Good morning, just awake, but the need to vent my anger is huge again. Five years ago, however, that meant literally ventilating. At five or six o'clock in the morning, the windows and doors open against each other, whether summer or winter. It starts during corona. I'm out of work because I can't do my job anymore, and in order to replace my creative profession, find a new hobby. Psychology has always attracted me, but teaching at university level was and probably is not possible, as in mathematics is certainly not my greatest talent. In 1983 I tried to recalibrate my math because I wanted to study again in a fit of idealism. Unfortunately, I can't get any further than chapter ten of modern mathematics, just like in seventh grade, more than two decades earlier.
Psychology! Jung drew me forty years earlier, but that's it. A few weeks earlier, in 2020, I watched a movie about Freud with my girlfriend, who currently has a trial subscription to Netflix. It seems interesting to me to know more about this Austrian psychiatrist in my opinion. The film is one of the horror genre. I remember a lot of dark, dark and obscure images and an absurd amount of dark red blood. This can't be. This can't be right, so it goes through me looking at the maled screen. A few weeks later at the start of the glory days of corona, it is at least wonderfully quiet on my street and throughout the city and actually I enjoy the whole situation, probably partly because I have never been infected myself, I decide to look for a book about Sigmund Freud.
At boekwinkeltjes.nl I find a thick, bulky biography about Sigmund Freud, which is delivered a few days later. Early in the morning I'm sitting at my table with my first real introduction to the psychology of Sigmund Freud. You can find a lot of it, but he remains the father of modern-day psychoanalysis. The book is not only very boring, but Freud's life, at least as it is written in this book, is really toe-curved boring and totally uninteresting. Halfway through the fistful book I'm stranded. Anyway, I'm a stubborn perseverant and ordering, also from an interest in explaining dreams, which in my view could be his most important work, Die Traumdeutung, but in a Dutch translation, because in my early years I strongly opposed learning the German language at school. Also in Die Traumdeutung I and then with a lot of effort did not get any further than halfway through the treatment of the dream by Freud, especially because his treatment and theory seemed to me to be rather one-sided and rather limited. Meanwhile I have discovered his pupil and pupil the Swiss Carl Gustav Jung. Because of the stories about this involved student of Bleur in a facility for schizophrenics, the hairs of my arms are going to rise and on April 20, 2020, it can't be better, the book of my choice is delivered: Psychological Types. I've always wanted to know more about human psychology, but also the phenomenon of archetypes, which I knew just as little about up to that point, has seemed fascinating to me all my life.
There I am, early in the morning in the cold with my book with something quite unknown to me, entrusted to the paper and humanity by a psychiatrist who was completely unknown to me from around the turn of the century, whom I myself experienced. Of course, Jung writes in German, which translates into Dutch for the untrained brain generates a very strange syntax. Each main sentence has an average of five sub-sections, which contain a lot of relevant information. Involuntarily I think of the Dutch lessons from my childhood in high school, especially writing, which I always thought were against, but which I'm going to like more and more every time I write. It dawns on me that I myself also wrote sentences with many sub-sections and a whole economical use of space in terms of all the information I wanted to share. It is then mainly a sport to make the opening sentence as long and comprehensive as possible as a short introduction. I always got a lot of criticism from my teachers. I try to do it in the other subjects, too, when I see the opportunity. However, in Jung I do meet my superior in this area and in the first few months I can only take one paragraph a day, partly because I have to read these two to three times to digest it. The quality of the great amount of knowledge that I get is exactly what I'm looking for in my life.
