Anxiety and the Postmodern Condition

Turbulent Times, Creative Minds Edited: Erel Shalit and Murray Stein This reviewer of  Turbulent Times, Creative Minds  was introduced to the work of Erich Neumann decades ago by his close friend, Gerhard Adler, who thought highly of him.  In complete contrast, Michael Fordham was critical of Neumann’s thinking on the child and told this reviewer he doubted that Neumann had ever encountered an  actual  child – thereby enacting an actual experience of the opposites. In addition, the profound Jung thinker, Wolfgang Giegerich, has also written critically on Neumann.  In order to experience Neumann’s thinking at first-hand, this reviewer participated in the 2015 conference held at Kibbutz Shefayim to mark the publication of the correspondence between Jung and Neumann edited by Martin Liebscher. The current skillfully edited book arising from that conference is an  homage  to the exceptional personal and professional relationship betw...

In  The Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey , I mention five pathologies that I relate to the idea of the Archetypal Adult. In this brief presentation I mention an additional one, which Jung speaks about – imitation. In the Red Book he writes, “The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship.” In  Two Essays in Analytical Psychology  he writes, "The human being has one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility from the collective point of view, is immeasurably detrimental from the standpoint of individuality; the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology can never dispense with imitation, for without it the organization of the masses, that of the state and of society, is quite simply impossible. Society is organized, indeed, less by law than by the propensity to imitation, implying equally suggestibility, suggestion, and moral contagion."              Imitation is a sh...

Jung`s Red Book For Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions by Murray Stein (Editor), Thomas Arzt (Editor)   The essays in this volume are geared to the recognition that the posthumous publication of The Red Book: Liber Novus by C. G. Jung in 2009 was a meaningful gift to our contemporary world. Similar to the volatile times Jung confronted with highly turbulent and uncertain conditions of world affairs that found himself in when he created this work a century ago, we today too are threaten any sense of coherent meaning, personally and collectively. The Red Book promises to become an epochal opus for the 21st century in that it offers  us guidance for finding soul under postmodern conditions. This is the first volume of a three-volume series set up on a global and multicultural level and compiling essays from distinguished Jungian analysts and scholars.   Contributions by:   Murray Stein: Introduction Thomas Arzt: “The Way o...

In these late essays, Murray Stein circles around familiar Jungian themes such as synchronicity, individuation, archetypal image and symbol with a view to bringing these ideas into today’s largely globalized cultural space. These are reflections for our time, drawing importantly on the works of C.G. Jung, Erich Neumann, Wolfgang Pauli and a wide range of contemporary Jungian psychoanalytic wri ters. The general thesis is that all of humanity is connected – to one another, to nature and to the cosmos – and no human being should be left out of the picture of postmodern consciousness. Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Outside Inside and All Around Chapter 2 – Synchronizing Time and Eternity: A Matter of Practice Chapter 3 – Music for a Later Age: Wolfgang Pauli’s “Piano Lesson” Chapter 4 – A Lecture for the End of Time Chapter 5 – “The Problem of Evil” Chapter 6 – On Psyche’s Creativity Chapter 7 – At the Brink of Transformation Chapter 8 – Failure in the Crucible of Ind...

Haaretz  journalist Ofer Aderet reported the following on December 9, 2012: “A rare letter written by Franz Kafka 95 years ago has been purchased by the German Archive of Literature, at a public auction held this weekend. This letter was apparently part of the bequest of Kafka's friend Max Brod. A court recently ruled that this collection of manuscripts should be transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem, as Brod had bequeathed in his will.” “The sale took place last Friday at the Kaupp auction house in Sulzburg, Germany, with the German archive managing to raise the required 96,000 Euros from private donors, wishing to remain anonymous. The four-page letter was written by Kafka to his friend on December 4, 1917, in the Czech town in which he was residing with his sister Ottla while recuperating from tuberculosis. In the letter, Kafka describes his fear of the mice lurking in his apartment, admitting that his phobia is irrational, and that psychoanalysts sh...