Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED

[Keith]

The unconscious is good? Whether there is any reality to something  
called "the unconscious" or not, I don't know of any conceptual  
system that defines "the unconscious" as good. Jung certainly did not  
define it as good. He was famous for making a case for both the  
feminine and Satan being included in any concept of God, for example.  
And, yes, God, for Jung, is outside consciousness, and therefor  
unconscious. And "the unconscious" is the "objective psyche"  
according to Jung, and contains all that the conscious (subjective)  
mind defines as good and evil. From a Jungian perspective there is  
nothing that is not contained in the (collective, or objective)  
unconscious. Personally, I think the concept of "the unconscious" due  
to it being defined as all that is outside awareness, becomes a catch- 
all for whatever one wants to make up about it, and is uroboric  
anyway. If it is outside awareness, how can we be aware of anything  
it contains or not. Nevertheless, it can be quite entertaining to  
play around with the Jungian framework, especially as fodder for  
fiction. As soon as people start literalizing it, it becomes silly,  
like anything anyone literalizes, and the subject of silly arguments.  
If there is a hell, it just might be having to sit for eternity in a  
room full of Jungians. Talk about meaningless jargon out the wazoo.  
Yecch.


On Jan 24, 2010, at 7:49 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

what I was sayin' was in answer to ian's q about whether the unconscious
contained the [inherent] vice:

I want(ed) to mostly believe NO...the unconscious is a Good.....so  
the Evil in hisotry came from elsewhere.......

Then it gets sticky.......



--- On Sun, 1/24/10, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Back to the past....riffing on THE PRESERVED
> To: "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Sunday, January 24, 2010, 7:09 PM
> Mark Kohut wrote:
>>   . . .
>> No, to the inherent vice within the unconscious except
> as the
>> unconscious got perverted sometime in history..
>>
>> Which of course begs the question of how it got
> perverted if the
>> unconscious is universal....
>
> Are we talking about the little ship of consciousness on
> the sea of
> the unconscious?
> Perversion? Well sure, wars, UFO sightings, social
> darwinism.
>
> alice wellintown wrote:
>> 23 January 2010, Boston,  reprinted in NY Times
> Op-Ed 24 January 2010
>>   . . .
>> Between God and a Hard Place
>>
>>
>> Terrible catastrophes inevitably encourage appeals to
> God. We who are,
>> at present, unfairly luckier, whether believers or not,
> might reflect
>> on the almost invariably uncharitable history of
> theodicy, and on the
>> reality that in this context no invocation of God
> beyond a desperate
>> appeal for help makes much theological sense. For
> either God is
>> punitive and interventionist (the Robertson view), or
> as capricious as
>> nature and so absent as to be effectively nonexistent
> (the Obama
>> view). Unfortunately, the Bible, which frequently uses
> God's power
>> over earth and seas as the sign of his majesty and
> intervening power,
>> supports the first view; and the history of humanity's
> lonely
>> suffering decisively suggests the second.
>
> Gee, whatever.
> Many of us see God as a projection of the unconscious. Not
> by the
> unconscious, but a conscious projection of the
> un-whatever.
>
>
>