In a recent paper for the Journal of Analytical Psychology, I discuss Jung’s creative writing process and his practice of active imagination based on selected entries in The Black Books and Liber Novus, also known as The Red Book. These selected entries concern Jung’s fantasy dialogues with the dead in 1914 and 1916, culminating in Jung’s authorship of Septem Sermones ad Mortuous (Seven Sermons to the Dead)-a stand-alone pamphlet that Jung circulated among peers and colleagues. Jung included an adapted version of Septem Sermones in the third and final manuscript of The Red Book, called Scrutinies.  

Photo: James Hollis with a statue of James Joyce in Zurich in 1985

In the past four years I have had elective knee and hip replacements, non-elective cancer treatments involving surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and two major spinal operations as the vertebrae of my spine dissolved and fractured, possibly as sequelae of the cancer treatment onslaught. So, the last few years have been pain-ridden and constrained by various procedures even as I continued to work as an analyst when out of hospital. As a result of my uncertain but life-threatening medical prognosis, my wife and I recently moved to a retirement center. Through it all, I found that my medical situation was less on my mind than my work with analytic psychology. Even I found that surprising, and I can only conclude that the work of Jung and Jungians continues to animate, direct, and feed the life of my soul. If that were not the case, I would be collecting stamps, or knitting doilies by now.

“Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere, except where we participate in the ritual of life.”

C.G. Jung (1950, para. 625)

Some days cultivating peace of mind seems like an insurmountable task. Daily news can pummel one into feelings of overwhelm and helplessness as we bear witness – via the small screens in our hands or the larger screens on our walls – to global distress. Trauma abounds, from human mass migrations across the planet, to the community-shredding epidemic of gun violence – its relative proportion unique to the United States – to war and famine in too many places on the planet, to governmental oppression of entire groups of people. Add to what it reports, the news too often simultaneously reports on and fosters polarization; soundbites that salaciously satisfy as they defy historical and political complexities.