Ukraine and Jung’s Red and Black Books: ‘Making the Unsayable Experiential’

Many of us feel disoriented because of the invasion of your country. My late husband Barry Ulanov's family comes from a small village near Kyiv; many of them were killed during the Holodomor of the 1930s, in World War II, and during the Soviet era. Our son Alexander worked in Kyiv and Donetsk from 2008 to 2015 and was present during the 2014 war, helping families evacuate from Donetsk and helping others find work. He is now sending aid and providing support. We think of your sister, brother, children, parents, grandparents, friends, communities, for whom everything was lost overnight, and who are experiencing maximum levels of psychic horror.

Please forgive me in advance for the offensive audacity of reaching out to you, who are suffering, from a place where there is electricity, running water, food, a bed, and silence, and where the constant, ever-present horror is absent.

I will offer you three parallels between Jung's experience of seeking the soul in The Red and Black Books, the images from which he created analytical psychology between 1913-1932, during the onset of World War I, and your experience in 2022, when the war in Ukraine erupted, bringing with it the existential threat of World War III.

I. Your Process of Individuation

The first parallel concerns the individuation process, which Jung formulated based on his experience of engaging with the unconscious and seeking his lost soul. He reminds us that consciousness is only a small part of the psyche, the larger part of which is an "unconscious fact, hard... as granite, immovable, inaccessible, yet ready at any moment to crash down upon us... The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are psychic epidemics. At any moment several million people may be struck by a new madness" (Jung 1928/1953/1966, para 302).

The invasion of Ukraine now is a psychic epidemic crashing down upon you, threatening the whole world behind your backs. And yet, amidst fear and determination, we also feel how the psyche, your psyche, my psyche, meets the force of our own individuation process. Jung writes: "When the psyche, as an objective fact, hard as granite and heavy as lead, confronts a person [sic] as an inner experience and addresses them [sic]... saying, 'It will be so, and thus it must be'" (ibid., para 303). Your own individuation process is happening to you right in the midst of the collective psychic epidemic of war unfolding across your country and threatening countries on your borders. In this cross moment, we feel both personal and collective upheavals happening to us and to everyone around us. The spirit of the depths is, at this moment, the spirit of the times.

But Jung, whose work changed our lives and to whom we owe our professions, taught us to work with the psyche we know, as well as the psyche of the "you" we do not know. Even though you are depleted of all your energy because of the suffering, you can draw on the reservoir of consciousness and register both the horrors of what is happening and the amazing flashes of gold. We draw on the knowledge of how to engage with the collective and not be buried in it. Just as Jung seeks and finds his soul, as The Red and Black Books describe to us, your soul's search may find you, and you too will come to know what lies beyond the psychic; as Philemon, the symbol of the Self, says, each of us will pray to our one God as a bridge through death (Jung 2009, p. 365).

This is a historical moment. Peace and war in confrontation. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy broadcasts directly to Russian President Putin, who instigated the invasion: "We are a peaceful nation. Stop your armies. If not, we will defend our land."

What to do? Ordinary life has been invaded. Many citizens have become soldiers, fighting day after day, night after night, ready to shoot, ready to dodge bullets, ready to push the enemy back from your cities. Many citizens have had to leave, torn away from everything dear and familiar – home comfort, a night's sleep – leaving behind everything except the clothes on their backs. Many citizens who had to stay suffer from the noise, the daily cacophony of bombs and sirens.

Thanks to your unwavering resilience, we can witness dictatorship undergoing its own disintegration, and democracy will develop in new forms.

We as analysts have something to offer. One parallel supports and teaches us. When Jung sought his lost soul, it crawled out of a dark corner of the earth. He looked into that place of the unconscious and at first found nothing: it was empty. Despite professional success and fame, home and children, inside he was empty. You must feel that nothingness, that emptiness, when the world around you is crumbling. Jung goaded his psyche by reading religious, esoteric, and mythopoetic materials and discovered that "something is living down there" (McGuire and Shamdasani 1925/1989/2012, p. 42). Then his unconscious erupted in dramatic affects, bizarre images, strange fantasies. He feared he was losing his mind – he was threatened by psychosis. You too must feel this in the midst of the chaos around you, or fear it will catch up with you as you seek other, safer territories for your children.

When World War I began, Jung saw the space between his own material and the eruption in the world. The collision of the personal and the collective expanded the space, and Jung could discern patterns of the human psyche. He did not fall into madness but observed what is applicable to all of us: he looked for patterns, thought of them as inherent in our human community, and tracked his own process.

What is this war doing to each of you living there? Corpses of war lie on the streets of shattered cities; a mass grave opens in a huge trench behind a gas station; fear that those we love who are fighting will be killed; the question of whether we have what it takes to keep going, to survive. You can track two processes happening simultaneously: the psychic epidemic with its collective patterns, and the individuation process, as you learn by heart, as well as from books, from the experience of madness, as well as common sense, from the living soul, despite the loss of meanings, allowing into consciousness all that you despised as evil that is now seeping the world with blood.

Although your personal process is depleted and numbed, it continues, and you can maintain a dialogue with it, even in the despair that, as unspeakable trauma, renders you mute. But if the shocking episode is experienced, taken inside, even trauma that defies words gets processed and transformed into an inner psychic event, rather than an external one that defines us from then on. We turn the unspeakable into experience, and this gives birth to images that convey meanings.

Such an eruption of primordial material presents us with two questions. A silent transformation begins. We create and find created the living symbol that holds in its secret aliveness the truth that cannot be explained, can only be lived. Jung repeats in The Red Book: "Our life is the truth we seek… We create the truth by living it" (Jung 2009, p. 299).

The two questions that arise lend meaning to the madness you enact, for example, when you drive a truck full of food, blankets, water bottles, even toys, into dangerous war zones for those trapped and displaced. Here are those two questions: What are we willing to die for? What are we willing to live for? The personal and the collective coincide, and something happens. Jung calls this the transcendent function. You suddenly get a new attitude, a new insight, a new relief, a living symbol, and It gets you.

II. The Personal and the Collective

The second parallel between Jung in 1913 and you in 2022 can be seen in the shared experience of the eruption of primordial material. Jung was just beginning to distinguish the living reality of the collective unconscious. The personification of Elijah, whom Jung experienced as "real," tells Jung that he is not his thoughts, that thoughts come, Jung does not invent them; thus he breaks Jung's identification of his "I" with his thinking and opens him to the objectivity of psychic reality (Jung 2009, p. 249; Jung 1963, p. 183).

Furthermore, Jung sees an indissoluble link between what people do (or do not do) and what happens (or does not happen) in their people. Community and individual life interpenetrate. Therefore, even what we suffer and do not resolve becomes a contribution to the life of the community and the nation; this tells us that our suffering, though real, does not break us. This gives us hope when we feel so helpless against bombs, bullets, and various shortages. Who knows?

What you are going through may help us process the sufferings that afflict us. The spirit of the times or the depths – it is something we all live in together. The water of your tears can water the drought in me and awaken it to life.

The main parallel related to the personal and the collective in Jung's fantasies of 1913 and now, in our experience of 2022, concerns their difference. It shows two phenomena: how the collective manifests, and how we deal with it. The collective unconscious appears to Jung in the form of hordes of the dead, crowding his fantasies and his children's dreams. He feels compelled to respond, and for three nights in a row writes the "Seven Sermons to the Dead." Jung feels compelled to answer the wailing of the dead but not to become their spokesperson, not to identify with them, to remain his own limited "I". The dead cannot rest, having died, because they did not find what was alive in life. They suffer from an unlived life. They neglected their individuation. Eventually, Jung offers them his work of developing analytical psychology in response to their unanswered questions: how to be a person? Tell us about God (Jung 2009, pp. 346-354; Jung 1963, pp. 190-192).

Your times now in Ukraine, like Jung's times, represent the collective unconscious through an image, but your image, I suspect, is different. For Jung, it was hordes of the dead with their questions. I suspect your image is Erasure. The collective unconscious in its form of psychic epidemic appears to us as erasure. On February 24, 2022, Putin, the president of russia, justified the invasion of Ukraine by claiming that you are not an independent country, never have been, and never will be; you belong to russia; you have no culture of your own; you are merely a part of russian culture. Like a bully on a schoolyard who sees what he wants and simply takes it because he can, he declares to the world that Ukraine is ours, and for twenty years Putin has been writing articles to legitimize his attempts.

Erasure is the refusal to see the otherness of the other. We erase its independent existence. The attack aimed at erasing Ukraine is acute and, foreseeing recognition, reminiscent of all other erasures happening in our world. Examples abound: wars for white supremacy over people of color; conquerors over indigenous people; the coercion of autocratic dictatorship over the right of every citizen to vote for their leaders. From the schoolyard, we remember that the most powerful reaction will be when all the children surround the bully, whose power complex disintegrates. Your struggle aims to surround the enemy who surrounds you, to declare that we defend our land, we rely on deep roots, expanding outward through our borders and inward through our culture.

The crucial difference between the personal and the collective unconscious lies in how we deal with each. Working, we can integrate significant parts of our personal unconscious into our identity and assimilate the surface layer of the shadow of our society. We cannot integrate the collective unconscious as part of our identity. It is too big, too massive. Its forces are impersonal, not personal, mass, not private.

Mania arises if we are invaded by and identify with unconscious collective archetypal symbols. As if we plug into a high-voltage power line we cannot turn off, which could explode. If we repress its force, it's like living with a hand grenade inside. President Putin strikes me as if he has crossed the line, as if his power-mania complex has, besides, a hole at the bottom. Through this hole, pure, undiluted, unadulterated archetypal energy fuels his identity as supposedly the one who has the same mission to compose the russian empire with expanded borders and sovereignty, as if he were a czar. This ambition plays out in his repeated threats to use chemical or nuclear weapons if he is not obeyed.

In The Red and Black Books, Jung shows that he does not fall into a state of identification with the fantasies of the collective unconscious, but rather engages with them. We personify them, dialogue with them, argue with them, say we don't understand, develop our own ego viewpoint, and receive from them disclosures of purpose and meaning.

We are trained as analysts to communicate with this voice of the collective unconscious, not to become it, not to let it possess us. The original material in each of us has its own patterns of communication. This is natural. It becomes pathological when we identify ourselves with an unconscious collective fantasy, and it replaces reality. Then we live in it, obsessed; it does not live in us. Then it rules us, and we use its power to rule others.

Jung engages with the primordial fantasies of the collective unconscious, recording them in detail, delineating their images, and translating them into the concepts of his structure of the psyche.

Engagement with collective unconscious forces instead of identification with them is the crucial differentiating boundary between contact with the core roots of the psyche, depicted in primordial images, and the pathological replacement of reality by these images. The vortex of war stimulates enormous affects and rampant images of cruelty, blood, destruction of beauty, evil itself, and sparks of unthinkable kindness from one person to another, that synchrony that saved your life that day from complete immersion in chaos.

In the period of devastation of your beautiful country, to engage with the psychic epidemic that has crashed down upon you, you can develop a ritual of gratitude, honoring the god you have lost. The smell of your baby's skin, the softness of your beloved's lips can be vital images of life amidst the death surrounding us, images that keep you on this side of the boundary between aliveness and deadness. Things you rejected in religion unexpectedly come to your lips, styles of philosophical thinking, alchemical images of nigredo and putrefactio, fragments of poetry, spontaneous prayers to a hidden but surprisingly close god – these are things that simply happen to you. You possess the capacity for human symbolic creativity, which imparts the power of aliveness even amidst the evil of destructiveness (1928/1953 paras 292, 490).

Jung defined his approach to evil in his struggle to find his place as a person between the gods and demons, between our finite being and the seeming infinity of the unconscious: "I fight for the freedom and life of the human being," says Jung (1913-1932 v. 6, p. 216). This does not deify the person: "Not the person, but the primordial core of the person." (ibid., v.6, p. 273). We cannot integrate evil and destructiveness. We can, in my view, rely on the blessing of our finite life and the symbols that radiate its life force as a source of resilience (Ulanov 2007, pp. 135-139).

Jung offers this insight: when we grow, good and evil mysteriously step along together. When we stop growing, they part in hostile rivalry (1913-1932 v. 6, p. 219; Jung 2008, pp. 217-218). Do they reconcile? I don’t know, says Jung; it happens that in the darkness behind our backs they step along together, not merging, not canceling each other out, existing distinctly in that psychoid layer of the psyche that defies representation.

Acknowledgment of this mysterious conjunction of evil and good creates space for our anger at this war and at the flagrant crimes being committed against civilians, exceeding the rules of war. Here we find a place for the hatred that seizes us toward the one who seeks to erase our very existence. I believe that giving hatred a place means holding that destructive force in consciousness (Ulanov 2017, pp. 83-84; Ulanov 2008/2014, pp. 171-175). This requires raw strength, not to act out sadistically against the enemy, becoming a monster in turn, but to fight the monster attacking us. And not to act out against ourselves for being so depleted, so frightened. Nor do we repress the terrible energy of hatred.

We cannot assimilate hatred; it feeds on the archetypal force of destructiveness, which is what it is, not reducible to social construction at its source, though social construction contributes its poison. We recognize this and engage with it, neither identifying with it nor ignoring our limits. Hatred has its place in us but does not define us. We find rituals – burying the dead, giving thanks for our lives, developing war strategies, enforcing rest periods to return later to the fight. I suggest that hatred is the first protest – from the gut, the bowels, the throat screaming in rage – the first protest against erasure, the assertion of will, subjectivity, the assertion that I, we exist.

The act of holding hatred in consciousness sets in motion what can transform it and shape ways of engaging with it. Like underground water, we can irrigate the spirit around us so that each can recognize and personally shape the life force passing through them, lest it be lost to the world. Evil is the theft of this life and the deportation of people into nowhere.

III. Notes from the Feminine Position

The third parallel between Jung's Red and Black Books of 1913 and World War I and the present war against Ukraine in 2022 is the voice of the feminine, personified by Jung in the figure of Salome. She first appears in The Red Book as a murderess, insane, blind, "because she did not see the meaning of things" (Jung 1961/1963, p. 182).

She appears last as a sane, sighted woman who wants to give Jung her love. He draws back: "You would suffocate my freedom" (Jung 2009, p. 324; Jung 1913-1932/2020 v. 4, p. 242; v. 5, pp. 248, 251). He says: no. You live your life fully, and I will live mine likewise. Nevertheless, his feelings of inferiority and attitude toward the feminine did develop. He is devoted to Love itself. Above all, he valued life, then love as love of the psyche, and devotion to doing whatever is asked of him, paying the price, serving psychic reality. (Jung 2009, p. 356).

Highlighting the feminine as a source is dangerous, given how much harm the concept has caused to women and the feminine in men – abuse and discrimination that persist to this day. Feminism massively reiterates its truth in new forms, but much remains to be done.

The Black Books bring new original material. Salome, in particular, offers a source of heroism and the terrible suffering now occurring in Ukraine. The soul reproaches Jung: stop despising the feminine; stop thinking women are a burden you have to give to; see what they offer you (ibid., v. 7, p. 207).

Salome gains her sight when she and Jung acknowledge that she is part of his soul. Imagine! (ibid., v. 7, pp. 191-192; Jung 2009, p. 24 and n. 211). She argues against Jung continuing to ask her to explain, insisting that he see that she comes from elsewhere. We need precisely this kind of feminine position to anchor the reality of Ukraine's national identity in its own soul.

In The Red and Black Books, the soul consists of three parts: the serpent (the earthly essence of the person (Jung 2009, p. 247)); Salome; and the part called the soul. This trio constitutes, in these texts, the full completeness of the soul. Without the Salome part, unlike the other two parts, the soul in its fullness would be genuine neither in everyday life nor in the world as "anima mundi."

Salome is the matter of the soul, matter where "light manifests only as matter" (Jung 1913-1932/2020 v. 6, p. 282). Without her, we lose the sense of the essential. Loss of home, rape, torture, murder, deportation aim to destroy the reality of Ukraine. The struggle exhausts all involved and renders them mute. Who has time to grieve when we must plan an escape route? How to calm our children when bombs fall? We need the raw reality of the feminine to tenaciously hold onto the essence of what exists now.

Salome makes things real. Her nature is matter that exists on its own, fact, the reality of your current personal being and the being of your country. Reality is preserved under the rubble.

The importance of seeing this is underscored by what that part of the soul that is the soul says – that it can be lured by evil as a shining bridge to the endpoint when it does not believe enough in Jung (Jung 1913-1932/2020 v. 6, p. 286). Jung sees that he falls into destructiveness when he does not believe in the primordial core, the tiny grain of his human "I" that stands between gods and demons. The saving moment is to trust this hard, tiny grain of sand that continues to exist within us and connects us to all of reality – divine and terrible.

We are the space where heaven and hell meet, and the feminine meets what I suspect is the unruly masculine in Putin's power-mania. Real fantasies, real existing images meet real external events. The violation of the masculine occurs when we forget that both are real, the real image and the real events, that they should neither be merged nor subordinated to each other, that each has its genuine place. Madness and psychic epidemic flare up when archetypal fantasy replaces external reality. Such a mad replacement of reality by fantasy is my impression of Putin, that he is in the grip of unprocessed archetypal energy, since his "mission" is an attempt to replace existing countries with his own image of the ruler of the russian empire.

Jung has a misunderstanding with Salome when he repeatedly asks her, what is your secret, your meaning? And we can ask in the midst of war, what is the meaning of this chaos, this devastation of everything dear to us? Is there some unchanging truth?

Salome replies: I have no secret or meaning. I am matter, in fact, the miracle of matter, which is the opposite of God (Jung 1913-1932/2020 v. 5, p. 269). But explain, says Jung, again falling into the identification of thinking with consciousness (ibid., v.6, p. 287). Reading this, I thought of the "cosmic meaning" of consciousness for Jung. When looking at the Athi Plain in Nairobi, Africa, and "the giant herds of animals [that] moved forward like slow rivers," Jung suddenly realizes that they exist because he sees them. He finds his myth! "Man is the second creator of the world, who alone gives the world its objective existence… Without it, the world would continue to exist in the deepest night of non-being until its unknown end" (Jung 1961/1963, pp. 255-256).

You who fight in Ukraine must often feel that the "deepest night of non-being" has descended upon you. But you are conscious of it; its "cosmic meaning" is present in you. Remember, the text tells us that Salome is a "creature of non-being" who accompanies you in the darkness as a fact, what is, feeling, the matter from which everything that has essence is born (Jung 1913-1932/2020 v. 7, p. 192).

Salome brings into consciousness something we live, not know. It is "light that is not knowledge but fact" (ibid., v. 7, p. 216). She embodies resource even in the midst of war. She is, as it were, the note of the feminine before images and words. She is the matter from which we learn to live by what has essence. The soul calls Salome her "sister," without whom there would be no meaning, and on whom the soul depends: Salome "transforms the unspeakable into experience" (ibid., v.7, p. 191).

This is your feminine resource in the darkness of the unspeakable suffering currently taking place in Ukraine. It helps us in a war where no explanation will be adequate. She does not "see" like Jung with his consciousness; she is and says: let events unfold so that all components have their share in life (ibid., v. 7, p. 195). Salome loves pure eternal delight and pure matter itself. From this are born the eternal images that the soul loves, the images from which meaning emerges and our creative capacity for symbolization – which defines meaningfulness in life – is born.

Can we say that Salome is being, when for a moment we renounce growth and understanding to make room for grieving loss, to make room for anger at suffering, to make room for hope that all citizens fight against erasure, to make room for the intuition that now is the time to flee or now is the time to stand unwavering?

From this feminine matter, you can feel now in your body what is essential, hold it in your consciousness, and believe in your heart the feeling of what loves you and supports the existence of the soul even in the madness of war.

I would like to acknowledge Kathryn Cox, whose initial idea led to this work of fundraising for you, and to thank her and the numerous volunteers of this wonderful team who have worked tirelessly to create this opportunity to gather together with you and deliver the funds to you.

Thank you. God bless you and keep you.

Ann Belford Ulanov
New York and Woodbury (Connecticut), April 2022