Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Psychological Perspectives
A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought

ISSN: 0033-2925 (Print) 1556-3030 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www
...
com/loi/upyp20

The Age of Imagination
Christophe Le Mouël
To cite this article: Christophe Le Mouël (2018) The Age of Imagination, Psychological
Perspectives, 61:3, 285-310, DOI: 10
...
2018
...
org/10
...
2018
...


Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 6

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www
...
com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=upyp20

Psychological Perspectives, 61: 285–310, 2018
Copyright # C
...
Jung Institute of Los Angeles
ISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 online
DOI: 10
...
2018
...
Unfortunately, most individuals will approach physical
sciences with dread, due in part to the difficulty with speaking the language of the
universe, and for this reason may fail to perceive its breathtaking beauty
...
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was an
Age of Reason that deeply shaped our modern society
...
This exploration concerns classical physics
and its repression of imagination; the difficult emergence of deterministic chaos is
viewed as a return of what was left behind, so to speak: the shadow of reason
...

—C
...
Jung (1970, par
...
The verb kosmein means “to prepare”
and also “to adorn, to dress
...
Physical science is about this: the
consideration of the lawful, orderly structure of material things
...
To
account for reality, we can no longer reduce the future to a recurrence of the past and
must also imagine what might be observed in the present
...


I

286

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

Peter Zokosky, Attraction, oil on panel, 18  17 in
...


CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

287

In an essay written in 1784, philosopher Immanuel Kant described the
Enlightenment as an Age of Reason wherein humanity threw off the yoke of nonage,
that is, of immaturity, especially in religious matters:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage
...
This
nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in
indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s
guidance
...
) “Have the courage to use your own
understanding,” is therefore the motto of the enlightenment
...
384)
Kant borrowed his Sapere aude from Roman moral poet Horace (65 B
...
E
...
68)
...

“Dare to imagine!” might become the motto of a new enlightenment wherein humankind consciously realizes its intimate participation in the creative flow of the cosmos
...
C
...
),

CLASSICAL PHYSICS
The Age of Reason loosely started around the 17th century with the discovery
that the universe, in its entirety, is orderly and that this order is expressed in the language of mathematics
...
But the book cannot be understood unless one
first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is
composed
...
(Popkin, 1966, p
...
There was no great divide
between Heaven and Earth, only a lack of imagination that prevented us from seeing
Heaven on Earth
...
Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a
bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it
...
The fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops

288

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something to your friend, you
need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another, the distances
being equal; jumping with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in every
direction
...
You will discover not the least
change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether
the ship was moving or standing still
...
26–27)
Galileo’s description of a correspondence between the motion of things seems
almost trivial, yet it is critical
...
We won’t have to
adjust the strength and direction of our actions
...
It is only when we consider what this basic correspondence
means that we begin to experience the shock of the relativity of motion
...
Through this mysterious window, we suddenly
see another context that presents itself to our ever-flowing imagination
...
The shock of the relativity of space and motion
consists in the unsettling realization that the bell-shaped trajectory of the apple observed
inside the second vehicle—our alter-ego throws its apple up, then moves forward with
its vehicle and catches it farther away at the same time that we do—corresponds to the
straight-line trajectory of our apple in our vehicle! Both trajectories describe the same
phenomenon viewed from two observers, yet they are entirely different
...
Our senses vacillate before such a paradox! How is it possible?
Finding order in such unsettling circumstances first requires that we become
increasingly critical of sensory experiences
...
The displacement of Earth from its central position, as proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus in the
16th century, took centuries to emerge, but when it finally did, it sparked a revolution
that presaged the Age of Reason
...
At all times, we are bound to
a particular context, or frame of reference, which implies that we cannot observe the
paradox of Galileo’s relativity
...
For this reason, they are
said to be universal and can be written in the language of mathematics
...
416)
...
Absolute rest could no longer exist; rather,
things left to themselves endlessly roamed the universe in a straight line
...
(Barbour, 2001, p
...

The scientific revolution was, however, not attributed to the power of imagination
...

Imagination was more like the scaffolding of a building, something necessary only in
the early stage of a construction that would eventually have to go
...
Descartes’s career started with
an impressive spiritual experience that changed him durably
...
113)
...
He had stopped for the winter
in Ulm, where he planned to attend the coronation of Ferdinand II of Austria as Roman
Holy Emperor
...
It is
interesting to note that the coronation of the new emperor coincides with the beginning
of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest religious conflicts in Europe with about
eight million casualties, which ended in October of 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia
...
Descartes’
career roughly spanned the time of war, since he died at the beginning of 1650
...

In the second dream—he was, in fact, awake—he heard a thunderclap that terrified him
and then saw his room fill with fiery sparks (von Franz, 1991, p
...
Descartes described
this happening as a descent of the “Spirit of Truth” (von Franz, 1991, p
...
176),
referring to the episode in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2, 2–4) in which the Holy Spirit
descended upon the Apostles with the sound of a mighty wind, in the form of tongues of
fire
...
Descartes received the gift of the new language of
reason—mathematics—and became the father of modern philosophy
...
The following year, in 1620,
Descartes wrote that he “began to understand the fundamental principle of a wonderful
discovery” (Descartes, 1620/1985, p
...
It is uncertain what this discovery might be,
but it might have been the idea “that there must be a general science which explains all
the points that can be raised concerning order and measure irrespective of the subject

290

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

matter, and that this science should be termed mathesis universalis” (Descartes,
p
...

Descartes went on studying geometry and arithmetic and developed crucial segments of the universal mathematics of which he dreamed
...
Further developed
by Newton, this science would become the essential language with which to express
the classical laws of motion
...
He wrote: “We have within us the
sparks of knowledge, as in a flint: philosophers extract them through reason, but poets
force them out through the sharp blows of the imagination, so that they shine more
brightly” (Descartes, 1620/1985, p
...

Imagination is not a mere combination of knowledge or impressions we have
...
I suspect that when Descartes wrote
the previous words, the shattering experience of the thunderclap followed by the vision
of the sparks scattered in his room was still bearing on his mind
...
In the essay “The Search after Truth by the Light of Nature,” he demoted the
imagination of a child to a mere tabula rasa, a blank slate, upon which our senses, various inclinations, and masters impress a coarse portrait of reality
...
” However, the task at hand is too great, the original impression too faulty, disproportionate
...
405)
...
This goal is truth, which the spirit that descended upon
him had originally revealed
...

The repression of imagination in Descartes’s philosophy is deliberate, but also
symptomatic of his own incapacity to appreciate the dimension of time in nature
...
126)
...
173)
...
The flow of time would later be introduced by Newton as a basic
principle of physics
...
From the moment of Creation until the end of time, every natural process was
yoked to absolute time, wherever it occurred
...
In Newton’s words: “Absolute,
true and mathematical time, in and of itself, and of its own nature, without reference to
anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration” (Newton,
1687/2016, p
...
The continuous flow of time was placed in the hand of God, who

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

291

conducted the clockwork mechanism of the cosmos with an inflexible law
...
This seems like a reasonable assumption,
which is implicit in our Western language when we speak of the past, the present, and the
future, rather than my past, my present, and my future
...
With the concept of absolute time, the metaphysical belief of an omnipresent yet transcendent God becomes part of science
...
In Einstein’s relativity, time becomes relative and God
cedes His conducting role to a natural phenomenon: light
...
There was no place in it for
invention and the creation of something new, only for discovery
...
402)
...

Imagination, however, did not entirely disappear, only retreated to the private
sphere of the philosopher where it inspired new discoveries
...
He was the last
of the magicians” (Dry, 2014, p
...

I compare the classical pathway of the physical sciences to an asphalt freeway,
going straightforward or, occasionally, circling above ground at an interchange
...
The result is the lifeless clockwork worldview we all
know and that has showed its disastrous limits in our time
...
This is a world where eros is reduced
to an extreme and where little real creativity spontaneously happens
...


DETERMISTIC CHAOS
The image of classical mechanics I have just presented might sound exaggeratedly negative, considering all the prodigious accomplishments this science has led to,
from the industrial revolution to space travels
...
It takes only a pause on the linear road of rigid reason to realize that more natural
beauty, featuring a complex order, awaits us when we take a closer look around us
...
Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens first discovered this “odd kind
of sympathy” in 1665 (Buyse, 2017, p
...
At the time of his discovery, Huygens resided
in his family house in a region struck by the plague
...
Huygens wrote to his father:
Having been forced to keep to my chambers for some days, which I occupied
in making some observations of my clocks of a new design, I noticed an
intriguing effect, and one which no one ever would have thought of
...
Here, two clocks
are found which never deviate at all, which will seem incredible and yet it is
entirely true
...
(Buyse, p
...
120)
...

Imperceptible material vibrations, induced by the motion of the pendulum clocks, were
at the origin of the perpetual accord
...
A letter from Huygens was published, without the consent of
its author, in a rush the following month in the French Journal des Savants
...
126)
...

His creation was based on Galileo’s study of the motion of the pendulum
...
In other words,
whether the oscillation was small or large, the duration taken for a back-and-forth
motion was identical
...
Much later, at the turn of the 17th century, he
would develop more accurate time-keeping devices to study the unsuspected order of
the pendulum motion
...
In the creation of the first pendulum clock, Huygens could not help but notice that
the isosynchronous behavior of a single pendulum was only an approximate behavior
hard to maintain
...
Then, even in the case of small amplitudes, a brief kick
had to be given repeatedly to the pendulum so that it did not stop in response to the
friction of the air and other contrary mechanical effects
...
Yet,

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

293

according to our modern standards, Huygens’ clock would be deemed exceedingly
imprecise since every single day, it would be skewed by fifteen seconds; in a month, a
duration of more than seven hours would be lost
...

Huygens continued to work on the design of his pendulum clock and, in 1660,
began to receive support from the newly formed British Royal Society
...
It could take a couple of months to navigate westward
across the Atlantic to reach the Americas
...
Of
course, the position of the North Star in the night sky indicated with good precision the
latitude of a ship—that is, its position from the North Pole—but no heavenly body
proved regular enough to determine its longitude
...
From time immemorial, the sun had served as indefatigable navigator along the invisible lines of the longitudes from east to west, as well as the celestial
clock beating the time of human societies
...
These positions were provided from the
benchmark city of Greenwich, where the British armada was harbored, and served navigators to situate themselves, at least approximately, at sea
...
For example, let us suppose we
are in the midst of our navigation to the Americas
...
According to our almanac, the sun rose at
6:00 in the morning in Greenwich
...
Knowing
the latitude of the ship, it takes only a little mathematics to calculate a longitude and
precisely determine the location of the ship
...
They seemed destined to replace the sun
itself
...
To the
inherent imprecision of Huygens’ clock, additional complex factors affected the oscillation of the pendulum clock at sea, such as the vibrations of the ship, the variation of
cold and heat, as well as irregular motions in case of storms
...
Moreover, it was
determined that at least two clocks were necessary on board each ship, in case one of
them would stop, need repair, or require cleaning
...
In this light, the extraordinary observation that
imperceptible vibrations mediating two clocks could be the cause of a collective order
appeared unexpected and, to say the least, unimaginable
...
Huygens’ odd sympathy was a setback and clocks, after all, might not be the
most appropriate instruments to solve the problem of the longitude
...

125–126)
...

Yet, they betray, at the same time, the utilitarian bent of classical mechanics
...
It
took three more centuries to realize that, in fact, nature favored such a subtle, complex
form of beauty
...
Entrainment is probably the
most primitive example of constructive, emergent behavior (Buyse, p
...

A recent re-examination of Huygens’ experimentation with clocks, published in
2002 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, indicates that the discovery of entrainment was due to “talent and luck,” since it “depended somewhat serendipitously on the
extra heavy weighting of his clocks intended to make them more stable at sea”
(Bennett, Schatz, Rockwood, & Wisesenfeld, p
...
I find this assessment quite meaningful, considering that we are dealing with a miraculous phenomenon that Huygens
called sympathy, consonance, agreement, “accord merveilleux” (marvelous accord)
...
127) and, from the latter
word, there is only one step to Jung’s version of serendipity: synchronicity
...
A few months after Huygens’ discovery, a giant of modern physics, Isaac Newton,
graduated from Cambridge
...
There he developed calculus,
studied optics, discovered the universal law of gravitation, and brought other extraordinary contributions to science that would later be incorporated in the monumental
Principia, which stands as the roadmap of classical mechanics
...
My personal
belief is that this split was necessary for the development of consciousness
...
What was left behind—the odd kind
of sympathy between clocks—may not have immediately found its rightful place among
physical ideas, but it stimulated imagination and sparked metaphysical speculations
touching the interconnection of the parts into a whole, as well as the nature and role of
causality
...

As I reflect on the belief that the dismissal of Huygens’ discovery from classical
physics was necessary, I realize that the odd sympathy might well have inspired it
...
The two bodies go at their
own independent pace at first but, imperceptibly, this divergence might be bridged,
provided new conceptual insights are imagined that would create a coherent medium

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

295

between them
...
The rhythmical moves
leading to the creation of scientific knowledge are those of a seductive dance, as
French mathematician Andre Weil clearly acknowledged in an insightful letter written
in March 1940 to his sister and philosopher, Simone Weil
...
Nothing is more fecund than these slightly adulterous relationships;
nothing gives greater pleasure to the connoisseur, whether he participates in
it, or even if he is an historian contemplating it retrospectively, accompanied,
nevertheless, by a touch of melancholy
...
(Krieger, 2015, p
...
147)
...
He also became a fervent opponent of Newton’s conception of
absolute space and time
...
Now this can happen in
three ways: the first is that of natural influence
...
He had suspended two pendula from the
same piece of wood, and the constant swinging of the pendula transmitted
similar vibrations to the particles of wood
...
The second way to make two faulty clocks always
agree would be to have them watched over by a competent workman, who
would adjust them and get them to agree at every moment
...
(Leibniz, 1696/1989,
pp
...
Now, Leibniz pursued his analogy
of soul and body:
Let us put the soul and the body in place of these two watches; their agreement
or sympathy will also come about in one of three ways
...
(Leibniz, 1989, p
...
Modern neuroscience also assumes that, somehow, mind and body are
interrelated and that the brain serves as a physical support connecting them
...
In my opinion, however, Leibniz’s criticism of the way of influence still
applies, since it remains unclear how, at the most basic level, a single neuron’s dynamism
connects to a qualitative state of the soul, and vice versa
...
Leibniz (1989) continues:
The way of assistance is that of the system of occasional causes
...
(p
...
How does a cause here persevere into an
effect there? According to occasionalism, inert physical substances cannot possess
such a power, so causality should be understood as God’s occasion to manifest His
divine influence in this world
...
This might feel satisfying, but hardly bears scientific fruit
...
From a physical standpoint, it
is enough to elevate energy (and impulsion) conservation over time as an inexplicable
principle of nature, as physicists eventually did at the end of the 19th century
...
Beyond this I do not think that I need to prove
anything else, unless someone wishes me to prove that God is skillful enough
to be able to make use of this prior artifice; we even see some examples
among humans, in proportion to their ability
...
148)
Leibniz is known to be the father of the way of pre-established harmony, which
C
...
Jung understood as a forerunner of his concept of synchronicity
...
Leibniz turns the relation of
the part to the whole on its head: Every part contains within itself the whole, in

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

297

proportion to its own nature and, for this reason, remains at all times in harmony with
the rest of the universe
...
Only quantum mechanics goes
this far in undermining the role of causality
...


CLOUDS

IN THE

19TH-CENTURY SKY

Let us now move two centuries forward to the end of the 19th century
...
In April of 1900, a prestigious scientific authority, William Thomson, also known as Lord Kevin, announced before the
British Society that the “beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory” was obscured
by two clouds, one related to the theory of heat, the second to the theory of light
(McAllister, 1996, p
...
Nobody could imagine that these clouds would provoke a
storm that would eventually topple the pillars of Newton’s physics
...
Then, five years later, in 1905, Albert Einstein showed that Galileo’s relativity had to be extended to time, which could no longer be considered absolute
...

In my opinion, we can reasonably add two more clouds, at least, that began to disturb the clear sky of the 19th-century horizon
...
Sigmund Freud
published his seminal book The Interpretation of Dreams in the fall of 1899, where he
presented his conception of an unconscious informing the content of dreams (Freud,
1899/1999)
...
G
...
He would call these clusters complexes
...
The psyche could no longer be identified solely with the conscious mind, neither could it be viewed as a tabula rasa, as Descartes had described it
...

Marie-Louise von Franz suggests the name of “a third independent discoverer of
the unconscious, the French mathematician Henri Poincare, who found the unconscious in himself through a personal experience” (von Franz, 1992, p
...
Poincare
came to the profound realization that the language of mathematics is intimately related
to psychology—the language of the psyche
...
It is the activity in which the human mind seems to

298

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

take least from the outside world, in which it acts or seems to act only of itself
and on itself, so that in studying the procedure of geometric thought we may
hope to reach what is most essential in man’s mind
...
321)
This position does not mean, however, that mathematical creation is completely
unrelated to the outside world
...
57) in
a coal mine
...
It is by way of
intuition that “the mathematical world remains in contact with the real world; and even
though pure mathematics could do without it, it is always necessary to come back to
intuition to bridge the abyss [that] separates symbol from reality” (Galison, p
...

The new emphasis on imagination emerging at the end of the 19th century suggests that mathematical—as well as psychological—creation cannot be purely driven
by goals set by ego-consciousness, otherwise inconvenient facts, such as the odd sympathy between clocks, would always end up in the trash bin of history
...
124)
...
For this reason, mathematical creation will often
precede the discovery of refined laws of nature
...
In his essay on mathematical creation, first published in 1910, he described in
simple words the feeling of beauty and the sense of harmony that led this gifted mathematician to an exploration of the realm between symbol and reality
...
321)
...
This is obviously not what
we observe
...
This question is further
related to the fact that individuals—even trained mathematicians—who are able to follow a short line of reasoning sometimes prove unable to understand a long mathematical
demonstration
...
“As for myself,” Poincare confesses, “I am absolutely incapable
even of adding without mistakes” (p
...
In fact, Poincare continues:
A mathematical demonstration is not a simple juxtaposition of syllogisms, it is
syllogisms placed in a certain order, and the order in which these elements
are placed is more important than the elements themselves
...
(p
...
Once the
gifted mathematician perceives the whole at once, then the parts come together in a
coherent way
...
We can
trust that Poincare speaks from experience, since, according to his biographer Paul
Appell, he was such a prodigious mathematician that he never took any notes during
his studies at Polytechnique
...
How useful would notes have been as a
mere linear repetition on paper of something already conveyed in its totality by the professor (Samueli & Boudenot, 2015, p
...
325)
...
Yet the ego is not in control of this choice, rather the unconscious self—
C
...
Jung would simply say, the Self—is
...
Useful
combinations are “felt rather than formulated” and cannot be found in a mechanical way
(p
...
Therefore, mathematical creation requires a delicate sense of esthetic:
[The mathematical entities to which we attribute the character of beauty and
elegance] are those whose elements are harmoniously disposed so that the
mind without effort can embrace their totality while realizing the details
...
And at the same time, in putting under our eyes a
well-ordered whole, it makes us foresee a mathematical law
...
331)
Poincare illustrates this process with his discovery of the Fuchsian functions—a
generalization of periodic functions such as the ordinary trigonometric functions (sine,
cosine, tangent)—around 1879 at the age of twenty-five
...
The first insight came during a sleepless night:
For fifteen days, I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like
those I have since called Fuchsian functions
...
One evening, contrary to my custom, I
drank black coffee and could not sleep
...
By
the next morning, I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian
functions, those which come from the hypergeometric series; I had only to
write out the results, which took but a few hours
...
326)

300

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

The second insight came while he was on a geological excursion, during which he
forgot his unsuccessful conscious efforts to expand his mathematical discovery
...
One day, entering an omnibus to go
somewhere, “at the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the
transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those
of non-Euclidian geometry” (p
...
Poincare could not
verify the idea immediately since he was in conversation with someone else
...
Shortly after, the third insight
came after many failures: “One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me,
with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that
arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical
with those of non-Euclidian geometry” (p
...
The fourth insight came, once again
after many unsuccessful attempts
...
I had all the elements
and had only to arrange them and put them together
...
328)
...
These forms display a high level of internal harmony and are the
object of profound modern conjectures connecting number theory, geometry, and last
but not least, superstring theory, which integrates quantum mechanics and general
relativity
...

Testimonies of the role of nonlinear inspiration, like Poincare’s invention of the
Fuchsian functions, are not limited to the domain of mathematics
...
Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart is another example of a soul on fire with inspiration when a new composition grew within him, piece by piece then, suddenly, as a complete symphony:
“Then my mind seizes it as a glance of my eye a beautiful picture or a handsome youth
...
16)
...
There is a mysterious presence within us that is, as Poincare describes it: It is
“not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how
to choose, to divine
...
330)
...
The creative genius is the exceptional individual who serves as a midwife
for the birth of a timeless reality in the here and now
...


CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

301

For most of us, a first step in the process of relating to the unconscious side of
the personality, when the ego has already firmly established a solid foundation in life, is
to bring to consciousness separate personal fragments of ourselves that have been
rejected or repressed in the course of our lives
...
This
is shadow work that occasionally points to a timeless aspect of reality, such as the one
described by Poincare and Mozart, and may eventually be followed by a deeper exploration of the psyche
...


PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS

WITH THE

WISDOM

OF THE

UNCONSCIOUS

I am reminded of my first encounter with Jungian psychotherapy at the end of
1994, which illustrates the unfathomable wisdom the unconscious self possesses
...
This interruption
in my intellectual studies, devoted entirely to the numinous discovery of the extraordinary resources of my body, had a profound impact on my personality
...
A big dream also came during this time, in which a young queen living
on a mountain requested that her garden be restored
...
Down the mountain, I somehow received the request, but knew also that the
workmen who could do the work for the queen had not, because the old envoy of the
queen who usually transmitted her requests had not done his job
...
I decided to go up the mountain to meet the queen,
accompanied by a soldier whom I met on my way
...
A new communication
channel had to be established between her and them
...

Soul and body needed to be reconnected and move again in unison
...
D
...
My energy had stalled, except in certain exceptional moments
when I would sense a very peculiar heat in my solar plexus that would intensify dramatically and envelope me entirely when I came close to some meaningful ideas or people
or even things
...
One day, in December of 1994, I decided to visit a
local museum, the Musee Fabre in Montpellier, France, where I was living
...
My intention was to look
carefully at each painting and simultaneously pay attention to the heat
...
I spent a long time before it, on fire
...
The square was half in the dark, but light
was flowing in from the right
...
The water on the ground mirrored the clouds in the sly
...
That was it! That was
what I was looking for! But what was it, exactly?

302

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

I knew about C
...
Jung’s essay “Psychology of the Transference” (1969), which
describes the process of transference in psychotherapy by using a series of images
from an ancient alchemical treatise, the Rosarium Philosophorum, the “rose garden”
of the philosophers
...
The queen was the divine Sophia, goddess of eternal wisdom, whom natural philosophers love—this is what the Greek
etymology of the word philosopher indicates: phılos, “loving” and sophıa, “wisdom
...
The following images represent the opposites: the king and the
queen, the sun and the moon, approaching each other, getting naked, then making love
while immersed in the waters of the fountain
...
Now,
the two become one, as in Huygens’ odd sympathy
...
This
paradoxical operation goes through distinct phases:
Practical analysis has shown that unconscious contents are invariably
projected at first upon concrete persons and situations
...
Among these contents the relation to the parent of opposite sex plays
a particularly important part
...
357)
Unconscious contents that can be integrated belong to what Jung calls the shadow
of an individual
...
Transference reaches deeper than
projection because it involves unconscious contents that cannot be integrated due to
their archetypal nature
...
In
the vessel of the psychotherapeutic process, transference involves the therapist
...
A few months later, Antoinette told me that the night before our first
encounter, she had a dream about me—something quite unusual for her with her

patients—in which she and Etienne
Perrot had to serve as my parents to justify my

parents, who were from Bulgaria
...

The verb justify may seem incongruous here, and it took me a while to grasp fully
its meaning in this context
...
However I prefer justify, which introduces the
positive value of making something just right, whereas transfer bears the negative

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

303

connotation of a dispensable trick played by the unconscious
...
As our relationship progressively warmed up
over the twelve years of working together on what had been corrupted by my biological
mother, Antoinette became a spiritual mother to me, and I would occasionally address her
this way with a respectful “dear mother”; she would reply with “dear son
...
This
is where, again, I experienced the fire around me—this time when I opened a book,

Le Jardin de la Reine (The Garden of the Queen), by Etienne
Perrot
...
The next days were spent reading this book,
slowly, in an altered state of consciousness, constantly surrounded by the fire
...
Profoundly touched by this manifestation of the unconscious, I decided to
take my pen and write to the author, which I promptly did, then went to the post office
to mail it
...
However, mysteriously, the machine stopped working just as the person in
line before me attempted to use it
...

The letter weighed 36 grams
...
G
...
Based on the principle of synchronicity, the I Ching displays 64 symbols or hexagrams, each one describing an archetypal
situation
...
The name of the
hexagram means literally ‘wounding of the bright’ and corresponds to a darkening of
consciousness
...
The darkening
of the light most accurately reflected my inner state
...
Still I resisted giving credence to my subjective
impressions and could not send the letter
...
In a shop months earlier, I had discovered a reproduction of Mark
Rothko’s painting No
...
It
seemed to be the perfect window on imagination I wanted to open in the wall above my
bed
...
” Suddenly,
in the middle of the night, the painting fell on my head! “The sun has sunk under the
earth and is therefore darkened,” spoke the I Ching
...
The following morning, I resolved to send my letter in
order to let the meaning of this inexplicable series of events unfold
...

It was now an oil plant with several derricks, and my new job was to be
part of a musical band and play a four-stringed bass guitar
...

A strong voice suddenly came down from the sky and intoned with great
solemnity: “Welcome to the extraction of 0
...
”
The meaning of the dream became clear to me when I received an answer to my

36-gram letter from Etienne
Perrot
...
Reading the letter, the pieces of the puzzle fell into place:
the painting by Vincent Bioules, the book on synchronicity, and the extraction of the
wealth of the world—of this light that had sunk into the earth
...

My urge to buy the reproduction of Rothko’s painting was heading in the right direction but did not go far enough, since it remained at the abstract level of a two-dimensional image hanging above my bed
...
Also, as Poincare intuitively realized, the unconscious is “not
purely automatic” (Poincare, 1908/2015, p
...
This is how I view the breakdown of the stamp machine
...
The four-stringed bass guitar symbolized the bodily sensor I was
experimenting with, which helped me to well up a profound inner truth, as infinitesimal
as it appears (0
...
We cannot interpret this percentage as a quantity; rather, it
should be understood as part of a whole that extends along the vertical axis from the
depths of the material world to immaterial heights where the voice originated
...

A few days later, at the beginning of January of 1995, a dear friend of mine, also a
love interest, came back from a trip to Egypt and gave me a beautiful blue stone that an
Egyptian man had given her
...
I looked at my stone, felt compelled to kiss it, then slipped it into
my pocket
...


 ERROR: THE RETURN
POINCARE’S

OF

CHAOS

In 1889, ten years after the discovery of the Fuchsian functions, Poincare pointed
to another cloud suddenly appearing in the clear sky of dynamism: Deterministic
chaos, which continuously connects the parts to the whole in a way that classical physics once rejected, began to show its disturbing face again in a place that had always
been associated with eternity-the heavenly realm of the solar system
...
The Scientific Revolution put an end to this way of seeing and
located the sun at the center of the universe
...
However, what happened to the stability of the solar system when all the planets and the satellites, when

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

305

all the comets and other minor bodies were included at once? Might it be that one day,
the regular motion of the planets would progressively and irremediably be skewed by
small reciprocal gravitational perturbations? Would continual imperceptible gravitational interactions between planets lead to chaos and the destruction of the solar system after a long time? Newton briefly discussed this question in Opticks (1704/1952)
and came to the surprising conclusion that “blind Fate could never make all the Planets
move one and the same way in Orbs concentrick … Such a wonderful Uniformity in
the Planetary System must be the Effect of Choice” (p
...

The stability of the cosmos and the only way to avoid chaos was to appeal to a
Deus ex machina, a deliberate divine choice to preserve the stability of the solar system against the blind forces of nature that God Himself had created
...
In particular, genuine acts of creation as well as structural
stability of organized bodies, like our own physical bodies, should also be the effect of a
divine choice
...
At the same time, it was still unclear whether Newton’s gravitational
theory could account for these irregularities, since no scientist knew how to solve
Newton’s equations of motion for more than two bodies
...
The circumstances of this discovery are themselves rather chaotic, as we will see
...
The winner
would be awarded a gold medal, as well as a prize of 2,500 Swedish crowns (Gray, 2012,
p
...
The winning submission would also be published in the prestigious Acta
Mathematica
...

Karl Weierstrass and Charles Hermite, two of the best mathematicians of the time,
were part of the jury (Gray, p
...

Poincare decided to take part in the competition and submitted the result of his
exploration on the question of the stability of the solar system
...
Poincare started
his article by stressing that his results were so incomplete that he hesitated to publish
them (Gray, 2012, p
...
Then he went on to determine the conditions under which
stability of the three celestial bodies would be sustained, using mathematical methods
he developed to map the trajectories of Jupiter and the asteroid
...
Poincare’s demonstration was a difficult one to follow, even for the esteemed
jury members who privately asked him many questions (Gray, p
...
The final conclusion, which went far beyond any other proof ever elaborated, affirmed without ambiguity that the solar system was indeed stable
...

The article was in the process of being published in Acta Mathematica, when a
young editor of the journal, a modest mathematician named Edvard Phragmen, pointed
to several mistakes in mail exchanges with Poincare
...
Poincare realized
it and was distressed: “I will not conceal from you the distress this discovery has caused
me” (Gray, p
...
The error was not only a considerable embarrassment to
Poincare, but also to all the jury members who had not caught it, to the journal Acta
Mathematica, to the organizers of the competition, and to the king of Sweden himself
...
However, the article
with the error had already been published and partially distributed
...
278)
...
However, the final conclusion of his demonstration was opposite to the
previous one: It is not possible to prove the stability of even the simplest system
containing three bodies
...
The domains of stability of
the three-body system proved inextricably mixed with the domain of instability,
resulting in unpredictable trajectories of the asteroid, which Poincare despaired to
draw
...

A recent study conducted by French physicist Jacques Lanskar (2012) reviews the
various physical explorations of the solar system’s stability over the past three centuries
and summarizes our current understanding on this question
...
According to Lanskar:
An error of 15 meters in the initial position of the Earth gives rise to an error
of about 150 meters after 10 million years, but the same error becomes 150
million kilometers after 100 million years
...
(p
...
The impossibility of predicting the movement of planets does not mean that the trajectories will suddenly become erratic and zig-zag after a
few tens of millions of years, simply that a minuscule error in the determination of the
position of Earth now, or a slight perturbation of this position due to cosmic events, will
yield dramatic, unpredictable effects over time
...
Millions of years
may seem incomprehensively long by human standards, but it is rather small in sidereal
time
...
Or, Lanskar tells us, Mercury may collide with Venus or the sun;
or Mars may be ejected from the solar system; or Mercury, Mars, or Venus may collide

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

307

with Earth (2012, pp
...
There is a broad spectrum of catastrophic scenarios,
which Newton’s God would be incapable of preventing
...
He had missed a
logical bifurcation leading to the distressing domain where chaos reigned
...
Newton’s development of calculus was based entirely on this fundamental assumption, which had
showed its extraordinary value in the mathematical principles of motions he had laid
out
...

In 1872, for example, Karl Weierstrass, a member of Poincare’s jury, presented a
mathematical function, now called Weierstrass function, which was continuous everywhere—that is, it showed no gap in its linear course—yet displayed an extraordinary
roughness similar to the rugged contours of a snowflake (Mandelbrot, 2004, p
...

This was one of the very first examples of what would later be called a fractal
...
973)
...
In the same spirit, Poincare wrote in 1899:
Logic sometimes makes monsters
...
More of continuity, or less of
continuity, more derivatives, and so forth
...

In former times when one invented a new function it was for a practical
purpose; today one invents them purposely to show up defects in the reasoning
of our fathers and one will deduce from them only that
...
973)
Unbeknownst to Poincare was the fact that his demonstration of the chaotic
nature of the solar system was, after all, directly related to logical monsters
...
It turns out that a chaotic system is characterized by the underlying
presence of strange attractors, which belong to the family of pathological functions
...
It was an entry into a dark realm of collective consciousness, where the questioning about quality proved as important, if not
more, than quantity
...
A
qualitative assessment—for example, of the stability or instability of a system—went
beyond the art of the geometer and required the survey of a multitude of geometric

308

PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 61, ISSUE 3 / 2018

features at once, rather than the exact detail of individual traits
...
The focus is now on imagining how things would be
otherwise
...
Then, as the scales fell from the eyes, the new generation of mathematicians began to appreciate the intricate beauty of deterministic chaos—which suddenly was perceived everywhere around us and within us, from the ragged contours of
coastlines, mountains, and leaves to complex weather systems; from the beating of our
own hearts to the simultaneous firing of neurons in our brains
...
The word fractal, coined by Mandelbrot, comes
from the Latin frangere, which means “to break
...
Fractals serve to describe
“grossly irregular and fragmented facets of nature” (Mandelbrot, 1980, p
...
Mandelbrot also makes
the analogy with numbers and situates fractals between the Euclidian shapes in the
same way that fractions and rational numbers lie between whole numbers (p
...
To
get an intuitive image of what this means, we just need to look around us at the cubes,
spheres, and other smooth shapes we use to build our homes and cities, and contrast
them with complex shapes of trees, root systems, and clouds engineered by nature
...
It was to reach the supernatural
...
The 19th-century mathematicians may have been lacking in
imagination, but Nature was not
...
3–4)
...
In this strange light, we might regard our individual human life, as
short as it is, as rough and fragmentary as it feels, not so much as the corruption of a
perfect, blissful state, but as a part of a complex interconnected whole, which includes
both human and nonhuman worlds
...
“The shadow,” C
...
Jung writes, “is a moral problem that challenges the
whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort” (Jung 1968, par
...
Unfortunately, most of us still cling to antiquated forms of occasionalism, according to which God will always choose to keep our

CHRISTOPHE LE MOU€
EL 䉬 THE AGE OF IMAGINATION

309

world balanced and stable, even though it is now clear that deterministic chaos set a
perpetual flag on the Earth billions of years before the first human existed
...

It might be that Poincare’s error and the way he dealt with it symbolically point to
an alternative route that we will need to imagine
...
Then he swiftly demonstrated the presence of chaos in the heavenly realm
...
This is the
moral obligation of our time, which will determine the fate of our civilization
...
A better analogy would be a dirty, bumpy
road that winds in a nonlinear way according to the landscape
...
Taking
the road of chaos demands a slowing down to meet the unexpected as well as careful
steering to stay on a safe course
...


Christophe Le Mou€el, Ph
...
, is Executive Director of the C
...
Jung Institute of Los
Angeles and Science Editor of Psychological Perspectives
...


FURTHER READING
Barbour, J
...
(2001)
...
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press
...
, Schatz, M
...
, Rockwood H
...
(2002)
...
Proceedings:
Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 458(2019)
...

Buyse, F
...
Spinoza and Christiaan Huygens: The odd philosopher and the odd sympathy of pendulum clocks
...
Arad, Romania: Vasile Goldis University Press
...
(1985)
...
2 (J
...
Stoothoff, &
D
...
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
...
(2014)
...

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press
...
(1999)
...
Oxford: Oxford University Press
...
(2003)
...
New York: Norton
...
(1973)
...
New York: Simon & Schuster
...
(2012)
...
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
...
(1996)
...
Princeton: Princeton University Press
...
(2011)
...
Davie & R
...
Oxford, UK: Oxford University
Press
...
G
...
The collected works of C
...
Jung
...
9(2): Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R
...
C
...
; H
...
Fordham, G
...
McGuire, Eds
...
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
...
G
...
The collected works of C
...
Jung
...
16: The practice of psychotherapy
(R
...
C
...
; H
...
Fordham, G
...
McGuire, eds
...

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
...
G
...
The collected works of C
...
Jung, Vol
...
F
...

Hull, Trans
...
Read, M
...
Adler, & W
...
Bollingen Series XX
...

Jung, C
...
(1973)
...
G
...
2: Experimental researches (R
...
C
...
, H
...
Fordham, G
...
McGuire
...
Bollingen Series XX
...

Kline, M
...
3)
...

Krieger, M
...
(2015)
...

Singapore: World Scientific Publishing
...
(2012)
...
Retrieved from
https://arxiv
...
5996
Leibniz, G
...
(1989)
...
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
...
B
...
The fractal geometry of nature
...
H
...

Mandelbrot B
...
(1980)
...
1981 Yearbook of Science and the
Future
...

Mandelbrot, B
...
(2004)
...
Berlin/Heidelberg,
Germany: Springer-Verlag
...
W
...
Beauty and revolution in science
...

Newton, I
...
Opticks
...
(Original work published 1704)
Newton, I
...
The principia: The authoritative translation and guide: Mathematical principles of natural philosophy
...
(Original work published 1687)
Petkov, V
...
Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag
...
(2015)
...
The Monist, 20(3), 321–335
...

Popkin, R
...
(1966) The philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
...

Samueli, J
...
, & Boudenot, J
...
(2015)
...
Paris: Ellipse Marketing
...
-L
...
Dreams
...

von Franz, M
...
(1992)
...
Boston & London: Shambhala
...
(1967)
...
(Cary F
...
), Bollingen Series
XXXI
...




---