My main character spends some time at West L.A. Division, sometimes called the jewel in the LAPD’s crown. In this scene, he walks up the street, and here’s what he encounters…

Moody walked up Butler in a daze toward Santa Monica Boulevard.

He stopped to call Vance’s cell-phone. As he was doing this, he gazed up at the building next door. It was a former Masonic hall (now a Post Office) with a giant, faded, post-apocalyptic mural called “Isle of California,” painted on the three-story stuccoed back wall by the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad. It was a vision of devastation (after the “Big One”) where the ocean is lapping up against a sheered-off cliff near Blythe, California, with a spindle of broken freeway still left teetering. Anyone who has driven across the desert from Phoenix into Southern California knows that Blythe is in the middle of nowhere. The mural originates in the collective fear that everything west of the San Andreas fault, where the American plate ends, including the entire California coast, will someday fall into the ocean.

Here’s an actual photo (near corner Santa Monica & Butler):

When I had first decided to write a Jungian Thriller set in Los Angeles, I remember attending a weekend conference called “Myths of L.A.” It featured many wonderful speakers and the overriding theme was the collective “shadow” of the city of  L.A., it’s underbelly.

One speaker said she imagined L.A. as the Hindu Goddess Kali with the freeways her circulatory system. What a great image. Here is a passage I finally cut from my manuscript where the main character of the book, Animus, imagines that:

He seemed to enter a dream-state, imagining the Goddess Kali, mistress of death and destruction, her dark skin lounging across L.A. County, 50 miles tall, the freeways her veins and arteries, the fingers of two of her right hands dipped in cool ocean water, the other two arms flailing to the East, scratching high desert sand. He thought about Los Angeles perched on the edge of the Western world. A city of binary differences. Sunshine and noir. And yearly fires threatening destruction and purity.

Only in L.A.

From The Portable Jung, chapter six, “The Phenomenology of the Self…” Jung writes, “Closer examination of the dark characteristics–that is the inferiorities constituting the shadow–reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly, an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something happens to him.”

In my novel, ANIMUS, A Jungian Thriller, I’ve tried to put my main character in exactly this position. He’s forced back into law-enforcement to stop crimes against his patients. It seems like his own dark characteristics are rebelling against him–and seem to get worse and worse–even as he works his way through them to solve the crimes.

First, let me start this blog off by saying, to quote screenwriter, William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.”

That would certainly apply to me when it comes to Jungian thought. The subject is so vast, the knowledge and education needed to engage the subject so far beyond what I’ve acquired, that it’s just silly. Clearly, I don’t know anything. But who cares? I want to play and, in the process, learn. My education in the subject consists of personal readings, individual workshops, one course, “Experiencing Jung” at the Jung Institute in Los Angeles, and two weekend conferences, Myths of L.A. with John Beebe (among other speakers) and In Defense of Jung with James Hillman, who wrote The Soul’s Code, and many other titles.Even though my knowledge of Jung’s writings is limited, my curiosity isn’t. So, join me in playing with the Jungian concepts here. Just because we can’t throw a fast ball a 100 miles-
-an-hour doesn’t mean we can’t pitch.

I hope respected Jungian analysts as well as mystery lovers and anyone drawn to this fascinating subject matter will post to this blog.

Well, here goes: let me throw you a change-up.

It’s Out of Your Hands

I’ll begin this blog with a few quotes from C.G. Jung’s book, Aspects of the Feminine, translated by R.F.C. Hull, page 78, from the chapter, Anima and Animus.

A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman, at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be “mannish.” The repression of feminine traits and inclinations naturally causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious. No less naturally, the imago of woman (the soul image) becomes a receptacle for these demands, which is why a man, in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity—a woman, in short, who can unhesitatingly receive the projection of his soul.

Jung goes on to say that it might turn out that “The man has married his own worst weakness.” I looked up imago in the dictionary, couldn’t find it, but under image, it gave imago as a Latin root, related to imitari, IMITATE. The first definition: a reproduction of the appearance of someone or something. Jung says that someone, in a man, is his mother. In a woman, her father.

The next quote is anecdotal and comes from that (albeit dated) purveyor of homogenized cultural knowledge, Werner Erhard, founder of the est Training:

It’s already happened.

That was the piece of information I was supposed to say “I got it” to after I’d spent two weekends in 1980, forbidden to piss, and spending $300. In other words, your career choices, your choice of mate, creative art—in fact, everything—has already been decided.

As far as your mate goes, I often look back and wonder how in the world I chose a woman who is as angry as I am. In fact, my wife and I are so alike in our vulnerabilities and negative character traits that it’s hard not to feel strongly when either of us is hurt—especially by the other. The saving grace is that we have different positive traits, perspectives, strengths and interests that help us bridge that forceful, electric soul similarity, that sparking wire that connects us at the anima and animus.

How does this apply to the mystery novel, particularly, my novel, Animus? Well, my main character, Gar Moody, is haunted by the suicide of a lover and tormented by a kidnapper who he can’t decide is a man or woman. He begins to believe he’s tracking the animus of a woman—since the energy is aggressive and forceful. Not until the end does he realize it’s a dance between his own anima and something very different.

Why would this be a compelling plot point in a mystery novel? Just think of it: if you look at Jung’s quote above, he’s saying that repressing our contrasexual characteristics makes them accumulate in the unconscious. He also says in other writings that, in affect, the shadow—that which is denied and unseen in our own consciousness—can take on a personality of its own. Can you think of anything more frightening? Think of the hosts bursting out of the abdomens of the inhabitants of the ship in Alien. Except you don’t have to be in space; they burst out around the water cooler, across the dinner table, in the bedroom.

What could be more mysterious? And where would a Jungian detective start?