The Perfect Body

[Brownlie]

The perfect body

was a marble paradigm.
To some this image of perfection
was a woman that they’d call an odalisque.
To deduce the accurate proportions of their courtesan,
they collected skulls
that would not lie
in mountains on a battlefield.
Instead of practicing barbarity, they treated them with antiseptic,
held them in a vaulted palm to dappled light,
proposed some theories on phrenology,
And tested them empirically with a bit of trepanning.
Searching for the Elan Vital that would correlate to preternatural beauty
and platonic forms,
they would drill and measure skulls
just to separate the psychoanalyst from the raving madmen
who, at the bus stop, said you slighted him because your
brow was wrinkled in a perturbed glance.
All of these tools worked to separate
the psychoanalyst from a raving madmen.

[Utnapishtim]

Sounds like Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his sun...

There is a juxtaposition between Freud and insanity that is ongoing
with numerous references to classical forms of beauty, dead pseudoscience [and living ones].

My critique is that this would be awfully hard to recite aloud.
That is a stylistic preference showing, nothing more.

'To deduce the accurate proportions of their courtesan,
they collected skulls
that would not lie
in mountains on a battlefield.'

That a Jungian could take a skull and say "This was a Valkyrie"
- could this overrule the cruel death of a Florence Nightingale?

There's a whole lot of symbolism here. It could use some traction in everyday life. Not that I'm saying to explain yourself in your own poem, lol. ON THE WHOLE this was a rather fascinating read. It will need a lot of re-reading, but look at what you've already inspired this reader to think about ;-)

[Brownlie]

Sounds like Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his sun...

There is a juxtaposition between Freud and insanity that is ongoing
with numerous references to classical forms of beauty, dead pseudoscience [and living ones].

My critique is that this would be awfully hard to recite aloud.
That is a stylistic preference showing, nothing more.  

'To deduce the accurate proportions of their courtesan,
they collected skulls
that would not lie
in mountains on a battlefield.'

That a Jungian could take a skull and say "This was a Valkyrie"
- could this overrule the cruel death of a Florence Nightingale?

There's a whole lot of symbolism here.  It could use some traction in everyday life.  Not that I'm saying to explain yourself in your own poem, lol.  ON THE WHOLE this was a rather fascinating read.  It will need a lot of re-reading, but look at what you've already inspired this reader to think about ;-)

Thanks for reading, I could see some of the areas providing hiccups in pronunciation. I like your couple of lines there, I haven't read much Jung but it is certainly a prescription that recreates the dead. I read some Derrida thing awhile back that talks about the difference between someone with paranoia and a practitioner of psychoanalysis, you know with the whole deconstruction thing going on. There's also this video that I found very interesting,

[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iZDapgQdFo]

[Utnapishtim]

I was getting at Jungian archetypes. He posited [I'm oversimplifying] that certain universal symbols or emblems get reproduced across cultures throughout history. Our mythologies are rife with them: the Mother, the Warrior, the Great Flood, the Resurrection [from Osiris to Christ, for example] etc. etc. and that they provide us with mediums for coming to grips with individual and mass consciousness. He was a student of Freud, and also was highly interested in dreams. Mental illness is very fascinating. I learned from gerontology that the whole process of dementia occurs in this crappy paraphrase: the higher psychosocial functions start peeling away first; that is, the things we develop later in life such as higher order reasoning and whatever [again crappy paraphrase lol]...and all of the stuff we developed EARLY on are like the inner layers of the onion. Our brains "peel" from outside in...that's why there's so much fear and confusion - those things don't go away. We are left something akin to insecure teenagers...and fascinated children.

[Brownlie]

I was getting at Jungian archetypes.  He posited [I'm oversimplifying] that certain universal symbols or emblems get reproduced across cultures throughout history.  Our mythologies are rife with them:  the Mother, the Warrior, the Great Flood, the Resurrection [from Osiris to Christ, for example] etc. etc. and that they provide us with mediums for coming to grips with individual and mass consciousness.  He was a student of Freud, and also was highly interested in dreams.  Mental illness is very fascinating.  I learned from gerontology that the whole process of dementia occurs in this crappy paraphrase:  the higher psychosocial functions start peeling away first; that is, the things we develop later in life such as higher order reasoning and whatever [again crappy paraphrase lol]...and all of the stuff we developed EARLY on are like the inner layers of the onion.  Our brains "peel" from outside in...that's why there's so much fear and confusion - those things don't go away.  We are left something akin to insecure teenagers...and fascinated children.

I vaguely remember the archetypes and the bit about the universal consciousness and I know, as you seemed to state, that they use him to study mythology and what-not as well.

Dementia is very sad. I could see a poem about that being called "The Onion" or "A Peeling" or something like that. Though, you'd have to be careful with a subject like that.