. Oddly enough, the idea of a descent and return will already be familiar to many Americans through the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell took the same ethics of descent and return to the unconscious as the model for his monomyth model of storytelling. This briefly influenced psychology and comparative religion in the U.S. and had a major impact on screenwriters to this day. Most of Campbell's influence on psychology is contained to the 1970s and 80s.

Campbell's ethics are the same as Jung's, though. If one becomes stuck on the monomyth wheel, or the journey to the unconscious and then the return to the integrated conscious, then one is no longer the protagonist and one becomes the antagonist. Campbell and American post-Jungians in general were not always great about attributing influences and credit where it was due, and Campbell did not do a great job of pointing out that the tradition he was describing was coming from Jung's psychology. Jung was suspicious of the new age theosophists and psychedelic psychonauts that became enamored with the structure of the unconscious for the unconscious sake during the new age movement and the interest in psychedelic drugs and mystical experimentation. Where lament shines

is when Hillman explains the ethics behind Jung's thinking here. Jung lightly implied this ethics, but was, as Hillman points out, probably not entirely conscious of it. One of lament's biggest strengths and weaknesses is that it sees through the misappropriations of Jungian psychology over the last hundred years. Both of the dialogue figures know the man of Jung so well that they do not need to address how he was misperceived by the public, and they also know the limitations of the knowable. This is another lesson that is discussed in lament. Can modern psychology know what it can't know? That is my biggest complaint with the profession as it currently exists. Modern psychology seems content to retreat into research and objectivism. The medical, corporate, and credentialist academic structure

of psychology in the 1980s certainly furthered that problem. Jung did not believe that the descent into the unconscious without any hope of return was a path forward for psychology. This is why he abandoned the path that the Red Book was leading him down. Can psychology let go of the objective and the researchable enough to embrace the limits of the knowable? Can we come to terms with limitation enough to heal an ego-inflated world that sees no limits to growth? I don't know, but I sincerely hope so. I said that I would provide a tangible example of the application of this book and its review, so here it is. I have always been enamored with James Hillman.

He was by all accounts a brilliant analyst. He was an incredibly intelligent person. And that intellect did not save him. Hillman ended his career as kind of a crank and a failure in my mind. In this book, you see Hillman contemplate that failure. You also see Hillman attempt to redeem himself as he glimpses the unglimpsable. He sees something in the Red Book that he allows to clarify his early attempt to revision psychology. Hellman's attempt to reinvent Jungian psychology as archetypal psychology was wildly derided, largely because it never found any language or technique for application and practice. Hellman himself admitted that he did not know how to practice archetypal psychology.

It's easy to laugh at somebody who claims that they have reinvented psychology and they can't even tell you what to do with their revolutionary invention. However, I will admit that I think Hillman was right. He knew that he was right, but he did not know how he was right. It is a mark of arrogance to see yourself as correct without evidence, and Hillman was often arrogant, but I think here he was not. Many Jungian analysts would leave the Jungian institutes through the 70s, 80s, and 90s to start somatic and experiential psychology that used Jung as a map, but the connection between the body and the brain as a technique for direct experience. These models made room for a direct experience in psychology that Jungian analysis does not often do.

And it added an element that Jung himself had practiced when he wrote the Red Book. Hillman never found this technique, but he was correct about the path that he saw forward for psychology. He knew what was missing. I started Taproot Therapy Collective because I felt a calling to dig up the Jungian techniques of my parents' generation and reify them. And I also saw those as the most viable map towards the future of psychology, even though American psychology had largely forgotten those techniques. I also saw them devoid of practical technique or application for a world where years of analysis cost more than most trauma patients will make in a lifetime. I feel that the experiential and brain-based medicine techniques like brain spotting are the future of the profession.

Pathways like brain spotting, sensory motor therapy, somatic experiencing, neurostimulation, ketamine, psilocybin, or any other technique that allows for direct experience of the subcortical brain is the path forward to treat trauma. These things will be at odds with the medicalized, corporate, and credentialized nature of healthcare. I knew that this would be poorly understood as a path that few people, even the well-intentioned, would be able to see, but I never would have found it if I had refused the call of the dead that is being talked about in this book. Lament is relevant because none of those realizations is somewhere that I ever would have gotten without the tradition that I am standing on top of. I am, as Isaac Newton said,

standing on the shoulders of giants, except Isaac Newton didn't invent that phrase. It was associated with him, but he was standing on the tradition of the dead to utter a phrase that was first recorded in the medieval period. We don't remember the person who first said that. The author of its origin is unknown because they are, well, dead, and they have no one to give their eulogy. The ethics and cosmology of lament is that our lives are meant to be a eulogy for our dead. Lament makes every honest eulogy in history become an ethics, and by extension, a cosmology. Read Pericles' eulogy from the Peloponnesian War in Thucydides. How many of these lessons are still unlearned? I would feel disingenuous in my career unless I tell you who these giants are that I stand on.

They are David Tacey, they are John Beebe, they are Carl Jung, they are Sanu Shandasani, they are Fritz Perls, they are Karen Horney, they are Hal Stone, and many, many others. They are all of the people that I use to have the perspective that I have now that I never could have built on my own. I would never have heard the voices of James Hillman inside myself unless I had learned to listen to the dead from his voice beyond the grave, and it would have been easy for me to merely criticize his failures instead of seeing him as incomplete truths. Hillman died with many things incomplete, as we all inevitably will, and Lament helped me clarify the voices that I was hearing in the profession. Lament of the dead is a fascinating read, not because it tells us exactly what to do with the dead or even what they are.

Lament is fascinating because it helps us to see a mindful path forward between innovation and tradition. The contents of the collective unconscious cannot be contained by one individual. Just as Jungian psychology is meant to be a container to help an individual integrate the forces of the collective unconscious, attention to the unlived life of the historical dead can be a kind of container for our culture. Similarly to Jungian psychology, the container is not meant to be literalized or turned into a prison. It is a lens and a buffer to protect us until we are ready and allow us to see ourselves more clearly once we are. Our project is to go further into the journey of knowing ourselves where our ancestors failed to. Our mindful life is the product of the unlived life

of the dead. It is the work of our life that is their lament, and their unlived life is our work to be done. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope that was interesting. If you have interest, you can order Lament of the Dead from Amazon or from anywhere else where you get your books. And if you have a question or a comment, please get in touch. Send me an email at joelblackstock at gettherapybirmingham.com or check out the website gettherapybirmingham.com. Thank you and have a nice night.