The Jung Ones

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #19 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space.

This issue: Carl Jung and the shadow side of psychedelia with Drs Ido Cohen and Gita Vaid, plus The Temple of Light and more

From ‘Novae’ by Lab212 Collective at Wavelength: A Momentary Spring at Beijing Times Art Museum till 1 July

‘Jung’s work reminds us that our psyches are endlessly complex systems with unfathomable capabilities for healing and growth.’

Not my own prescient words, but those of my esteemed Vital Psychedelic Training course tutor Johanna Hilla in Philosophy and Psychedelics. The seminal compilation is now available in paperback out of Exeter University, Albion. That’s where Johanna, a pioneering expert in applying Carl Jung’s psychology to psychedelic use, is based. ‘Jung’s contribution may prove essential for realising a comprehensive psychology of altered states,’ she concludes in her essay Journeying into the Realm of the Unconscious.

Jung famously rejected Sigmund Freud’s focus on childhood, sexuality and biological functions. Legend has it that during a long ocean voyage spent together, the spritely Jung implied Freud’s lack of sexual experience might contribute to the significance he attached to it.

Freud shall we say was triggered. Jung spiralled into a spiritual crisis, his mind blown by the realisation Freud was not only sexually repressed himself, but possibly projecting it all over human history. The son of a priest and a medium, his confusion manifested in lavish, intense visions including an especially poignant prophecy of the First World War in October 1913. From Jung’s 1962 autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

‘I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision last about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness. Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized.’

Jung did what any of us would: he comissioned a large red leather bound scrapbook, built a massive extension on his crazy villa by Lake Zurich and retired there ‘in solitude’ AKA alongside his polyamorous coterie of society beauties, to write canonical books – and paint a unique illuminated manuscript exploring his own psyche.

The son of a priest and a medium favoured stuff that – a century later – would turn out to be highly appealing to us voyaging-through-the-netherworlds types. 

Arguably, the writing was on the wall when Jung wrote the introduction to the first-ever 1935 German edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Timothy Leary and Richard ‘Ram Dass’ Alpert would present as an LSD road manual in the 60s. His med school dissertation was written On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena.

Jung channeled the imagination to illustrate our purpose, and the route to homeostasis. He empirically examined the use of classical tools like religious texts, alchemical practices, and dream states to understand human psychology. He believed historic methods employed a metaphysical vocabulary richer than words alone. 

The mental health crisis is a result of these more elegant methods of understanding falling into neglect, Jung decalred. Muddied are our personal blueprints for fulfilment: ‘The will can control our impulses only in part. It may be able to suppress them, but it cannot alter their nature,’ he wrote in 1951’s Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, ‘And what is suppressed comes up in another place, in another form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy.’

This issue goes Carl Jung bananas: with special guests my aforementioned teach Ms Johanna Saponnen, modern-day magus Dr Ido Cohen, and many more psychedelic thinkers who tell stories with punchlines like “You must respect the circle of life to drink ayahuasca” and “Shouldn’t we be coming up with something better than ‘just trust the inner healer’?”

In this archetypal collector’s issue:

New Aion

Approach

Carl Jung applied scientific rigour to mystic wisdom. His alternative psychology provides a framework for psychedelic integration. Only now are its most profound messages coming to light

Evan Roth, ‘Landscapes’ at Wavelength: A Momentary Spring, Beijing Times Art Museum till 1 July

‘The years when I pursued my inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is derived from this,’ opens Jung’s masterwork The Red Book.

Leading psychedelic voices say Jung’s established, if exotic, psychology provides an explanatory framework that complements and legitimises the visionary psychedelic experience. Yes, your trippy bullshit is of significance after all.

‘Godfather of Psychedelic Therapy’ Dr Stanislav Grof writes in his definitive work LSD Therapy ‘The only psychiatrist who systematically explored and described many of the transpersonal phenomena we see is Carl Gustav Jung.’

But, “It seems unlikely Jung took psychedelics” writes my Vital tutor Johanna Saponnen in Philosophy of Psychedelics (out now in paperback). Her extensive mapping of Jung’s work comes to mixed conclusions. The acclaimed early 20th century psychologist cautioned fellow intellectuals against the mescaline trend in his correspondence. But his interest seemed piqued by LSD just before his death in 1965 aged 85.

Jung believed delving into our imaginations, instincts and personal mythologies – using techniques he bastardised from alchemy and mysticism – was fraught in itself. Which is possibly fair enough.

“It seems unlikely Jung took psychedelics”

Whether Jung had his wings or not he certainly seemed to know his way around the astral plane, and beyond. Interpreting plus integrating dreams and visions, primeval male and female forces, kabbalistic mental alchemy, re-enchantment, re-storyfication, ‘ancestor work’ the importance of a spiritual practice and – yes – ‘the shadow’ were Jungian tropes. 

He said nature could ‘make us unconscious’ and warned of its potency. Jung was even into embodiment, stressing the importance of a daily yoga practice. He essentially converted to mysticism (despite doggedly maintaining an empirical attitude) after a premonition of the First World War. A spiritual crisis provoked by conflict between his scientific and spiritual sides drove him into isolation. 

“The only psychiatrist who explored transpersonal phenomena is Carl Gustav Jung”

Therein he painted and drew, as opposed to wrote, The Red Book an illuminated train of thought manuscript exploring his most conceptual hypotheses. Jung was so conscious of its obscurity that he only showed it to a handful of confidants. This definitive work of human endeavour was finally published in… 2020. 

It’s not your average mash-up era comeback. And before you conclude the bookish-seeming Jung mustn’t have done his own shadow work, turns out he was a shall-we-say ‘photo polyamourist’ and college jock who swerved penury by marrying an heiress to the IWC Swiss watch dynasty.

What Goddess encounters really say about your lifestyle

Therapy

Those visions and messages from the deep reflect real-world events, relationships and consequences

Wangechi Mutu, ‘Yo Mama’ showing at Intertwined, the New Museum, NYC till 4 June

How do Jungian interpretations of trip reports actually play out in therapy rooms?

Naturally we’re all smug that canonised psychologist Carl Jung – arguably the most famous one after Sigmund Freud and y’know, Jordan Peterson – dignifies the visionary aspect of psychedelic experiences.

Jung’s relational depth psychology explains the personal relevance of dreamlike imaginary narratives in his masterworks including Man and His Symbols and Archetypes of the Unconscious.

But waxing lyrical on your entity encounters is a far cry from a typical talk therapy session.

“It’s not always good to start diving into the archetype that penetrated their body midway through a ceremony”

I asked Vital lecturer Dr Ido Cohen how he uses Jung’s psychology to help patients make sense – and use – of psychedleic experiences.

“It’s important to meet people where they are,” says the accomplished Jungian analyst and scholar of indigenous shamanistic practices, “So I think first I want to listen. I want to listen to where they are, what the actual capacity, is and what the need is.”

Ido, also a scholar of indigenous shamanistic practices, explains: “I have patients who I worked with for years without talking about anything like I have today. You can also have someone specifically psychedelic related, who comes back from retreat really raw and are very, very open, or very, very scared or something. So it's not a good time for them to start diving into like the archetype they saw that penetrated their body midway through a ceremony. That's not what they need right now.”

Jung related mental health to our inner conflict with subconscious yearnings. Poignant visions from dreams or the waking ‘active imagination’ were messages from our deepest instincts, he believed.

But it’s the emotional content, and the compulsions they stir, that bear most relevance.

“I'm not dismissing the image: act it, treat it as though it's real. But my game is curiosity”

Those encounters with the Goddess evoke more down to earth matters. They present as deeply profound because they are wrenched from the collective unconscious, where that which is undeniably bigger-than-us dwells.

“To give you an example: I worked with this young man, lovely young man, riddled with anxiety and low like low self esteem, had a strong Saturnian father, went to ceremony, came back and he's like, You don't you don't understand what happened to me!’,” says Ido. He continues, “I was like, ‘What happens?’ And he paints this scene, where he was on these mountains… and he was a wolf running with a wolf pack. He's describing this to me in vivid detail. I asked him one question: ‘How was it? How did it feel, to run with wolves?’ He said, I've never felt so strong. I have never felt so capable. I've never felt so much in my body. And I've never felt so free’.”

The subconscious demands we confront said urges. Not by actually going feral in the woods with the pack, tempting as it remains.

“You were a wolf. Consider your wolf self”

But instead by transitioning from the being we are, to someone a little more like the one up on the that mountainside. 

“You were a wolf. I'm totally down with that. I'm not dismissing the image: act it, treat it as though it's real,” says Ido Cohen, “But my game is curiosity… to have you consider your wolf self.”