Beginning My Red Book

I went to an amazing training by a local therapist named Jed Murphee this week.  It was well structured and put together and utterly modern.  It was deeply steeped in the drive to label personality traits and define them neurologically.  As I listened to this training on diagnosing teens with bipolar and borderline personality disorder, I became mad.  At the end, there were a series of case studies and people in the audience laid out diagnoses for the teens in the case studies.  In the end, the group decided diagnosing to early was bad, but they also kept limiting the teens to other easy labels. The case studies consisted of mostly behavioral descriptions of the teenagers.   Teenager A has attempted suicide, cuts, and has been hospitalized twice.  Teenager B has run away from home and has rapidly cycling moods. What made me mad is the very factor that has lead me to this blog.  These teens were nothing more than symptoms.  These human beings were nothing more than a collection of behaviors. When I see teens with symptoms like these, there is usually a deeper narrative that is beyond neurology and diagnosis.   They were abused, abandoned and lost and are desperately seeking meaning in a world that has offered them none.

I have seen Carl Jung's  Red Book described as The Holy Grail of the Unconscious.  I think this is beautiful, but inaccurate.  I see The Red Book as a road map to healing and self exploration.  Carl Jung was one of the father's of modern psychological practice and psychology.  He worked with Freud.  His work permeates much of modern psychology.  Jung wrote The Red Book at a time when he was going through  some of the worst crisis's of his life.  It was his road map to healing.  It was his exploration of meaning in a world that was on fire.  One of the teens I work with and I went through the red book together last week and discussed it.  It was, for her, a window of hope.  She felt that it was good to know that even wise men suffer and struggle and she loved the process of it.  She loved the idea of exploring the inner workings of her mind and having someone listen and care and believe that her ideas might have some deeper meaning.  Adults had reduced her to a collection of symptoms.  They had diagnosed her with bipolar with psychotic features and treated her as broken.  She felt hopeless and condemned by the labels that weighed her down and the symptoms she saw as inescapable products of who she was as a person.  There was, for her, as with many of my young people, a solace in the belief that in the journey to life even the wise man could periodically be broken and even she could actually have beauty to offer and have something to say that held meaning.  To me, this is the hope held in Jung's Red Book.  It is the hope that we can all be different archetypes during different stages of our lives and that even in the fool, wisdom awaits.

As I began my work on my Red Book, I had to look into my active imagination.  I explored this deeply and found the same images emerging.  I did the following drawings as my first attempts to make my active imagination more tangible.

I had to do some research to explore the archetypes in my art, but both of the images I drew came from the same mythology.   Both contained images of the triple goddess and the Tree of Life.   The Tree of Life is a reoccurring image in my active imagination.  It is the archetype that permeates all religions and cultures and binds heaven, hell and earth together.  The Norse, Celts, and Christians all embraced the symbolism of the tree.  Carl Jung incorporated it into his own Red Book frequently.  It is a symbol of life and death and reaching for something higher.  The triple goddess required more research.  She is taken from Celtic mythology but it could be argued that her archetype is seen in the Fates and the Norn's.  She is one person and three, like the trinity.  She is the maid, the mother, and the crone.  She represents fate and the unknowable and the fact that women are constantly shifting and changing and evolving. Men are typically represented as stable once they enter adulthood.   Women, however, are constantly evolving.  In youth, they are desired, beautiful, and powerfully sexual.  Our society loves the maid and women often long to remain her.  The mother is the nurturing aspect of woman.  She is older and wiser and focused on caring for others.  Her youth is spent. The crone is the postmenopausal woman.  She is wise and in older cultures she is closer to magic, but her sexuality is lost and so is her beauty. 

So why would these images be so present in my active imagination?  I think it is because I am aging and that is weighing down on me.  I am no longer in my twenties and much of the attention that was paid to me when I could wander the beach in a bikini is gone.  I am firmly in the mother role and I miss my youth and fear my evolution into the crone.  I am not sure why since I have always respected wisdom more than beauty.  I will need to explore this in more depth. 

As with many things in life, it is how we interpret the images in our active imagination that really matters.  Have you ever wondered why every Tarot card reading is accurate? It is because each image can always be seen as holding some piece of the truth and it is how we explain the images that make the validity of each image eternally accurate.  I could have described these images in a dozen ways, but my interpretation gives the images meaning and touches on the truth of the issues that are weighing upon me now. 

Further Reading:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html