EXPLORING INNER SPACE

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32460, 21 November 1970, Page 10

EXPLORING INNER SPACE

The Myth of Meaning in the Work of C. G. Jung. By Aniela Jaffe. Hodder and Stoughton. 186 pp., with notes and biblography. This is not a book to read with a background noise of television dialogue, but is one to be concentrated upon in a quiet library setting. Jung’s long-time secretary has carefully researched his many volumes to give a distillate of the Master’s meditation on the meaning of existence. This is Jung at his most speculative and philosophical, and although his compiler has done yeoman service in her research, the long, logical analyses joined by metaphysical acts of faith, still require a great deal of mental effort to pursue. Jung as a psychiatrist considered that a psychoneurosis must be ultimately understood as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning: “About a third of my cases are suffering . . . from the senselessness and uselessness of their lives ... a sense of religious emptiness.” To move into the amalgamation of the mind and soul, man must use the images and ideas within the unconscious which is in large part inherited from the archetypical patterns of thinking right back to the dawn of history. To penetrate into this sphere, this way to religious experience being a hazardous one, Jung advises the use of purposeless, unrestrained fantasy activity. Thus, by a partial collapse of the self, which he compares with the illness of schizophrenia, a journey is taken into the interior vaults of the psyche and this, “like schizophrenia, can be a natural way of healing our appalling state of alienation called normality.” The meaning of life itself Jung then sees as the realisation of the self. This individuation is far more difficult to find than making a landing on Mars, says the author. It leads, however, to an interweaving of conscious and unconscious, profane and sacred reality, as an integral part of the experience of wholeness and a reconciliation of opposites. Always this ambivalence is the basis of Jung’s thinking and when the positive and negative poles are completely reconciled, then it corresponds to a religious experience of the Holy Ghost Jung, the son of a clergyman who went to pieces because of unresolved problems of faith, himself had a direct experience of the evil and daemoniac as an overwhelming reality at the age of twelve. This could in clinical terms be seen as a psychosis in adolescence and his later pain-wracked travels into his own depths of the unconscious after his breaking with Freud, can similarly be interpreted. Nevertheless, from his journeys he returned to heal’ many patients with his conviction that man had within himself the living God and, by fully comprehending himself, can cope with feelings of emptiness and despair. Much of Jung’s insights can be seen as highly topical in the arid world our artists describe and our politicians Chores and joys of teaching Chalk Dust and Chewing Gum. By Freda Bream. Collins. 241 pp. A considerable number of the teachers in our New Zealand secondary schools are married women who have returned to teaching when their families become old enough to make this practicable. Freda Bream is not exactly one of these. She had taken her arts degree and attended Training College before her marriage but had carefully avoided any actual teaching until, twenty years after her training, she posted a casual application for a teaching job. The application brought a lightning response from the hardpressed head of a city school and within two days she found herself in front of a class. “Chalk Dust and Chewing Gum” is the story of Mrs Bream’s first year at this school and its outstanding merit is that it gives such a complete picture of the joys and frustrations of the teaching profession. The author has avoided the temptation (to which many writers of such books succumb) of concentrating almost exclusively on the outrageous behaviour of the worst pupils. True this aspect is not entirely absent and the tales of the Machiavellian planning of 4 Ag. or the cheerful unscrupulousness of her own form H. 3 C. provide some amusing reading; though one suspects amusement was not the dominant emotion of the teacher at the time. Mrs Bream holds such episodes in balance with many of the other aspects of teaching. The stimulating discussions in the staff-room on such subjects as caning; the joys of the occasional interested and diligent pupil, the worry about the children’s home life, the instinctive terror of the inspectors’ visit, the constant tricks employed to keep the class interested; Mrs Bream records all these with an easy style, a humour and a warmth so that the book cannot fail to appeal. Past and present teachers will be struck by its truth, other readers will, one hopes, be made more aware of what this important job involves, and all can be stye of entertaining and thought-provoking reading.

buoy up with smiling optimism. However, such a voyage of spiritual discovery can only be undertaken by a few philosophers with the majority of people having to accept the explorations second-hand, or looking for a shadow facsimile by the use of chemical distortion. This book is a short concentrated account, and understanding its message shows why Jung was fascinated by mind-expanding drugs but was able to reject their use in favour of his extraordinary mental activity. PERIODICAL Landfall 95 (Volume 24 No. 3). Edited by Robin Dudding. Caxton Press. 120 pp., 5 plates. Three excellent short stories dominate this issue, none of them by writers with a reputation for prose fiction. A new contributor to Landfall, Witi Ihimaera, has produced a 20-page elegaic story about the response of a Maori family to the death of their father; it is a most remarkable achievement for a young writer, and may well be unique in our literature for the manner in which it treats a young Maori’s difficulties in communication through the ethnic barrier in conjunction with his sense of inadequacy before the new experience of a death in his family. Mr Ihimaera uses stylistic devices reminiscent of the “naive” artists, and his use of natural imagery for symbolism and irony has an audacious simplicity like the early poems of Hone Tuwhare. Ruth Dallas’s “The Visitor” begins by evoking a situation similar to that of many of her poems, but unexpectedly diverges out into the examination of an old woman’s personal dilemma. The story’s main appeal, however, lies not in its development so much as in its depiction of familiar detail. “Royal Occasion,” by Michael Beveridge (whose interview with Sargeson was a feature of the last two issues), works through the cunning juxtaposition of two kinds of stereotyped existence; although Mr Beveridge’s story appears to have an uncertain tempo, it is interesting for its use of colloquial language and for its sympathy with plebeian values. Landfall 95 also contains a radio play by Peter Bland, criticism of Janet Frame by Dr Lawrence Jones, correspondence in reply to lan Wedde’s article on the Middle East, and the usual assortment of poems, reviews and illustrations. VERSE 73 Man to Be. By Rewi Alley. Printed at the Caxton Press. 99 pp. Rewi Alley’s latest volume of outspoken comment on the East takes as its central theme the emergence of a new character as the dominant type of Asian youth. As propaganda, this volume should be popular with those readers who sympathise with Mr Alley’s denunciation of the effects of capitalism and imperialism; as social criticism, many of his provocative assertions are to some degree defensible. As poetry, however, much of this book is of a very low quality indeed, and one cannot help but wonder why the author insists on arranging in crude verse form what could make a reasonably effective tract.