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Ann Casement's 1998 "The Qualitative Essay

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In the prologue to Jung's (1965) book, Memories, dreams, reflections, he states that life, to him, is like a plant that lives on its rhizome. The real life of the plant is not seen but hidden, rather, in the rhizome.

The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away -- an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Jung (1965) goes on to explain that his book about his life has been based on the rhizome of his life -- the interior happenings as opposed to the exciting events of his life -- like traveling -- because it is the rhizome of his life that has inspired all of his work. These interior happenings, it could be posited, is where man and God meet:

…the point where transpersonal energies flow into personal life, eternity as opposed to the temporal flux, incorruptibility, the inorganic united paradoxically with the organic, protective structures capable of bringing order out of chaos, the transformation of energy, the elixir of life -- all refer to the Self, the central source of life energy, the fountain of our being which is most simply described as God (Edinger 1992).

Jung believed that certain events in an individual's life, events that could be called mystical, are often of transformative...

The event with Narcissus when he sees his own image is just one of these types of transformative events (Schwartz-Salant 1986). The meaning it projects cannot be exhausted, according to Schwartz-Salant (1986) because it asks probably the greatest questions of identity of all time: "Who and what am I?" (1986). The dream Jung has where God smashes the cathedral also seems to be a transformative event in the life of Jung as it mentally challenges him to go against everything he was taught to believe and find his own meaning about God and himself in God as well as God in himself.
Religion -- or numinosum (Schwartz-Salant 1986) -- may inspire awe in a person, but it may also inspire fear -- or even terror (1986). "Being confronted with the power of the Self arouses just such emotions, which always and everywhere have been associated with religious experience" (1986). Entering into the third stage of life -- or individuation -- is where people can transform themselves and their ways of thinking -- as well as their lives, in general.

Sources used in this document:
References:

Casement, Ann. (1998). Post-Jungian today: key papers in contemporary analytical psychology. Routledge.

Dunne, Claire. (2002). Carl Jung: wounded healer of the soul. Continuum International Publishing Group.

Edinger, Edward. (1992). Ego and archetype. Shambhala.

Jung, Carl. (1965). Memories, dreams, reflections. Vintage Book Edition.
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