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Tales from the Island of Serendip
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As Dean says, "We have too much data, but not enough to make any decisions because we are uncertain about the contexts and networks into which we might integrate this information. Enabled by technology we become aliens, connected outside the state." And, just as often, "we're abducted by the same technology."

 

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Abduction, however, recognizes the futility of resistance even as it points to other possible freedoms. Colonization implies an on-going process with systematic limitations. Yet abduction involves the sense that things are happening behind our backs.

 

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The Search

 

"On my way to school, I stepped out of a mist and I knew I am. I am what I am. And then I thought, 'But what have I been before?' And then I found that I had been in a mist, not knowing to differentiate myself from things; I was just one thing among many things."Carl Jung, 1959

 

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The search is also, in a certain sense, about abduction, in the way that Jodi Dean refers to it. Not as literal abduction by sci fi aliens born of popular culture, but as a dark and terrifying aspect of the world we create, think we control, but do not understand. And it is this widening gap the alien walks through. For the alien is within us all.

 

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When I began this thread I thought to call it "Tales from the Island of Serendipity" little realizing how prescient this choice would prove to be. Insofar as I have been able, this has been an authentic journey with an unscheduled itinerary.

 

The research for given themes has persistently carried me into unknown waters, sometimes, as now, dark and inchoate. I feel no more at home here than anyone. Nor did Carl Jung.

 

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Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Carl Jung's most seminal work is also a "Red Book"! It has been called the most important book on psychology ever written. And yet until a facsimile of this hand-created work was finally produced in 2009, it had been seen and read by barely a handful of people.

 

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In this agonized study Jung strove to come to grips with the reality of the modern world. Not in it's glittering surfaces, but it's inward experiences. He fought to come to terms with the contemporary experience of inner fragmentation, which he felt was born of the loss of God in favor of the discoveries of science. Arguably, he and Freud brought psychology into being to heal the split in the modern psyche. A split not commonly experienced by people living in supposedly primitive societies. And where if an individual falls mentally ill, they are not stigmatised or ostracized as all too commonly experienced in Western society. Where indeed the entire community gathers round to nurture and protect it's own. Could we say the same?

 

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I am an artist but I work in mental health, and I do not think we can. And I think the reason is that we are terrified at what mental illness represents. Yet how much everyday does stress in our daily lives increase? How close does each of us come on any given day to that point when we can no longer maintain the mask of conformity Society - any Society - requires of us?

 

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Before looking at the wonders of Jung's Red Book, here by way of contrast and comparison are the astonishing works of Charles Steffen, who was studying drawing, art history, and photography at the Illinois Institute of Technology when he suffered a mental breakdown in 1950.

 

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