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The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal (view source)
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>''Lipton’s Journal'': Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>''Lipton’s Journal'': Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal}} | ||
{{MR12}} | {{MR12}} | ||
{{byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|abstract=Norman Mailer kept a journal of self-analysis for approximately four months in the mid-1950s. This record was called ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]''. | {{byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|abstract=Norman Mailer kept a journal of self-analysis for approximately four months in the mid-1950s. This record was called ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]''. Mailer took a Jungian approach to self-analysis that he believed had the potential to liberate his work and his life. Further, it records his discovery of jazz as an important pathway to artistic renewal. Mailer’s self-analysis through ''Lipton’s Journal'' was transformational and foundational and it would become the key to all his future work, beginning in the 1960s. Reading the journal, we witness both the ''how'' and the ''why'' of Mailer’s personal transformation.|note=The manuscript I am citing here is the manuscript edited by J. Michael Lennon and Susan Mailer, which they generously provided to me. My heartfelt thanks to Mike and Susan, especially to Michael Lennon who commented at length on this essay during its development. The journal-entry numbering system I follow is theirs, where each numbered entry Mailer made is re-numbered according to the editors’ system for a proposed, compressed edition of the journal to be published in the future and to include the Mailer-Lindner correspondence. [This system has been updated to correspond with this site’s project. —Ed.]|url=http://prmlr.us/mr12beg}} | ||
{{cquote|The modern mind has forgotten those old truths that speak of the death of the old man and the making of a new one, of spiritual rebirth and similar old-fashioned “mystical absurdities.” My patient, being a scientist of today, was more than once seized by panic when he realized how much he was gripped by such thoughts. He was afraid of becoming insane, whereas the man of two thousand years ago would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of a magical rebirth and renewal of life. But our modern attitude looks back proudly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity and entirely forgets that it carries the whole living past in its lower stories of the skyscraper of rational consciousness. Without the lower stories our mind is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous. The true history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living mental organism of everyone.|author=[[w:Carl Jung|Carl Jung]]|source=''Psychology and Religion''}} | {{cquote|The modern mind has forgotten those old truths that speak of the death of the old man and the making of a new one, of spiritual rebirth and similar old-fashioned “mystical absurdities.” My patient, being a scientist of today, was more than once seized by panic when he realized how much he was gripped by such thoughts. He was afraid of becoming insane, whereas the man of two thousand years ago would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of a magical rebirth and renewal of life. But our modern attitude looks back proudly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity and entirely forgets that it carries the whole living past in its lower stories of the skyscraper of rational consciousness. Without the lower stories our mind is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous. The true history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living mental organism of everyone.|author=[[w:Carl Jung|Carl Jung]]|source=''Psychology and Religion''}} | ||