Blake, Jung, and the Collective Unconscious: The Conflict Between Reason and Imagination (The Jung on the Hudson Book series) Paperback – March 1, 2000

Thoroughly researched and beautifully written. This book, applying Jungian analytical frameworks, captures Blake’s life course as well as his creative work. I constantly wonder whether society today could produce and/or tolerant a prophet like Blake or Jung. Even with so much truth and warmth they offer, would they even be heard or understood by their people in meaningful topics like dualism, men’s divinity within, and the sense of becoming and individuation. I wonder.

not yet completed

This is a new edition of Singer's 1970 book, The Unholy Bible. New title, same text. Nice cover.

The table of contents lists "illustrations" to be found between pages 42 and 43. There are no illustrations. Not happy. Also, where are plates 25-27? From the perspective of one studying alchemy, descriptions are insufficient. One must have the plate. What a disappointment. I'm returning it.

I've owned this book since 2001, and have read it several times. It promises much, but all in all, it's not that insightful. Blake did not simply presage Jung, Jung borrowed a great deal from Blake, although Jungians never put it as bluntly as that. Well, Jung "borrowed" a great deal from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant and above all from Schelling, who coined the word "unconscious." But Jung never got round to making this clear, or crediting his predecessors.Always remember when reading Freud and Jung, that very little therein is new. It was all there before in the great philosophy that preceded the rise of psychology. Jung was a great scholar, make no mistake, but the vast majority of his ideas are a synthesis of ideas that were in vogue before his time, from German Romanticism and German Mysticism. He did not pervert these ideas, but did not give credit where it was due. This kind of thing is now epidemic in the so-called modern world, among most present-day writers.Singer's book doesn't do justice to the subject of Blake and psychology. Better works on this subject include W. P. Witcutt's "Blake: A Psychological Study," and "An Introduction to the Study of Blake," by Max Plowman. I won't list the more advanced works here, since I'm assuming readers are on a beginner level. In any case, these two books are (despite their limitations) much easier to understand and are much more insightful.The major quandary with Blakean scholars, and manner in which they go wildly wrong, is when they assume him to have been a believer. Actually he was not a Christian but an Idealist in the tradition of George Berekeley and Nicholas Malebranche. He cloaked his great work in the language and symbolism of Christianity, but only to free himself to show how religion of all kinds (Gnostic and Orthodox) comes into being. And what a fascinating story he told. All of it accurate. He tells the story religion can't possibly tell, even if it wanted to, about its own origins, nature and purpose. His critiques of religion are the same critiques he'd have leveled at psychoanalysis and psychology, had he lived to see the advent of these schools. So one must beware comparing his work to Jung or any other psychologist, even though the effort is worth it in other ways. But as an expert on the human psyche, Blake works on a far higher level than Jung or his followers know exists.Once this is understood, we clear away the debris of orthodox religion and get to the heart of what Blake was talking about. Blake was an Idealist, phenomenologist and master symbolist, what he described was consciousness, pure and simple. It's just that his conception of consciousness was far wider and deeper than most. Reading his astoundingly profound works, instructs us as to the real meaning of existence, in ways that Jung and others couldn't even begin to comprehend. Their work, excellent as it is, is really a footnote to Blake, who is distinguished not only by being a genius, but by being the first to deal with the mysteries of consciousness in a profound manner, making art and poetry, rather than religion and philosophy, his means of doing so.What we call reality was for Blake merely one emanation, expression and concretization of the human Spirit, or in his parlance - Imagination. Likewise, God is one manifestation this Spirit, as is nature. But it is the human soul that comes first and foremost, since it conceives of the idea of God. As Blake wrote: "All the gods reside in the human breast." In other words, God is part of the process experienced by man's consciousness. He is not, as metaphysicians and Deists believe, apart from the world. Concepts of that kind constituted the "mind-forged manacles" imposed by the agents of religion and false science, of Locke, Newton and men of their like, intent on presenting the world of objects as a stand alone reality separate from the mind beholding it.Blake was all too aware of where these impossibly false and unsustainable theories were leading society. For him God was a convenient placeholder for the Imagination, the true God in which man exists. In other words, what we call Imagination is not a kind of thinking, thinking is a kind of imagining. And it's a living process, like consciousness itself. In this way, Blake showed that the knower and the known enter relationship because of the connective tissue of Imagination which directs and undergirds both."The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination: That is God himself, The Divine Body, Jesus: We are his Members" - William BlakeMental Things are alone Real; what is called Corporeal, Nobody Knows of its Dwelling-Place: it is in Fallacy and its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of mind and Thought? Where is it but in the mind of a Fool? – William Blake

The psychological analysis is very meaningful. I dislike end notes and would prefer footnotes. The arangement is confusing, plates should be in color and the sequence should be left page plate, right page printed content, then analysis of the plate. flipping back and forth between plates, contnet and analysis, and end notes is very distracting.

This is a classic Jungian Interpretation of the English Poet and Engraver William Blake by Jungian analyst June Singer. I had owned a copy 4 decades ago and lost it, but I was happy to find a copy via Amazon.