Jung, according to van der Post: Jean Brown eavesdrops on a relationship between two `large souls' - and comes home to herself

For A Change, Dec-Jan, 1998 by Jean Brown

Some 20 years ago, when I first read Jung and the story of our time (*), it detonated a series of life-changing explosions deep in the recesses of my imagination. Author Laurens van der Post had long been a favourite of mine. In this book, he reflects on the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), whom he knew personally. It set off a chain reaction of definitive `ah ha' moments, that helped me to come home to myself both as a woman and as a rooted human being.

The Jungian scholar may be impatient with a book in which van der Post, himself a dreamer, philosopher and adventurer, regurgitates his understanding of the thought and experience of Jung, the `father of modern psychology'. But for me it was a heady mix. While giant intellects and great souls, go deep-sea-diving, thousands of the rest of us wriggle our toes in the shallows, and gaze across the surface to ooh and aah at the sunrises and sunsets and ask a few questions. But even the toes have a story to tell, the sand on the edge has been stirred and the environment is changed a little and for ever.

Let me explain a couple of things about myself. In spite of my personal experience of God up to that point, and my sense of meaning as part of a Divine plan, I still suffered from a feeling of isolation, the `pimple on the skin of the universe' syndrome. Jung's belief in a Collective Unconscious connected me with a deeper sense of rooting and being.

Jung, like Freud, believed that the unconscious part of the mind contains personal drives and experiences of which the individual is not aware. But Jung also thought that members of every race share a deeper level of unconsciousness which he called the Collective Unconscious. `I found,' Jung told van der Post, `that the more I looked into my own spirit and the spirit of my patients, I saw stretched out before me an infinite objective mystery within, as great and as wonderful as a sky full of stars spread out above us on a clear and moonless winter's night.'

This glimpse of a common story and a shared memory knocked me off my lonely perch and into relationship with the totality of the human experience. Jung believed that every person has a `myth' of their own derived in part from the shared mythology of the peoples of the world. He saw `myth' not in the reductive sense of illusion, but rather as the container of the great truths and beliefs and symbols that are passed down through the generations.

While growing up, a process in which I am still engaged, I also went through a not unusual, but rather elongated, period of self-rejection. It was a rejection of myself as woman. The complexity of that issue is not for these pages at this time. Perhaps I was identifying, unknowingly, with `the rejected, despised, deprived and persecuted feminine in life ...' which Jung took as his guide at one stage in his inner journey. In Jung and the story of our time I found myself captivated for the first time by the vision of the essential feminine aspect in life.

How could I have missed it? My mother is a competent professional woman, musical, spiritual, literary, story-teller and nurturer extraordinaire, a role model with few parallels. My father is visionary, artistic, strong, inclusive. I grew up in an adventurously feminist period--still, I missed it.

Van der Post describes in detail Jung's quest for `the lost feminine principle'. Its rebirth and its `reliance on love as the only true transformer of inadequacy and imprecision of spirit, is as urgent today as it was 2,000 years ago on the first Christmas Day in the Roman colony of Palestine'.

Van der Post then adds, `In our own Western history we have betrayed the vital honouring, in equal proportions, of the masculine and feminine in being.' He continues, `History remains unilluminated by any realization that just as man has a feminine self through which he creates, woman has this masculine self ... through whom she is equipped to make a contribution to life; not only as wife or mother, but in her own unique right.... A greater relationship between man and woman, a complete renewal of their attitudes to one another, promises a richer partnership of the human spirit than any life has ever seen, despite the chaos and confusion of the present moment.'

These thoughts and their tracing through ancient mythologies, broke a logjam in my spirit that had me stuck in a narrow definition of myself. Interestingly the call to wifehood and motherhood was occurring simultaneously for me. Soon afterwards a remarkable experience in my spiritual life brought me into relationship with Jesus Christ and affirmed and consolidated this new understanding of my meaning and contribution as a woman.

Van der Post had been introduced to Jung by his wife, Ingaret Giffard, soon after the war, when he was struggling with a sense of `isolation and loneliness ... the sickness of our time'. In the `debris of war and disaster ... men had lost their capacity to dream.... I knew that somehow the world had to be set dreaming again'.