The Symbolic Life

For the first time in paperback, the authoritative edition of Jung’s miscellaneous collected writings The Symbolic Life gathers some 160 of Jung’s writings that span sixty years and reflect his inquiring mind, numerous interests, and wide circle of professional and personal acquaintance. These writings include three longer works, “The Symbolic Life,” “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams,” and “The Tavistock Lectures”; a number of previously overlooked reviews, reports, and articles from the early years of Jung’s career; several finished or virtually finished manuscripts that weren’t published in his lifetime, including a 1901 report on Freud’s On Dreams; and works Jung wrote after retiring from active medical practice. The other pieces collected here include forewords to books by colleagues and pupils, replies to journalists’ questions, encyclopedia articles, and letters on technical subjects.

Originally planned as a brief final volume in the Collected Works, The Symbolic Life has become the most ample volume in the edition, and one of unusual interest. It contains some 160 items spanning sixty years; they include forewords, replies to questionnaires, encyclopedia articles, occasional addresses, and letters on technical subjects. Collection of this material relied on three chief circumstances. After Jung returned from active medical practice, he gave more of his time to writing, and some sixty papers as well as books were written after 1950. Second, recent research has brought to light a number of reviews, reports and articles from the early years of Jung's career. Finally, Jung's files yielded several finished or virtually finished papers that survived in manuscript. Volume 18 includes three longer works: 'The Tavistock Lectures' (1936); 'Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams' (1961); and 'The Symbolic Life', the transcript of a seminar given in London in 1939.

In Religious but Not Religious, Jungian analyst Jason E. Smith explores the idea, expressed by C.G. Jung, that the religious sense is a natural and vital function of the human psyche. We suffer from its lack. The symbolic forms of religion mediate unconscious and ineffable experiences to the field of consciousness that infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. That is why we cannot be indifferent toward the decline of traditional religious observance so widely discussed today. The great religions house the accumulated spiritual wisdom of humankind, and their loss would be catastrophic to the human soul. As human beings, we hunger for spiritual experience. To be “spiritual but not religious” is one possible response, but it often doesn’t go far enough. All too easily it can become a kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, which lacks the capacity to effect the kind of growth and transformation that is the true goal of all the religious traditions. Smith argues that we need to be “religious but not religious.” We need an approach to religion that recognizes the essential importance of the individual spiritual adventure while also affirming the value of collective religious tradition. He articulates an understanding of religion as a participation in the symbolic life as opposed to a mere content of belief. By recovering our personal sensitivity for symbolic experience together with a symbolic understanding of religion, we facilitate a profound encounter with life and with the human condition through which one may be tested, tried, and transformed.

As a current record of all of C. G. Jung's publications in German and in English, this volume will replace the general bibliography published in 1979 as Volume 19 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung. In the form of a checklist, this new volume records through 1990 the initial publication of each original work by Jung, each translation into English, and all significant new editions, including paperbacks and publications in periodicals. The contents of the respective volumes of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung and the Gesammelte Werke (published in Switzerland) are listed in parallel to show the interrelation of the two editions. Jung's seminars are dealt with in detail. Where possible, information is provided about the origin of works that were first conceived as lectures. There are indexes of all publications, personal names, organizations and societies, and periodicals.

Wrestling with the Angel is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspective. It argues for the enabling function of formal and symbolic constraints in sustaining desire as a source of creativity, innovation, and social change. The book begins by calling for a richer understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of the symbolic and the resources it might offer for an examination of the social link and the political sphere. The symbolic is a crucial dimension of social coexistence but cannot be reduced to the social norms, rules, and practices with which it is so often collapsed. As a dimension of human life that is introduced by language—and thus inescapably "other" with respect to the laws of nature—the symbolic is an undeniable fact of human existence. Yet the same cannot be said of the forms and practices that represent and sustain it. In designating these laws, structures, and practices as "fictions," Jacques Lacan makes clear that the symbolic is a dimension of social life that has to be created and maintained and that can also be displaced, eradicated, or rendered dysfunctional. The symbolic fictions that structure and support the social tie are therefore historicizable, emerging at specific times and in particular contexts and losing their efficacy when circumstances change. They are also fragile and ephemeral, needing to be renewed and reinvented if they are not to become outmoded or ridiculous. Therefore the aim of this study is not to call for a return to traditional symbolic laws but to reflect on the relationship between the symbolic in its most elementary or structural form and the function of constraints and limits. McNulty analyzes examples of "experimental" (as opposed to "normative") articulations of the symbolic and their creative use of formal limits and constraints not as mere prohibitions or rules but as "enabling constraints" that favor the exercise of freedom. The first part examines practices that conceive of subjective freedom as enabled by the struggle with constraints or limits, from the transference that structures the "minimal social link" of psychoanalysis to constrained relationships between two or more people in the context of political and social movements. Examples discussed range from the spiritual practices and social legacies of Moses, Jesus, and Teresa of Avila to the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière. The second part is devoted to legal and political debates surrounding the function of the written law. It isolates the law's function as a symbolic limit or constraint as distinct from its content and representational character. The analysis draws on Mosaic law traditions, the political theology of Paul, and twentieth-century treatments of written law in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Legendre, and Alain Badiou. In conclusion, the study considers the relationship between will and constraint in Kant's aesthetic philosophy and in the experimental literary works of the collective Oulipo.

"From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, bodily fluids or "humors" - whether blood, semen, or phlegm - obsessed the educated and ignorant alike. These "elixirs" were believed to possess magical powers guaranteeing long life, sexual potency, intellectual insight (particularly in women), and even holiness." "Piero Camporesi, a specialist in popular culture from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, tells this fascinating story with an abundance of examples, still of great relevance to those of us who drink "cordials" for revitalizing the heart, take potions for sexual vigor, and believe that a ruddy complexion is a sign of health. This is also a proto-feminist story, for women's purified body, with its menstrual discharge, endows her with greater intelligence - a paradoxical but revolutionary conclusion in an era of misogyny."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved