A PRESCRIPTION FOR MESHUGGE MEDICINE

It’s just as well we can’t foretell the future, because if anyone had told me twenty years ago that I would be given strict medical orders to blog every day by my therapist, I would have thought them madder than a row of chairs. Orders from a doctor of psychology to spend time on the internet? My shrink’s prescription is, ostensibly, an encouragement to market my professional services, I know, but lurking close to the surface is the nudge towards learning to enjoy myself; to play a little. They are foreign words, completely forgotten from consideration as a right, let alone a need as important to wellbeing as the recommended daily dose of vitamins or the correct number of hours of sleep.

When he was 38, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung hauled himself up out of a severe episode of doldrums through writing a journal . “Jung’s gone fucking meschugge,” Sigmund Freud wrote to the other shrinks. (I’ve put a stolen note with my footnotes here, for further reading.) Today the Jungian Technique of Active Imagination is supposed to bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious minds. Jung’s ‘The Red Book: Liber Novus’ is a folio manuscript so named due to its original red leather binding. It kept account of Jung’s psychological observations and experiments on himself between 1913 and 1916. He later termed the process “mythopoetic imagination“. The first entry on 12 November 1913 begins with this petition:

My soul, my soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you–are you there? I have returned, I am here again. I have shaken the dust of all the lands from my feet, and I have come to you, I am with you. After long years of long wandering, I have come to you again….

Playing is just as important for adults as it is for children. Among its many benefits, adult play can boost our creativity, sharpen our sense of humor, and help us cope better with stress, I am advised by the boffins at PsychCentral[1] when I do a little sleuthing to find out if my therapist is losing her marbles. Play? Play???

I have written here before [link] about my complex relationship with social media, it is a subject perpetually in my thoughts due to the editing work I do on literary manuscripts and academic documents. It follows that my algorithm throws thought-provoking stuff at me constantly, and in keeping with the very informed company I keep at my desk, I thought I would revisit the parts of blogging that gave me so much comfort and pleasure in a previous chapter of my life when I was flailing about and needed succor. Back then my blogging was frivolous, although criticism of that younger self serves no value. The point here is that I was Out and About and Learning, that is the enduring legacy of my previous blogging chapter: I still have that innate curiosity. I have always had it.

The beloved walkabout ‘Legal Alien’, Quentin Crisp, famously answered his telephone whenever it rang, day or night. He had an open listing in the New York telephone directory, and would happily chat for hours to anybody who phoned. The exchange of ideas, his curiosity about the world, meant that he got through his days as an outsider – an Alien, an Englishman in New York – by journaling his encounters. “If I have any ambition, other than to be a chronic invalid, is to meet everybody in the world before I die. And I’m not doing badly.” He said, and he didn’t do too badly at all, in the end. He passed it on, the exchange of ideas, like another beloved outsider, Hector, pleads on behalf of shy author Alan Bennett in The History Boys: “Take it, feel it and pass it on. Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day. Pass it on…”

I guess my prescription is to play with purpose by blogging. Let’s wait and see.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” Jung said, and Abraham Harold Maslow (the American psychologist who created Maslow’s hierarchy of needs) agreed: “Almost all creativity involves purposeful play.”

REFERENCES

Gregory, A. P. R. (2003). Coleridge and the conservative imagination. Mercer University Press.

Hoerni, Ulrich; Fischer, Thomas; Kaufmann, Bettina, eds. (2019). The Art of C.G. Jung. W. W. Norton & Company.

Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) Random House.

JUNG’s MOMENTARY MADNESS

[Incekara F, Blom JD. Carl Jung: a life on the edge of reality with hypnagogia, hyperphantasia, and hallucinations. Front Psychol. 2024 Mar 7;15:1358329. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1358329. PMID: 38515975; PMCID: PMC10954828.]

At the age of 38, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) feared that he had become psychotic. For ten months he had been experiencing catastrophic dreams, hallucinations, and what he himself described as ‘visions’. He struggled to make sense of these sensations, but it was not until August of 1914, after the onset of what was to become known as the Great War, that he interpreted the rivers of blood and dead bodies he had seen in his mind’s eye as truthful premonitions (Jung and Shamdasani, 2020a,b). He nonetheless realised that ‘to the superficial observer’ his experiences might still ‘appear as madness’ (Jung and Shamdasani, 2009, p. 226). Yet, the first claim that Jung was mentally ill did not come from ‘superficial observers’, but rather from his contemporaries in psychoanalytic circles. Sigmund Freud repeatedly wrote to his colleagues Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham that Jung was ‘crazy [meschugge]’ (Freud et al., 1993, p. 440). Freud also received a letter from Ernest Jones in which the latter stated that Jung was ‘mentally deranged to a serious extent’ and that he ‘made a paranoiac impression’ (Freud and Jones, 1993, p. 199). Similar such claims continued after Jung’s death. Jung biographer Paul Stern described him as ‘hallucinating ghosts and demons’ while in a state of ‘semi-psychosis’, although he also credited him to be a visionary ‘without being manifestly mad’ (Shamdasani, 2005, p. 73). Deirdre Bair, another Jung biographer, describes how in 1961 Richard F.C. Hull, translator of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, was invited by the psychiatrist to read his Red Book, after which he concluded that the then unpublished work was ‘the most convincing proof that Jung’s whole system is based on psychotic fantasies’ and that it was ‘the work of a lunatic’ (Bair, 2003, p. 293). To date, there is an ongoing debate about whether Jung became psychotic. 

[1] https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-importance-of-play-for-adults

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