Newsletter 2011

Psyche and the City: A Soul’s Guide to the Modern Metropolis

Edited by Thomas Singer

New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2010, 417 pp.

The essays in Psyche and the City: A Soul’s Guide to the Modern Metropolis lead us to eighteen international cities through historical passages, urban landscapes and mythical reflections, all leavened by accounts of daily life. This extensive journey takes us, in reverse alphabetical order, from Zürich, the heartland of the Jungian universe, to Sydney, Shanghai, Sao Paolo, Moscow, Mexico City, Kyoto, Jerusalem, Capetown, and Cairo, including old world capitals like London and Paris. We are offered a first-class tour by analysts living and practicing in their respective cities. This is an eye-opening exploration of the anima mundi not in abstract form but as lived daily experience.

While each city has its unique charms as well as its “back wards,” it is impossible to do justice to all so I have chosen three essays that present a diverse sampling.

Jungian analyst Joerg Rasche begins with a bittersweet story about Moses Mendelssohn that takes us back to 1742. As a young man, Mendelssohn could not enter Berlin by the Brandenburg Gate but had to seek admission through the Oranienburg Gate, restricted to Jews. He gained access by cleverly saying he was “living out of pocket.” Many years later the future philosopher of the Enlightenment told his host, King Frederick the Great, that it was “easier to see the king as a juggler than as a philosopher.”

Rasche’s essay “Arrival in Berlin” addresses the horrors of the Holocaust as well as life behind the Wall during Cold War days. He himself came to Berlin in 1970 as part of the generation seeking to remake the world.

A photo of American Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial, a field of thousands of stone blocks, accompanies his text. (Rasche informs us that Eisenman was the son-in-law of San Francisco analyst Joseph Henderson.) Today ancient churches and venerable museums stand alongside contemporary art works, illustrating the overlapping traces of history. The opera house where Daniel Barenboim is the conductor stands next to the square where Jewish books were burned in 1933.

Sabina Spielrein lived in Berlin from 1911 until 1914. Rasche reminds us of her significant passage between Jung and Freud and her violent murder by Nazis after she returned to Russia in 1943. He reports that Jung felt the menace in the city when he visited in 1937 after writing his essay on Wotan. Erich Neumann, Gerhard Adler, James and Hilde Kirsch, and Ernst Bernhard, who later analyzed Federico Fellini, lived there before they took flight.

As he gazes out over the city from the revolving restaurant inside the TV Tower that once stood as a monument to the Soviet presence there, Rasche remarks that Berlin has now become a beacon to creative young people. In fact the city has become the second largest tango centre in the world after Buenos Aires!

Bangalore is observed by analyst Kusum Dhar Prabhu in her essay “Whispers in a Bull’s Ear: The Natural Soul of Bangalore.” Many may know of the Electronic City as the heart of the IT industry that has made this city of almost six million a large part of the engine of modern India. However, the author reminds us that there is still an ancient mythic core to the city also called Bangaluru. This essay addresses some of the conflicts that arise when globalization comes to the Third World.

Among the mythic stories. we are told of the bull Nandi and his rider, the God Shiva. People still stop at the numerous temples dedicated to them to confess their troubles in Nandi’s ear.

Prabhu encounters local people like Muslim rickshaw drivers who feel that their founding fathers have been neglected in local

politics. One of India’s finest gardens, Lal Bagh, was created by an 18th century enlightened Muslim leader, Tipu Sultan, whose legacy seems to have been forgotten. The Hindu nationalist party (BJP) rules in Karnataka state at present. Prabhu also informs us of race riots and traffic jams. These troubles are somewhat offset by the Bangalore motto: “solpa adjust madi” –“please adjust a little.” This is the “secret of the city’s gentle mixture of creativity and conflict.”

New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans comprise the American section of this book. (Montreal also gets a nod from local analyst and new President-Elect of the IAAP, Thomas Kelly.)

In “The One and Many Souls of New York City” Beverley Zabriskie presents us with a travelogue that takes us from the Bronx to the Broad Way, from subway to skyscraper, from Walt Whitman to Count Basie. From the corner of East 89^th and Fifth Avenue, she follows the sweep of the local mascot, a hawk named Pale Male, as it soars above the traffic bustling below: “The mix of residents, tourists, children and the recovering who are ready, willing and able epitomizes the self-sufficiency and interdependence essential for being in New York. (p. 126)”

One of the three essays that conclude this volume pays tribute to Jane Jacobs, the “Patron Saint of Cities.” Jacobs stood up to the “urban renewal” projects that would have modernized Lower Manhattan in the 1950’s by razing most of Greenwich Village and putting in a four-lane highway. Author Craig Stephenson recognizes her as a modern-day Themis, a woman who fought for “right order.” Her view of economics and urban development urged population density, diversity and a more organic process. “Hope resides … in the natural creativity and ingenuity of citizens, in community and social diversity – in the Eros and the Otherness engendered by cities.” (p. 393)

In his Afterword, the book’s editor Thomas Singer writes affectionately about his hometown of Saint Louis. This chapter presents two sculptures from his city. One portrays the baseball legend Stan Musial giving an autograph to a young fan; the other is the famous Gateway to the West. Singer writes: “Eeero Saarinen’s masterpiece joins the soaring spirit of the masculine with the supple curve of the grounded feminine in a coniunctio, symbolizing the Self of St. Louis.” The arch … “is soaring and circular at the same time; it is inspiring and embracing, aspiring, and containing – and, at their best, and that is what we would like all our cities to be.” (p. 411)

The turtle was chosen to represent the spirit of this book; its likeness is shown on the back cover along with a gentleman with a top hat and cane, walking with the turtle on a leash. Legend has it that 19^th century Parisian flaneurs, perhaps inspired by Beaudelaire, used to stroll the arcades and boulevards of Paris in this manner. Italian analyst Luigi Zoja writes that these detached and aimless wanderers “struggled with the ego’s hubris so they could reconnoiter those uncharted twists and turns of the crowd, the mass, or the soul of the city, what we might call today the city’s unconscious.” (p. 400)

It is disturbing that sales of this book have been so weak at the several events at which copies were available. Is the Jungian public so uninterested in global affairs? Are we really so ethnocentric? Does the polis have so little effect in our lives?

Personally I am curious to know if there will be a sequel, including such cities as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Rome, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and North American cities like Chicago, Boston and Vancouver. I am willing to allow “my boot heels to be wandering,” even if only, for now, on the pages of such a spell-binding book.

–Murray Shugar