Seeing Life in the Round

I've just returned from a trip to the British Isles with members of a Jungian study group. While our main focus on this trip was British poetry and what we could garner about the individuals who wrote it, as well as the society at the time of the writing, some of us spent time on the side researching the history of our family names. Though we had not planned to do that, when the opportunity was at hand, curiosity about our ancestry grabbed most of us and drew us into the search.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung said, "Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present." He went on to speak of his Tower at Bollingen as being a place that was "as if one lived in many centuries simultaneously." And he talks of answering questions for his ancestors that their lives could not have answered. (p. 237)

Since we, unlike Jung, live a continent away from our ancestral origins, our recent trip seemed in many ways an opportunity to work on "harmonizing the historical family inherent within us." In our small group of seven individuals, we sought the harmony both individually and, as a group, culturally. In the course of our observations, study, and processing of the total experience, we found ourselves wrestling with a tension of opposites - a necessary part of the process of individuation. While we reveled in the beauty of the Lake District of England and read the idyllic poetry of the Romantic Age writers who drew inspiration there, we wrestled with grief over the animals slaughtered because of recent outbreaks of foot and mouth disease. The great literature of the British Isles is part of our cultural heritage. The disease and its wide-ranging economic effects are part of the ephemeral conditions of the present. We, nestled and nurtured in a cozy bed and breakfast in northern England, experienced powerful emotions as we read Robert Burns' "To a Mouse" and heard news of the latest herd to be slaughtered just down the road near a neighboring town.

Another day we visited ancient Rosslyn Chapel and pondered the mixture of pagan and Christian symbols carved into its stones. In Dublin we were startled by the mixture of young-new-lively and relics from the far past. While walking from our hotel to the "now happening" Temple Bar area, we stopped to examine plaques in the sidewalk with carvings of relics found there from the period of the Viking beginnings of the city. At Edinburgh Castle and Sir Walter Scott's home, we walked through rooms of weaponry from the past, but when entering Ireland and the United States, a member of our party had difficulty with the small souvenir and toy swords she had bought. Even in the British Library, the Magna Carta and Beatles lyrics were displayed in the same collection of rare manuscripts. Everywhere we were confronted with the tension of opposites.

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