Lament of the Dead: Psychology After Jung's Red Book

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For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides, as Hegel said, inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. The book without the dustcover is red, the same red as both the dustcover and cloth cover of The Red Book.

Reading the Lament, much like reading The Red Book, one gets the sense that one is witnessing a private but important moment in time. It also offers advice on interpreting dreams, discusses the nature of dreams, and tells how to remember the details of dreams. I've come to the conclusion that psychological language does do damage, it isn't really the language of the soul.The medical, corporate, credentialist and academic restructuring of psychology in the nineteen eighties certainly furthered that problem. His new psychology never really came together coherently and he never found the technique to validate his instinct. Jung saw it as a dead end for experiential psychology and retreated back into analytical inventorying of “archetypes”. These two - Hillman and Shamdasani - seem to have no idea what other people - people other than Jungians - have been doing with Jung's material.

Hillman introduces the concepts of the book with his explanation of Jung’s reaction to the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer. Some scholars believe Jung was partially psychotic while writing The Red Book, others claim he was in a state of partial dissociation or simply use Jung’s term “active imagination”. Jung also despised the practice of eastern mysticism practices by westerners but admired it in Easterners. A gnarly urtext by psychologist Carl Jung is extolled but not illuminated in this incoherent series of transcribed dialogues.The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask. A brilliant collection, evocative of all that is wonderful and strange about Jung’s Red Book and about the human psyche.

While this is true if you are an English professor, the mystic and the therapist in me see these limitations as the book’s strengths. The earliest conversations explicate Jung's work, providing a framework for exploring and understanding the Book. Hillman, who was 84 at the time of having the conversations 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. Our mindful life is the product of the unlived life of the dead it is our life that is their lament.It was an attempt for Jung to heal himself in a time of pain and save himself from madness by giving voice to the forces underneath his partial psychotic episode. Some of my favorite James Hillman books are the ones that transcribe his conversations, capturing his thoughts on the fly. The Red Book seems to help him clarify the disorganized blueprints of his stillborn psychological model. His insights have the detachment of the theoretical where Hillman’s are more felt and more intuitive but also more personal.