CG Jung Page: weblog

Telegraph | Arts | The filth and the fury:
... "Bertolucci has been in psychoanalysis off and on since 1967 and he knows his films are full of clues. 'I am embarrassed because all of my movies are so linked to my own life, to my story,' he says, squirming. 'Sometimes it is too strong. They are like bringing back ghosts.'
He talks about how they reveal the Oedipal complex that has led him to 'kill off' his father (The Spider's Stratagem, 1970, The Conformist, 1970, and even, it could be said, with a switch of sex, Last Tango); the fascination with his mother, 'the most mysterious person in my life' (La Luna); the obsession with virginity (Stealing Beauty) or anonymous sex (Last Tango again).
But his idle conversation is more enlightening than you might realise, too. In an otherwise dignified acceptance speech for the nine Oscars received for The Last Emperor, he caused a stir by describing Hollywood as 'the Big Nipple'. And it is exactly what talking to Bertolucci is like. "
...
Like Last Tango, The Dreamers is set largely in a single apartment in Paris (in 1968, as opposed to the early 1970s); there is nudity and sexual exploration, and the camera itself plays a leading role. But it is a gentle film, much less angry or controversial, less about age and despair than about youth and hope.
...
In The Dreamers, a brother and sister meet a young American, a fellow film buff played by Michael Pitt, in a demonstration outside the Cinémathèque Française, just after its director, Henri Langlois, has been fired. Their parents away, they invite the American back to their apartment (as in many of Bertolucci's films, the action takes place in an enclosed space - a sanctuary and a prison) and while the young people outside take to the streets, experimenting with political freedom, these three take to bed, experimenting with each other's emotions and sexuality....

"Sadistic 'snakes in suits' in the office identified by new psychological test
By Jason Bennetto, Crime Correspondent
12 January 2004

If you suspect your boss is a sadistic control freak with violent tendencies, or fear the head of accounts is a psychopath likely to run off with the pension fund, then help is at hand.

The 107-point questionnaire, known as a 'B-scan', which stands for business scan, enables companies to spot potential managers who are likely to turn violent or defraud the company."

If you answer yes to three or more of these questions you could have a psycho boss:
* Does the person make slick presentations that are too good to be true?
* Have career goals that are ambitious but unrealistic?
* Comes across with an inflated, almost grandiose self image?
* Is hungry for money, power and status at any cost?
* Has no clear life plan?
* Takes credit for the work of others?
* Borrows equipment and supplies promising to return them, but keeps them?
* Flies into a rage, which dies down quickly, but continues as if nothing had happened?
* Comes across as a thrillseeker?

Courtesy of news.independent.co.uk and the Moreover.com Newsfeed.

-dw

International Links to Psychoanalysis, Part 5 (Dr. A. Muhs, Karlsruhe)

Includes Jungian associations and links to institutes, societies, and journals in Europe, the US, and South America. Surprisingly detailed.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The best of British blogging

The Guardian's second British blog awards found the country's webloggers in fine form, with last year's high standards maintained. Simon Waldman, chair of the judges, hands out the accolades

Thursday December 18, 2003

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/
NYTimes.com > Sunday Book Review

By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
Published: January 11, 2004
Member account required

Excerpt:

Freud and Jung represent the twin therapeutic impulses of the modern age: neurotic self-scrutiny versus New Age spiritual redemption. Freud, the essential Enlightenment figure, meant for psychoanalysis to free man from the elements (the unconscious, superstition) that deprived him of autonomy. Jung, the German Romantic, for whom individuation meant returning to the archaic and the mystical, complained that Freud's biological theories excluded the very Dionysian, polygamous spirituality essential to the fully realized life. Freud wrote about sex; Jung had it.

While writing her comprehensive biography, ''Jung,'' Deirdre Bair discovered that the battles between Freudians and Jungians are as nothing compared with the internecine war raging in the Jung world: ''In a field whose history is inflamed by the quasi-religious status of its pioneers, partisans have been vocal. . . . Anyone who undertakes to write about him is confronted by the many charges against him.'' Much ink has been spilled over Jung since his death in 1961; in ''The Jung Cult'' and ''The Aryan Christ,'' for instance, Richard Noll characterized Jung as an ambitious charlatan who lifted his central insights from other scholars. For its part, the Jung family has maintained an iron grip on his archives, refusing access to many of his writings, and even those by long-deceased colleagues. Bair, the author of biographies of Samuel Beckett, Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, circumnavigated most of the family's restrictions, noting only that she couldn't use any document ''unless a member of the family has read it first,'' and that she had to know in advance which files she wanted to see, ''because even the card catalog was tightly restricted.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/books/review/11BOYNTOT.html

Encountering Jung: An Evening with Deirdre Bair

Friday, Feb. 6 - 7:30 pm
The Jung Center of Houston
$10 ($5 for members

The National Book Award-winning author of Jung: A Biography discusses her compelling new research into the life of the founder of analytic psychology

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear renowned author Deirdre Bair discuss the process of writing her new biography of Carl Jung. Bair addresses the extraordinary new scholarship and contentious debates of recent years in a balanced, definitive examination of Jung’s life and work. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where Jung taught, as well as to the diaries and letters of Jung’s colleagues, patients, and critics, Bair offers fresh perspectives on the achievements and contradictions of this great personality.

HoustonChronicle.com - 'Jung' by Deirdre Bair: "Nov. 24, 2003, 2:02PM

Seeking meaning
Jung's biography thoroughly researched
By JAMES HOLLIS

JUNG: A Biography.
By Deirdre Bair.
Little, Brown, $35; 881 pp.

APPROACHING a balanced view of Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychoanalysis, is not unlike climbing Everest. There are many paths up, each offering a different view along the way and none without a peril of its own.

Deidre Bair, who won the National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett and has written biographies of Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, has produced what is the most neutral and thus far most informed attempt on this peak yet. Bair had unprecedented access to papers and documents owned by Jung's heirs, documents and letters cached at the Eidgenosse Technisches Hochschule, the M.I.T. of Switzerland where Jung once taught, and numerous interviews with his contemporaries. "

...

Blogcritics.org: Sopranos Spoiler: "Sopranos Spoiler
Posted by David Weinberger on December 24, 2003 12:04 PM (See all posts by David Weinberger)
Filed under: Video, Video: Original Fiction


I know how the Sopranos will end.
I base this on no insider information. I have not stolen the scripts for the upcoming season nor have I slept with David Chase. I have, however, just finished re-watching the entire series. This has led me to several inescapable conclusions.
First, this is the funniest show on TV. Maybe ever. On seeing it again, it seems so obviously to be structured primarily as a comedy. Chase must have been thinking, 'Wouldn't it be hysterical if...' And no show earns its laughs the way this one does, putting real people into a sub-world with its own tight but insane logic."

Joho the Blog: "Peter Coffee in eWeek meditates on what PowerPoint is doing to us. He begins with Edward Tufte's piece on how PowerPoint misled the assessment of the risk to the shuttle Columbia. Peter writes:
Bad presentations result from people learning to write with a model of 'topic sentence, body, conclusion,' instead of a journalistic model of 'lead (conclusion), significance, supporting details.'"

We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom--symbolizing an end as well as a beginning--signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forbears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe--the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge--and more.

See Matthew Clapp's weblog" for the rest of the text at the Nautis Project.

-dw

HOW TO SMUDGE:

Boulder, Colorado: The "New Age" trademark is less fashionable these days; it seems like most people who use the phrase are compelled to add qualifiers such as "I wouldn't associate myself with all the 'New Age' practices but...."

...but anything goes. And Boulder is host to it all, this "power spot" where the most rigorous activities center on "speaking one's truth," "letting go of negativity" [when did "negativity" become a word?], pursuing athletic prowess, and as everywhere, making money, aka letting success into your life, and finally, for University students, drinking lots.

Here's a new practice I learned about, though of course it's an "ancient" practice and that makes it "good" -- Smudging:

"Smudging is the common name given to the Sacred Smoke Bowl Blessing, a powerful cleansing technique from the Native American tradition. It forms the central part of the great majority of rituals and blessings in this book. Smudging calls on the spirits of sacred plants to drive away negative energies and put you back into a state of balance. It is the psychic equivalent of washing your hands before eating - and used as an essential preliminary to almost all Native American ceremonies.

SMUDGING SOMEONE ELSE

1. You can use exactly the same technique to smudge another person. Except you hold the bowl and waft the smoke over the other person.

2. You can ask them to repeat the words after you. You might also want to ask them if they feel any sense of blockage or uncomfortable feelings in any part of their body. If so direct the smoke towards that part in particular and ask the spirits of the Smudge to help release the blockage.

3. You may also direct smudge to each of the person's chakras (above the head, at brow level, at their throat, at the heart, the solar plexus, the genitals, the base of the spine). Visualize each chakra coming into balance as it is purified by the smudge."

...from Boulder where the smudging is sacred and the milk and honey are always organic.
-dw

The Nautis Project - Jung, Sheldrake, Bergson, Campbell

The Nautis Project is an exploration into the work of Rupert Sheldrake, C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Henri Bergson. Each of these intellectuals offers a view of the natural and life sciences that converge in a concept that Bergson called creative evolution. Instead of a contra-Darwinian approach to evolutionary theory, the idea of creative evolution is an extension Darwin's theories and also the work of the neo-Darwinians. This web site is an attempt to open a dialogue on these interesting issues.

The Nautis Project - Articles & Chapters: "Jung, Jungians, and Psychoanalysis"
by Kenneth Eisold, PhD

The break between Freud and Jung and the subsequent division between their followers has had profound and continuing consequences for both parties. The Jungians have continued an ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis, with the effects of internal conflicts and institutional schisms. Mainstream psychoanalysis, for its part, has used Jung, the primary and still most prominent deviant, to inhibit developments in areas associated with his work. This article explores how the pressure to maintain solidarity and conformity in psychoanalysis has curtailed, in particular, thinking in 3 areas: symbolism, lifelong development, and paranormal experience. It concludes with observations about the opportunities and dangers associated with the move toward pluralism being considered in both camps. "

Kenneth Eisold (William Alanson White Institute) is on the editorial board of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and his article appears now at the Nautis Project by Matthew Clapp. The Nautis Project concentrates on CG Jung, Henri Bergson, Rupert Sheldrake, and Joseph Campbell.

-don

Some of you may be wondering where the green weblog template came from - I am! I was looking around for a different template and must have "tried this one on." I'll see what I can do about it later this week when I have a bit more time.

-don

Full text search of 120,000+ books at Amazon.com

Scholars and writers can rejoice at Amazon.com !!

::

Amazon Debuts New Book Search Tool
© Gary Price 2003.
Written for SearchEngineWatch.com October 27, 2003

"Search Inside the Book" allows you to search the full-text of more than 33 million pages from over 120,000 printed books.

More than 190 publishers are participating in the program, including Wiley, Time Warner Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Inc., Random House, Inc., and many others.

Access to the full-text of 120,000 titles has enormous research and reference value. However, Amazon's primary motivation for offering this service is to sell books. The company is calling this new service, "a significant extension" to "Look Inside the Book" service which has been online since October, 2001.

How does "Search Inside the Book" work?

The service is easy to use. Simply enter your search terms into any Amazon search box. In addition to the usual results listing authors and titles, you'll also see short snippets labeled "excerpt from" and the hyperlinked title of the book where your search terms were found.

Click on the title link you'll see a scanned image of the page with your search term(s) highlighted. Amazon is using optical character recognition technology to find words embedded in the scanned images.

Scanned books are fully browseable. You can move forward or backwards one page at a time using links above the page image. You can also move forward by simply clicking on the page image.

Like most search engines, Amazon uses an implied Boolean "AND" between your search terms. And although the service supports phrase searching with quotation marks, there are no advanced search capabilities or search limits. Searching for phrases is often imprecise. I ran a search for "sports broadcaster" and received many false drops.

It's also possible to find a title and then search within it. Just look for the "search inside this book" label above the cover image of books in your search results.

Unfortunately, table of contents and index pages do not contain hyperlinks. This would have been enormously useful -- perhaps we can hope to see this capability in the future.

Amazon provides a helpful overview of the service, showing how it works in step by step fashion. A more detailed FAQ is also online.

Although Amazon is the first commercial bookseller to offer a service like this, many libraries offer access to thousands of web accessible books via netLibrary [see footnote]. This service offers full-text searching and many other options. Ask your librarian if you have access to it. If you do, you'll most likely be able to can access the database from ANY computer.

Ebrary is another company operating in this space. The National Academy Press continues to offer free web accessible full-text access to over 2500 titles.

And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the terrific Online Books Page, maintained by the indefatigable John Mark Ockerbloom. This "page" is actually a database of more than 20,000 freely accessible online books that we wrote about last January.

::

News of story came to me from Chris Locke EGR Weblog who pointed me to Jeff Bezos' (Amazon CEO) letter when it first appeared on the Amazon.com website several days ago.

-don

Footnote:
netLibrary is a Boulder, Colorado company. When I enquired about publishing Jung's Collected Works, they were willing to do it and to re-key/re-type all of the volumes without cost to Princeton or Routledge. I contacted Murray Stein who took up the banner with Princeton and the Jung family. Unfortunately, the publishers "dug in their heels" and would not move. It is no surprise, therefore, that the Collected Works are not searchable at Amazon because Princeton would not permit it ...despite the fact that book sales usually go up when portions of the text are online (thanks to Chris Locke for this info as well), despite the fact that Amazon could or may already provide financial compensation to publishers.

Perfect Weight | Chopra.com:
From the Depak Chopra website - the "perfect weight seminar":
"Actually, we are a package of thinking and feelings housed in this body that is called you and me."

Deep, very deep. So much better than Lear's "bare forked animal" or or a colloquial "unit." I think of myself now as a "package." Sign me up.
-dw

Why a broken heart hurts so much:
"CALIFORNIA RESEARCHERS have found a physiological basis for social pain by monitoring the brains of people who thought they had been maliciously excluded from a computer game by other players."
Naomi I. Eisenberger, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles and the first author of the study to be published Friday in the journal Science, said the study suggests that the need for social inclusiveness is a deep-seated part of what it means to be human.
“These findings show how deeply rooted our need is for social connection,” said Eisenberger. “There’s something about exclusion from others that is perceived as being as harmful to our survival as something that can physically hurt us, and our body automatically knows this.”
Eisenberger and her co-authors created a computer game in which test subjects were led to believe they were playing ball with two other players. At some point, the other players seemed to exclude the test subject from the game — making it appear the test subject had been suddenly rejected and blocked from playing with the group.
The shock and distress of this rejection registered in the same part of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, that also responds to physical pain, Eisenberger said.
“The ACC is the same part of the brain that has been found to be associated with the unpleasantness of physical pain, the part of pain that really bothers us,” Eisenberger said.

Iraq Body Count :

"Casualty figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media reports and eyewitness accounts. Where these sources report differing figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. All results are independently reviewed and error-checked by at least two members of the Iraq Body Count project team in addition to the original compiler before publication."
...
"The project takes as its starting point and builds upon the earlier work of Professor Marc Herold who has produced the most comprehensive tabulation of civilian deaths in the war on Afghanistan from October 2001 to the present, and the methodology has been designed in close consultation with him."

As of this day and hour, the minimum number (because reports vary) of deaths is 6131 and the maximum is 7849.

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