Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

Eleanor left Borneo and was with Max again in England for a time; then she went back to Zurich to complete her training to be a qualified analytical psychologist. She wanted, I suppose, to find out more about mind. She had already done her years of training as a medical student, and then her psychological studies in Zurich. She became one of the acolytes around Jung during his last years: she was in Zurich when he died. Then she left the entourage that had formed round him and came back to London: one of the things she had learned, she said, was that a prophet's teaching was likely to be distorted by his disciples organising themselves into something like a church after his death. This was a difficult time for Eleanor; she had disagreements with many of her friends. But the best form of promulgation for a prophet's ideas, she said, was, as always, for seeds to become scattered.

Eleanor wrote a short book about Jung's alchemical studies: this book was an elaboration of her thesis of 1939. Towards the end of his life Jung had become obsessed with alchemy: alchemists, he suggested, had used materials and material symbols but in fact they were trying to deal with states of mind. Eleanor elaborated on this: it had been necessary, she said, for alchemists to have spoken in riddles about what they were doing because what they were dealing with were processes rather than states — and the experience of a process had necessarily to be that of a journey in the dark. A too well-lit imaginative idea of what was happening would result in an end being assumed and thus the function of a process being destroyed — this function being a search, a testing, a trying-out of this or that, in recognition of the necessity that one should learn to learn for oneself. If an end was clear then there would be no process but a following of what was given; and from this, what could be learned for oneself? What was required of every organism if it was to develop or even survive was to learn to be flexible, to deal with whatever unexpectedly turned up: of what help in such practisings would be journeys in the light! The business of learning to learn as opposed to learning to follow a line would be learning on a higher level: a level of openness and testing on which there might be furtherance of life.

Eleanor did not settle down to earn her living as an analytical psychologist straightaway: she continued to travel; she obtained grants from universities and academic foundations for her work

abroad. She and Max continued, in their different disciplines, to echo and interweave with one another — about the business oflevels, of patterning, of the way in which by the recognition of such structuring there were made possible what otherwise seemed to be impossibilities about life. Max persevered in the areas of his scientific disciplines: he toyed with the idea that had first come to him on the mountain-top in Spain — Granted that in some sense the observer brings into existence that which he observes (there are potentialities from which he chooses) then indeed what should be the criteria by which he chooses; should not these indeed be called 'aesthetic', since he appears to act like an artist — trying out, testing, this or that? Why are scientists in their experimenting so reluctant to recognise their creative role? At the same time Eleanor noted how even writers in modern literature carried on as if people like themselves did not exist: they wrote of people who were helpless or comic victims: they did not write of people, that is, who were able to recognise and deal in patterns. And thus there was a contradiction in their work: the helplessness that they wrote about was belied by the skill of their performances: their description of other people's despair seemed to offer a successful protection perhaps against their own and that of others, but why could they not even try to write about the implications of this? At this point in her essay, however, Eleanor seemed suddenly to change tack: she said -

But of course it might be self-defeating to write too openly about such protection; this would be on a different level from that of telling a story. As with the old alchemists, to achieve what one wants there probably has to be some secrecy; but if there is a code, then still it might be recognised that there is a message!

Eleanor and Max saw quite a lot of each other during these years (the mid-1960s). Eleanor was setting herself up as a psychoanalyst in London: Max had been given a professorship at the university in the north of England where he and Eleanor had been before the war. He and she travelled to and fro; they went on holidays together; they spent some time trekking in the Himalayas. In later years they talked with great animation of this time: they were never quite at ease, it seemed, in justifying their many separations. Eleanor would say 'But think of the self-satisfaction in settling down!' Max would say 'But you sometimes get tired of being on a tightrope.'

They were both now becoming recognised names in the academic and scientific world: it was as a cyberneticist that Max had gained his professorship in the north of England. Cybernetics was a field coming into fashion at this time: it was defined as 'the study of systems of communication and control'. Max said 'I was a cyberneticist long before the word was invented.' Eleanor said 'No wonder no one knew what you were trying to say!'

Max's commitment to cybernetics arose from his interest in patterns of interaction and control. Living organisms regulate themselves by maintaining a steady state in the face of changes in the environment; they heal and restore themselves in response to pressures and damage; they ensure consistency of form even when they reproduce themselves. In this they resemble a thermostat, which performs a function of maintaining a temperature within limits. This mechanical function is on one level; on another is the business of setting the dial, which is performed by humans. It is on this human level of consciousness that oscillations are apt to get out of control: there are dashings between extremes — wars, obsessions, self-destructions — a snowballing effect so that the human psyche, and thus human societies, are often like engines without a governor, so of course eventually they are likely to fuse or blow themselves up. At one time it had been felt that just as a human agency was responsible for the setting of a mechanical system, so a divine agency was responsible for the setting of a human system: but such a formulation (Max argued) was no longer necessary: humans themselves now had the ability to look down and see what was happening to them on the level of consciousness. This level might be seen as the one on which the requirements of morals and the terrible destructive demands of evolution met; from which the activities of the other levels could be surveyed and perhaps accepted if not controlled. There might always be, that is — for the continuance of life, of evolution — some forms of battle, of self-destruction; what mattered was that these should be contained by a way of looking at them, approaching them, being conscious of them — in a style which was to be learned; which might even result in control.

As a postcript to his papers on cybernetics Max published an article in a small religious magazine (Eleanor joked with him 'You and I are religious not because anyone would recognise us as religious, but because we have recognised all recognitions are of a code'). There were obvious parallels, Max argued, between the idea of cybernetic levels and the efforts that Christians had made in

trying to establish their doctrine of the Trinity. At the level of God the Father there was a simple cause-and-effect view of the world — God made his covenants with humans, which was a way of describing something like the mechanical functioning of a thermostat: if humans got too far above themselves then disasters knocked them down; if they got too far below themselves then they were ready to be boosted by the inspiration of a prophet: on this level humans did not have much say in the style of the to-and-fro. At the level of God the Son humans were given information about how to handle such a mechanism: life was indeed a matter of paradoxes — by dying you lived; fulfilment was achieved by sacrifice; you were to love your neighbour as yourself; and so on: but still, in this style humans seemed to experience a somewhat helpless oscillation between ecstasy and despair. But then there was, so it was said at least, the domain of the Holy Spirit, in which humans could be led into responsibility for themselves. This was not so much a level as an ability to move between levels, to see a pattern by means of an inbuilt knowledge of truth — such means, if observed and honoured, allowing ends to look after themselves. But about this style, this spirit, the so-called 'guide into truth', not much more was ever said. And of course this was perhaps necessary, because the point of this activity, this understanding, was that individuals, now being somewhat godlike, might find their own way. But with this spirit humans could keep an eye on (take a walk away from every now and then) the mechanisms that to some extent necessarily ran themselves on the other levels; the nature of the world seeming to be such that this watchfulness, alertness, gave a sense of the miracle of control.