You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This lucid and engaging book is notable as the first extensive exploration of Jung's views on temporality. In the Preface, the author frames her core thesis, asserting that there are implicit or explicit assumptions regarding time in almost every theory that deals with human existence. ‘Each field, approach or statement needs to rest against a temporal background; each uttered sentence assumes a temporal frame’ (p. xxxi). This is an important and thought-provoking idea that is well worth exploring.
Beginning with that overall point of view, the author focuses more specifically upon the temporal perspectives that underlie Jung's theories. In Chapter 1, the author begins to develop the basic idea that Jung's mature writings on temporality stem from the Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead). This philosophical poem, written in 1916, was not publicly available until 1961, when it appeared as an appendix to some editions of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. It was later found in the closing pages of the Red Book, and was the only part of that work published during Jung's lifetime. Jung describes its emergence (p. 3):
In 1916 I felt the urge to give shape to something. I was compelled from within, as it were, to formulate and express what might have been said by Philemon. This was how the Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos with its peculiar language came into being.
In the Seven Sermons, it is ‘Basilides’ who is the Gnostic voice of the poem (whereas in the Red Book it is ‘Philemon’). The distinction between ‘Pleroma’ and ‘Creatura’ is crucial in the text. In Gnostic mythology, Pleroma indicates the totality of the divine. It is a state that cannot be grasped by humans (p. 6).
Creatura is not in the Pleroma, and is the realm of the human. It has qualities and is subject to change. ‘Whereas in Pleroma there are no distinctions, in Creatura effects are brought about because of change; that alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change’ (Jun