Episode 73: Carl Jung and the Power of Art, Part One

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2020

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the first of two conversations that Phil and JF are devoting to C. G. Jung's seminal essay, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry," first delivered in a 1922 lecture. It was in this text that Jung most clearly distilled his thoughts on the power and function of art. In this first part, your hosts focus their energies on Jung's puralistic style, opposing it not just to Freud's monism (which Jung critiques in the paper) but also to the monism of those other two "masters of suspicion," Marx and Nietzsche. For Jung, art is not a branch of psychology, economics, philosophy, or science. It constitutes its own sphere, and non-artists who would investigate the nature of art would do well to respect the line that art has drawn in the sand. Weird Studies listenters will know this line as the boundary between the general and the specific, the common and the singular, the mundane and the mystical... REFERENCES C. G. Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry" Joshua Gunn, Modern Occult Rhetoric: Mass Media and the Drama of Secrecy in the Twentieth Century Peter Kingsley, Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity Sigmund Freud, Austrian psychologist Kinka Usher (director), Mystery Men Theodor Adorno, “Bach Defended Against his Devotees” Aleister Crowley, English magician C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life" in: Untimely Meditations Weird Studies, episode 49: Nietzsche on History Weird Studies, episode 70: Masks All the Way Down, with James Curcio Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal Paul Ricoeur, French philosopher Rudolph Steiner, Austrian esotericist Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:02.0	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird studies. This is Phil Ford.
0:53.3	JF and I try to share out podcast jobs equally,
0:56.3	so we take turns on doing these intros. And this week, it's my turn to do one, which is funny,
1:02.0	inasmuch as I know about 100th of what J.F. knows about Carl Jung, the subject of today's show.
1:08.0	But maybe it's just as well that I drew the assignment this week. Maybe there's
1:12.2	something to be said for having a low-res mental picture of a complex thinker. It's like being able
1:17.5	to stand back from a big painting to see if the frame is crooked. However, early in this episode,
1:23.6	J.F. and I consider what gets lost when we go too much on received opinion with Jung.
1:29.3	Young has a reputation of being the weirder version of Sigmund Freud, or the cooler version, depending on your point of view.
1:36.2	Freud writes of the individual unconscious. Young writes about the collective unconscious.
1:41.7	Okay, fine, that's true to a certain point. But what if we think of
1:45.9	Jung a few other ways? What if we think of him as a 20th century paracelsus, a Swiss physician
1:51.8	and student of nature with one foot in science and the other in the occult, and a major figure
1:56.8	in the Western esoteric tradition? Or what if we think of him as the uncanny repetition of the archaic in the modern,
2:04.6	a shaman reincarnated in a starched European collar?
2:08.6	Or instead of Freud, perhaps he might be more profitably compared to William James,
2:12.6	a pluralistic philosopher whose starting point is psychology.
2:16.6	Jung's essay, on the relation of analytical psychology to poetry, despite its dreary title, is a fascinating introduction to Jung's thought.
2:26.3	It's a rich essay, so rich that when J.F. and I had been recording for about an hour,
2:31.3	we realized that we had spent the whole time setting up the
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