Shrink🇺🇦Wrap Sunday 2.27.22
Preludes, Next Drafts... and A Terrible Love of War
Sunday greetings, and welcome to newShrink.
Today’s response to the week’s dramatic news rippling globally from Ukraine is a Shrink-wrap that applies title themes from depth/soul-engaged psychology, history and journalism — themes both new and recently discussed in newShrink .
The above sequence of today’s themes and stories is presented first as visual images. That’s by intent, for it is often in images in the wings or along the margins of the story that the soul, the psyche in psychological, makes its presence known. In depth-psychology terms that presence animates, gives life to, our psychological faith — recognition of the soul’s reality.
The Ukrainian flags used as topical bullet-points in today’s newShrink honor and salute the power, sometimes even numinous, sacred, that images can have.
Themes taken in reverse-order from the title:
🇺🇦A Terrible Love of War: the title-concept of depth psychologist James Hillman’s book in which he incisively flips the familiar theme of the human soul in war to confront instead the far less palatable — yet psychologically spot-on — war, and love of war, that lives in our human soul;
🇺🇦Preludes: bringing historic perspective and context to today’s events and news (taken from Shakespeare’s line in The Tempest, “past is prologue;”) and
🇺🇦 Next Drafts — applying lessons from the past to weave the updated future story forward (taken from the quote attributed to former WAPO publisher Phil Graham, “journalism is the first rough-draft of history.”)
Some notes of historical relevance as we consider depth-psychological dimensions of this nascent European war today:
🌀In profound ways the bloody European wars and redrawn maps of the early 20th Century influenced, and in some ways were impetus to, both Freud’s and Jung’s seminal work in understanding the unconscious human mind. (This was some 120 years ago, long before its mysteries would be mapped and confirmed by the technologies of today’s neuroscience.)
🌀 The Nazi regime would ultimately restrict Freud, a Vienna Jew a generation older than Jung, in his professional practice and force him out of his acclaimed positions as an international award-winning writer (the Goethe Award) and psychoanalysis pioneer. By 1938 he was forced with his family to flee for their lives and relocate in London.
🌀And for Jung at the 1914 eve of World War I in his native Switzerland, the extended period later described as his “confrontation with the unconscious” had begun. Possible factors in the apparent breakdown were his traumatic, permanent, rift with his early mentor Freud plus a bombardment of violent, recurring dreams featuring rivers of blood flowing throughout Europe. Jung’s learnings from navigating this experience and from clinical practice were the foundation of the entire analytical psychology he would develop and practice for the next 50 years.
connecting themes…
Starting with the top row of photo-images:
The first two are excerpted from the introduction to depth psychologist James Hillman’s book, A Terrible Love of War. I highly recommend reading the full excerpt here like a short essay quite relevant as we try to make sense of Ukraine and Russia today. The entire book is excellent, too.
#1. Iconic scene with George C. Scott in the title role of the 1970 film Patton.
“One sentence in one scene from one film, Patton, sums up what this book tries to understand. The general walks the field after a battle. Churned earth, burned tanks, dead men. He takes up a dying officer, kisses him, surveys the havoc and says: ‘I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life.’
(Hillman, 2004).
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#2. “We can never prevent war or speak sensibly of peace and disarmament unless we enter this love of war. Unless we move our imaginations into the martial state of soul, we cannot comprehend its pull.”
(Still from Hillman, 2004).
“This means ‘going to war,’ and this book aims to induct our minds into military service. We are not going to war in the name of peace, as deceitful rhetoric so often declares, but rather for war’s own sake: to understand the madness of its love.”
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#3. Statue titled “Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace” atop the U.S. Capitol dome in Washington, DC. She’s modeled on the powerful Greek Olympian Goddess Athena, whose domains are Wisdom, Weaving and War-Strategy. This places the human archetype represented by Athena at front and center in today’s challenges.
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Author Mark Twain was much-acclaimed during and after his life as a humorist. But like many, even most, fine minds he could bring a knifelike edge to the wit when shining light on the darker sides of our human nature. A friend and reader, who’s also a fellow former journalist, shared this Twain piece as the Ukraine situation grew dire this week:
#5. “The Lowest Animal,” 1896 essay by Mark Twain. (Published in other forms under various titles, including “Man’s Place in the Animal World.”)
“The cat is innocent, man is not.”
"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out.. and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel… And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man'— with his mouth."
Some of my thoughts before shifting from themes to today’s stories:
🌀 Although in today’s world it’s constantly sentimentalized into triviality (if considered at all) the soul is not all sweetness and light. It is simply unconscious.
🌀Nor is the psyche or soul either good, or evil. The unconscious is amoral. As Jung used to say — in my mind’s ear dryly with a “well, duh” — “the unconscious is unconscious.”
🌀Even St. Augustine of the Catholic tradition assures that we are not morally responsible for the content of our dreams. And he was… a saint! (Well, eventually. He did a lot of living first.)
🌀More seriously in Jung’s view, and I think some of what Hillman is getting at here: Once we become consciously aware of some truth from the unconscious psyche or soul — however difficult or unwelcome, as with facing up to our capacity for aggression, a terrible love of war — individually and collectively we have a moral imperative to take it into account in the way we live our lives, the choices we make, our relationships and work.
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At far right in the top row the final quote from Hillman shifts the focus from themes to stories in today’s news:
#5. “The saying ‘Someday they’ll give a war and no one will come’ remains a fond wish. War drives everything else off the front page.”
… with the stories
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#6. This visual image recaps three elements of the ways an historical perspective plays out with the news stories of the day.
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#7. The image depicts three of five videos of Russian air-strikes against Ukraine. (Videos confirmed by The Washington Post.)
Russia Attacks Ukraine — The New York Times’ first-day stories on the invasion, with continuing live updates
President Biden announces new sanctions against Russia. (NPR)
"‘Putin is the aggressor,’ Biden said in remarks at the White House. ‘Putin chose this war and now he and his country will bear the consequences.’”
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“By evening I think half of Ukraine will be Russian”. Residents scramble to flee Kyiv (NYT).
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The next visual image brings us to:
cults-of-personality…
Here, we see case examples of such psychological dynamics as mutual, utterly unconscious (ie, soul-less) — and therefore dangerous — projection of shadow in such figures as Russian President Putin, un-elected American Donald Trump commenting from the sidelines and Fox Channel media personality Tucker Carlson.
# 8. The photo-image depicts Putin at a wreath-laying ceremony on Defenders of the Fatherland this week.
Russians Now See a New Side to Putin: Dragging Them Into War (NYT)
“The autocrat who has steered Russia for 22 years was embraced by many Russians for what they saw as his rationality and astute risk management. That image has been upended.”
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while Americans see a very familiar Trump…
“This is genius.’” Trump Praises Putin’s Move into Ukraine and Blasts Biden” (from Forbes)
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Meanwhile, the American media personality continues his courtship of Russian state media propagandists.
Tucker Carlson interview demanded by Margarita Sininyan (From The Daily Beast.)
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#9. The photo depicts a strategic war map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Russia-Ukraine: What to know as Russia attacks Ukraine (Associated Press)
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past is prelude…
Putin Calls Ukrainian Statehood a Fiction. History Suggests Otherwise. (NYT)
“In a speech, President Vladimir V. Putin bent Ukraine’s complex history into his own version that served as a justification for his cleaving off more of its territory.”
Full video news coverage or transcripts of Russian President’s rambling, nearly hour-long, historic fact-defying speech attempting to rationalize his planned invasion of Ukraine is chillingly worth the viewing or read for those who can push through it. Political historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American (heathercoxrichardson.substack.com) and others provide excellent insights.
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Ukraine is now democracy’s front line: “Calamity Again” (The Atlantic)
“No nation is forced to repeat its past. But something familiar is taking place in Ukraine.”
And yet…
I am noting again how philosopher Hegel’s ideas parallel those of several thinkers relevant to depth psychology, as previously discussed in newShrink. Hegel’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis is comparable to Jung’s transcendent function (holding the tension of two opposites in order that a transcendent “third option” is generated by the psyche.) In his memoir Speak, Memory, novelist Nabokov cites Hegel to describe his idea of his own life and personal history unfolding as a series of spirals. Also there’s poet Dante’s tersa rima, forward-back-forward, rhyme scheme in his The Divine Comedy.
This sounds very much like Athena depicted on the US Capitol statue, weaving our history, from back in past through present to forward in future. (All requiring current news-drafts, revisits of history and newly drafted updates as they unfold.)
New York Times columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman here spells out that constant weaving forward of history underway today...
We Have Never Been Here Before
“The seven most dangerous words in journalism are: ‘The world will never be the same.’ In over four decades of reporting, I have rarely dared use that phrase. But I’m going there now in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world.” [A wired and connected world, as he goes on to explain.]
some of history’s next drafts…
Shifting gears to key stories this final week of Black History Month.
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#10. Biden Picks Ketanji Brown Jackson for Supreme Court
(NYT)
Biden introduces historic nominee Jackson, tapped to be first Black female justice (The Washington Post)
“Announcing a choice that fulfills a campaign promise, President Biden introduced federal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee for the Supreme Court at a White House event Friday afternoon.”
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Some much-awaited verdicts arrived:
Three men are found guilty of hate crimes in Arbery killing. (NYT)
Three White men guilty of hate crimes charged in connection with Ahmaud Arbery murder (WAPO)
“‘Justice is long overdue for our small town,’ one resident of Brunswick, Ga., said after hearing the verdict.”
And on Thursday:
Ex-Officers Guilty in Federal Trial Over George Floyd’s Death (NYT)
“Three former Minneapolis police officers who arrested Mr. Floyd alongside Derek Chauvin were convicted of violating his civil rights. They still face a separate trial on state charges.”
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Constitutional law scholar John Simpkins in The Charlotte Observer punctuates the month’s finale with this opinion piece:
This month let’s put the focus on Black futures
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For us to close on some lighter notes, the next visual image shifts the tone.
#11. “Laughter is soul-making, too” is from novelist Sue Monk Kidd, who also has undergone and written eloquently about her own deepening experience of soul and faith.
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#12. The Vintage Calvin & Hobbes cartoon is selected to address this week’s events and themes. (Thanks again to friend, veteran journalist, reader and cartoon curator-par-excellence Ann Allen.)
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and finally,
#13. “Mardi Gras is coming up. Here’s where to find your King Cake in the Charlotte area”
(Story from the The Charlotte Observer)
This week is Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) and Lent in the Christian calendar begins this Ash Wednesday.
First, there are some serious psychological benefits in making constructive changes through practicing the ritual of Lent.
🌀While it’s generally assumed to be making a sacrifice, “giving something up,” often the greater discipline might be to add and make time to begin new positive practices.
🌀Some examples are gratitude lists, adding exercise or meditation practice, acts of generosity disciplines.
🌀Anything (good or bad) that we do intentionally for 40 days becomes set-in as a habit.
Now I have a Lenten joke to share… on myself.
🌀Having grown up in a mouthy family of opinionated women, worked in newsrooms and in very male-dominated corporate settings, I know my way around some salty language (though I’m told I can sometimes appear deceptively prissy.)
🌀 So a decade or so ago I decided to give up cussing for Lent, putting teeth in the vow by starting “quarter jars” both at work and home, in which I was to make a deposit every time I slipped-up.
🌀When I shared this noble intention in a book-study group with colleagues, one spontaneously exclaimed: “Oh, what are you going to do with all of that money?!”
(I did donate it to charity.)
Now, about that king cake in the photo:
🌀If you look closely there is a tiny plastic baby where the cake has been sliced.
🌀Pretty unfamiliar with king cakes in my Protestant background, I just learned from the story that this apparently depicts the Baby Jesus.
🌀 (By way of explanation, Mardi Gras marks the end of Carnival season, which was kicked off at January 6 Epiphany. That’s when the Biblical kings or wise men are said to have arrived to greet the Baby Jesus in Bethlehem.)
Back to the baby in the cake…
🌀This story goes on to explain that the person who gets — or, bites into — the plastic baby in a king cake slice must throw the next party…?!?
🌀Even before this, those cakes didn’t look all that delicious to me. Now every nerve in my body still jangles from the carnivore-cannibal imagery of that ritual of biting-into-a-plastic-baby. (Even worse is the idea that it’s Jesus!)
There’s that power-of-the-psyche’s-images theme again…
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I’ll leave you with a look toward the next newShrink’s themes that include the soul in place(s) and soul in the body, in motion.
🌀In that spirit next Saturday morning I’ll have “soles” in motion. Weather and other stuff permitting I plan to run the YMCA-Truist Corporate Cup race in uptown Charlotte 5k race from Bearden Park through historic 4th Ward.
🌀Speaking of history themes here in newShrink of late, it’a a rare treat to get to walk or run the streets back in my hometown. This course is along the street where my maternal grandfather grew up and past the hospital where my mom was born (it’s still there, as condos.)
🌀This is mainly a shorter practice in a race setting for the 10k I hope to do in April at SouthPark. If any of you local morning-early-bird types are out and about in that uptown area, would love to have you wave! (I won’t be zipping past, am just devoted not fast.)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
•🌀🔵🔷🦋💙
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”