A Jung Tale


Ellen Stuttle

Recommended Posts

"The Uprooted Tree"

I keep having replay images of a dream I had not long before I started reading Jung's work. I finally decided, what the hell, this is way out of sequence, but I'll talk about that dream now. It seems to want to be talked about.

There were horses in the dream -- sort of. I'd been tracking the horses by following their hoofprints, but I barely glimpsed the horses themselves as they disappeared over the distant lip of the amphitheater just as I came to the tree roots.

The amphitheater was a dream feature I knew from several earlier dreams. It had the feeling of something very old, a Stonehenge effect. All that remained of it was a dusty circular declivity, nothing specific to identify what its purpose had been. Yet I felt sure that it had long ago been a place of ancient rites -- and that it awaited use again for reawakening those rites.

In most of the earlier dreams when I'd come upon the amphitheater I'd been exploring a modern city, often recognizably New York City. I would turn a corner and find that dusty declivity opening in front of me amongst the buildings. It would be empty, none of the city dwellers walking into it, or even seeming to notice it. I would stop at the circumference and stand for awhile looking into the dusty loam, as if I was trying to discern the place's history from residues in the dust, but I wouldn't step forward. The time didn't feel right yet. Generally I'd then wake up, feeling enticed, hoping for some further dream development to come.

I'd also had horses appear in several dreams from the same time period -- late 1980 - early 1981. The dream horses didn't seem quite "natural," though they weren't fairy-tale creatures either. They seemed full-bodied, not "ethereal." However, they had the effect on me of being symbol animals, representatives of animal powers older than human.

The horses and the amphitheater hadn't appeared together in a previous dream -- or at least not in one that I'd remembered.

The tree roots dream took place in a landscape similar to an actual landscape I knew from the area near Creede, Colorado.

The entrance to the ranch where some of my mother's people still lived -- not the ranch she'd grown up on but an adjacent property -- was fourteen miles from Creede along a dirt road. For a two-to-three-mile stretch before what was called "Seven-Mile Bridge" (seven miles out of Creede), the road ran through a mini-gorge cut by the Rio Grande, the headwaters of which were up past the ranch. The road hugged one wall of the mini-gorge, the wall to the left if you were headed away from Creede. The river, along the other wall, was at a lower level unless in flood conditions.

In the dream I was driving through a mini-gorge similar to the one described, except reversed. The road hugged the right wall. Below to the left as I drove was a dusty swatch which might have been a dried-up river bed.

In the dust I could see hoofprints. I was trailing the hoofprints trying to locate the horses.

I came to a place similar to where the actual Colorado landscape widens after Seven-Mile Bridge. To my left was the amphitheater. The hoofprints cut a diameter to the farthest point from me on the declivity's circumference. The horses were disappearing over the lip.

I couldn't proceed to follow. The road was blocked by the roots of what had to be an enormous tree. The roots filled my entire visual field except for the amphitheater to the left. The sight produced an eerie, half-frightened feeling. I was asking myself in the dream if there was any way I could navigate past the roots. A voice spoke into my dream thoughts, saying, "Yes, with difficulty." I woke up.

Upon awakening, I dubbed the dream "The Uprooted Tree." I thought the roots were those of a fallen tree which was lying outstretched on the other side where I couldn't glimpse it.

However, in the days after the dream, I kept re-seeing and re-seeing the image and thinking that I'd missed something important, I wasn't identifying correctly.

I began to recall a book I'd been given as a child, a book called When the Root Children Wake Up.

I don't still have the book. One of my sisters has it. I found on the web and ordered a copy of the English edition I had as a child. That's the 1941 Lippincott edition which has the original drawings from Sibylle von Olfers' 1906 picture-book German classic, Etwas von den Wurzelkindern, combined with a prose-adaptation text by Helen Dean Fish. (There's a later English edition with different illustrations. Also a later English edition called Story of the Root Children, presented, according to a review I found (link), "as if it were a straight translation" of Von Olfers' text.)

You can see a photo of a two-page spread from The Green Tiger Press' 1988 reprint of the Lippincott edition here.

The illustrations are friendly -- charming little creatures, the root children -- and the tree roots aren't the dark, eerie sight which I found half-frigtening in the dream. The roots in the book don't overpower and forebode. But something reminded me of the children's book. What?, I kept wondering. Then I thought of it: The glints of glow, of light. The tree roots in the dream had glowy touches.

I then realized with a sense of shock: The tree in that dream wasn't "uprooted." The tree was alive! It was a growing tree, with active roots, dark clumps of soil, earth creatures crawling, the glow coming from moisture. I was seeing the roots, not from the position I'd thought in the dream, but instead as if I were looking up from underneath a giant living tree which towered above those roots into the atmosphere.

I then thought of an odd movie I'd seen on television some years before. The movie, released in 1958, is titled "The Roots of Heaven." The screenplay, quoting from Wikipedia (link), "is based on Romain Gary's 1956 Prix Goncourt winning novel The Roots of Heaven (Les racines du ciel)."

Here's a description from IMDb:

link

Storyline

In Fort Lamy, French Equitorial Africa, idealist Morel launches a one-man campaign to preserve the African elephant from extinction, which he sees as the last remaining "roots of Heaven." At first, he finds only support from Minna, hostess of the town's only night club, who is in love with him, and a derelict ex-British Army Major, Forsythe. His crusade gains momentum and he is soon surrounded by an odd assortment of characters: Cy Sedgewick, an American TV commentator who becomes impressed and rallies world-wide support; a U.S. photographer, Abe Fields, who is sent to do a picture story on Morel and stays on to follow his ideals; Saint Denis, a government aide ordered to stop Morel; Orsini, a professional ivory hunter whose vested interests aren't the same as Morel's; and Waitari, leader of a Pan-African movement who follows Morel only for the personal good it will do his own campaign. Written by Les Adams

The story might be romanticized. I've never looked into the factual basis. It's definitely environmentalist in message. Factual and philosophical issues aside, I enjoyed the movie, with its complex variety of characters and their motives, and I thought that Trevor Howard was believable and intriguing as Morel.

It wasn't the story, however, which brought the movie to my mind in connection with the tree roots dream. It was the explanation of the title. The title, as I recall, came from a saying of one of the African tribes:

"The animals are the roots of heaven. If the roots die, the stars will go out."

That seemed to tie together: the amphitheater, the symbol-horses, the roots -- and my yearning at the time (shortly before I started reading Jung's work) for a deeply rooted theory of psychology

Ellen

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I found your story very interesting, Ellen, but all I have now is some superficialities concerning Creede, CO. As a young man, E. Cardon Walker worked in around Creede. Many decades later my brother married one of his daughters and having been told of Creede by him and how beautiful in was, they built a summer home and guest house near the Rio Grande about halfway between Creede and South Fork. They and their children, two boys, rode horses and biked there. (E. Cardon Walker was CEO of Disney before Eisner came in after his retirement.)

About eleven years ago I was driving a semi-tractor trailer full of Colorado potatoes (or beer) to Phoenix to be made into Frito Lay products along the Rio Grande near South Fork headed for Wolf Creek Pass. The river, little more than a raging stream, was flowing in my opposite direction of travel. It had been snowing and it was misty in light totally diffused by pervasive cloud cover. The tumbling water was flanked by the wet snow with steam rising. I have never seen anything more beautiful in nature and I knew that in hours it would be gone and I could not tarry.

--Brant

Edited by Brant Gaede
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I found your story very interesting, Ellen, but all I have now is some superficialities concerning Creede, CO. As a young man, E. Cardon Walker worked in around Creede. Many decades later my brother married one of his daughters and having been told of Creede by him and how beautiful in was, they built a summer home and guest house near the Rio Grande about halfway between Creede and South Fork. They and their children, two boys, rode horses and biked there. (E. Cardon Walker was CEO of Disney before Eisner came in after his retirement.)

About eleven years ago I was driving a semi-tractor trailer full of Colorado potatoes (or beer) to Phoenix to be made into Frito Lay products along the Rio Grande near South Fork headed for Wolf Creek Pass. It was snowing and the river, little more than a raging stream, was flowing in my opposite direction of travel. It had been snowing and it was misty in light totally diffused by pervasive cloud cover. The tumbling water was flanked by the wet snow with steam rising. I have never seen anything more beautiful in nature and I knew that in hours it would be gone and I could not tarry.

--Brant

One should never tarry in any event.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Brant,

Your reminiscence brings back many happy memories, and one very sad one.

I loved the area around Creede. I haven't been there in many years. I've heard from my youngest brother, who's visited the ranch several times, that things are "growing up" a bit, changing some scenes I particularly loved. For instance, the drive from Creede to the ranch doesn't have the uncluttered sweep in did have.

I first visited Creede one summer when I was in grade school. We stayed in a cabin looking straight out across the Rio, a mere stream there most of the time, at a mountain called Old Bristol Head. The name was because, in certain lights, especially toward sundown, the configuration of the top looked like a hawkfaced man's head looking up at the sky. In other lights, one could clearly see that the rocks making the formation weren't even in a line with one another.

The second time I was at Creede was the summer of 1961 (right after I'd first read Atlas Shrugged). All of us, except Father, spent six weeks at the ranch. That's when I met a man named Ford Davis. Ford and his wife had a lodge in Creede. He ran a hunting/fishing service. He'd lead excursions by horseback into the mountains for trout fishing, or for hunting in season. I went on many of the fishing excursions with him that summer of '61, and each of the next two summers, the latter two after I'd taught riding at the girls' camp in Wisconsin where I learned to ride.

I was very fond of Ford, and he had a strong "thing" about me. I'll talk about that when I get to the subject of sex, my relationship thereto versus Rand's depiction thereof, a subject coming up.

At off-season times, Ford would haul hay for the Phoenix racetracks. (Incidentally, he got several of his riding string from the Phoenix tracks, racehorses whose wind had broken. The climbing about in the mountains was healing to them.)

The summer of '65 I couldn't go to the ranch, other things I had to do. That fall, somehow -- no one knows exactly how a person as competent as Ford could have managed this -- a pile of hay he was hauling came loose and fell trapping him, somehow catching fire. He died from the burns. I feel horrified thinking of it to this day.

Sad, sad ending. But my memories of those excursions into the mountains by horseback are treasured ones. The vistas were so beautiful. One time, we left from Creede very early, before dawn, and as dawn broke we were at the ranger station way up where the Rio is just little trivulets. God's Country indeed.

Your mention of Wolf Creek Pass brings back a story my mother told. She went to nursing school at Denver. The exit from the Creede area was via Wolf Creek Pass. She'd get a ride with a trucker, having no car of her own. She told how one winter while she was riding in a truck headed into the pass, the snow came down so heavy the trucker couldn't see the edge -- over which there was a serious drop. So Mother waded through snow up to her knees, feeling for where the road was in order to guide the truck.

Many other tales. My Aunt Em -- actually first cousin once removed but so much older than Mother, whose first cousin she was, as to be called "Aunt"... Starting the sentence over, my Aunt Em was one of the last whites to see Geronimo and his by-then-straggling band before their capture. She was just a young girl then. She said that she kept very quiet.

Em's mother was an American Indian whose people were coming through one winter. She took a fancy to Mother's Uncle Dan and married him. The name she adopted as her white name was "Ellen." Mother was named for her, then I was named for Mother.

___

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And I was named--I guess for Mom never told--for my grandfather. My first name is her maiden name. Even today its spelling is uncommon for a first name and probably even more uncommon back when I was born.

--Brant

digress now to my mother's distant cousin, Grace Toof: Toof was her mother's maiden name; the Toof estate went from Memphis to the Mississippi border in the 19th C.--by the time Elvis bought it it was much smaller; the house was built by a doctor in 1939 (and I'm a name dropper)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

This post will be written in haste. I have a lot going on, but I don't want to leave too big a time gap between "installments," so here goes......

At this point, I think that I should provide some "station identification." The title of the thread is "A Jung Tale," and readers might wonder how the material so far connects to the title. I could say, in effect, that "All roads lead to Rome." Jungian psychological theory is so encompassing and multi-faceted, anything psychological can lead thereto.

However, at the time when I first read Atlas Shrugged in the spring and summer of 1961, I was many years away from being in the state of longing for "real psychology" I was in at the time when I began to study Jung's work. I was perplexed and dissatisfied by what I'd been taught in the introductory psychology course I'd taken my freshman year of college, but I didn't begin to have an idea of how dissatisfied I'd eventually become by every theory of psychology I knew of. If someone had asked at that time -- I don't recall anyone's asking -- I'd have described myself as a contented person looking forward to the rest of my college years, and meanwhile enjoying my horse-related pursuits.

When I went to college I had no definite career plans. I still halfway thought in terms of the idea I'd formed in gradeschool when I'd read Mary O'Hara's My Friend Flicka series -- My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, Green Grass of Wyoming. I liked all three books but especially the third, which featured the adults as much as the boy and gave me a desire to run a horse ranch in the Rockies.

Realistically, I already figured by the time I was thinking of college that I wouldn't be physically capable of cutting the grind of running a horse ranch. I had lingering problems from my childhood polio, problems which I could anticipate would worsen with age. I don't mean here "resurgent polio," which was hardly known about then. Instead difficulties because of nerve-muscle damage which resulted in my needing more rest time than would be provided to someone running a ranch.

The physical problems turned out -- in a strange way -- to be significant to my ultimate interest in Jung. I'll explain why next time I post. Here I only mention the issue because of its relevance to my choice of college.

I'd been told by a college recruiter -- at one of those college-recruiter-meet-highschool-students events -- that with my academic qualifications I was assured of admittance at any college to which I applied. I chose between Northwestern and Cornell.

For someone with an interest in a career somehow related to horses, Cornell would have been the "logical" choice, with its College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and its veterinary school. However, Cornell was far from Peoria and I wanted to be able to get home on weekends for two reasons.

One was to ride my own horses. The other was because I was worried about my brothers and wanted to provide some emotional support. I've mentioned that two of my brothers committed suicide in the early '70s. Signs of trouble were apparent from earlier, and I wanted to help as much as I could. I might or might not tell that substory eventually. It was a factor in my thinking when I read Atlas Shrugged that Rand didn't know much about people. Here I mention the family troubles only because they were the other major factor, besides my wanting to get home on weekends to ride my own horses, for my choosing Northwestern instead of Cornell. Northwestern provided pretty easy routes home, the first year by train (freshmen couldn't have cars on campus), thereafter by car. Plus I liked the look of the campus from pictures I'd seen.

So, Northwestern it was. There was then the issue of whether or not to declare a major. I was thinking that ethology might be what I'd go into -- and that would have been a subspecialty of biology. However, it overlapped comparative psychology, and declaring a psych major had an advantage. At Northwestern, one wasn't allowed to take introductory psychology until the sophomore year unless one had both declared a psych major and pro'ed out of freshman English. I'd done the latter, so I did the former too.

I wasn't expecting what I was taught (rat labs, "learning theory," etc.). The result over the next couple years -- by then I'd read Atlas Shrugged twice -- was my deciding to stay in psychology attempting to figure out what the hell was wrong with the intellectual world so as to have produced the Behavorist hegemony in American research psych -- plus other things which by then I thought were amiss. Rand became of major importance to my perplexities once I learned of Objectivism as such. (I didn't learn that there was an organization teaching Rand's philosophy until almost two years, spring 1963, after I'd first read Atlas.)

The material so far is part of the background of why I could never fully sign on to Objectivism either, why I was left feeling that none of the theories I knew of did justice to my own experiences. I've described some details of observations of other people. There were many more such details. Plus there were my own inner experiences which I could see no way of explaining within an Objectivist theoretical frame.

Next time I'll back up chronologically and start talking about the sorts of inner experiences I mean, experiences directly pertinent to Jungian theory.

Ellen

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ellen, I'm sorry you lost two brothers to suicide. If you can come to tell their stories (story?) it might be of value considering your knowledge of psychology--which seems substantially greater than my own and I'm not a piker)--in keeping others from suicide, especially out of a depressive state.

When I was a young boy everybody was concerned about polio. There were pictures of people in iron lungs. Then I got a shot of the Salk vaccine and those fears went away. (When I enlisted in the army we were given the Sabine oral vaccine.) I'm so sorry you missed that. It's kind of like you got swatted by the tail of a giant animal in its death throws.

--Brant

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Brant,

Thank you.

I did write the story of my brothers back in 1997, and I might further down the road post a shortened version. I'd have to leave out some details which include private information about other people besides my family.

I don't know that the story would be of much help "keeping others from suicide," since the particulars were so unique to the terrible personal alchemy between my mother and my brother Fred. Jon's death was fall-out. It was like he got the brunt, via Fred's doing a lot of taking out on him what he (Fred) wanted to take out on Mother. No one expected Jon's suicide -- or knew how depressed he was. At the time when Jon killed himself, he was attending school at the University of Hawaii and we'd thought that he was doing pretty well. I think that Fred felt such guilt about Jon, that added to his raging conflicts. Truth to tell, when Fred disappeared, we all held our breaths -- even me, though I was living in New York City by then -- since we thought that either Fred had gone off and killed himself or that he would come back and kill the rest of us, either/or. It was a few weeks before his body was found. He'd hung himself from a tree in a wooded stretch of someone's farmland. The body was identified by the teeth.

About the polio, you say, "It's kind of like you got swatted by the tail of a giant animal in its death throws." That's a good description.

The way I feel about it is lucky that I was swatted so mildly compared to many others. The iron lungs business was horrific, whole hospital wards filled with people in iron lungs.

The older sister of my best friend when I was in grade school and highschool was stricken by the type of polio that directly affects the brain. Her intelligence level was diminished. She was still smart, but she'd been thought to be a child genius before she got polio.

My own case was fairly mild, and with Father's expert care I ended up being able to walk, and even to ride horses for years. So I got off in much better shape than I might have.

Polio is one of the most dreadful diseases. The blessing to the world of the vaccine, first the Salk and then the Sabine, has prevented so much pain and suffering.

Ellen

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
link

(Alternate link if that one doesn't work on your browser.)

MACBETH: Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee!

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going,

And such an instrument I was to use.

A dagger was featured in my first series of visions.

Not a "fatal" dagger, or a metal dagger. I presume that Macbeth's dagger-image was of a metal dagger.

But a dagger that did "marshall'st me the way that I was going" -- and more or less (think Freudian) such an instrument as was to be used (by someone, not by me).

My first series of visions, though not my first visions, occurred when I had started menstruating (age thirteen), and had begun having lustful thoughts/wishes.

In that series, I was lying on my back, on a stone altar. The altar was at the center of a surrounding jagged-edged circle of mountains. My legs were spread. The hymen was being perforated by a stone knife.

I knew but couldn't see that the rite was being performed by a male. I knew who the male was. Cochise.

I had several times read the book Blood Brother. As near, I suppose, as I ever came to Rand's forming the image of Cyrus, I had formed the image of Cochise.

I didn't become a "man worshipper." Instead I entered years of intense lust, identified as such. Unlike, I suppose, Rand, I didn't confuse the onset of sexual desire with a quest for one's "highest values." I knew "the facts of life." (Did she know those "facts" at the time when she read "The Mysterious Valley"?) I attributed the visions to the beginnings of an interest in sex.

Additional detail for those familiar with Jungian theory. The whole scene -- YEARS before I heard the name "Carl Jung" and many more years before I had any proper idea of Jungian theory -- was like a text-book illustration of animus awakening.

Ellen

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, you are making Jung more interesting to me than Freud, but I have too much ignorance to actually compliment you on him.

As a boy I visited the Cochise Stronghold with my brother and Mother in SE Arizona. We took what must have been a ten-mile loop hike with my brother complaining what seemed to be every step of the way. The last great "battle" with the Apaches occurred north of present-day Phoenix. The Indians were trapped in a large cave and decimated--slaughtered--by rifle fire. Geronimo was a burp and the wars were over. Geronimo was so hated in Arizona he was never allowed back and died in Oklahoma after his Florida exile.

--Brant

I liked your story (stories)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...
  • 6 years later...

Have these letters been shown already?

From: Ellen Stuttle To: atlantis Subject: ATL: Re: jung and such Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2001 01:33:56 -0500 After a long and tiring day, I pulled in my e-mail to find some 140 ATL posts, among them several with references to Jung. I'd like to comment -- though I'll only do so briefly for now -- on these speculations by Joe and Christian:

Joe B writes: "but he [Jung] did seem to uphold a sort of Platonism, from what I've  gathered so far...which may be why he hasn't been linked to Rand"

Christian says: >I'd hazard to guess a significant reason why Rand and Jung have not "been linked", is that they held disparate views regarding consciousness. For Rand, the primary significance of consciousness was it's process, while for Jung, the emphasis was on content.

Christian, I'm not understanding what you mean in saying that the "primary significance of consciousness" was process for Rand, content for Jung.  Could you elaborate?  What I see as some of the important differences between Rand and Jung are that:

(1) For Jung the ego is not the ultimate boss in the psyche's "house."

(2) Jung was to an extent influenced by Kant and thought that there was a "noumenal" world the nature of which we could never know.

(3) Jung didn't give reason the centrality Rand did, though he didn't denigrate reason.  But he thought that there are non-rational ways of knowing.

(4) Jung's model of consciousness was circular -- a model of different "functions," schematically represented as if on a wheel, and each function to be given its role in turn -- whereas I think I'd describe Rand's model as hierarchical as a structure of ascending levels.

(5) Rand thought that man is born "tabula rasa."  Jung didn't.

Regarding this last point, it's an interesting question whether he upheld "a sort of Platonism."  Depends what you mean by "Platonism." Jung was often accused of proposing a theory of innate ideas, and he often hotly denied that this was what he was proposing.  On the other hand, he often analogized the archetypes to Plato's forms. I think the clue to the discrepancy is that he thought of the archetypes NOT as having content, thus not as being "ideas," but instead as being formative *principles* common to the psyches of all persons.

The above is hasty and sketchy, but it might provide some leads.

I'd like to correct a possible misunderstanding of Jung's idea of "the shadow."  Although in common parlance, and even at times as used by Jungians, the term is equated with bad characteristics, precisely speaking, Jung used the term "shadow" to include *everything* of which we're unaware about ourselves, good, bad, indifferent.  The connection between "the shadow" and evil is that, when we deny our unattractive characteristics and attempt to push them into unawareness, then they can take on a life of their own and become more powerful.  Often, too, such denied characteristics are projected onto others with the result that we think we see in other people's behavior what we don't want to acknowledge in our own. Ellen S.

From: PaleoObjectivist To: atlantis Subject: Re: ATL: "I've outgrown Ayn Rand"  Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 01:56:54 EDT Ellen Stuttle wrote: Interestingly, I think that I have some idea of what the discovery of Rand was like for many Objectivists because of what happened next.  In 1981, I began to read the work of Carl Jung.  Looking back, I would think how odd it was that I'd never read Jung before I'd reached the age of nearly 39; I'd several times felt curious  about his ideas because of little glimmers I'd heard about them, but I'd always been too busy reading other material.  What finally did the trick of inspiring me to embark on the delayed project of reading Jung was that a friend of mine -- a talented writer -- kept saying that my thoughts about psychology sounded Jungian.  > In early '81 -- almost twenty years after I'd first read *Atlas* -- I bought a couple volumes of selected essays by Jung and I began with an essay titled "On the Nature of the Psyche."  Within a few pages, I had to close the book and just sit there for a while feeling the strangest sense of combined desolation and joy:  joy at what I'd found; desolation at the thought of *all those years!* (the phrase kept going through my mind), all those years when I'd yearned and hadn't known that what I yearned for was available to be found, had  I only looked in the right place.

I certainly understand and appreciate what Ellen is sharing here. Although my particular interest is in Jung's personality type theory (and its elaborations and applications by Isabel Myers and David Keirsey and others), I have to say that learning of it was the second greatest "aha" experience of my intellectual life – the greatest being Rand's philosophy.

 > Circling back to the thought which began my reminiscing:  I have personally found that as a result of my participation on this list, my appreciation of Rand's genius has grown to be deeper and more informed than it was before.  And George's essays *connecting* Rand to the history of thought have been the strongest contribution to my enhanced awareness of what Rand accomplished.  For me, seeing Rand in the light cast by historical context heightens not diminishes her luster.

Agreed. Another person who has helped me see Rand in historical perspective is Chris Sciabarra, especially in his ~Ayn Rand, the Russian Radical~. I was barely 20 pages into his book, on a fateful day back in 1996, when I realized that he knew what the hell he was talking about, and he had nailed the essence of Rand's intellectual process when she considered what was wrong with the traditional views of the great philosophical problems. She had the great gift of being able to intellectually transcend false alternatives, to see the partial truths they contained, and to understand what was the fuller, more complete view of the truth. In case after case, the objective transcends the subjective and the intrinsic, and Rand was the one who discovered and systematized that realization. She did not emerge out of nothing with her views; she studied the historical context, saw the shortcomings, identified their root, and formulated the solution to problem after problem. In a somewhat similar way, so did Jung in his ~Personality Types~, as did Camus in ~The Rebel~. I recommend both of these works to those who have not yet had the pleasure of reading them.

Thanks, Ellen, for sharing your personal experience with us. Best 2 all, Roger Bissell

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now