Excerpt from Living Beyond Reality: A Jungian Primer for Enhancing Your Life by Diane Lau

CHAPTER 1:

Carl Jung Says We're Not Crazy

Do you considered yourself a strange person? Are there certain elements of your life you feel are peculiar...certain aspects of your personality you’d call quirky? Has the word "weird" been a defining adjective for you?

Do these facts not really bother you?

If you are able to accept the weird in yourself and in life, the author feels you give yourself a big advantage. Those who deny the weird are going to fail to see a lot of what’s going on, and miss much of what makes life worth living.

It is my weirdness which best qualifies me to write this book. Sad to say, I’m not a psychologist, and I express my gratitude to you who have chosen to read the book even though the author’s name is not followed by a Ph.D. Nevertheless, I do feel I owe you some accounting of my credentials, so here they are: While in my mid-thirties I discovered the explanation for my aforementioned weirdness in the works of C.J. Jung (1875-1961). Subsequently, although hindered by monetary considerations from pursuing a most desirable doctorate in Jungian psychology, I did enough reading to qualify for at least an imaginary masters degree. That’s it for the qualifications. Oh, I’ve had a very interesting life as well, but then so have you and you’re not cheeky enough to write a book.

I have derived so much help and guidance from Dr. Jung that I found myself constantly wishing I could pass it on, Ph.D. or no. So passing it on I am. If some of this material is intensely personal, I ask your indulgence. What we discuss in these pages cannot be anything else but personal, and if one were to try to communicate about it while editing out the embarrassingly private, there wouldn’t be much to say. Yes, it’s weird, it’s personal, but I’m happy to report that according to Jung, it’s not insane:

I have heard the most curious dreams and visions from the lips of people whose mental sanity not even the professional psychologist could doubt. The experience of the archetype is frequently guarded as the closest personal secret, because it is felt to strike into the very core of one’s being. [Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 78]

Carl Jung’s accounting for the weird, and his declaring it not only sane but very much so, is one of the nicest things anyone has ever told me. If acceptance of your own weirdness is all you glean from this book, I will be happy. But I hope to do much more.

Let me offer another apology in advance: It is audacious to attempt, as these pages will, to answer some of the deepest questions about human nature, God, love, the meaning of life, and the popularity of ice hockey. These are only my answers. As Jung himself said,

...Every psychology--my own included--has the character of a subjective confession...Even when I am dealing with empirical data I am necessarily speaking about myself." [Collected Works 4, par. 774/D22]

A final apology: In the chapters that follow I will speak of my answers as truth, but this is only for the sake of simplicity. While there was a time in my life when I had all the answers (many Lutherans do), my intention here is merely to present my case and let the reader mix it into his or her own stew of truth.

So, here’s what I think:

We Are Not Alone.

I’m not referring to aliens, although I speak to those who search the skies for company. I’m not even referring to God in the conventional sense, although I speak to those who have relied on a higher power.

I’m talking about that character in a book who seemed so real to you that you wept when you closed the last page on him. I’m speaking of the feeling you got as a teenager, on a really happy morning, as you thought about your future life companion somewhere in the world. I’m referring to the movie star, or rock singer, or sports hero whose pictures you’ve clipped from magazines. I’m talking about being in love, of yearning, of finding inner strength, of surrendering to a burst of terror or rage or lust. I speak of all the things that make us feel most alive, most divine and immortal. We are not alone, and that is why we experience such things. When they happen, we have encountered something...someone...who has been defined in a hundred ways by humankind.

One of those ways was the viewpoint of Carl Jung, who, together with Sigmund Freud, developed the basis of modern psychoanalysis. Jung accounted for those yearnings, those feelings of rapture. He explained why we can feel so much for people who are not real or whom we have never met. He also believed we are not alone—there are somethings and someones out there—and they are of the utmost importance, both to our sanity and to life itself.

Jung’s theories are thorough and logical, abounding in precise terminology and documented by countless case studies. And while a pair of psychoanalysts could discuss these theories in all their glorious detail, even a child, in her own way, knows Jung’s world....

It’s Really Sad That There’s No Such Place as the Planet Vulcan

When I was ten, there were six channels available on our black-and-white TV, and nobody had conceived of VCRs even in science fiction. Perhaps because our media choices were so limited, Premier Week in September seemed like a lot bigger event back then. As the networks started advertising their new fall line-ups, there was a show or two every year which set my young heart beating with anticipation. The Week itself was almost too much to bear, especially in 1966 when I awaited the premier of NBC’s Star Trek. I ran around the neighborhood that warm afternoon in a frenzy I usually reserved only for events like going to a drive-in movie. I wolfed my supper, and planted myself in front of Channel 4 at five to seven.

No wonder I was excited. A show about space travel! With weird planets, monsters, ray guns! I worried it might be scary, like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, but the TV Guide article made this show look friendlier. Plus one of the main characters was from another planet! How much better could TV get?

The first episode did not disappoint me. This was the first sci fi show I’d seen featuring characters with whom I could identify. It took only a few weeks for me to pick up on enough of the Enterprise’s culture to start fantasizing about myself in a Federation uniform (with a much older body that could do justice to the costume). I was still me, but I was galaxies away, keeping company with the friendly but exotic inhabitants of the 24th Century.

The most exotic of these was, of course, Mr. Spock. I was only one of millions of teeny boppers taken by the charming Vulcan. The popularity of Spock, with his satanic ears and coldhearted logic, flabbergasted the show’s producers, but I’m sure C.G. Jung could have easily explained it. Jung would have loved to analyze my fantasies of cracking through Spock’s monolithic self-control to the tender emotions buried beneath, emotions susceptible to me alone. (Right. Actually, there were thousands of "me alones" who joined me in writing him fan letters.)

Of course, I wrote a fan letter to Leonard Nimoy, the actor, not to Mr. Spock. Believe me, I would have preferred writing to Spock. A few years later I was privileged to be taken by my parents to see Nimoy play Fagin in "Oliver!" at a local summer theater. The experience was exciting but something of a letdown as well. He was not the same in the scruffy beard and raggedy clothes of the Master of Pickpockets as he was in the snug uniform and arched brows of the Vulcan. The flesh-and-blood actor could hardly compare to the vision of the kind, wise, solitary alien I carried in my mind.

Fictional characters invariably exert more power over us than actual humans do, and larger-than-life fictional characters do it best. Over the years since 1966, the various Star Trek permutations would supply me with more thrilling archetypes including Capt. Picard, Data, Q, Odo, the holographic version of Prof. Moriarty, and the computer-generated Doctor.

You’ll note I have just allowed my first Jungian term to creep in: archetypes. It is probably the first Jungian concept the average person grasps, and that is not surprising. Sociologists and psychologists have found archetypes to be an element of just about every culture the civilized world has seen. When we studied mythology in grade school, we were examining a sophisticated system of archetypes: Ares, the fierce god of war; Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess of love; Hercules, the hero; Hades, the dark lord of the Underworld. But mythology was probably not our first exposure to archetypes. Before that we watched superheroes in cartoons and comics, had our first crush on a teacher, dreamed of meeting TV stars, pretended to be a famous sports hero while shooting baskets in the driveway. Regardless of the form they take, archetypes have one thing in common: their power over us. Jung explains:

When an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or a fascinating effect, or impels to action....It seizes hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. [Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 70]

Why archetypes exert such a powerful influence over us will be explored later, but for now let’s return to 10-year-old me, glued to the Boob Tube watching Spock. I found my love of this character brought me pain as well as joy, for as happy as that hour-a-week made me, when the credits rolled I had to return to 20th Century Wisconsin where there was no such thing as warp speed. Perhaps you too have had the experience of falling in love so much with a fictional world that you can’t bring yourself to believe it doesn’t exist in some way. When I stood in my asphalt driveway in our suburban neighborhood and looked up at the stars, I wondered how it was possible that there was no planet Vulcan among them. This thought made me sad to the core, with the same grief one feels for losses in the real world.

I didn’t know then, but almost 30 years later someone would show me I did not need to grieve—that there really is a planet Vulcan up there. But that’s a tale for a later chapter.

©1997 Diane E. Lau

Wishing Wand stained glass by Karen Mandelbaum, "Talk to the Moon" and "The Woman Who Wanted it All"
paintings by Melissa Harris, available from The Pyramid Collection.

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