#Alchemical Hermeneutics

[drthomasmaples-blog]

Siddhartha Gautama, the prince that would find enlightenment at the Bodhi Tree and transcend ordinary consciousness to become the Buddha was a man driven to understand the essence of suffering. His mission was singular, and as such, he developed acute skills of FOCUS (Follow One Course Until Successful) through meditative practices. These practices brought him deep levels of self-introspection, knowledge, and ultimately lead him to realize his true nature. Like the process of meditation, the Buddha’s lessons are simple to employ, filled with beautiful symbolism, but can take a lifetime to master the meanings inherent within their context.

However, to realize self, as the Buddha’s life is an example of, is no easy task. As a goal, it encompasses a process that Jung himself thought extremely difficult to attain. Yet our propensity to seek answers for those big, yet somehow unanswerable questions stands as a litmus for the journey we all undertake to develop deep, rich, and expansive Self-meaning. While the Buddha attained this level of consciousness, he also informed us that it is up to us as individuals to reach down, sometimes deep down inside, so we can develop individual meaning within the context of our daily lives, make sense of our personal life journey, and find a path conducive to our individuated Self development.

The Buddha is a a religious figurehead. As such, his life, and the stories associated with it are highly symbolic. As the head of a major world religion, any attempt to understand his journey to become Self-Realized must take into account the rich symbolism present in his life, so that those symbols can be deciphered in ways that interact with, correlate to, and assists us to develop meaning within our own personal storyline. Like the life of major religious figureheads, we as individuals are born to this earth, plan, chart, and explore the context of creation we have been given, and partake in a lifelong developmental journey that is inclusive of birth, death, and the wonderful stories we create in between. Therefore, the symbolism inherent in the religious storylines we find solace within can act as pathways, or even precursory stories to our own developmental journey.

Our human nature is rich with symbolic meaning, that oftentimes correlates to the very storylines religious figureheads have undertaken. In many ways, they act as a beacon of hope for us to emulate, so that we also may find our true nature, and transcend the split nature of a consciousness that has fallen. However, in order to understand the effects of our developmental journey and the journey it takes to mend the divisive nature of consciousness, we must employ introspective and reflective, rational and empirical, scientific, philosophical, and symbolic methodologies as a means to make sense of the ways common symbols affect our daily life.

What follows is the research methodology I employed to understand the symbols presented in Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha. While methodological in scope, by understanding the steps I took to decipher the symbolism present, others may begin to develop their own way to decipher symbols for their own journey, so they to can begin to make sense of their inner workings and advance confidently in the direction of their dreams.

Research Methodologies. Three research methods are employed in this book to analyze the symbolism present in Siddhartha. Case study methodology is primarily employed as a research method to understand the developmental themes present in Siddhartha’s life and archetypes that affected his developmental journey. I then analyzed and amplified these themes using a philosophical hermeneutic method to produce a developmental outline for Jungian psychology and to correlate its themes to existing developmental literature. I then amplified these themes through the alchemical hermeneutic approach of biographical reflection, calling upon my subjective presence to help amplify the themes present in an archetypal development theory from examples of my personal developmental sequence. By correlating an archetypal outline of development to existing developmental literature, I amplified the themes present within the content of Siddhartha to biological theories of attachment, psychosexual, object relation, and psychosocial models of development using a comparative theoretical approach housed within the tenets of the hermeneutic circle.

 Siddhartha sought to understand his personal ontology. Therefore, I viewed the storyline from the perspective of a case study in order to discern what archetypes were present within in his life. By viewing the storyline from an analytical perspective, I was able to to perceive and therefore decipher some of the driving dynamics present that drove the unfolding of Siddhartha’s individuation process. By doing this, I sought to provide answers about the very questions of development that Jung (1931/1969) believed would lead to more than one answer and would ultimately meet with further conjecture as to the validity of the answers ascertained by such an endeavor. Carl Jung’s psychology is dialectic; each archetypal pole presents the psyche with a dilemma, which promotes psychological growth through a process of working the tensions common to the dialectic nature of consciousness. Therefore, I utilized philosophical and alchemical hermeneutic methods to analyze and interpret the dialectic data gathered by reading Hesse’s (2002) story.

As a researcher, I must define the personal history that led to this research inquiry. This will allow me to identify the presuppositions I have towards the subject matter, a necessary component of any qualitative research endeavor. Researchers simply cannot remove their consciousness from the research endeavors they undertake. Because the ability to be conscious and perceive underlies the ability to make meaning about a subject studied, no researcher can truly remain completely objective. One simply cannot remove subjectivity from a consciousness that perceives and assigns value to an object. Therefore, I identified my history with this subject matter to let further researchers know that I am aware of the predispositions I have towards this study so that I may remain objective about the subject material studied. Furthermore, use of the autobiographical material I brought to this research process also helped me to identify the subjective experiences that occurred within the context of personal reveries, a procedure used within the alchemical hermeneutic research methodology, and a process that is imperative for any qualitative researcher to employ to understand the ways there perceptions create the reality they perceive. 

Case study, philosophical hermeneutic, and alchemical hermeneutic methods comprise the methodology I utilized to study the archetypal and developmental themes found in the novel Siddhartha. The data gathered by using each method, provided a wealth of information that guided the development of a theoretical outline of archetypal development that promotes individuation. While I use existing developmental theory to amplify the themes present in Siddhartha, this data was gathered using the procedures common to case study, philosophical, and alchemical hermeneutic methods.

The case study method.  Case study method has a long history in the social sciences (Creswell, 1998). This is primarily due to this method’s ability to access both quantitative and qualitative factors of analysis (Yin, 2003). Case studies allow a researcher to draw on empirically collected material to develop working hypotheses about human nature; by correlating theoretical material to the real life events, a case study allows the often complex theoretical constructs proposed by the human sciences a means to be seen within a personal context.

In this research, I studied Siddhartha as he underwent individuation. I sought to understand how the archetypes affected our maturation journey and the individuation process as a holistic construct of consciousness. Therefore, I utilized the embedded analysis method to understand the specific archetypal themes that arose in Siddhartha’s life. Embedded analysis is an empirical method of inquiry that allows a researcher the ability to study multiple units of analysis simultaneously to discern the features and context of a described phenomenon (Scholz & Tietje, 2002; Yin, 2003). I then provided a holistic analysis of the archetypal themes that affected Siddhartha’s individuation.

A researcher that utilizes case study method must pay particular attention to the era and the culture of the specific case (Creswell, 1998). Research would appear biased if it attempts to understand specific cultures from a knowledge base that is not common to that culture or if it attempts to understand a phenomenon from the past through the general knowledge base that currently exists. The setting for Siddhartha takes place in India nearly 2500 years prior; however, the psychological theories of Carl Jung developed during the 20th century had great influence on many of the themes present in Hesse’s (2002) story.

Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha inhabited two different worlds and eras. Siddhartha inhabited the Indian subcontinent at a time when religion represented the key means by which individuals made sense of their lives. As was shown prior, Hesse lived during a time in Europe when the vocation of making meaning within one’s life became the subject matter studied by the sciences, philosophy, and religion. These three major schools of inquiry represent the foundation from which Carl Jung based his dualistic psychology. Therefore, I must take into account both periods and present the material with respect to the general historical timelines and cultural systems that underlies the plot and setting of the story. If a researcher does not pay attention to the traditions common to the era studied, a research project can alienate a past knowledge base as being trivial in the light of new knowledge (Romanyshyn, 2001). The acquisition of knowledge is progressive; when new knowledge supersedes past knowledge without crediting its source, the new knowledge base assumes a biased position (Romanyshyn, 2001). Therefore, this study takes into consideration that Hesse’s novel is set in ancient India, but utilizes the theories developed by Carl Jung to inform the way the author portrays the overall process of individuation.

The Buddha was an extraordinary individual who achieved an enlightened state of consciousness. Even if a researcher takes out of the equation the attainment of Nirvana, Buddhist doctrine shows a path in which all individuals can achieve a heightened state of consciousness through learning the discipline associated with the middle way. This researcher believes that other world religions also provide paths that allow for enlightened modes of consciousness to arise within individuals that practice faith within a particular belief system. In this study, I sought to develop the broad outlines of a developmental theory based on the Jungian theoretical tenets of archetypes that underlie the individuation process.

The philosophical and alchemical hermeneutic methods. Hermeneutics seeks to understand the entire meaning of a text through the specific themes that lead to a conclusion (Barrell, Aanstoos, Richards, & Arons, 1987). Hermeneutics offers a means to make sense of the often-opposing themes that are present within a dialectic process. While this study did not seek to provide ultimate truths regarding the nature of human development, it does provide a space for acknowledging the profound effects that dialectic tensions have on the developing psyche. Labouvie-Vief (1994) wrote:

confrontation between the two forces of light and dark

Truth is never final and determined; it is not a product but an ever-evolving process. It is a dance of interactive subjectivities, performed under objective rules of mutual tolerance and respect… individuals surrender to the dialect of interacting subjectivities and permit themselves to be changed in the process. (p. 181)

This correlates to Jung’s (1931/1969) notion that developmental stages often lead to more questions than answers, and answers that inevitably lead to doubt and therefore more questions. In this study, I did not intend to propose ultimate truths; instead, I utilized an approach that honors both the objective and subjective factors of analysis.  

Glen Slater (1996) believed that the hermeneutic method brings a researcher into interaction with a text, which in turn provides a greater understanding about the hidden meanings that underlie the text. A researcher attains these meanings through analyzing the symbols (words) present within a text. Within the context of this research, I choose to review a literary story because literature helps crystallize unconscious themes by impregnating the psyche to be open to the symbols found within the plot, setting, and characters of the storyline.

Bildungsroman literature, of which the story Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002) is part, speaks to the psychological and moral development of the protagonist as it occurs throughout the lifespan. Siddhartha underwent a lifelong quest to understand Atman, as it exists within Brahman. In essence, Siddhartha sought to understand his true nature.

The means by which people develop Self understanding relies on the symbols present in the unconscious. Furthermore, the symbolic, archetypal content common to the unconscious is also a theme found in novels, myths, stories, and fairytales. While archetypal themes are primarily unconscious, the plot of a story often speaks to these themes the same way that life unfolds with biological certainty. While a person may relate to the themes present in a story differently than others who read the same story, archetypal themes speak to the consciousness of the reader by allowing them a vision from which to view the story unfolding upon itself. In other words, the symbols within a story speak to the individual psyche of the reader as well as promote collective themes that allow for the passing of generational values through the stories created by each generation concerning its nature of its essence.

Hermeneutic method has a long history that dates to early attempts to formulate meaning about the morals common to biblical texts. Notable philosophers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1959), Wilhelm Dilthey (1924, 1960), Paul Ricoeur (1967, 1970, 1974a, 1974b, 1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004) adapted biblical hermeneutics to the study of human phenomenon. Gadamer believed that the task of philosophical hermeneutics is ontological and inter-subjective, not methodological.

The philosophical hermeneutic procedure consists of engaging the dialectic tensions common to a studied text. A text consists of individual parts as well as a whole construct that emerges from each part. Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) believed that each concept needed to be understood in reference to the other. The philosophical hermeneutic tradition allows a researcher to work the inherent dialectic that exists between the whole and the parts of a text; by understanding the parts by the whole and the whole by each part allows complex themes to emerge from the text. This forms the concept of the hermeneutic circle.

Romanyshyn (2007) amplified the concept of the hermeneutic circle by allowing the unconscious a place within the hermeneutic research tradition. The alchemical hermeneutic tradition allows a researcher to use the personal workings of the unconscious to further elucidate information from a written text. The procedures that underlie this method consist of using Carl Jung’s concept of active imagination and meditation as methods of induction that drive the research process forward. While the practitioner of philosophical hermeneutic method has the ability to approach the studied subject matter from an objective or subjective level of reasoning, the alchemical hermeneutic method offers the subjective nature of the unconscious a valid place within the research tradition.

In this research, I first conducted a case study of the character Siddhartha. I also utilized procedures from the philosophical hermeneutic and the alchemical hermeneutic research traditions to understand what archetypes drive individuation, paying particular attention to the dialectic phenomena that occurred within each archetype as it arose during the developmental sequence explored in the story. By examining the developmental sequence from a philosophical hermeneutic perspective, I utilized existing literature to amplify the symbols present from a developmental and analytical perspective. By using the alchemical hermeneutic method, I allowed the symbols studied to spontaneously work the unconscious space of my psyche, so that I could gain insight into how archetypal themes foster development forward from an experiential perspective.

Research procedures. Stories of religion are both rich in archetypal symbolism and many explore concepts that relate to the individuation process. One need only turn to the Bible, Koran, or the analects of Buddhist philosophy to see stories about extraordinary individuals that achieved a transcendent level of consciousness. The Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed are extraordinary individuals that represent what an individuated form of consciousness entails. Their respective religions have provided guidelines for others to follow to ascertain the level of consciousness that is associated with their teachings. The story that I analyzed was Siddhartha. Although not a work of religion, Hesse’s (2002) story presents as a literary masterpiece that is rich in archetypal symbolism. Furthermore, Carl Jung, the researcher whose works form the foundation of this research project, influenced the themes present in Hesse’s story. Hesse was an analysand of the Jungian analyst J. B. Lang and had an analytical relationship with Carl Jung himself after undergoing a period of severe writer’s block that nearly derailed his work on Siddhartha (Morris, 2002). Siddhartha’s life story provided the archetypal motifs that I analyzed to understand the themes common to archetypal development. 

Literature provides the source material from which I developed an understanding of the archetypal phenomena that drove Siddhartha’s individuation process. I used case study method to discern the archetypes that were present within the context of the story. This method also allowed me to examine how the specific archetypal themes drove Siddhartha’s individuation. Furthermore, philosophical and alchemical hermeneutic methods provided me with a sense of continuity to the process of delving into the dialectic tensions common to each archetypal symbol. Sadak (1999) stated:

Hermeneutics is a dialectical attempt to articulate a better understanding of particular perspectives, comparing, contrasting, and clarifying them in metaphors of engagement that hold the tension between objective and subjective factors, enabling them to embrace each other without a fantasy of an ultimate and decisive conclusion as they attempt the ever-evolving search for truth. (p. 14)

Philosophical hermeneutics also provides a means by which a researcher can amplify the meaning of a text by utilizing materials both within and independent of a studied text. While philosophical hermeneutics honors the positions of objectivity and subjectivity common to the psyche, Romanyshyn (2007) developed a method that honored the subjective presence the unconscious brings to the research process.

Interpretation at the level of soul is not just about deciphering a hidden meaning, it is also about a hunger for the originary presence that still lingers as an absent presence. For a psychological hermeneutics, it is this lingering absence that fuels the hunger for interpretation, that unfinished business of soul that waits as a weight in the work… Hermeneutics, then, is about a longing to return to the originary presence of the Divine which haunts the human world, a longing for a restored connection to the sacred, to the gods, who, Heidegger says, have fled and whose radiance, therefore, no longer shines in human history, and to the gods, who, Jung says, have become our diseases. (p. 225)

While a researcher that practices objective hermeneutics perceives the text from a removed perspective and interprets the phenomenon studied within the text objectively as written, alchemical hermeneutics allows a researcher the ability to use active imagination to tap into unconscious themes that drive a work.  

In this study, I honored objective and subjective modes of inquiry. Qualitative research can utilize both subjective and objective modes of inquiry to examine the same phenomenon. While statistics validate quantitative models of investigation, qualitative research does not share this same strength. Because qualitative researchers often conduct research outside of the experimental laboratory through natural observation, it is easy to question the validity of research findings based solely on the perceptions of the researcher. However, recent philosophers such as Robert Romanyshyn (2007) and John Polkinghorne (1994) have drawn into question the ability any research has to remain truly objective. Camic, Rhodes, and Yardley (2003) furthered this point, stating:

Elevating the laboratory and the experimental method—and all that that image entails—onto a “pure” and objective plane where the values and biases of the researcher are supposedly left at the door and where statistical control ensures validity and objectivity is highly problematic… “Objectivity,” as taught in many psychology textbooks and classrooms, is a myth. No experiment, no research question, and certainly no interpretation of data can possibly be truly objective. The types of problems we are interested in, the questions we ask, the kind of data we collect, and the analyses we undertake all emanate from some context, be it socioeconomic, political, cultural, or personal. (p. 6)

The ability to study any phenomenon relies on the ability consciousness has to discern and judge about the nature of events. While I provided subjective factors of analysis within the context of this study, I presented these findings solely to lend periphery evidence to the empirically based themes I gathered by objective research methods.

I utilized Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002) and resource materials from analytical, psychoanalytic, and developmental psychology to develop further understanding of the archetypes that drove the protagonist’s individuation process. My research followed these specific procedures:

I read Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002) noting the archetypal themes present in order to present the data as a case study. I focused specifically on the developmental tasks the protagonist underwent to understand his personal ontology. Because Siddhartha is a story written in the bildungsroman style, I presented each developmental sequence as it occurred within the context of the text, focusing on specific developmental sequences that arose.

I utilized personal unconscious material in order to develop experiential understanding of what individuation entails. This procedure is common to the transference dialogues of the alchemical hermeneutic method proposed by Robert Romanyshyn (2007). I undertook the transference dialogues by entering a reflective space of meditative inquiry, which allowed spontaneous subjective materials to arise from my unconscious that helped amplify the themes collected from the case study method; by conducting an alchemical hermeneutic analysis, I wrote from an autobiographical perspective that was inclusive of active imagination. This allowed me to both reflect on the past that underlies this research undertaking and to dream this process forward; which, in turn allowed me to understand the ways I currently work with my personal aging process as it unfolds. I present the data collected from this procedure to lend peripheral evidence for the objective material gathered by the case study.

I interpreted the archetypal themes present in the story using the process of dialectic reasoning common to the hermeneutic circle proposed by Martin Heidegger (1927/1962). Using the hermeneutic circle, I engaged the subject matter by exploring the archetypes present in the story to the current knowledge that exists in Jungian and post-Jungian developmental theories. I then utilized this procedure to formulate meaning about the archetypal themes present in the text in order to understand the common developmental themes that drive individuation.

I reviewed the literature from other developmental models to see if an emergent model of Jungian development was similar, or in opposition to established psychoanalytic developmental models.

In Appendix B, I provide tables that correlates the archetypal theory developed and extant developmental literature to the themes present within the context of Hesse’s (2002) story. I then show how the developmental sequence from both theories unfolds within the context of the Buddha’s life.

By conducting these procedures of research, I examined whether an archetypal development pattern occurred within the sequence of the themes present in Hermann Hesse’s (2002) text. By examining the archetypal themes present in the story from the developmental perspective, I sought to understand whether an outline for a general theory of archetypal development was feasible within the context of a Jungian framework.

Autobiographical reflections and motivations to conduct this research. During my early post-graduate studies, I found myself overtaken by a poem that I had written during a moment of empathic response about grief. The grief was not personal, but secondarily felt through the eyes of a widow. Although this poem did not have personal significance at the time I wrote it, with recollection I now understand that I also wrote about the grief I felt about exiting childhood and entering young adult-life.

Time ticks to sorrows grief.

An acorn fell to earth, but lost its way, falling towards an endless sea.

Yet, the rabbit runs blissfully towards the setting sun (Maples, 2003, p. 1).

While I wrote this poem to help a widow in her grief process, with hindsight, I now see how the emergence of the research passion associated with this study came from the loss of my childhood, which this poem touches upon in its exploration of the life sequence unfolded from a symbolic perspective.  

My graduate studies in psychology coincide with the emergence of my adult-life. In particular, the founders of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and the theories of Carl Gustav Jung helped shape the interests of my early adult-life. While attending postgraduate studies in psychology, I learned a number of theories concerning human development. However, one class in particular stands out as I look back upon my post-graduate educational experiences. During a class on aging and dying, I met with a Jungian analyst that greatly affected my life. The research I began during this class formed the foundation of this research study.

From my initial research into the fields of Jungian analysis, Buddhist philosophy, and human development, I became aware that minimal research exists within the field of analytical psychology, which provides a detailed account of the developmental sequence that drives individuation. A wealth of literatures exists about the topics of individuation (Blazina, & Watkins, 2000; Elise, 2001; Garbarino, Gaa, McPherson, & Gratch, 1995), the development of personality in conjunction with individuation (Fordham, 1969; Gordon, 1986; Redfearn, 1977), archetypes and masculine development (Dreifuss, 2001; Knox, 2004; Moore & Gillette, 1990), and developmental stages of life (Erikson, 1956, 1959, 1963, 1982; Freud 1905/1989a).  However, the lack of a Jungian theory of development constitutes one of four core controversies in Jungian literature (Withers, 2003). While the lack of a developmental theory represents a current controversy in analytical psychology, as I read Siddhartha, I realized that a developmental sequence driven by archetypal themes was apparent in the structure of Hesse’s (2002) story.

As I have continued my postgraduate studies in Jungian, psychoanalytic, and theories of transcendental and depth psychology, I have found that, many synchronistic events occurred that allowed my psyche to grow. One such synchronistic event occurred when I traveled to Sipapu, New Mexico, at a time that I found myself questioning the essence of my being as a young adult of 25 years of age.

While attending a three-day conference entitled Love Letters to the Flowering Earth, I entered a period of disorganization that I believed at the time to be a psychotic break. This culminated during my twenty-fifth year of life, when for the first time my adolescent views of immortality began to fail me. This realization compounded after I faced my mother’s mortality after she developed breast cancer for a second time in her life. While she luckily recovered, facing the concept of mortality proved to be an enlightening experience that prompted my personal maturation. 

silhouette of native american shaman with pikestaff on background of sunset beutiful in mountains

During this conference, I began to take inventory of the unconscious processes that affected my life. The poet and author Robert Bly (1990, 1991, 1996), the shaman, author, and artist Martín Prechtel (1998, 1999), and the storyteller and author Gioia Timpanelli (1998) hosted the three-day conference. During this conference, I recollected dreams and aspirations from my adolescence, felt the power of the Wild-Man, and became lost in a world that seemed very different from the one I had known just days before. From a Jungian perspective, I had come face-to-face with the dreams and ashes that formed the foundation of my shadow.

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour [sic]. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many – far too many – aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes. (Jung, 1931/1969, p. 395)

During this conference, I feared I was going psychotic; however, with hindsight, I now believe I entered a period of spiritual emergence that fostered growth within my psyche. I became open to the arcane mysteries of the unconscious that my ego had yet to be willing to explore in a personal sense. Glimpses of the shadow that I had formed during my early childhood years began to emerge within the growing ashes my adult psyche  was producing; however, I had yet to find the glowing ambers left behind in the growing pile of ashes from my past.  

I underwent brief periods of lucidity intermixed with periods of insanity. I found myself grasping for any aspect of reality that would lead me home to the world I had once known. While I can now look back on this event with clarity, I found myself overtaken by unconscious contents that battled to overtake my conscious sensibility during the time these events took place. “Am I insane,” I thought as I grasped for those periods of lucidity. What I did not realize was that I had slowly slipped into the depths of the unconscious, undergoing a hero’s quest (Campbell, 1949) and a night sea’s journey (Jung, 1967/1911-1912). Although I did not have an understanding of what God had in store for me by providing me this experience, through faith and a little help from an acquaintance I met at the conference, I proceeded with the closing ritual of the three-day shamanic conference.

With hindsight, I realize that the trickster had played a volatile game with my psyche during this three-day period. I became overly fatigued after climbing one of the mountain peaks close to the resort. I had almost missed the final ceremony, as I rested on my bed, waiting for the final hours of the day to end so that I could go home and be with my family. However, the kind words of a stranger convinced me to attend this ceremony. I attended the final ceremony primarily to obtain a book signing from Mr. Martin Prechtel, the Mayan shaman who was one of the three teachers of the conference. He wrote, “For Tom: This fist isn’t a fist, but flowers with eloquent words with a fire whose wage is love” (personal communication, 2001). While I did not understand the meaning of these words when they were written, I now realize that this message represented a metaphor of the journey I was about to undertake to understand my personal ontology. I had always considered myself a warrior—the carrier of a heavy fist. However, I had lost my way, and now I was not open to a path of love. Since this time, the passion that love inspired has helped me to understand that personal growth occurs in relationship with other individuals. The shaman had seen my inner daemon well before I was even open to the idea, and provided me an alternative path.

During this conference, I had entered a psychological state in which I projected archetypal themes onto other individuals. However, being conscious of this forced me to confront the daemons of my unconscious narcissistic attitudes of adolescent and early adult-life. I needed to reconcile the attitudes of my adolescent and emergent adult-life. Although I was well aware of the collective unconscious at this stage of my post-graduate studies, I was not open to the experiential effects it could have on the individual. Life is relational; both conscious and unconscious events occur intra and interpersonally. This lesson proved to be a humbling experience to a highly ego-driven young man.

During those three days, I underwent a psychological transformation that would stand to have long-lasting repercussions in my life. Because I was a practicing psychotherapist, I immediately labeled the symptoms that I had suffered a psychotic break. I realized that I was hallucinating, splitting at the psychological level between absolute constructs of holy and evil, projecting upon others traits that were inherently mine, and assuming traits in a delusional pattern that led to fear of whether I had entered a psychotic break. Furthermore, this was not induced by any foreign substance. As I look back on this powerful initiatory experience into adult-life, I now realize that an individual who enters and exits stages of development incurs a substantial amount of psychological distress. I cannot conjecture whether I would have found lucidity if I did not attend the final ritual. However, only through having experienced the true effect of this psychological journey, I now know that it is the ritual that gave me a sense of closure towards an alternatively scary time within my life. Through the ritual, I was more open to tend to the unconscious workings of my soul.  

When a developmental stage ends, a therapeutic closure occurs within the confines of the psyche. This allows for a state of equilibrium to exist within the individual. Just as the cellular wall helps to protect the DNA within its boundaries, the psyche offers a level of containment to a person that enters a new stage of psychological development. During this three-day conference, I saw the daemons inherent in my shadow, the effects that narcissism has on the developing psyche, worked with some of the tenets of my unconscious psyche, and found that an inherent duality exists within the archetype itself, which ultimately found its way into my personal views about consciousness. Furthermore, this belief system continues to perpetuate my therapeutic understanding about how psychopathology differs from normal developmental patterns; and has helped me to help others integrate the bothersome polarities of consciousness that drives their personal journey to become a whole person.

Joseph Campbell (1949) believed that people enter a circular process known as the hero’s journey. Although I had written on this topic during my graduate school studies, I had never experienced it firsthand. Psychological and physiological maturation occurs through a process deintegration and reintegration (Fordham, 1969, 1976, 1993; Fordham, Hubback, & Wilke, 1971). This process is similar to the paranoid schizoid and the depressive positions proposed by the object relation school of psychoanalysis (Segal, 1990). The processes of deintegration and reintegration are similar to the death and rebirth motifs proposed by analytical psychology, occur throughout the lifecycle, and propel psychological and physiological development. Childhood must die for adolescence to take fruition, just as adolescence must die to the emerging pressures of adult-life. This position towards the death and rebirth motif is similar to the position taken in fairy tales; in fairy tales, a hero never truly dies, only their inferior sense of self gives way to a new and improved sense of Self. However, this process cannot occur unless the individual works the dual nature of the archetype in order to mend it by the neutral third entity that Jung (1951/1969g) stated unites the two opposing themes. Virgil (1916/1999) stated:

faciles descensus Averno:

Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

Sed revocare gadum superasque evadere ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est. (pp. 540-541)

The descent into Hell:

For nights and days, long the door of gloomy wealth stands open.

However, this leads to the upper air.

This is work, Here it is.

We descend through the black door of the unconscious psyche. We yearn to escape the depths of the ever pressing soul, to soar freely in the air, determined to chart, follow, and realize the dreams we encompass. As Virgil alludes to in this quote, the work of deintegration and reintegration so common to the individuation process is a work of descent and ascent. It is a work, hell, a work of flight, a work of love, and a work of being.

In order to complete this research, I must toil with the presuppositions I bring to the study in order to pass on to the “upper air” that will be ascertained by completing the task that has called upon me. This quote from Virgil is a poetic example of the circular process known as the hero’s quest (Campbell, 1949). Being such, it was imperative that I identify the predispositions I have towards this research so that I can remain objective towards the subject material. What I am conscious of when I conduct this study allows me to learn and grow at the experiential level. However, as with any undertaking of consciousness, unconscious motifs can also affect the opinions I draw from conducting this research.

In Jungian psychology, it is imperative to bring the unconscious into conscious awareness in order to work the polarities present. This prompts the maturation of the psyche. Researchers formulate opinions based on evidence. However, an opinion, even when based on evidence remains just that, an opinion based on subjective factors of analysis. Research has both conscious and unconscious components. Because unconscious motifs underlie the reasons why a researcher chooses to study a phenomenon, the theory of objectivity seems obsolete. Furthermore, a research study is also dependent on past knowledge. Therefore, it is imperative that researchers honor and cite past authors that have studied similar lines of thought. By identifying one’s predispositions, the researcher can engage the studied phenomenon in an objective and qualitative manner. By identifying the unconscious processes that underlie a research study, a researcher can also actively engage the subject matter in a manner that honors the unconscious growth attainable through employing self introspective methods common to the alchemical hermeneutic method (2007).  

My personal predispositions to this study center on the respect I have for the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement. Robert Bly’s (1990) work, Iron John: A Book about Men, provided me with a glimpse into what it means to feel as a man. This book also provided me with an understanding of the complex nature of my psyche. Through this book, I was able to understand that the anger and narcissism associated with adolescence is a natural response to the lack of socially sanctioned adult initiations that is common to the American culture. The male psyche has a mythological core; Iron John: A Book about Men spoke to my mythological core by offering an account of the inclusion that I sought as a young man from a mythological perspective. By conducting this study, I hope to provide other men a means to understand the mythological symbols that drive our development during the lifespan.  

The methods of induction utilized in this study honor factors of objectivity and subjectivity. I wrote the above autobiographical account to show the personal history I have with this subject matter. I cannot remove myself from my conscious that perceives this research process forward. Nor can I remove the events of my past that unconsciously drive this research passion forward. I can only strive to become conscious of the unconscious events that drive this process, so that I can remain aware of, identify, and bring to light these themes not only from a position that may or may not taint the research process itself, but to also be open to possible other underlying archetypal themes that can drive our individuated development forward. The research that underlies this study will forever remain a part of the work that will be associated with who I become. From the perspective of a legacy that one leaves behind, no person can truly remain objective about the passions that drive their undertakings. This research endeavor remains part of the storyline I create about my life’s journey, and is part of my subjective experience.

I wrote this section from an autobiographical perspective to help prepare the reader for the following sections that utilize transference dialogues, a subjective research method that allows a place for self-analysis to decipher and objectify common human themes. These dialogues will take the form of personal reveries from the past, present, and the future dreams of this researcher as I delve into the subject matter present in Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002). My goal in this undertaking is to understand whether there is a developmental sequence from which individuated development unfolds.

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  Chapter 3 of a Jungian perspective of developmental psychology

Siddhartha Gautama, the prince that would find enlightenment at the Bodhi Tree and transcend ordinary consciousness to become the Buddha was a man driven to understand the essence of suffering.

Chapter 3 of a Jungian perspective of developmental psychology Siddhartha Gautama, the prince that would find enlightenment at the Bodhi Tree and transcend ordinary consciousness to become the Buddha was a man driven to understand the essence of suffering.

[oracularodyssey]

Hermes Resources

So I tend to not see more in depth resource suggestions floating around for Hermes in particular, or maybe I’m just conveniently missing them somehow, but either way I figured I’d compile a list of things I’ve read and am reading for convenience sake. This is by no means exhaustive, and I welcome other resource suggestions!

Most of these you can find easily available online at no cost or a low cost if you look hard enough. Archive.org has some of these available to borrow, JSTOR and Academia.edu  have most of the articles listed, and Scribd has some things available as well with a free trial account. And of course, check what you can find at your library. If you're struggling to find anything, you can also feel free to message me and I'll help you out.

Web Resources

Some web resources to start - should go without saying Theoi is a good first stop. All of these are just some basic summaries but for anyone starting out, some good overviews can be found online.

https://www.theoi.com/Summary/Hermes.html

https://www.theoi.com/Olympios/Hermes.html

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hermes-Greek-mythology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes

Books on Hermes

There are sadly very few books all about Hermes, but these are the small handful I have found

Hermes: Guide of Souls by Karl Kerényi (1944)

Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth by Norman O. Brown (1969)

Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus by Antoine Faivre (1995)

Hermes by Arlene Allan (2018)

Tracking Hermes, Pursuing Mercury by John F. Miller, Jenny Strauss Clay (2019)

Note that this last book I have not read entirely, however I have read selections from it - if anyone knows where I can find it without spending more money than I currently have, I would be grateful for the info!

Other Books ft. Hermes

Books that feature sections on Hermes or otherwise have a good bit of information about Hermes within them. Obviously there are bound to be many more likes these, but these are the ones I've read myself that come to mind.

The Gods of the Greeks by Karl Kerényi (1951)

Greek Religion by Walter Burkert (1977)

The Cult Of Pan In Ancient Greece by Philippe Borgeaud (1988)

Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde (1998)

Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore by Jennifer Larson (2001)

Ancient Greek Cults: A Guide by Jennifer Larson (2007)

A Companion to Greek Religion by Daniel Ogden (2007)

Articles ft. Hermes

All of these should be available online - you are welcome to message me for any of them if you're having a difficult time finding them.

The Origin of the Greek Herm by Hetty Goldman

Diaktoros Agreiphontes Jacqueline Chittenden

Hestia - Hermes : The religious expression of space and movement among the Greeks by Jean-Pierre Vernant

Hermes the Craftsman: The Invention of the Lyre by Romani Mistretta Marco

The Liminality of Hermes and the Meaning of Hermeneutics by Richard E. Palmer

Crossing the Borders Vergil’s Intertextual Mercury by Sergio Casali

Hermes among Pan and the Nymphs on Fourth-Century Votive Reliefs by Carolyn M. Laferrière

The Sacred Stones in Ancient Greek and Macedonian Folk Traditions by Lidija Kovacheva

The Evolution of Hermes His Influences and Appearance from the Archaic to Classical Periods by Haley Lavach

Hestia and Hermes: The Greek Imagination of Motion and Space by Jean Robert

Hermes a-re-ja (PY Tn 316): a new interpretation by José Marcos Macedo

Rethinking Hermes: A New Proposal by Nicola Reggiani

Communicating with the Divine Herms by Helene Collard

Cupid, Hermes, and Hymns in Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Micah Young Myers

Hermes Iambicus by Andrea Capra, Cecilia Nobili

Hermes and Herackles by Jennifer Larson

Lugalbanda and Hermes by Jennifer Larson

The Corycian Nymphs and the Bee Maidens and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes by Jennifer Larson

Like Mother Like Son by H. A. Shapiro

Dearest to be Man's Companion Hermes, Divine Aid, and Agency by David Chou

Books on Magic

Books on Magic and Necromancy in the Ancient Greek world that have interesting snippets about Hermes in them that offer insights as well. Some I've read or browsed through include:

Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion by Christopher A. Faraone (1991)

Greek & Roman Necromancy by Daniel Ogden (2001)

Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds by Daniel Ogden (2002)

---

Also, please do offer any suggestions of your own, because this is by no means an exhaustive list, it's just my personal list and I'm always looking for more.

[drthomasmaples]

Siddhartha Gautama, the prince that would find enlightenment at the Bodhi Tree and transcend ordinary consciousness to become the Buddha was a man driven to understand the essence of suffering. His mission was singular, and as such, he developed acute skills of FOCUS (Follow One Course Until Successful) through meditative practices. These practices brought him deep levels of self-introspection, knowledge, and ultimately lead him to realize his true nature. Like the process of meditation, the Buddha’s lessons are simple to employ, filled with beautiful symbolism, but can take a lifetime to master the meanings inherent within their context.

However, to realize self, as the Buddha’s life is an example of, is no easy task. As a goal, it encompasses a process that Jung himself thought extremely difficult to attain. Yet our propensity to seek answers for those big, yet somehow unanswerable questions stands as a litmus for the journey we all undertake to develop deep, rich, and expansive Self-meaning. While the Buddha attained this level of consciousness, he also informed us that it is up to us as individuals to reach down, sometimes deep down inside, so we can develop individual meaning within the context of our daily lives, make sense of our personal life journey, and find a path conducive to our individuated Self development.

The Buddha is a a religious figurehead. As such, his life, and the stories associated with it are highly symbolic. As the head of a major world religion, any attempt to understand his journey to become Self-Realized must take into account the rich symbolism present in his life, so that those symbols can be deciphered in ways that interact with, correlate to, and assists us to develop meaning within our own personal storyline. Like the life of major religious figureheads, we as individuals are born to this earth, plan, chart, and explore the context of creation we have been given, and partake in a lifelong developmental journey that is inclusive of birth, death, and the wonderful stories we create in between. Therefore, the symbolism inherent in the religious storylines we find solace within can act as pathways, or even precursory stories to our own developmental journey.

Our human nature is rich with symbolic meaning, that oftentimes correlates to the very storylines religious figureheads have undertaken. In many ways, they act as a beacon of hope for us to emulate, so that we also may find our true nature, and transcend the split nature of a consciousness that has fallen. However, in order to understand the effects of our developmental journey and the journey it takes to mend the divisive nature of consciousness, we must employ introspective and reflective, rational and empirical, scientific, philosophical, and symbolic methodologies as a means to make sense of the ways common symbols affect our daily life.

What follows is the research methodology I employed to understand the symbols presented in Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha. While methodological in scope, by understanding the steps I took to decipher the symbolism present, others may begin to develop their own way to decipher symbols for their own journey, so they to can begin to make sense of their inner workings and advance confidently in the direction of their dreams.

Research Methodologies. Three research methods are employed in this book to analyze the symbolism present in Siddhartha. Case study methodology is primarily employed as a research method to understand the developmental themes present in Siddhartha’s life and archetypes that affected his developmental journey. I then analyzed and amplified these themes using a philosophical hermeneutic method to produce a developmental outline for Jungian psychology and to correlate its themes to existing developmental literature. I then amplified these themes through the alchemical hermeneutic approach of biographical reflection, calling upon my subjective presence to help amplify the themes present in an archetypal development theory from examples of my personal developmental sequence. By correlating an archetypal outline of development to existing developmental literature, I amplified the themes present within the content of Siddhartha to biological theories of attachment, psychosexual, object relation, and psychosocial models of development using a comparative theoretical approach housed within the tenets of the hermeneutic circle.

 Siddhartha sought to understand his personal ontology. Therefore, I viewed the storyline from the perspective of a case study in order to discern what archetypes were present within in his life. By viewing the storyline from an analytical perspective, I was able to to perceive and therefore decipher some of the driving dynamics present that drove the unfolding of Siddhartha’s individuation process. By doing this, I sought to provide answers about the very questions of development that Jung (1931/1969) believed would lead to more than one answer and would ultimately meet with further conjecture as to the validity of the answers ascertained by such an endeavor. Carl Jung’s psychology is dialectic; each archetypal pole presents the psyche with a dilemma, which promotes psychological growth through a process of working the tensions common to the dialectic nature of consciousness. Therefore, I utilized philosophical and alchemical hermeneutic methods to analyze and interpret the dialectic data gathered by reading Hesse’s (2002) story.

As a researcher, I must define the personal history that led to this research inquiry. This will allow me to identify the presuppositions I have towards the subject matter, a necessary component of any qualitative research endeavor. Researchers simply cannot remove their consciousness from the research endeavors they undertake. Because the ability to be conscious and perceive underlies the ability to make meaning about a subject studied, no researcher can truly remain completely objective. One simply cannot remove subjectivity from a consciousness that perceives and assigns value to an object. Therefore, I identified my history with this subject matter to let further researchers know that I am aware of the predispositions I have towards this study so that I may remain objective about the subject material studied. Furthermore, use of the autobiographical material I brought to this research process also helped me to identify the subjective experiences that occurred within the context of personal reveries, a procedure used within the alchemical hermeneutic research methodology, and a process that is imperative for any qualitative researcher to employ to understand the ways there perceptions create the reality they perceive. 

Case study, philosophical hermeneutic, and alchemical hermeneutic methods comprise the methodology I utilized to study the archetypal and developmental themes found in the novel Siddhartha. The data gathered by using each method, provided a wealth of information that guided the development of a theoretical outline of archetypal development that promotes individuation. While I use existing developmental theory to amplify the themes present in Siddhartha, this data was gathered using the procedures common to case study, philosophical, and alchemical hermeneutic methods.

The case study method.  Case study method has a long history in the social sciences (Creswell, 1998). This is primarily due to this method’s ability to access both quantitative and qualitative factors of analysis (Yin, 2003). Case studies allow a researcher to draw on empirically collected material to develop working hypotheses about human nature; by correlating theoretical material to the real life events, a case study allows the often complex theoretical constructs proposed by the human sciences a means to be seen within a personal context.

In this research, I studied Siddhartha as he underwent individuation. I sought to understand how the archetypes affected our maturation journey and the individuation process as a holistic construct of consciousness. Therefore, I utilized the embedded analysis method to understand the specific archetypal themes that arose in Siddhartha’s life. Embedded analysis is an empirical method of inquiry that allows a researcher the ability to study multiple units of analysis simultaneously to discern the features and context of a described phenomenon (Scholz & Tietje, 2002; Yin, 2003). I then provided a holistic analysis of the archetypal themes that affected Siddhartha’s individuation.

A researcher that utilizes case study method must pay particular attention to the era and the culture of the specific case (Creswell, 1998). Research would appear biased if it attempts to understand specific cultures from a knowledge base that is not common to that culture or if it attempts to understand a phenomenon from the past through the general knowledge base that currently exists. The setting for Siddhartha takes place in India nearly 2500 years prior; however, the psychological theories of Carl Jung developed during the 20th century had great influence on many of the themes present in Hesse’s (2002) story.

Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha inhabited two different worlds and eras. Siddhartha inhabited the Indian subcontinent at a time when religion represented the key means by which individuals made sense of their lives. As was shown prior, Hesse lived during a time in Europe when the vocation of making meaning within one’s life became the subject matter studied by the sciences, philosophy, and religion. These three major schools of inquiry represent the foundation from which Carl Jung based his dualistic psychology. Therefore, I must take into account both periods and present the material with respect to the general historical timelines and cultural systems that underlies the plot and setting of the story. If a researcher does not pay attention to the traditions common to the era studied, a research project can alienate a past knowledge base as being trivial in the light of new knowledge (Romanyshyn, 2001). The acquisition of knowledge is progressive; when new knowledge supersedes past knowledge without crediting its source, the new knowledge base assumes a biased position (Romanyshyn, 2001). Therefore, this study takes into consideration that Hesse’s novel is set in ancient India, but utilizes the theories developed by Carl Jung to inform the way the author portrays the overall process of individuation.

The Buddha was an extraordinary individual who achieved an enlightened state of consciousness. Even if a researcher takes out of the equation the attainment of Nirvana, Buddhist doctrine shows a path in which all individuals can achieve a heightened state of consciousness through learning the discipline associated with the middle way. This researcher believes that other world religions also provide paths that allow for enlightened modes of consciousness to arise within individuals that practice faith within a particular belief system. In this study, I sought to develop the broad outlines of a developmental theory based on the Jungian theoretical tenets of archetypes that underlie the individuation process.

The philosophical and alchemical hermeneutic methods. Hermeneutics seeks to understand the entire meaning of a text through the specific themes that lead to a conclusion (Barrell, Aanstoos, Richards, & Arons, 1987). Hermeneutics offers a means to make sense of the often-opposing themes that are present within a dialectic process. While this study did not seek to provide ultimate truths regarding the nature of human development, it does provide a space for acknowledging the profound effects that dialectic tensions have on the developing psyche. Labouvie-Vief (1994) wrote:

confrontation between the two forces of light and dark

Truth is never final and determined; it is not a product but an ever-evolving process. It is a dance of interactive subjectivities, performed under objective rules of mutual tolerance and respect… individuals surrender to the dialect of interacting subjectivities and permit themselves to be changed in the process. (p. 181)

This correlates to Jung’s (1931/1969) notion that developmental stages often lead to more questions than answers, and answers that inevitably lead to doubt and therefore more questions. In this study, I did not intend to propose ultimate truths; instead, I utilized an approach that honors both the objective and subjective factors of analysis.  

Glen Slater (1996) believed that the hermeneutic method brings a researcher into interaction with a text, which in turn provides a greater understanding about the hidden meanings that underlie the text. A researcher attains these meanings through analyzing the symbols (words) present within a text. Within the context of this research, I choose to review a literary story because literature helps crystallize unconscious themes by impregnating the psyche to be open to the symbols found within the plot, setting, and characters of the storyline.

Bildungsroman literature, of which the story Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002) is part, speaks to the psychological and moral development of the protagonist as it occurs throughout the lifespan. Siddhartha underwent a lifelong quest to understand Atman, as it exists within Brahman. In essence, Siddhartha sought to understand his true nature.

The means by which people develop Self understanding relies on the symbols present in the unconscious. Furthermore, the symbolic, archetypal content common to the unconscious is also a theme found in novels, myths, stories, and fairytales. While archetypal themes are primarily unconscious, the plot of a story often speaks to these themes the same way that life unfolds with biological certainty. While a person may relate to the themes present in a story differently than others who read the same story, archetypal themes speak to the consciousness of the reader by allowing them a vision from which to view the story unfolding upon itself. In other words, the symbols within a story speak to the individual psyche of the reader as well as promote collective themes that allow for the passing of generational values through the stories created by each generation concerning its nature of its essence.

Hermeneutic method has a long history that dates to early attempts to formulate meaning about the morals common to biblical texts. Notable philosophers, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1959), Wilhelm Dilthey (1924, 1960), Paul Ricoeur (1967, 1970, 1974a, 1974b, 1976) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (2004) adapted biblical hermeneutics to the study of human phenomenon. Gadamer believed that the task of philosophical hermeneutics is ontological and inter-subjective, not methodological.

The philosophical hermeneutic procedure consists of engaging the dialectic tensions common to a studied text. A text consists of individual parts as well as a whole construct that emerges from each part. Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) believed that each concept needed to be understood in reference to the other. The philosophical hermeneutic tradition allows a researcher to work the inherent dialectic that exists between the whole and the parts of a text; by understanding the parts by the whole and the whole by each part allows complex themes to emerge from the text. This forms the concept of the hermeneutic circle.

Romanyshyn (2007) amplified the concept of the hermeneutic circle by allowing the unconscious a place within the hermeneutic research tradition. The alchemical hermeneutic tradition allows a researcher to use the personal workings of the unconscious to further elucidate information from a written text. The procedures that underlie this method consist of using Carl Jung’s concept of active imagination and meditation as methods of induction that drive the research process forward. While the practitioner of philosophical hermeneutic method has the ability to approach the studied subject matter from an objective or subjective level of reasoning, the alchemical hermeneutic method offers the subjective nature of the unconscious a valid place within the research tradition.

In this research, I first conducted a case study of the character Siddhartha. I also utilized procedures from the philosophical hermeneutic and the alchemical hermeneutic research traditions to understand what archetypes drive individuation, paying particular attention to the dialectic phenomena that occurred within each archetype as it arose during the developmental sequence explored in the story. By examining the developmental sequence from a philosophical hermeneutic perspective, I utilized existing literature to amplify the symbols present from a developmental and analytical perspective. By using the alchemical hermeneutic method, I allowed the symbols studied to spontaneously work the unconscious space of my psyche, so that I could gain insight into how archetypal themes foster development forward from an experiential perspective.

Research procedures. Stories of religion are both rich in archetypal symbolism and many explore concepts that relate to the individuation process. One need only turn to the Bible, Koran, or the analects of Buddhist philosophy to see stories about extraordinary individuals that achieved a transcendent level of consciousness. The Buddha, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed are extraordinary individuals that represent what an individuated form of consciousness entails. Their respective religions have provided guidelines for others to follow to ascertain the level of consciousness that is associated with their teachings. The story that I analyzed was Siddhartha. Although not a work of religion, Hesse’s (2002) story presents as a literary masterpiece that is rich in archetypal symbolism. Furthermore, Carl Jung, the researcher whose works form the foundation of this research project, influenced the themes present in Hesse’s story. Hesse was an analysand of the Jungian analyst J. B. Lang and had an analytical relationship with Carl Jung himself after undergoing a period of severe writer’s block that nearly derailed his work on Siddhartha (Morris, 2002). Siddhartha’s life story provided the archetypal motifs that I analyzed to understand the themes common to archetypal development. 

Literature provides the source material from which I developed an understanding of the archetypal phenomena that drove Siddhartha’s individuation process. I used case study method to discern the archetypes that were present within the context of the story. This method also allowed me to examine how the specific archetypal themes drove Siddhartha’s individuation. Furthermore, philosophical and alchemical hermeneutic methods provided me with a sense of continuity to the process of delving into the dialectic tensions common to each archetypal symbol. Sadak (1999) stated:

Hermeneutics is a dialectical attempt to articulate a better understanding of particular perspectives, comparing, contrasting, and clarifying them in metaphors of engagement that hold the tension between objective and subjective factors, enabling them to embrace each other without a fantasy of an ultimate and decisive conclusion as they attempt the ever-evolving search for truth. (p. 14)

Philosophical hermeneutics also provides a means by which a researcher can amplify the meaning of a text by utilizing materials both within and independent of a studied text. While philosophical hermeneutics honors the positions of objectivity and subjectivity common to the psyche, Romanyshyn (2007) developed a method that honored the subjective presence the unconscious brings to the research process.

Interpretation at the level of soul is not just about deciphering a hidden meaning, it is also about a hunger for the originary presence that still lingers as an absent presence. For a psychological hermeneutics, it is this lingering absence that fuels the hunger for interpretation, that unfinished business of soul that waits as a weight in the work… Hermeneutics, then, is about a longing to return to the originary presence of the Divine which haunts the human world, a longing for a restored connection to the sacred, to the gods, who, Heidegger says, have fled and whose radiance, therefore, no longer shines in human history, and to the gods, who, Jung says, have become our diseases. (p. 225)

While a researcher that practices objective hermeneutics perceives the text from a removed perspective and interprets the phenomenon studied within the text objectively as written, alchemical hermeneutics allows a researcher the ability to use active imagination to tap into unconscious themes that drive a work.  

In this study, I honored objective and subjective modes of inquiry. Qualitative research can utilize both subjective and objective modes of inquiry to examine the same phenomenon. While statistics validate quantitative models of investigation, qualitative research does not share this same strength. Because qualitative researchers often conduct research outside of the experimental laboratory through natural observation, it is easy to question the validity of research findings based solely on the perceptions of the researcher. However, recent philosophers such as Robert Romanyshyn (2007) and John Polkinghorne (1994) have drawn into question the ability any research has to remain truly objective. Camic, Rhodes, and Yardley (2003) furthered this point, stating:

Elevating the laboratory and the experimental method—and all that that image entails—onto a “pure” and objective plane where the values and biases of the researcher are supposedly left at the door and where statistical control ensures validity and objectivity is highly problematic… “Objectivity,” as taught in many psychology textbooks and classrooms, is a myth. No experiment, no research question, and certainly no interpretation of data can possibly be truly objective. The types of problems we are interested in, the questions we ask, the kind of data we collect, and the analyses we undertake all emanate from some context, be it socioeconomic, political, cultural, or personal. (p. 6)

The ability to study any phenomenon relies on the ability consciousness has to discern and judge about the nature of events. While I provided subjective factors of analysis within the context of this study, I presented these findings solely to lend periphery evidence to the empirically based themes I gathered by objective research methods.

I utilized Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002) and resource materials from analytical, psychoanalytic, and developmental psychology to develop further understanding of the archetypes that drove the protagonist’s individuation process. My research followed these specific procedures:

I read Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002) noting the archetypal themes present in order to present the data as a case study. I focused specifically on the developmental tasks the protagonist underwent to understand his personal ontology. Because Siddhartha is a story written in the bildungsroman style, I presented each developmental sequence as it occurred within the context of the text, focusing on specific developmental sequences that arose.

I utilized personal unconscious material in order to develop experiential understanding of what individuation entails. This procedure is common to the transference dialogues of the alchemical hermeneutic method proposed by Robert Romanyshyn (2007). I undertook the transference dialogues by entering a reflective space of meditative inquiry, which allowed spontaneous subjective materials to arise from my unconscious that helped amplify the themes collected from the case study method; by conducting an alchemical hermeneutic analysis, I wrote from an autobiographical perspective that was inclusive of active imagination. This allowed me to both reflect on the past that underlies this research undertaking and to dream this process forward; which, in turn allowed me to understand the ways I currently work with my personal aging process as it unfolds. I present the data collected from this procedure to lend peripheral evidence for the objective material gathered by the case study.

I interpreted the archetypal themes present in the story using the process of dialectic reasoning common to the hermeneutic circle proposed by Martin Heidegger (1927/1962). Using the hermeneutic circle, I engaged the subject matter by exploring the archetypes present in the story to the current knowledge that exists in Jungian and post-Jungian developmental theories. I then utilized this procedure to formulate meaning about the archetypal themes present in the text in order to understand the common developmental themes that drive individuation.

I reviewed the literature from other developmental models to see if an emergent model of Jungian development was similar, or in opposition to established psychoanalytic developmental models.

In Appendix B, I provide tables that correlates the archetypal theory developed and extant developmental literature to the themes present within the context of Hesse’s (2002) story. I then show how the developmental sequence from both theories unfolds within the context of the Buddha’s life.

By conducting these procedures of research, I examined whether an archetypal development pattern occurred within the sequence of the themes present in Hermann Hesse’s (2002) text. By examining the archetypal themes present in the story from the developmental perspective, I sought to understand whether an outline for a general theory of archetypal development was feasible within the context of a Jungian framework.

Autobiographical reflections and motivations to conduct this research. During my early post-graduate studies, I found myself overtaken by a poem that I had written during a moment of empathic response about grief. The grief was not personal, but secondarily felt through the eyes of a widow. Although this poem did not have personal significance at the time I wrote it, with recollection I now understand that I also wrote about the grief I felt about exiting childhood and entering young adult-life.

Time ticks to sorrows grief.

An acorn fell to earth, but lost its way, falling towards an endless sea.

Yet, the rabbit runs blissfully towards the setting sun (Maples, 2003, p. 1).

While I wrote this poem to help a widow in her grief process, with hindsight, I now see how the emergence of the research passion associated with this study came from the loss of my childhood, which this poem touches upon in its exploration of the life sequence unfolded from a symbolic perspective.  

My graduate studies in psychology coincide with the emergence of my adult-life. In particular, the founders of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement and the theories of Carl Gustav Jung helped shape the interests of my early adult-life. While attending postgraduate studies in psychology, I learned a number of theories concerning human development. However, one class in particular stands out as I look back upon my post-graduate educational experiences. During a class on aging and dying, I met with a Jungian analyst that greatly affected my life. The research I began during this class formed the foundation of this research study.

From my initial research into the fields of Jungian analysis, Buddhist philosophy, and human development, I became aware that minimal research exists within the field of analytical psychology, which provides a detailed account of the developmental sequence that drives individuation. A wealth of literatures exists about the topics of individuation (Blazina, & Watkins, 2000; Elise, 2001; Garbarino, Gaa, McPherson, & Gratch, 1995), the development of personality in conjunction with individuation (Fordham, 1969; Gordon, 1986; Redfearn, 1977), archetypes and masculine development (Dreifuss, 2001; Knox, 2004; Moore & Gillette, 1990), and developmental stages of life (Erikson, 1956, 1959, 1963, 1982; Freud 1905/1989a).  However, the lack of a Jungian theory of development constitutes one of four core controversies in Jungian literature (Withers, 2003). While the lack of a developmental theory represents a current controversy in analytical psychology, as I read Siddhartha, I realized that a developmental sequence driven by archetypal themes was apparent in the structure of Hesse’s (2002) story.

As I have continued my postgraduate studies in Jungian, psychoanalytic, and theories of transcendental and depth psychology, I have found that, many synchronistic events occurred that allowed my psyche to grow. One such synchronistic event occurred when I traveled to Sipapu, New Mexico, at a time that I found myself questioning the essence of my being as a young adult of 25 years of age.

While attending a three-day conference entitled Love Letters to the Flowering Earth, I entered a period of disorganization that I believed at the time to be a psychotic break. This culminated during my twenty-fifth year of life, when for the first time my adolescent views of immortality began to fail me. This realization compounded after I faced my mother’s mortality after she developed breast cancer for a second time in her life. While she luckily recovered, facing the concept of mortality proved to be an enlightening experience that prompted my personal maturation. 

silhouette of native american shaman with pikestaff on background of sunset beutiful in mountains

During this conference, I began to take inventory of the unconscious processes that affected my life. The poet and author Robert Bly (1990, 1991, 1996), the shaman, author, and artist Martín Prechtel (1998, 1999), and the storyteller and author Gioia Timpanelli (1998) hosted the three-day conference. During this conference, I recollected dreams and aspirations from my adolescence, felt the power of the Wild-Man, and became lost in a world that seemed very different from the one I had known just days before. From a Jungian perspective, I had come face-to-face with the dreams and ashes that formed the foundation of my shadow.

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour [sic]. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many – far too many – aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes. (Jung, 1931/1969, p. 395)

During this conference, I feared I was going psychotic; however, with hindsight, I now believe I entered a period of spiritual emergence that fostered growth within my psyche. I became open to the arcane mysteries of the unconscious that my ego had yet to be willing to explore in a personal sense. Glimpses of the shadow that I had formed during my early childhood years began to emerge within the growing ashes my adult psyche  was producing; however, I had yet to find the glowing ambers left behind in the growing pile of ashes from my past.  

I underwent brief periods of lucidity intermixed with periods of insanity. I found myself grasping for any aspect of reality that would lead me home to the world I had once known. While I can now look back on this event with clarity, I found myself overtaken by unconscious contents that battled to overtake my conscious sensibility during the time these events took place. “Am I insane,” I thought as I grasped for those periods of lucidity. What I did not realize was that I had slowly slipped into the depths of the unconscious, undergoing a hero’s quest (Campbell, 1949) and a night sea’s journey (Jung, 1967/1911-1912). Although I did not have an understanding of what God had in store for me by providing me this experience, through faith and a little help from an acquaintance I met at the conference, I proceeded with the closing ritual of the three-day shamanic conference.

With hindsight, I realize that the trickster had played a volatile game with my psyche during this three-day period. I became overly fatigued after climbing one of the mountain peaks close to the resort. I had almost missed the final ceremony, as I rested on my bed, waiting for the final hours of the day to end so that I could go home and be with my family. However, the kind words of a stranger convinced me to attend this ceremony. I attended the final ceremony primarily to obtain a book signing from Mr. Martin Prechtel, the Mayan shaman who was one of the three teachers of the conference. He wrote, “For Tom: This fist isn’t a fist, but flowers with eloquent words with a fire whose wage is love” (personal communication, 2001). While I did not understand the meaning of these words when they were written, I now realize that this message represented a metaphor of the journey I was about to undertake to understand my personal ontology. I had always considered myself a warrior—the carrier of a heavy fist. However, I had lost my way, and now I was not open to a path of love. Since this time, the passion that love inspired has helped me to understand that personal growth occurs in relationship with other individuals. The shaman had seen my inner daemon well before I was even open to the idea, and provided me an alternative path.

During this conference, I had entered a psychological state in which I projected archetypal themes onto other individuals. However, being conscious of this forced me to confront the daemons of my unconscious narcissistic attitudes of adolescent and early adult-life. I needed to reconcile the attitudes of my adolescent and emergent adult-life. Although I was well aware of the collective unconscious at this stage of my post-graduate studies, I was not open to the experiential effects it could have on the individual. Life is relational; both conscious and unconscious events occur intra and interpersonally. This lesson proved to be a humbling experience to a highly ego-driven young man.

During those three days, I underwent a psychological transformation that would stand to have long-lasting repercussions in my life. Because I was a practicing psychotherapist, I immediately labeled the symptoms that I had suffered a psychotic break. I realized that I was hallucinating, splitting at the psychological level between absolute constructs of holy and evil, projecting upon others traits that were inherently mine, and assuming traits in a delusional pattern that led to fear of whether I had entered a psychotic break. Furthermore, this was not induced by any foreign substance. As I look back on this powerful initiatory experience into adult-life, I now realize that an individual who enters and exits stages of development incurs a substantial amount of psychological distress. I cannot conjecture whether I would have found lucidity if I did not attend the final ritual. However, only through having experienced the true effect of this psychological journey, I now know that it is the ritual that gave me a sense of closure towards an alternatively scary time within my life. Through the ritual, I was more open to tend to the unconscious workings of my soul.  

When a developmental stage ends, a therapeutic closure occurs within the confines of the psyche. This allows for a state of equilibrium to exist within the individual. Just as the cellular wall helps to protect the DNA within its boundaries, the psyche offers a level of containment to a person that enters a new stage of psychological development. During this three-day conference, I saw the daemons inherent in my shadow, the effects that narcissism has on the developing psyche, worked with some of the tenets of my unconscious psyche, and found that an inherent duality exists within the archetype itself, which ultimately found its way into my personal views about consciousness. Furthermore, this belief system continues to perpetuate my therapeutic understanding about how psychopathology differs from normal developmental patterns; and has helped me to help others integrate the bothersome polarities of consciousness that drives their personal journey to become a whole person.

Joseph Campbell (1949) believed that people enter a circular process known as the hero’s journey. Although I had written on this topic during my graduate school studies, I had never experienced it firsthand. Psychological and physiological maturation occurs through a process deintegration and reintegration (Fordham, 1969, 1976, 1993; Fordham, Hubback, & Wilke, 1971). This process is similar to the paranoid schizoid and the depressive positions proposed by the object relation school of psychoanalysis (Segal, 1990). The processes of deintegration and reintegration are similar to the death and rebirth motifs proposed by analytical psychology, occur throughout the lifecycle, and propel psychological and physiological development. Childhood must die for adolescence to take fruition, just as adolescence must die to the emerging pressures of adult-life. This position towards the death and rebirth motif is similar to the position taken in fairy tales; in fairy tales, a hero never truly dies, only their inferior sense of self gives way to a new and improved sense of Self. However, this process cannot occur unless the individual works the dual nature of the archetype in order to mend it by the neutral third entity that Jung (1951/1969g) stated unites the two opposing themes. Virgil (1916/1999) stated:

faciles descensus Averno:

Noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;

Sed revocare gadum superasque evadere ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est. (pp. 540-541)

The descent into Hell:

For nights and days, long the door of gloomy wealth stands open.

However, this leads to the upper air.

This is work, Here it is.

We descend through the black door of the unconscious psyche. We yearn to escape the depths of the ever pressing soul, to soar freely in the air, determined to chart, follow, and realize the dreams we encompass. As Virgil alludes to in this quote, the work of deintegration and reintegration so common to the individuation process is a work of descent and ascent. It is a work, hell, a work of flight, a work of love, and a work of being.

In order to complete this research, I must toil with the presuppositions I bring to the study in order to pass on to the “upper air” that will be ascertained by completing the task that has called upon me. This quote from Virgil is a poetic example of the circular process known as the hero’s quest (Campbell, 1949). Being such, it was imperative that I identify the predispositions I have towards this research so that I can remain objective towards the subject material. What I am conscious of when I conduct this study allows me to learn and grow at the experiential level. However, as with any undertaking of consciousness, unconscious motifs can also affect the opinions I draw from conducting this research.

In Jungian psychology, it is imperative to bring the unconscious into conscious awareness in order to work the polarities present. This prompts the maturation of the psyche. Researchers formulate opinions based on evidence. However, an opinion, even when based on evidence remains just that, an opinion based on subjective factors of analysis. Research has both conscious and unconscious components. Because unconscious motifs underlie the reasons why a researcher chooses to study a phenomenon, the theory of objectivity seems obsolete. Furthermore, a research study is also dependent on past knowledge. Therefore, it is imperative that researchers honor and cite past authors that have studied similar lines of thought. By identifying one’s predispositions, the researcher can engage the studied phenomenon in an objective and qualitative manner. By identifying the unconscious processes that underlie a research study, a researcher can also actively engage the subject matter in a manner that honors the unconscious growth attainable through employing self introspective methods common to the alchemical hermeneutic method (2007).  

My personal predispositions to this study center on the respect I have for the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement. Robert Bly’s (1990) work, Iron John: A Book about Men, provided me with a glimpse into what it means to feel as a man. This book also provided me with an understanding of the complex nature of my psyche. Through this book, I was able to understand that the anger and narcissism associated with adolescence is a natural response to the lack of socially sanctioned adult initiations that is common to the American culture. The male psyche has a mythological core; Iron John: A Book about Men spoke to my mythological core by offering an account of the inclusion that I sought as a young man from a mythological perspective. By conducting this study, I hope to provide other men a means to understand the mythological symbols that drive our development during the lifespan.  

The methods of induction utilized in this study honor factors of objectivity and subjectivity. I wrote the above autobiographical account to show the personal history I have with this subject matter. I cannot remove myself from my conscious that perceives this research process forward. Nor can I remove the events of my past that unconsciously drive this research passion forward. I can only strive to become conscious of the unconscious events that drive this process, so that I can remain aware of, identify, and bring to light these themes not only from a position that may or may not taint the research process itself, but to also be open to possible other underlying archetypal themes that can drive our individuated development forward. The research that underlies this study will forever remain a part of the work that will be associated with who I become. From the perspective of a legacy that one leaves behind, no person can truly remain objective about the passions that drive their undertakings. This research endeavor remains part of the storyline I create about my life’s journey, and is part of my subjective experience.

I wrote this section from an autobiographical perspective to help prepare the reader for the following sections that utilize transference dialogues, a subjective research method that allows a place for self-analysis to decipher and objectify common human themes. These dialogues will take the form of personal reveries from the past, present, and the future dreams of this researcher as I delve into the subject matter present in Siddhartha (Hesse, 2002). My goal in this undertaking is to understand whether there is a developmental sequence from which individuated development unfolds.

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  Chapter 3 of a Jungian perspective of developmental psychology Siddhartha Gautama, the prince that would find enlightenment at the Bodhi Tree and transcend ordinary consciousness to become the Buddha was a man driven to understand the essence of suffering.

[onewomancitadel]

Do you think you'd ever give Naruto or Bleach a try? Theres just as much to read into with those series as RWBY(actually more since they're longer). If not, how do you feel about Cowboy Bebop, Rurouni Kenshin, or Serial Experiements Lain?

Oh, Naruto and Bleach were what I was forced to watch. Also, my shitty roommate from a couple of years back (literally shitty - the toilet was frequently unflushed. So many stories about that one) was very much into Naruto too, lol.

And yeah, I 'get' those anime - my Best Mate used to be VERY into anime and has explained where it seems like the anime influences with the show are playing out and in what fashion - but none of those interest me honestly. Like, I know and have seen enough that I know I don't need to see them, and I can see what's applicable to the show presently, even if I don't write meta.

I have been spoilt for the ending of Cowboy Bebop, and when I am not emotionally broken I might give it a try - I know it definitely influenced R/WBY (the opening), and said Best Mate has also educated me on such a topic re: R/WBY. So, consider me educated in the art of unseen anime.

I mentioned I watched Lain and I'm a big fan of Lain. I love the Jungian universal unconscious stuff. More evidence of Jung used in R/WBY, truthfully. Jung is also in Angel's Egg and Ghost in the Shell.

I would be curious on that front to know if Jung is employed in other anime. Eva is obviously very Freudian.

And to be quite truthful with you: in terms of the things I like talking about on my blog, literary hermeneutics is really where it's at for me. I know another blog which discusses alchemical storytelling as employed in R/WBY, but the Jungian and fairytale elements seems more like my particular end of things, yes? In terms of what I can offer? And it's really the stuff that interests me the most, personally speaking, in terms of my own research and what I enjoy reading.

I think, at least, I can offer a unique perspective on that front.

[g-faded-smile]

Umm I've shared my opinion a couple of times, but I'll tell it anyway to distract you :).

Recently, I've read too much about other pagans saying myths are not real in any way, they say deities are not like the myths. In the other side, there the ones who truly believes those myths were real, reason why others say stuff like "Zeus is an asshole", "Hera is crazy", etc. Both beliefs are reductionist to me.

I believe myths are half truths. They help you to understand the complexity of deities, their personality and their subjects. I love everything that involves occult messages (since my sister showed me semantics and I took anthropology classes 😅), may people don't notice but we're always around the hermetic or hermeneutic stuff like movies, fairy tales, music videos, magic stuff, alchemy pictures and a long etcétera, the thing is... myths are not the exception.

Cultures have their form to interpret all kind of concepts, and we still use the symbolism of their myths. For example, there are interpretations about the fire Prometheus bring to humanity that means knowledge, reason why fire is the representation of science and knowledge in the logos of some schools. Another interpretation of another myth is about Dionysus, he borned twice... like alchemic death. The alchemic death says when we die, we reborn but stronger like reincarnation or just how we go on through difficult experiences.

Actually, I use this logic to choose what version of the myth makes more sense to me, for example, I prefer to believe Dionysus was Zagreus because Persephone has this vegetation powers, and the fields are important to produce wine.

Another example it's about why's of certains deities... like Aphrodite. I think people criticize her so rude and she's more than we think. In some way, love, beauty and sex spin this world, it doesn't matter if you're asexual, aromantic, bi, heterosexual, or whatever, it's a topic that everybody has an opinion and experiences. Many people say Aphrodite doesn't represent love, but she actually does because you can be married and don't love the other person, or you can find love in someone you cheated on. She absolutely represents their areas very well.

So, myths are a message you can decode and get more information. After all, myths are not just stories. Yes, they show the ancient perspective of a culture, but they still being wisdom. Myths are a narration about why of all kind of things like environment, humanity, abstract subjects, values, places, space, etc. and we still talk about them for a reason. You can make a tons of analysis of deities and their myths, not only the Greek pantheon but all pantheons.

Sorry if I said too much, lol. I wanted to share some examples and myths have helped me a lot with my practice. I think it's unfair to ignore them but they're not ad litteram. Besides, I'm enjoy to talk about this as you can see ☺

I’m sorry your mental illness has been ruining your spiritual practice ❤️ I thought of a question to distract you, please ignore if it triggers you or is too draining to answer. What do you think of the connection between a deity and the myths about them? Do you think of the myths as being accounts of things the deities actually did (on some spiritual plane or something), or more like stories made up by mortals for entertainment or as a way of understanding the entities they worship?

Thanks for your question! This is a topic that I could talk about for hours and I'm honestly open to any point of view. I've tried several times now to write down what my opinion on it is, but it's such a complex idea that I'm having trouble putting it in writing. Honestly, I’m just putting this post out there in case anyone wants to share their thoughts on it.

[queernuck]

Gay Globalization

When Badiou describes a politics of democracy, he does so as a means of measuring democracy from the state of a neoliberal, American hegemony of Imperialism and of a specific ideological state of the situation, where one finds a specific consideration of bodies as secondary, as a sort of hegemonic articulation of the state of affairs as one which allows for the consideration of a certain type of evangelization as the driving good of the state, as a means of creating personhood and of creating the self within the relation to the state such that the ideological of a Secular West can in fact be used in order to contrast both decadence and deprivation as impetus for a sort of Secularity of the Christian soul. 

The creation of Western Civilization is far greater than merely delineating a certain place and the nationalisms within it, it is a larger, metanational character that is specifically violent, modern, and indeed predicated on a concept of the state as an arbiter of the political such that one requires its hierarchy, its arboreality, in order to make sense of the self. One cannot survive without this modernism, without the cultural hegemony of the West, and this is reflected in the means that one extends a field of postmodern permissiveness within the social in order to preclude meaningful critique of the hegemony that this field is structured by. 

As a prohibition, homosexuality is structured by Western concepts of sexuality and gender, and moreover is allowed to exist such that it does not interrupt the heterosexual, the heteronormative concept of desire, the presence of the phallus as possessed by the man and of the woman, such that one can arbitrate over these structures as proper, as a means of articulation that further allows a sort of phallogocentrism to be mapped upon the homosexual body, in order to include it in a superficial account of the means of realizing heteronormative paradigms.

Part of this, in turn, is the creation of a sort of expanse underneath that belies the supposed-secular West: the absolute freedom of postmodern expanse is built upon the Enlightened freedom of Christianity, such that only through the gift of a Christian freedom of will can the postmodern expanse be realized. The neocolonial articulation of former-colonial subjects upon this postmodern plane allows for a recourse to the colonial structuring of violence through a Western vocabulary as a reaction to the “decadence” of this postmodernity, a recourse to the violence of modernism and the structuralisms of the family. The search for a precolonial reference is in fact belied by the way in which postmodernity is structured by the modern, and how the violence that is structurally imbued within the modern is shaped by the very notion of a Christian atheism, of an atheism that specifically requires a Christian precognition in order to become coherent. The psychoanalytic is in part based within this: what makes psychoanalysis so useful is that, in fact, it is a vocabulary deeply imbued with the very secularity of a Christian West and thus is a rabattement of the ideas implicit within the supposed-secular. 

In this fashion, the West structures not only its own decadence, but the traditionalist ideals to which one appeals, to a “pre-modern” that is in fact thoroughly imbued with modernism. That there are superficial arguments between fascists looking for a mythic European Paganism and those who wish to create a New Crusader is part of how the neoliberal is able to structure the fascist libidinal flows underneath and within itself as means of directing violence without allowing a full realization of their own structural power. The means by which fascist movements call upon a sort of magical modernism in order to blend the specifically Christian character of their atheism with a sort of new spirituality of this ideology, one that may indeed be Christian but is based within not the expanse of salvation that structured the modern but a drive toward totalization of the postmodern as decadence is even allowable within the violent structure of neoliberal desire. Neoliberalism requires this fascist impetus in order to structure its secularism, its sort of hermeneutics of the self that create the prohibitions that it may so generously restructure.

The West is thus realized in two means at once: in a sort of Traditionalism that turns from the decadent postmodern, and the postmodern secularity upon the Christian modern. Both of these require a sort of violence of the self as well as a crafting of the hyperreal that results in a confused, muddied metaculture that is defined by a politics of democracy in service of American Imperialism and the globalization it operates through. Through this, we may realize a means to form schizophrenic networks of affinity between the Maoist and the Anarchist, within the postmodernism of the neoliberal, such that one may in fact critique the repetition of the modern in the supposed-postmodern. 

The state of the situation of the West is one that specifically contradicts itself in order to create itself, that requires a layering of hyperreality such that at once more than one may simultaneously exist, as if it were a wave pool presented as the ocean. This is due to how the postmodern state of the situation is defined by the lack thereof, by how it is not any particularity of situation, by how the neoliberal has relied upon proliferation in order to structure itself. Homosexuality as a prohibition was realized before the heteronormative subjectivity was named, but this was merely the naming of a certain structure, the means by which heteronormative ideology was given a diminished structuralism in order to conceal its centrality to ideas of accumulation, distribution, and the phallogocentrism of the paradigm of gender as a means of relation. Similarly, in how molecularity of whiteness has formed structurality of race, it does not mean that there was not a preexisting coloniality, but merely that the transition from the modern to the postmodern has involved a consciousness of structuralist critique and a means of entering it into neoliberal discussions of the world, of the state of the situation. Homonationalist ideology is the way in which these structures are realized in the political: they are foundational to the traditionalism of the decadent West.

When a reactionary discusses the means in which fellow reactionaries kill gay men, they do so within a specific means of speech that quickly reveals its own desire, its own salivation at the same prospect. It, too, is in relief to the paradigm of a postmodern expansive West, and it too is structured by the neoliberal state of the situation. It is not in liberation that their libidinal investment lies, it is instead in a desire to control these bodies within a structuralism of the West, to change these bodies through an alchemical act of the state from victims to rightfully discarded vestiges of decadence. The politics of a return to the Modern are in fact a structural continuation of the neoliberal along specific lines, through certain libidinal structures, such that in supposedly moving past the decadence of the postmodern, they merely create a mythic tradition in order to justify their own violence. It is an appeal to the neoliberal sense of self in order to extend what is by necessity a neocolonial preface to appearance, an articulation of the subaltern for-themselves that precludes any entry of the subaltern. Thus, one finds a homonationalism: gay fighter jets, transgender CIA spies, a woman commanding missile strikes on an empty airfield. Thus, the neoliberal apprehension of identity is entered into a structuralism of the state of the situation that relies upon a democratic politics to come to being, that is enacted through this structuring of democracy such that it can then become comprehensible. 

The postmodern expanse is one that is part of this hyperreality, the “freedom” of the neoliberal is in fact merely artifice, is a specific experience meant to create the opportunity for the neocolonial expansion to be justified within its own vocabulary.

[thebrewstorian]

Pop Culture Conference 2017: Beer Culture: Session 1: Community/identity

So last week I was in sunny San Diego attending and presenting at the Pop Culture Conference. This is the fourth year of a “beer culture track,” which has now moved from temporary to permanent status for the conference. 

I took pretty copious notes during the eight sessions, so over the next several days I’ll be typing them up and posting them here. They are pretty much straight summaries, but I’m hoping that you’ll get a sense a) of who is doing this research and b) the amazing variety of research topics. 

The track kicked off with a session on community and identity, and the first speaker was Teresa Novak, who gave a talk called "Beer as soul food." My brain was still stunned by all the sunshine, and this topic is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, so I took good notes and did a lot of Googling based on the words I wrote down later to write this post. This site helped me a lot: https://www.selfsoulcenter.org/soulwork-the-mundus-imaginalis-introduction/.

Novak looked at brewing culture from depth psychology and archetypes perspectives, specially looking at beer as an archetypical image (think "cup of life") and as a means for soulful engagement. She also talked about alchemical hermeneutics, which seems to have its roots in Jung and the psyche, looking at how the invisible aspects of life, the collective unconscious, or unconscious impulses behind instincts link up with the psychic dimensions, archetypes, and generative instinctual expressions.

We are drawn to brewing because it is a "root" activity that informs our communal customs and connection to communities communities. And if there is an "inherent intelligence" behind all consciousness, Novak explored how brewers could impart it into their creation and how we could use these ideas of beer as a "life force" of mankind to study the popularity of brewing culture. We can do this by analyzing these archetypal images, looking at how image making comes from the soul dimension, and how the brewer's psyche participating in the creation of beer. So this impacts the relationship between the crafter and consumer, but also allows is to look for deeper meanings behind these actions.

She talked specifically about the movie "How Beer Saved the World," which claims beer was born out of happenstance, but shifted us from a nomadic culture where beer (grains) were a source of nutrition and needed a persistent presence to keep growing. I was pretty excited when she quoted OSU's Tom Shellhammer and Pat Hayes about wild yeast, barley, and the agricultural revolution.

Aaron Ellis' talk was called "Fighting over a hazy beer: the rejection of beer and market ideologies," and it was easier for me to process, though he did throw in some Foucault and "resistance / power" stuff that made me think. Ellis was looking specifically at the birth of the New England IPA, which is a quintessentially local product created by people who wanted to return a sense of specialness/localness to beer styles.

In New England there was an opposition to the generalized "American Style" (basically "West Coast IPA") which was a style that could be and was replicated easily in other regions.  Ellis says that IPA was born in opposition to macro lager - think Anchor's Liberty Ale - and meant to showcase hops. But the NE IPA doesn't follow this: it's a hazy, cloudy beer, extremely delicate and finicky, has to be consumed soon after brewing and close to its source, and it looks like a glass of orange juice.

This beer first came from the people: the home brewers, and once it was gaining in popularity that meant that the governing body that determined style guidelines had to grapple with how to categorize this. So in this way, the case study of the NE IPA is a great one to understand the way move from curiosities to a legitimate style. But it is also an interesting way to think more about how "local" is ingrained in the basic craft beer ideals: giving back and integration into communities, using ingredients with a link to the area, being creative, and going against the grain.

Speaking of creativity, Ryan Miller was up next with a talk called "Identity and expertise of home brewers in beer culture," which was a short version of his thesis, which focused on interviews with home brewers. Fun side note about Miller: I ran into him the night before at White Labs, where he was tasting *and* interviewing a home brewer who happened to be tasting too. That's dedication!

A "Community of Practice" forms when a group of people gather around a common interest, sharing what they've learned through their own experiences and learning from each other, which gives members an opportunity to grow personally and/or professionally. This theory was developed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in 1991 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_practice). So if we look at home brewing and the community, it is the practice that defines it.

Miller wanted to look at how the popularity of craft brewing impacts the popularity of home brewing *and* the identity of the home brewer, as well as how the home brewer assesses her or his own position as expert or knowledgeable resource. He posits that the rise of craft brewing has led to a more informed consumer base, which ultimately changes the home brewers relationship with both profession brewers and non brewer consumers.

He divided his interviewees into three categories: beginner/novice (not producers), home brewers (not sell beer or obtain licenses, production for own enjoyment), and professionals. He found that the goal and main motivation for home brewers was to improve their practice, and not all wanted to make the move to make their hobby a profession. One interesting find was that there was a link between professional status and expertise, as if this movement from home to professional makes someone an expert; however, there was also an interesting relationship between the consumer and the home brewer over "recommendations, with the consumer assuming that because the brewer makes beer she/he knows how to recommend beer.

Another interesting dynamic within the community of practice is that when home brewers are with each other they are building an expertise together, ultimately challenging the idea of a hierarchy with one person above another.  Who is an expert changes very quickly, there is greater fluidity, and there are different levels of "success" or interpretations of standards (e.g. success is set by community and usually means winning medals).

There was a really great conversation at the end of this session! The first topic addressed how expertise and money feed the politics of scarcity. Are people driven to make something unique or so hyper local that a black market or consumption tornado (my phrase) forms around the beer, ultimately undermining the "local"ness of the beer since oftentimes a black market develops and people stop appreciating the beer itself. Miller said that for home brewers & novice consumers these beers that are coveted are often entrees into the conversation and a means for entering the community without taking part in practice. So I don't make beer, but I can talk about beer as if I do.  

Another question addressed how  an increase in size impacts integrity? One panelist said once you sell out your brewery is destroyed; but the brewer her/himself seems to have "angel wings" (especially if you have worked at a larger brewery), and can still do great things or be authentic. But Novak wondered if the "soul" was lost when the motivation is an economic gain and not an artisanal one. Miller said that as home brewers keep tabs on who owns breweries, they are reinforcing the expectations of craft integrity. 

Does money corrupt the process? The general consensus was that growth is good and money is needed to run a brewery; however,  money is a positive only up to a point, and then it flips and is a negative. One conflict is that people want to believe that brewers are brewing just for love and not for money, and while many people can certainly do both, if you actually admit that you are doing it for money (which you are because it's  job), it tends to "destroys" the beer for people. Novak pointed out one irony here: beer is thought to be one of the first commodities, so there is this early link to money.

The session concluded by talking about the maturity of the industry and how the industry narrative is challenged by growth. Many businesses are attached to being identified as a "local business" even if they aren't -- because they see the benefit of being seen as local. And sometimes even when we (consumers) are faced with the evidence that contradicts the "origin" stories we've been telling ourselves, variations on the theme of the heroic entrepreneur knocking on doors and often including welding of dairy tanks, we cling to them. Because we are attached to this narrative, we can't deal with the inconsistency or contradictions. A great example would be the maligning of big distributors: there's a benefit for some breweries to sign on with distributors, also benefits to other regional breweries who don't sign on because now there is a supply line of ingredients to more isolated places.

I liked this session because it focused on the pride of identity with the craft brew culture, yet also the importance of beer as a larger culture symbol. There is a sort of grand narrative to the story of beer in our culture, and the closer we look at it the messier it gets because the reality of a person or business rarely matches our inflated notions of them.

Curious about the image at the top? 

[blessedrestlessness]

Radical Fictivity as a Desperate-Yet-Measured Plan of Attack in a Continual Fight Against Pervasive, Peer-Pressurized Modes of Ideological Consumption (Modes Obedient to the Status Quotient of Avaristic Disengagement from Humanistic and Ecological Efforts, Which Undergirds Empire’s Voracious Vampirism) as Expressed in Alternative Comix

By Wolfhart Polkinghorne

     The exploration of varied modalities of Fictivity is absolutely central to alternative comix’ entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those [varied modalities] of surreality (characterized, in recent series, like E. T. Weevil’s NOISE COMIX, as being “rooted in [an] orientation towards a harmony between the mythologizing of the “subjects/themes” harbored in primary structures on the one hand, and the realization—in every sense—of subjectivities’ objectives on the other”) and those in which Fictivity is as fundamental a feature in an aesthetic sense as in a “strictly” narrative sense. Generally, alternative comix’ visual production precedes our narrative/textual production, not infrequently generating the very mythopoeic literature that it retroactively comes to “illustrate”. The texts, though, are no less incomplete without the images that attend them than the images are before they reference the texts (which texts are their initial exegesis); so these pictures are more, of course, than illustrations, in much the same way that, say, images of Charlie Brown in PEANUTS comic strips aren’t “mere” illustrations of a comedic text, mere supplements that enhance the humor, but active components of [an otherwise solely linguistic] humor, which are essential, sometimes more so, to the “gags” as the punch lines themselves (which lines [of ink] may render the face of the belovèd blockhead more important than his words).  

     The intra-relational discursivity of our pseudonyms (which are neither meaningless nor governed by any predetermined internal system, game, logic, etc.) has much to do with the ways in which meanings generate themselves by means of ‘our’ kinetic kenosis. (It is ironic, of course, to call kenosis (i.e. “self-emptying”) our own, but such are the results of the limitedness of linguistic communication; results which attest to the necessity of, for example, non-textual philosophy, in forms such as contemporary “visual” art. The meaning of Félix González-Torres’s work, for instance, is not reducible to the language, however poetic or philosophical that language might be, that describes or evaluates it; his works’ aesthetic qualities, physical presence, participatory nature, evocative accord between eternal faux-stasis and endless mutability refer, quite precisely, to those aspects of being, phenomenological and nuanced, that only poetry-at-its-best could ever elevate language into conveying a still-quite-mediated hint of. Polkinghorne’s favorite contemporary artist, CF [Christopher Forgues] has long been involved in an ongoing reimagining of the parameters of the phenomenon on meaning’s self-exhaustion, lyrically borrowing from the highest of the “high” and the lowest of the “low” to inject a blended sensibility into the heart of an aesthetic sphere freshened by hybridity.

     The stark interrogation of what might be called “resurrection” in CF’s work has served as a galvanic actant that has fractionated a largely less-than-self-critical “secularism” (that less-than-robust critique of “the sacred” that long ago lapsed into precisely the kind of thoughtless its proponents intended it to curb) into secularisms, plural, highlighting the baseless presuppositions that undergird the limited and limiting set of stances that refuses to see itself as such (i.e. as a limited, limiting set). Fresh kinds of “sorcery”, revealed impressionistically, run through the work like the reniform “hearts” ever-present in Twombly’s oeuvre. There’s a sense in which CF’s work has been a kind of nondenominational semi-neo-pagan critique of Western secularisms’ cynical presuppositions as well. CF has been the supreme seeker and discoverer in the comix community: the crown of Comix History as a history of struggle. No artist was more instrumental than CF in the collapse of the anti-miscegenation laws that seemed second nature to comix thought in the 90s and earliest years of the 21st century (divided as comix were into a “mainstream” camp and an “indie” camp that were marketed as antithetical to one another). Comix Studies has necessitated a new interpretation of Art History, as it springs from the conviction that literature and visual art eloped in secret, long ago, in forms the hybridity of which was a kind of invisibility cloak (old eyes attuned as they were to segregative rather than integrative forms).

     The increasing relevance of such practitioners of interdisciplinary aesthetic philosophy as CF and Blaise Larmee points to, highlights, and double-underlines the need for a raging inversion (via aesthetic praxis) of human beings’ spiritual humiliation; the humiliation of being reduced in/to a medical number, a legal name, one cog—mere and replaceable—in the machine of an international military industrial makeover of the planet (i.e. the Anthropocene) without, for instance, the Zen rejection of static identity in its entirety; the incessant insistence within social structures that identity is real (an anti-Zen, anti-Advaita Vedanta stance) but generated by the post-humanistic conditions of industry rather than the humane conditions of liberty, conscientious citizenship, religious faith, etc. (which are increasingly seen as ill-equipped to contend with the systemic violence that’s an inevitable byproduct of a free market now rabid, dribbling its mouth froth all o’er our Earth). Human beings’ spiritual humiliation at the bloodied hands of a market now UNJUSTIFIABLY free (given its lethal rabidity) is a theme CF has taken up in ways less Neo-Marxist than “Neo-Masochist”; interested in humiliation’s ALCHEMICAL transformation into a kind of transcendence rather than in the utopic, pipe-dreamy cessation of those psychological states that are (but needn’t necessarily be) construed as “debasement”.

     If CF’s practice is ABOUT surrealism rather than [“merely”?] an example of surrealism, mightn’t this shed some [new?] light on the work of an older artist like Kai Althoff as well? In HIJIME (2011), Kai Althoff satirized some of the rote conventions of contemporary art publication, using ARTFORUM as the semi-self-deprecating pad from which his hermeneutic launched, while simultaneously situating an audience (as it typical of him) before an otherness toward which the adventurous may orient themselves (an orientation the promise of which is [at least] an enigmatic encounter). From the press-release-like text accompanying HIJIME: “Well, I do not want to hate what at least incorporates the faintest hope, that it may derive from this otherworldliness, meaning what I am to be reflecting in this current state, or what reflects me.” CF’s is a practice of passionate (if non-dogmatic) proclamation, in which he pledges his allegiance to the project of comix (without fetishizing or deifying the context), and to his fellow artists. He is not disinterested in his “cartooning” contemporaries, but he is justifiably critical of the presuppositions that have undergirded discussion of comix in [at least] the United States for [at least] the last sixty years. He isn’t alone in his rejection of the strained semi-tender semi-rebel account of comix—an account that pits “underground” comix against mainstream comics on the one hand and the art world on the other in a painfully affected way. (Two semi-likeminded paragons of this resistance are Art Spiegelman and Blaise Larmee). But there’s a sense in which CF’s practice is more probing, a more thorough critique of [“Western”] [“secular”] art historical presuppositions IN GENERAL—a playful-but-severe analysis of the status quo-preserving narrative that has neatly cradled the history of art’s progression. The apprehension and comprehension of the best recent art, CF suggests, has stagnated for decades in the anxious liminal space between Surrealism’s contentious development and the inability of criticism to prehend it. As Mike Kelley said: “Dali’s whole late career was basically Jeff Koons, and so by erasing his late history, it makes Koons a star. That’s the New York prerogative. […] To stop Dali’s career in 1939 and keep him a Freudian Surrealist is to escape the fact that pop culture was already in full throttle production by the ’40s. Dali was already there, doing that. They have to erase his late work to create artists that the New York art world could not recognize until the fuckin ’80s. […] Without Dali there would be no Jeff Koons and without Dali there would be no Warhol, and by erasing Dali’s late career and making him a hack, it just makes those New York-oriented stars ‘stars’, because the New York art world is based on a phony star system.”

     Kelley understood, as does CF, that Surrealism never “ended”, and is nowhere near “over” or “passé”, that, despite a voracious market’s need to generate [seemingly] new ideologies that necessitate the invention of [seemingly] new goods (i.e. the manifestation of these ideologies’ key hypotheses, the material expression of a public’s assent to “The New”), we’ve never moved beyond the glittering discourse around the Surreal: the exegesis of surrealism that the advent and presence of surrealism demands.

     In an interview at Floating World Comics with Brian Chippendale and Matt Fraction (2010), CF mentioned Marvel artist Jack Kirby as an [unlikely?] inspiration. In WINTER: FIVE WINDOWS ON THE SEASON Adam Gopnik writes: “The biting strings and breathless beauty of Vivaldi’s ‘Winter,’ from his FOUR SEASONS of 1725, is a place to begin—although the more knowing of you probably cringe and grimace a little when you hear that name. Could anything be more inexorably middlebrow than this? Yet sometimes repetition can dull us to true greatness. (I suspect that if Vivaldi’s SEASONS were dug out of a chest today and performed by a suitably sniffy German original-instruments group on a suitably obscure European label, it might be more easily recognized as the masterpiece it is.)”

     Similarly, Kirby’s work would seem as fresh in the milieu that has arisen in the wake of Fort Thunder-possessed post-Panterism, as have the masterful interjections of Blaise Larmee.

     If CF’s POWR MASTRS was/is a reaction against the high-minded (and hive-minded) pretentions of the anti-mainstream/anti-sci-fi stance in contemporary [“alternative”] comix, Larmee’s oeuvre (especially 3 BOOKS) can be read as a response to the other central pretension of contemporary [“alternative”] comix, the other unwritten rule under which the so many “alternative” cartoonists labor: the precious and almost-pathological aversion to contemporary art (as a “culture”, i.e. “The Art World”), which is written into the self-pitying history of comix as a history of systemic oppression in which the doggedly underdog revolt. Blurring all divergence (“V”) into a haze that can be made, by means of manipulative rhetoric, to some consistent sum (“U”?), a naïve, paint-by-number approach to the reality of non-duality is appropriated by discursively lackluster alliances that profit from aesthetic passivity.

     Not unlike fallen-yet-still-green breeze-blown leaves prettifying a beheaded mutant Slowpoke’s face (its muzzle agape) [FIGURE 1] Larmee’s aesthetic interjections both obfuscate and bedazzle the visage/façade (a bulletin board of rosy motifs rooted in ill-interrogated presuppositions) of the metanarrative presumptions of the [prevailing] hermeneutic circle-jerk of alternative comix “criticism” the supposèd authoritativeness of which perpetuates a kind of collective headspace one socio-kinetic element of which is the hauntological reverberation of the historical predominance of many subjectivities’ exclusion (an exclusion the auratic signature of which was and is the baseless condemnation of alterity).

FIGURE 1

     In particular, Larmee offers a minimalistic “disk” of dissonance and revision in the form of a renegotiated (label-soakèd, etc.) philosophy of the photoset: a kind of “torture chamber” for status quo notions of the ego’s dissolution-via-bare-humility: a critique, in other words, of the comfortable ways that phenomenological innovations (Zen, for example) are incorporated into (and thus sterilized by) the market. Larmee provides a web of amiable postponement. He realizes more than any other “cartoonist” working in/with contemporary art how the bubbling cauldrons of mutable modalities can come to have a certain sedativity about them; how we can come to take for granted the narratives that frame our comfy presumptions; the belief, for instance, that all vital conduits of possibility cannot but remain, like a remnant of necessary thespians, immortal in the width of violent night. We can come to trust, all-too-easily, in the gilded lie by means of which one meaningful stance stands for or is conflated with another, until unique subjectivities become cards in a deck, their widths lengths hacked unto an identicality the innocuous “sameness” of which leads to a view of interpersonal relationality that banishes the miraculous and refuses the numinous a room in its inn; a view of interpersonal relationality that ultimately fails us, as we’re led into a set of headspaces that discourage us from addressing that which could (and would, most likely, otherwise) be most immutably vivid within us. No robust critique of clear-cut non-duality, Larmee reminds us, can evade the bristle of the antagonism it inevitably generates. Embittered retorts unite into an animate confederacy of negation.

     As the now-instinctively-integrative “consciousness” of pseudo-post-neoliberal cultural capital accoutrement-production (a refreshing and generative yet lamentably limited and increasingly less-than-relevant arena of discourse adjacent to Art-as-such [in the Venn Diagrammatological intersection of “highbrow” entertainment and semi-prosaicentric academicism]) makes a surprisingly ever more successful attempt to contend with the legacy of varied surrealisms’ cacophonous clash’s claim on the pedestrian self-portrait of our disorientation, artists like Althoff, Forgues and Larmee will, I hypothesize, continue to loom large in any honest assessment of the evolution of interdisciplinary contemporary art in the age of the post-post-medium condition.

     Despite the introspective profundity of so much late- [20th] century art criticism, its presumptions have been mercifully superannuated as art criticism has taken hybridity into account more and more since the “advent” of a postmodernism now nearing its end (or else already ended and haunting the nomadic assemblage of subjectivities that has replaced postmodernity by assassinating it in secret and adopting much of its structure).

[lostedges]

Lost edges 5

‘I am a sculptor a moulder of form

In every moment I shape an idol

But then in front of you, I melt them down

……..

In this house of mud and water

My heart has fallen to ruins

Enter this house, my love, or let me leave’

           Rumi, https://allpoetry.com/I-am-a-sculptor,-a-molder-of-form 30/11/19

  I am making another self-portrait. It is challenging. I start the portrait whilst moderating an A level exam, over three consecutive days. I re-draw several times, through initial stages of colour. At each stage thinking I’ve cracked it, only to come back and realise it looks weird. There’s a tendency in my mind to reassure, to encourage a veneer of flattery in terms of self-evaluation – not in beautifying the image necessarily, but in make-believing the work is more successful than it is. I need reassurance, even if it’s from myself. For me, painting is a constant struggle. It is endlessly digging deeper for a more profound understanding, against my less helpful instincts.  I’ve struggled to structure the head correctly in paint. I initially made the head too narrow and have laboured this in error. Adjusting this has set in motion a series of other adjustments. It is a fluid process of pushing towards quality. Good is not good enough, and good is a distant country. The push towards understanding is an open question. I am not troubled by self. I’ve seen the suit of armour, with its imperfections and passages of integrity.  Self is not a burden in working. I am troubled. How could I fail to be at this time? I’m painting that. This is the thematic route into the drawing. My initial inspiration for this painting, as a study of technique-meeting-idea, is a Rembrandt self-portrait. Black hat, enlarged eyes. I’m so impressed with the apparent fluidity of touch in his work while working with thick paint. It looks well-rehearsed, but it is almost impossible to understand how such subtlety is applied so confidently. Humility needed on my part. I notice I’m inclined to work with colour in blocks, a touch of Lucien Freud, who I admire, although it’s not necessarily helpful in achieving my intentions. In Freud, the edges of the unsoftened brushstroke give structure and huge physicality and gravity – the heart of his paintings. In Rembrandt, there’s more ‘inner’, more of the spirit. I’m wary of copying, but at this point of exploration I must accept that I will take time to work out a method and language that feels like my own.

At the end of this process I take the painting home and seek to work it up, thickening the paint in Rembrandt-like impasto. It has a rough, bold quality to it, which I find satisfying. There is a sense of Rembrandt in the lighting and colour, and the roughness of the work, makes for a physical edge that I want to associate with myself, in terms of capturing some internal quality of physicality. A desire for bravura. The more I look, however much I am seduced by the quality of paint, I know that the drawing is just not me. It’s clear that despite looking to widen the head in previous re-draws, I’ve not taken this far enough. I’m past the point of wanting it to be just OK, so I redraw with paint several times. I have to destroy the stage I had reached and built towards carefully. The new re-draw brings with it new problems. Nose is bigger and at the wrong angle. Big nostrils. Plausible, but not quite me. There is a degree of frustration here. I want the work to be resolved quickly. I am learning degrees of patience.

Painting the self-portrait is, mentally speaking, a layered, rich negotiation. A negotiation between my aspirations as a painter, and my confrontation of self-image. My internal self-image is brought outwards for external scrutiny. It is a curious thing to make a version of yourself that sits outside, permitting inspection in some sort of objective/subjective exchange of perception. Making a text from the text of myself, each simultaneously in dialogue, shifting on unstable ground. Saorsa (2011) describes the creative act as a process of questioning with no end, in which logic is not enough.

“in the creative process, logic is always superseded by artistic nuance, always interrupted, terminated, redirected and diverted, and the process itself becomes therefore a struggle, a constant dialectic between percept and affect where every mark is transitory and defined only by its indefinite character until the last mark is made.” P. 196

The conversation between painter-me and the painting-of-me, is mirrored by the dialogue of making. To make a painting is to engage in an endless hermeneutic arc. I make a series of decisions. I see them, reflect on them against my shifting sense of self-image, and then remake another set of decisions, which feed back, and back. As the text I create in paint becomes a mirror of self-image, it is evaluated and either assimilated or rejected. Each time these decisions are owned, made personal. I appropriate my own image, from the outside, as I reflexively create a self on both fronts.

The painting has its own laws and demands, which I must seek to reconcile with my own sentience. I am obliged to occupy an objective position. I observe my features with cold scrutiny. There is a structural logic and system to the initial application of paint. But in order to make the painting breathe, to make a true portrait I must move beyond my own distanciation of measurement and construction, making a head that looks like mine. I must make the painting ‘feel’, by entering its space, by allowing the painting to pass through my own boundaries. The painting forms in a space bordered by myself and the painting. The painting  forms intuitively, through doubt, sensory navigation, the  cold objectivity of form, structure, representation, as I walk the boundaries within which I am obliged to be form and formless, self and non-self, various possible depictions, an image with which I identify, an image which I reject. As I build a form, which looks ‘like me’, I build a ‘diagram’ constituted in doubt, a fear of failure, a sense of self-importance, mitigated by humility and a triumph of self-will and determination. The diagram slowly bleeds into the surface and looks ready to implode at any second. Saorsa (2011) describes the limitless expansion of the hermeneutic circle that the artist continually re-draws as a drawing is made,

“just as the artist must ‘enter’ the work to escape the limitations of contingency, there is indeed no going back. Truth cannot be turned away from once discovered, because where the truth of being is that, there is no truth, its revelation reveals the paradox that can only negate the meaning of the search for it, and thus negate in turn the purpose and meaning of Being. The true figure, the essence of Being that true understanding of the meaning of Being can reveal, exists therefore, only and perpetually in search for it.” (p.206)

I take the painting back to Cardiff so that it’s within reach of critique. From then on I am more patient, more considerate of the painting, hoping to move it gradually towards a conclusion. The painting moves from too yellow, too pink (I am a little infatuated with the flesh ochre) and back again. I lose and regain and alter the expression many times. I am looking for, throughout this drawing, a look of doubtful concern. There is a look in Rembrandt’s eyes in his late portraits that feels like his world is about to end. I make myself as a middle aged, fleshy, overweight figure, not entirely unlike Rembrandt in physical attributes. I have looked at myself, in drawing and painting, many times over the years. How much has this process altered the man that I am? How much is it changing me as I make this painting? I am reminded of the two-slit experiment. If the passage of protons through cardboard is affected by observation, how much does this act of looking at myself change the looker? How much do I resolve myself in order to appease observation? By handling paint, by entering a process of not-knowing myself, an interplay of distance and intimate proximity ensues, making myself strange. Elkins (2000) describes painting as a process that is meditative, physical, and a transgression of the normal boundaries of looking.

“The “experiment” of art changes the experimenter, and there is no hope of understanding what happens because there is no “I” that can absorb and control substances themselves. All that is known with certainty is the flow of fluids, back and forth from the tubes to the canvas.

In this domain nothing is secure. The alchemical or artistic work is strangely inside, and the human mind that directs it is also partly its inert substrate. What was once the agent of conceptual control over the work has become the bricks of its furnace, the weave of its canvas. The furnace produces a product that is the furnace, and the mind tries to watch a process that is the mind.” (P.166)

The painting is yet unfinished. It will always be so, just as I am in a state of constant flux. As the painting and I observe each other, the uncertainty is amplified. At some point when the painting is at a point of crisis, where it is a choice between ‘as far as it can go in this direction’ or ‘making a new painting’, I will walk away. A painting is never finished, says Osi Rhys Osmond (2017), it is only ever abandoned. When abandoned, the edge is hardened. From this form, a shadow is cast. It is the shadow I must walk into in order to make another painting. As I hold to form, I must simultaneously let go. As I assume a form, I must shed it, like a skin.

              “Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror

           Up to where you’re bravely working

……

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes

If it were always a fist or always stretched open

You would be paralysed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding

The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated

As birdwings”

(Barks, C. trans. Rumi 2004, p174)

[queernuck]

Psychoactive//Psychoanalytic

Within the reactionary conditions of postmodernity, there has been an opposite impulse from structuralist thought toward a sort of anti-structuralism, a creation of a hyperreality of constructivist realism, a development of the impulses of scientism into a specific worldview developed as rational, as impartial by virtue, as endlessly logical. The means by which this worldview is constructed in part is in reaction to the spirit of Marx seen in the deconstructionist impetus: if one can arrive at the schizoanalytic, at the meaninglessness of meaning, the way in which the very act of interpretation paradigmatically refutes the basis of the modern, how is one to structure the despotic body, how is one to construct the likeness of the self, the modern man? As a result, one finds within the psychological a biological essentialism, a bioideological construct that creates an idealized, normative body through an act of ontology named as scientific. This is a reactionary action by virtue of its structure, but that it has become so paradigmatically necessary to enter into certain discourses of the school, of the prison, of the military and imperial, is by no means accidental. It is a development of the psychoanalytic past psychoanalysis, away from the possibility of schizoanalytic critique but providing a means of engaging with the schizophrenic instability of meaning when necessary.

To elaborate further, the panoptic structures of modern epistemology have been repeated in postmodernity, have been created as a singularity of becoming-meaningful and as a paradigm of analysis. This is not a refutation of the postmodernist hermeneutics that make reading possible, but instead a specific engagement with the standards of reading laid out that create an apparently undeniable structure of the reading-act. The textualization carried out is part of reducing thinkability to a certain academic and confined means of writing, a literature of artlessness, a literature of scientism rather than the scientific. The vital differance here is in part that it rejects the means by which Deleuze and Guattari separate the scientific and philosophical: the latter is of concepts, while the former of functions, such that the functional engages with a certain way of apprehending and repeating. The functional involves certain means of constructing states-of-affairs from individual examples, of dealing with functives in a fashion that can be understood as constructivist, but is denied as such. The importance of this denial is that it creates a sort of theologism of the scientific, a theologism of ugliness and structuralist defeat that rejects all possibility of critique. The state of affairs, of functions, is an ontology of an unmoving and static world which is functional and merely functional. 

The scientific is not by necessity ugly. However, an ideological turn of artlessness is taken in moving through a sort of analytic influence and creating a specifically anti-continental, supposedly-enlightened figure which may read and arbitrate in the political, social, scientific and thus draw out meaning in a singular fashion. The psychoanalytic is specifically rejected not because it is useless, but because it is unscientific as a means of critiquing this structuralism. The structure cannot be critiqued, it must merely be accepted. The scientific thus can create the structure as known, but cannot question its origins. This enters into a metaphysics of forbidding metaphysics: not an anti-metaphysics, a means of denying the metaphysical in order to free the means by which one can engage with it, as Badiou does through Maoist thought. Rather, a negation of even this negation, a negation of metaphysics as a knowledge. Psychoanalysis is necessary for the schizoanalytic in that the arboreal is contrasted with the rhizomal, in that the psychoanalytic account of violence that creates Oedipalization, that inflicts this trauma, that constitutes the metaphysics of this structure must be first named in order to further name the structures by which it may be critiqued. 

Instead, one moves toward a conceptual ontology of static culture, such that the inevitably-other is known through the creation of the cultural, and that one must leave the cultural behind in order to enter into the domain of the enlightened, growing West that has structured the globe. Meaningfully, one can posit that there was not a globe, not an earth, before the structuring of the imperial: it was understood in some sense but the globe as a means of relation is specifically imperial, is structured through a process of exchange such that the process of development is used as a means of destabilization rather than of postcolonialism. The first world specifically engages in trade through neocolonial flows across the Body without Organs of the earth, such that it creates floating intensities of investment which are effectively forced to deal with the violence of the market, or face the violence of the imperial army. If one does not meet these standards, one is taken as precultural, as structurally absent rather than lacking, as specifically indicative of a territory that can be seized. As a result, one sees violence such as the overfishing of the waters off of Somolia, and the manner in which one has seen assemblages of terrorism placed upon unnamed bodies, upon bodies unable to enter a relationship of subjectivity. 

The psychoanalytic, at least, necessitates some sort of metaphysical presence in order to be engaged; the psychological, through the creation of a sort of humanism that engages with neocolonial concepts of culture, does not need this same metaphysical structure as Oedipalization-in-itself, may instead extend the despotic body through a sort of postmodern relativism that ignores the structuralism of colonial histories, and instead creates new histories absent this colonial injury, absent this specific inflicting of violence. Thus, one arrives in the gaze of the panopticon a supposedly unaltered subject, rather than through the affirmation of a traumatic subjectivity present in psychoanalysis: one arrives in the scientific gaze already formed and moreover formed through a strictly natural series of processes, not through a becoming but through an already-present. Psychoanalysis allows and admits a certain description of trauma, while schizoanalysis allows for its deconstruction, for a passing-through the traumatic, while the rejection of these paradigms instead inflicts the trauma yet again.

The schizoanalytic is predicated on the schizophrenic: even schizophrenia itself is not pre-experiential, pre-phenomenological, pre-empirical: the transcendent empiricism necessary for its framework lies in that the experiential is in fact linked to a transcendent being, a phantasmic materialism that does not require the Christological, spiritual, eschatological investment of modernity. However, in moving past this totality of modernity the structure of late capitalism has itself required the sublimation and structural rearticulation of the schizophrenic in order to create a sort of individual after the death of Communism, an individual out of Communist opposition. With the death of the Soviet Union, the crisis of the American individual was resolved in one sense, but now without an opposition, one needed to fill the lack created by this new emptiness, one that is still realized in a specifically anti-communist fashion. The self is thus articulated against the self, as a self coming apparently ex nihilo; not genuinely ex nihilo as this would constitute transcendent encounter, but rather through a sort of maneuvering whereby the schizophrenic affinity of anti-historical thought raised in Foucault is used to posit a “false origin” as posited in response by Spivak, such that one can reach the materials of a sort of alchemical historiography, where the socius is transmuted into the scientific. This scientism specifically informs the pedagogy of the charter school, the privatization of the prison, the creation of an articulation of human rights that allows the IDF to read Deleuze without irony. 

This alchemical paradigm is part of the larger Christology of schizophrenic late capitalism, the means in which history is made ever-present and yet unchanging, totality all at once, in the same sort of fashion as the canonical structuring of the Bible. The New Testament’s apparent following from the Old relies specifically on a conceptualization of the Bible as a text that is relatively close to modernity’s concept, but moreover as one beyond reproach as a result. The Bible, as a result, must point away from the expanse of postmodern theology, from the openness of hermeneutic space generated by its structure, and instead toward an endless and final victory of the globalized body. The schizophrenic, eternal event has risen from the ashes of the fallen towers, and constitutes an absoluteness of Events constantly being documented and related, metadata of metadata, Events upon Events without the occurrence of any meaningful event to speak of. The apparent banality of the 1990s has given way to the rush of the 2000s.