The word plague derives from the Latin plangere, “to strike the breast as if in lamentation.” The novel coronavirus has visited loss, fear and hardship on many. Nature in her destructive mode can radically disrupt cultural creations and norms and show us how fragile they – and we — are.
We may also find new sources of sustenance within. Dreams, bodywork, and the imaginal realm can help us access a new attitude: a reorientation of purpose, meaning, and consciousness.
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.
C.G. Jung, CW 18, Para. 1400.
Dream
“The landscape is a lush, deep forest. In the foreground is what appears to be a bush, a brightly colored bush that looks like something out of science fiction as it is unique to the shrubbery around it. In fact, the neon-colored blossoms on the shrub are the club-shaped viral spike peplomers of a virus and I immediately know this ‘bush’ to be an image of a coronavirus. A female deer is peacefully munching on these ‘blossoms’ one by one. I take the image of the deer eating the blossoms of the virus bush to represent how the wonders of the natural world can be an antidote to the pandemics of our time.”
Appreciate you guys tackling the topic.
A side thread included the forty years of wandering and some dread about the length of that time. And yet….worth looking at all the quaternities, fours and forties that have a correspondence to Quarentine: (etymology) mid 17th century: from Italian quarantina ‘forty days’, from quaranta ‘forty’.
I am not an anylist, but I was an analysan for 8 years. This can help me continue to learn.
I found these discussions both powerful and replete with wisdom.
The collective dream was symbolic and also useful as a meditational and collective image to ‘take back’ power from the fear of the virus, and bombardment of constant negative media images (with the hidden ‘we’re all going to die’ themes (Which can be used negatively or positively by political and business leaders).
Thank you…
What an outstanding interview – Thank you!!!
Very enlightening!!!!
Dr. Thomas Arzt, Germany, with Murray Stein
Editor of the series “Jung’s Red Book for
Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern
Conditions”
Thank you for this pointer and reality check! I will promote it on Archetype in Action.
All boxes of thinking and doing have to be thrown away. This is the time to celebrate creative thinking and doing.
For example when out walking I saw neighbours sitting on their driveways on opposite sides of the street having a conversation across the road. I just had a virtual walk/talk with new friends. I hope you share these thoughts and new ideas
You’ve offered wonderful ideas that affirm how resilient we all can be.
~ Joseph
I really appreciated this episode. I particularly liked the Slavic myth. When the subject chose to pass and thereby protect his village. It made me think of this time during the pandemic, as a realization of the world as a “global village” becoming apparent. It truly brings into awareness & consciousness the fact that we are ONE WORLD and how we are mutually interconnected and interdependent. We have known about a ONE world since the first photo of earth from space but now know it in a very real way through the body .,,,an incorporation (corporealized)
Thank you
COVID-19, 20, from a Jungian perspective, suggests to me a synchronistic archetypal image emanating from the innermost depth of the human psyche, inviting a collective global response for humanity to reassess its ethical priorities for preservation of the planet and for each individual’s personal responsibility for “The Other.”