Newsletter 2009

An American Jungian:

In Honor of Edward F. Edinger

Edited by George R. Elder and Dianne D. Cordic

Toronto: Inner City Books, 2009, 285 pp.

Daryl Sharp’s Inner City Books has, for many years, seen fit to pay tribute to leading lights in the Jungian world. Marie-Louise von Franz has been the beneficiary of this treatment and now it is the turn of Edward Edinger, who had fourteen books published by this Toronto publishing house.

Edinger (1922-1998) was born in Indiana and lived the latter part of his life in California. His prolific output – his articles appeared in several Jungian journals and some of his books were published by Chiron Publications – has touched on esoteric subjects like alchemy and has addressed such classic subjects as the ancient Greek myths and philosophy, as well as the Biblical canon. His literary scholarship includes interpretations of Shakespeare, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job. His great respect for Ralph Waldo Emerson is illustrated in a featured essay in this book (“Naturalist of the Soul”). His analysis of Goethe’s Faust is a linchpin to this book and to his analysis of Jung’s vast contribution to western culture. Furthermore he has explicated Jung as perhaps no one other than von Franz has done. Jung’s most complex writings – Aion, Answer to Job and Mysterium Coniunctionis – are all given considerable attention by the sharp, analytic mind of Edinger, whose self-appointed task was, according to his wife Dianne Cordic, co-editor of this book, “… to articulate the great man’s work.”

This collection of essays, interviews and tributes offers a vivid sampling of Edinger’s interpretation of the most important features of Jung’s psychology:

1. The collective unconscious or objective psyche is a reality and one that carries a tremendous force.

2. Only inner experience of the collective unconscious – numinous experiences – can lead us to live authentic lives. Traditional religions and their containing myths and morality that sustained our Western civilization for almost two millennia no longer hold.

3. The legend of Faust, perhaps based on the life of a real individual who lived about five hundred years ago, touched Jung’s life deeply and is also emblematic of a phenomenon that continues to affect us today. Citing the sixteenth century alchemist Paracelsus, Edinger claims that at that time, “the god-image fell out of heaven into the human psyche.” (p.190)

An early chapter of this book provides concise and clear definitions and a road map to Jungian thought. “Jung Distilled,” brewed perhaps much like Sharp’s current volumes, “Jung Uncorked: Rare Vintages from the Cellar of Archetypal Psychology,” describes psychological types, synchronicity, and the structure of the psyche. But mostly it serves to define archetypes – “… inherent pattern(s) of psychic function common to all human beings ”– and how these forces manifest in religious and mythological symbols, as well as dreams and delusions. Here Edinger makes a critical link between the delusions of schizophrenics and religious imagery; as the prophet and religious saviour are common themes in all religions, they are also delusional among those whose egos cannot contain the potent energy therein.

What strikes this reviewer in light of the upcoming visit of Ted Fillery and his chosen subject of “Visionaries, Mystics and Madness” are the figures that appealed so strongly to both Jung and Edinger. Both were enthralled with Nietzsche and Goethe’s Faust. Jung was at first wary, even terrified, of reading Nietzsche, held back by “a secret fear that I might perhaps be like him.” (p.159)From 1934-39 Jung conducted a seminar on Zarathustra, in which he delved into the madness that consumed the German philosopher, who was caught up in an identification with the god-like figure. Edinger concludes that Nietzsche was a pioneer in depth psychology for having such an unmediated encounter with the collective unconscious. Somewhat hyperbolically he writes that “Nietzsche is a heroic martyr for the cause of emerging depth psychology.” (p.164) He calls him “the first modern man.” (p.165)

Edinger had a strong interest in Emerson and Lincoln, great Americans who are described at some length in the middle section of this book called “Soul Mates.” He describes predecessors like Paracelsus, Emerson, and Nietzsche as part of a lineage that led to Jung – psychologically-minded thinkers who described a phenomenon that is only now coming to fruition: the creation of the god-image in man and not in some remote transcendent sphere. Paracelsus called this the “lower heaven.” Edinger sees it as the birth of the Antichrist, a good and necessary thing.

Edinger describes the sixteenth century as a time when a real John Faustus may have lived. His contemporaries would have included such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci, Paracelsus, Martin Luther, Columbus, Copernicus, and Machiavelli. To Jung, and to Edinger as well, this time was marked by a shift in focus from the transcendent to the material world, bringing with it a rapid increase in knowledge and consciousness, and a focus on man as the centre of the universe. It was “a kind of watershed in the evolution of the Western psyche, in what might be called the collective individuation process of Western humanity.” (p.126) Many traditionalists saw this as a deal with the Devil. The Faust legend symbolized that moment.

Edinger claims that it took several centuries before the impact of these revolutionary times was finally felt. The musings of nineteenth-century poets and philosophers, increasingly aware but without the moorings of transpersonal experience, ultimately led to Jung and a new myth for the twentieth century. Jung’s encounter with the unconscious between 1913 and 1918 brought him face-to-face with his demons and gave him the god-image he could work with. Having lost his religious myth, “(an) activated God-image appears as a pair of opposites when it first comes into human experience. (p. 190) “The discovery of those images that unite the opposites … constitutes the process of individuation.” (p. 191)

This book contains three interviews by colleagues. Although somewhat repetitive, they do underline Edinger’s exuberant admiration of the “great man” that he believes Jung was, and the hope that his work would result in a search for greater consciousness on the part of mankind. However, like Jung and von Franz near the end of their lives, Edinger took a rather bleak view of the world as he grew older. Only the raising of the consciousness of more individuals, he believed, could bring mankind back from the brink of disaster.

In the early 1980’s, there were two groups here in town that listened to a set of audiotape lectures and companion texts published by the Centrepoint Educational Center. We are told in a footnote in this book that Edward Edinger was involved in the creation of the first in that series. His intention to publicize Jung’s work was instrumental in educating a number of us in basic Jungian concepts back then.

A sweet grace note brings this tribute to a conclusion; the memorial service for Edward Edinger is transcribed along with testimonies from friends, family and colleagues. He is praised for his dedication to the cause of analytical psychology, his intensity, grace, intelligence, and above all, his passion. Whether Edinger was correct in his appraisal of Jung as an “epochal” figure or not, it is certain that he remains, through his own collected works, an educator par excellence.

–Murray Shugar