Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung's Red Book
Excerpt - James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani
In October 2009, James Hillman and I commenced a series of conversations taking as their point of departure C. G. Jung’s newly published Red Book. In April 2010 we held a public dialogue, at the invitation of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. In the following autumn and summer we continued discussions in Connecticut and New York. This book arises from the transcriptions of those conversations. Recurring motifs and themes taken up from different angles have been retained. We both went over the text, finalizing the manuscript before his death in the fall of 2011. I added endnotes for the sources of the works referred to. Subsequent revision has been restricted to copy editing.
Sonu Shamdasani
……
First Conversation
Los Angeles
JAMES HILLMAN: I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead.1 It was a ritual and I think we don’t do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.
SONU SHAMDASANI: It takes blood. That’s what it takes. The work is Jung’s “Book of the Dead.” His descent into the underworld, in which there’s an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions.
JH: Their unanswered questions.
SS: We think we’re posing the questions but we’re not. The dead are animating us.
JH: But the questions . . . Jung says there that we think the figures we uncover in our dreams or in active imagination are the result of us, but he says we are the result of them. Our life should be derived from them. We just think of it wrong. We think whatever comes to us comes to us as something leftover from, as Freud said, Tagesrest, the residues of the day, images that are composite stuff, garbage from life. But Jung is saying these figures come to us in our dreams and even our thoughts derive from these figures, so the task would be uncovering the figures, which seems to be what the Red Book does. He allows the figures to speak, to show themselves. He even encourages them to.
SS: Descending into his own depths he finds images that, in a sense, have preceded him. It is a descent into human ancestry.
JH: Good.