Newsletter #5– March 2024

The Call of Destiny:

An Introduction to Carl Jung’s Major Works

J. Gary Sparks

Toronto, Inner City Books; (2022); 192 pps.

This is the first new publication by Inner City Books since the death in 2019 of Daryl Sharp, its founder and editor for over forty years.

This book is intended to provide independent readers of Jung who already have a basic understanding of his psychology with an introduction to four of his major works that many find difficult to understand.

Sparks devotes an entire chapter to Symbols of Transformation because it establishes the foundations on which subsequent works were built. Jung distinguishes between two kinds of thinking here: Logical and linear, associated with the rational approach; versus symbolic thought, i.e. “thinking in pictures” and clusters, which characterizes the language of the unconscious, the matrix out of which consciousness arose. (p. 20)

For Sparks, Jung will spend the rest of his life elaborating the “little statement [about] ‘the controlling influences of the unconscious.’” This along with Jung’s assertion regarding the “forward striving function” of the unconscious, are the most important phrases in this work. Jung elaborates on this concept and the premise that “there is something going on that is bigger than we are, of which we are a part …” in later works. (pp. 39-40)

In working up the rich symbolic contents of Miss Miller’s fantasies, Sparks emphasizes the importance of asking oneself where the energy wants to go when one feels overwhelmed by images from the unconscious. He unpacks the psychological significance of major themes such as death and rebirth, the hero myth, incest (negative and positive attributes) and the importance of sacrifice that Jung discusses in this work.

One almost inevitably gets lost in the overwhelmingly dense mass of details that Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis contains. However, by keeping in mind its two major themes, i.e. ‘the opposites and their synthesis,’—the fundamental premise upon which the entire books rests—as well as ‘the extraction of some essence’ from the process, it becomes manageable. (p. 50)

Although we don’t produce this synthesis or know how it happens, by “taking responsibility for all of our conflicting tendencies” we produce the preconditions necessary for this ‘Mysterious Union’ to happen. (p. 50) What makes our work so difficult is the need to contain the emotional poison and chaos within us and not let it spill out into the world in fits of blaming or acting out our distress onto others. (p. 59)

The transformation process goes through three stages: in the first, a strong ego is developed; in the second, the ego can experience powerful emotions without being overwhelmed by them or by acting them out; in the third, opportunities for bringing something of ourselves into the world arise synchronistically.

Through all of this suffering, if we direct our attention to the unconscious, put energy into the process and take an active role, it will yield its contents and “fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” (p. 70) What Jung originally termed the “forward striving function of the unconscious” he now calls “the spirit, the inner guidance,” that leads us to live a more meaningful life grounded in a deeper knowledge of genuine selfhood. (p. 74)

Aion represents a Mithraic God, the dominant religion of the Roman era and also the Greek root for the word eon. Jung’s book Aion presents his views about the major epochs of Western history, especially the Christian era with a psychological focus on how it provided the necessary, spiritual counterbalance to the unbridled instinctual excesses of Roman times, and what the historical moment needs now. The fish symbolism associated with Christ and the simultaneity of the corresponding astrological era is profoundly significant for Jung’s psychology.

The Christian god-image and the resulting split between good and evil present us with a problem that cannot be solved by philosophy or economics or politics, but only through individual experience. (p. 111) In order to heal this split, this era needs to confront the material excesses of the past thousand years and find the spirit embedded in it. For Sparks, that is the main point of Aion. (p. 124)

Thus, one might ask: “Where is our spirit? What is our spirit doing? How can I create my genuine future? And how can I bring my instincts along with it?” (pp. 124-5) But we also need to bear in mind that “The system of our identity is given to us piece by piece ... in small doses” over time. The whole already exists as such, “somehow beyond time and space.” (p. 128)

For Sparks, Jung’s Answer to Job—the only book Jung would not revise even if he could—is about the nature of evil, our problematic relationship to it and the image that we have built up about God through the millennia to the present day. (p. 141) Sparks refers frequently to Edinger’s Transformation of the God-Image for help in understanding this work.

The situation depicted in Answer to Job can be viewed as one where the “Self isn’t beneficial but rather is out to kill or destroy us.” However, traumatic experiences can prompt us to vigorously explore what it means “to be a genuine person on our genuine path.” (p. 139)

In some situations, archetypal psychology can help facilitate a therapeutic healing process. For Edinger, typical encounters between the ego and the Self have four distinct features which he grouped under the term the ‘Job Archetype’: First, there is an encounter between the ego and a greater power; secondly, there is a wounding; thirdly, the ego perseveres and searches for meaning; lastly, the ego is rewarded with a divine revelation into the nature of this transpersonal experience.

Throughout the process, the ego needs to maintain a dialectical relationship with the Self. “The individual who endures their experience of injustice and carries it, knowing that it is not just a meaningless accident …” understands that it “is a religious experience.” (p 170-1) Ultimately, through such encounters, a new religious attitude” is formed, one that can suffer conflict.

These major works do in large measure demonstrate how Jung laboured upon his calling in life, his destiny prefigured by his “Radiolarian” dream as described in Memories, Dreams and Reflections and Aion (p. 127). Sparks’s introduction to these works provides avid readers of Jung with invaluable keys to accessing the treasures they contain.

—Roman Rogulski

Jung, un voyage vers soi

(Jung: A Journey Towards Oneself)

Frédéric Lenoir

Paris, Albin Michel, (2021). Le Livre de Poche, (2023), 335 pps.

You can find gold in the least expected places. The kind of psychoanalysis that flourishes in France is mainly "the unconscious is structured like a language"—the Lacanian kind. I see Lacanian psychoanalysis as a kind of "strict observance" of Freudian thought (a reformed, or rather, re-formed version of it). Many Lacanians do not have a kind view of Jung, not the least of their accusations being anti-Semitism. Not fertile ground, to say the least, for a positive view of Jung and his work.

Frédéric Lenoir is a French philosopher and sociologist. He is the author of some fifty works that have been translated into twenty languages and have sold ten million copies worldwide. His main interest is the philosophy of religion. His latest work is L’Odyssée du sacré (The Odyssey of the Sacred), published last October. My personal reflections/refractions to the book on Jung will be put in italics.

Lenoir has published two books about the people who have most influenced him: Spinoza and Jung. “These are the two modern thinkers who have had the greatest impact on me and who seem to me to have gone furthest in understanding human beings and the meaning of their existence.” (p. 7) For Lenoir, “They both try to redefine a spirituality outside of any religious belief.” (Ibid.)

Lenoir starts by reviewing Jung’s biography. In families, there is often an impersonal karma that passes from parents to children. This is the case with Jung, with his lineage of doctors and Protestant ministers (eight uncles on his father’s side and six on his mother’s). There is also a strong spiritualist inclination in the female side of the extended family. Can one speak here of a tension of opposites between the two sides?

Growing up, he is an asocial child who prefers the company of nature (sitting on his rock). He is also a fragile child. He will grow up to be a robust, popular young man.

After his First Communion, he felt that “the result was nothing but emptiness… For me, it wasn’t religion, it was the absence of God.” (p. 32) This does not mean a loss of faith or a rejection of God. The idea of an ineffable God who gives meaning to the cosmos appeals to him far more than all the religious figures and Christian dogmas.

He falls out with his father, who exhorts him to believe and not to think, and who is besieged by doubts. Jung could not follow this path.

Jung becomes a doctor with an interest in the paranormal and even writes his thesis on the phenomenon of mediumship. He hesitates between archaeology and medicine as a career choice. It can be said that he embraced both with his archaeology of the soul.

At first, he supported Freud at all costs, even against those who warned him that it would damage his university career: “If what Freud says is true, I’m all for it! I don’t care about a career in which truth is killed and research is mutilated.” (p. 50) Again, at great personal cost, a second falling out occurs, this time with a father figure. It begins on the boat trip to America, when Freud is reluctant to share personal details about a dream, lest he lose his authority. Finding his authority enabled Jung to become the author of his work and his life. The word "author" comes from the Latin word for to increase, to originate, to promote.

As a young doctor, he was disappointed. For him, the doctor must treat the whole patient, not just the disease. This is not far removed from his later conviction that to be individual is to be complete, whole.

As for his ideas, Lenoir sees Jung as using linear and demonstrative thinking, but he can also switch to circular and paradoxical thinking—a passage that can be confusing to the contemporary reader. He refused to create a system (which Spinoza did, and in many ways Freud did as well).

The following quotes are taken from the book's introduction, pages 16-20, inclusive.

He offered a critical interpretation of religion, especially of Christianity: “Christian civilization has shown itself to be hollow to a frightening degree: it’s no more than an outer veneer.” This does not make Jung anti-religious. “Jung believes that Europeans without religion can rediscover, in the depths of their psyche, this access to the sacred, to the ‘numinous,’ which is cruelly lacking.”

Lenoir goes over Jung’s major contribution to the understanding of human beings and of the meaning of their existence. “Although [Jung] always refused to build a system, [he] nevertheless made fundamental discoveries that have enriched and even revolutionized our understanding of the human being, and whose truth and consequences we are only now beginning to appreciate.”

With the first of these discoveries he redefined the libido, “understanding it as a vital impulse rather than a sexual drive” and the unconscious “discovering its creative properties and adding to the personal unconscious the notion of the collective unconscious, which connects us to our ancestors and to the symbols of our culture. He studied universal myths and symbols and developed the notion of the archetype as a primal image inscribed in the human unconscious.”

The second major discovery was the theory of synchronicity, “which shows that two events can be connected, not causally, but by the postulate that there is a dimension of reality that still escapes our scientific knowledge.”

The third concerns individuation: “He showed that the dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious (especially through the analysis of our dreams and the synchronicities of our lives, our active imagination and our artistic creation) promotes access to a knowledge of ourselves that enables us to ‘individuate,’ that is, to become fully ourselves and to realize what the Hindus call ‘the Self,’ the totality of being.”

Lenoir further defines Jung’s process of individuation by relating it to his concept of archetypes. This process, “allows us to unmask the false image of ourselves that we wish to present to others (the persona), to integrate our masculine (animus, for women) and feminine (anima, for men) parts, to cross over into our shadow, the dark, repressed part of ourselves, and to reconcile our polarities. It’s an inner experience, an alchemy of being, of an eminently spiritual nature.”

Finally, Lenoir stresses that for Jung, individuation is not an intellectual adventure: “My life is my action, my work dedicated to the spirit is my life; one cannot be separated from the other.”

From a biographical point of view, as well as for the description and understanding of Jung’s ideas, this is a commanding work that will hopefully soon be translated into English.

–Alain Bédard

Alain Bédard has worked as a senior financial officer and project manager. He has degrees in theology, linguistics, management, and holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the Pacifica Graduate Institute.

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Newsletter #4– February 2024

Individuation Psychology:

Essays in Honor of Murray Stein

Editors: Steven Buser & Len Cruz

Asheville, S.C.; Chiron Publications; (2023) 390 pps.

It is fitting that this collection of essays, a “Festschrift” compiled to honour Murray Stein on his eightieth birthday, is published by Chiron, a book publisher he co-founded together with Nathan Schwartz-Salant. Stein is well known through his many published works, presentations and involvement in countless Jungian organizations world-wide. Variations on the theme of “Individuation Psychology” characterize the essays contained in this volume.

For Joseph Cambray, Stein “exemplifies the fullness of a well-lived Jungian life ...” (p. 15) For Stein, Individuation is a “core value” and Synchronicity is what can help us expand our understanding of the universe and “lead us to a ‘re-enchantment of the world ...”

(p. 17)

Magi Guindi’s Individuation as Testimony of Inner Process points to the considerable influence Stein has had on his and so many other peoples’ life journeys. In a fitting tribute to an author much loved by them both, he examines how Individuation played out in the life of Marcel Proust.

Roderick Main examines how humanity has come to embrace a term coined by Max Weber as “the disenchantment of the world’ and how the life, work and writings of Jung and Stein are contributing to a much needed “re-enchantment” of it.

Through a detailed analysis and amplification of carefully chosen poems by Goethe, Nietzsche and Joseph von Eichendorff, Paul Bishop illustrates how the “existential goal of individuation” runs through them while simultaneously paying tribute to Stein’s love and appreciation of German literature and culture.

Chiara Tozzi’s insights regarding Jung’s concept of Active Imagination, a bridge between ego consciousness and the unconscious psyche, lead to touching anecdotal accounts of synchronistic bridges between “time and eternity” experienced with Murray Stein and his wife Jan.

Robert Mercurio probes the rich symbolism regarding the need for a transformation of the god-image in a novel by John Steinbeck. As articulated by Stein, when the individual finds a bridge between conscious and unconscious and recognizes the ego’s limitations, a relationship to the archetypal psyche can be established.

Jan Wiener, a long-time friend and colleague of Stein’s, deftly prompts him to speak to various issues of interest and concern out of his vast storehouse of knowledge and experience. Topics such as global conflicts, climate change, mystical and numinous experiences, death, the afterlife and the future of Jungian psychology are all captivatingly addressed in this interview.

John Beebe explores the problem of evil from the perspective of an eight-function, eight archetype model of the psyche that Stein encouraged him to develop. Combining elements from Jung’s dream of the Arab Prince and Hitchcock’s film, “The Wrong Man,” Beebe illustrates how, as Stein puts it, “good and evil must be united.” (p. 138)

Maria Grazia Calzà expresses her “deep and enduring gratitude” for Stein’s mentorship which helped her understanding of the circumambulatory nature of the individuation process. Her inspired examination of the life and writings of the medieval mystic Hadewijch eloquently portrays the depths of love and courage required to unite the opposites within ourselves.

By focusing on how Jung was influenced by Goethe, Wagner, Schopenhauer and Meister Eckhart, Ann Casement’s tribute to Stein is grounded in philosophical roots. Her survey of motifs such as Redemption, Archetypal Incest, Persona, Shadow and Evil leads her to conclude that “telling truths about life is the thread that connects” them all. (p. 182)

Stein’s lifelong work on individuation has been an inspiration to Thomas Singer and his work on cultural complexes. However, because individual models of the process cannot easily be applied to large groups or nations, he also refers to it as a soul-making process.

Linda Carter’s observations about Stein’s “Odin-like” capacity to “carry grief and sorrow on one shoulder while simultaneously carrying joy and pleasure on the other” (p. 201) serve as a leitmotif for the balance we strive for in life. Symbols, paintings, poems and myths all play a vital role in helping us achieve it.

Author and founder of Gifts Compass and Life Atlas, James G. Johnston shares Stein’s love of Jung’s psychology and elaborates on how typology can help us better understand the phenomenon of individuation. He maintains that discovering “who we are becoming” is of far greater import than focusing on “what we are in the world.”

Taking an approach that speaks primarily to the reader’s feeling function, Henry Abramovitch’s essay and moving tribute to the value of “true friendship” in life and the individuation process draws on many sources: personal, clinical, literary and, of course, the deep bond he and Stein have forged together.

In order to unpack the complex Central American myth (both Creation and Night-Sea Journey) of Quetzalcoatl, Nancy Swift Furlotti plumbs the same creative depths with which Stein is so familiar. Because of its archetypal roots, when properly understood, it underscores the need for symbolic ego sacrifice and atonement in the process of transformation.

Patricia Michan also writes about Quetzalcoatl but with a focus on his role as mercurial psychopomp. Stein played a similar, mentoring role in her journey to become a Jungian analyst and the support he provided to help found the Centro Mexico C. G. Jung was invaluable.

For Heyong Shen, the Secret of the Golden Flower and the I Ching have been faithful companions on his journey of individuation that includes fostering a “heartfelt” rapport between east and west. By helping to set up Analytical Psychology in China, Murray Stein and Tom Kirsch continued the work started by Jung and Richard Wilhelm.

Drawing on her own experience during the analytic training process at ISAP Zurich under the tutelage and mentorship of Stein, Anna Chia-Yi Li demonstrates a deep understanding of the relationship between ancient Chinese wisdom teachings and Jung’s psychology, both in theory and in practice.

Stein maintains that ‘there are many roads to individuation, but how can individuals steeped in Japanese culture and the centuries-old practice of Zen Buddhism adopt this practice without forsaking theirs? Mari Yoshikawa artfully evokes the rich depths of experience and challenges both mindsets face in encounters with each other.

With over forty-five years experience as a clinical psychologist and thirty in the Dzogchen tradition, Jim Manganiello maintains that Jungian individuation psychology with its temporal focus tends to minimize the central importance that numinous experience had for Jung. He argues that by integrating Dzogchen psychology and its intemporal focus, this imbalance can be corrected.

Each contributor to this volume expresses the deep and lasting impact Murray Stein has had on them. The depth and variety of viewpoints expressed in these essays reflect the multi-faceted influence Stein has had on the authors and the spirit of openness and respect he cultivates, practices and embodies.

—Roman Rogulski

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The Collected Writings of Murray Stein (Volume 7): The Problem of Evil

Asheville, N.C.; Chiron Publications; (2023) 247 pps.

“Pure unadulterated evil.”

President Joe Biden pronounced those words in a televised address from Israel three days after the atrocities of last October 7, when Hamas raiders from Gaza slaughtered 1,200 Israeli residents, among them babies, children and pregnant women, and took hostages.

I had at least the cold comfort of knowing that this review of Volume 7 of The Collected Writings of Murray Stein, the Saskatchewan-born internationally eminent Jungian analyst, had become even more topical than when I began working on it.

Stein is expected to touch on the problem of evil in an online lecture sponsored by the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal on February 17.

Neither President Biden nor the Hamas-Israel crisis, which happened months after Volume 7 was published, is mentioned in this volume, but the president’s response to the crisis resonated with what I had been reading there. For instance, in an essay on “The Shadow and the Problem of Evil,” based on a lecture given in 2016 and reprinted in Volume 7, Stein writes:

The rhetoric of evil in politics was given a strong push in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan in a speech that became known as the Evil Empire Speech … delivered to a group of fundamentalist Christians in Florida. In it, President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire … This term … reflects his personal psychology, but it also resonates with many. It sounds like science fiction to speak of an Evil Empire. This gives the phrase an archetypal quality. The rhetoric of evil in politics continued when President George W. Bush in a speech in 2002, given shortly after 9/11 and the attack on New York City, used the phrase “axis of evil” to speak of three countries aligned against America. Iran, Iraq and North Korea were pegged as evil for promoting terrorism and for presumably seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction to further their designs against the West. President Bush, like Reagan, chose a moralistic, quasi-theological division of the world into those who favour good (our side) and those who favour evil (the other side). (pps. 211-212)

For me, the immediate context of President Biden’s remarks greatly mitigates any potential criticism that he too was being moralistic. He was speaking at a particular moment, when the horror of the Hamas raid had everyone’s attention and Israel’s massive counterattack had scarcely begun. His remarks on October 10 do not reflect the complexity of his psychological and political responses over time.

However, Biden’s agonized attempt to support Israel while seeking to reduce suffering, death and destruction in Gaza is a prime example of the tension between what Stein calls solar and lunar conscience. Biden’s plight reminds me of the tragic figure of Orestes from Greek myth, depicted by the dramatist Aeschylus, and cited by Stein.

The discussion is found in “Solar Conscience, Lunar Conscience: An Essay on the Psychological Foundations of Morality, Lawfulness, and the Sense of Justice, first published by Chiron in 1993. The essay occupies about the first half of Volume 7; the second half contains a half-dozen essays, mostly reprinted from various sources, that complement the first half well.

For Stein, conscience is more than internalized parental and social pressure but has roots deep in the psyche. It tends to be archetypal, intuitive and “gnostic” and is hostile to egoism.

In Stein, conscience, like other archetypes, is polar. The poles are in tension but complement each other. Both are essential but either alone can be dangerous. He thinks that these days there is too much emphasis on “solar conscience,” which is characterized by reason, openness, scrupulosity, and conventional morality. Solar conscience is akin to the “superego” of Sigmund Freud’s psychology but there is another ground for conscience, at least partially irrational and unknowable:

“This is what I … call “lunar conscience” or the lunar side of conscience. I conceive of it as representing ‘mother right’ rather than ‘father right.’” (p. 23) “Lunar conscience” tends to be less conscious and more feminine, arcane and instinctive than solar conscience. Where law and justice collide, lunar conscience will tend to opt for justice.

As Stein retells the story, Orestes is commanded by the solar god Apollo to execute Orestes’ own mother, Clytemnestra, as punishment under divine law for collaborating in killing her husband, Agamemnon. But after he does so Orestes is relentlessly hounded by the darkly feminine Furies, seeking justice against his matricide.

Again from Aeschylus, Stein makes a connection between Prometheus and modern political uprisings.

The Titan Prometheus was led by his empathy for humans to steal fire for them and bring them other arts of civilization. Angry at this infringement of divine law, Zeus had him pinioned to a rock.

By putting humanity on its psychic feet, Prometheus in the same moment destroyed a prior relationship between humanity and the gods. This in turn promoted the delusion that humans are the supreme masters of their fates and brought about hubris, the cardinal sin of Greek culture. (p. 106)

Stein adds that Prometheus

… behaves in many ways like a narcissistic ego complex—going too far, overreaching, doing too much out of what might at first be laudable motives, full of self-righteous indignation, bursting with competitiveness, eager to supplant the old paternal authority with its own. While … motivated originally by lunar conscience and the sense of justice, Promethean consciousness ends up living in self-deception and inflation with its delusions of mastery and blind hope. An amount of this is surely needed by humans, but a sense of proportion and what is fitting for the human is lacking in Promethean consciousness. (p. 107)

This is also where the humanistic, anti-religion developments of the last several centuries have landed Western culture. What began as a laudable and understandable rebellion against the authority of dogmatic religion and the absolute authority of church and royal privilege has created in Western societies a psychological attitude of hubris and disrespect for the archetypal powers of the psyche. Conscience in both solar and lunar aspects has been denied a place in modern mentality, where only instrumental and so-called rational calculations carry much weight. (p. 107)

In a chapter in the second half of the volume, Stein describes Carl Jung himself struggling with the nature of evil at several levels ranging from the philosophical to the biological—referring to “absolute evil” as frighteningly real, yet on the other hand insisting that good and evil are judgments made by human consciousness, that evil “is a necessary category of human thought.” (p. 130)

Jung’s friendship with the Dominican priest, Victor White, came to grief over this issue, with the priest insisting on God as pure, unadulterated good, so to speak, taking the Catholic view that evil is the absence of good. Stein’s lecture on February 17 will probably touch on this part of Jung’s life, which Stein discusses in other works. Some of these can be found in Volumes 1 and 5 of Stein’s Collected Writings; references in Volume 7 are quite brief.

—Harvey Shepherd

Newsletter #3– January 2024

We Are the Light

Matthew Quick

Avid Reader Press; (2022); 256 pps.

How often do we come across a work of fiction that has Carl Jung as a central figure? In 1999, Timothy Findlay wrote Jung into Pilgrim, the tale of an immortal time-traveller, who also encountered other famous figures from history, including Leonardo da Vinci and Henry James, along with Herr Jung.

We Are the Light was penned by Matthew Quick, the author of Silver Linings Playbook, which was adapted to the screen and featured Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence won an Oscar for best actress. Like Playbook, this book also has a distinctly psychological dramatic core.

Without divulging too much of the complex and compelling plot, we are introduced at the outset to the central characters and the tragic moment that launches the story—a shooting at the local cinema that leaves many dead.

All eighteen chapters are written, in the form of letters, by the protagonist, Lucas Goodgame, a guidance counsellor at the local high school, Majestic High, in the wake of the shooting The dead include Lucas’s wife Darcy who has been visiting him as an angel!

The letters are being written to his former Jungian analyst, Karl; their weekly Friday sessions have been suddenly cut short. Even though there is no response from Karl, Lucas feels compelled to continue to write detailed reports on what has been happening in his shattered life and to those who have survived the senseless slaughter.

Lucas’ letters are also written to offer comfort and solace to Karl whose needs, he feels, must be as great as his own. And of course to vent his profound confusion and sorrow. In a time of dreadful absence, they also express a yearning for intimacy.

The story revolves primarily around Lucas’s relationship with the traumatized brother of the shooter who appears one day in an orange tent in his backyard. He will take Eli in and develop a close relationship with him. The entire community of the small town of Majestic, Pennsylvania—the Survivors—and their collective grief and rage, are seen through Lucas’s eyes.

Lucas will suffer a terrible breakdown in his attempt to stage the traumatic moment in the life of the Majestic community. This dramatic and therapeutic climax to the story features monsters and heroes and brings healing to the disparate characters of the community.

Along the way there is anguish and grief, visits to families and cemeteries, and several unlikely love stories.

Eli will play the lead role as the Monster in the cathartic “production” at the scene of the crime. Some years later, after completing a film studies program at a west coast college, he will “shoot” a very personal film and send it to his mentor for one final epiphanous scene: a circle of healing has been complete. The community of survivors prove to be The Light.

Could this story ever become a feature film? Could an American-style Horror story become a much-less-than Marvel Movie? With life-size heroes, even broken individuals, overcoming what has become a tragic and commonplace occurrence in American life.

What to make of a book that features a Jungian analyst who remains invisible and does not utter a word?

Where the prologue of the book has Jung’s famous adage: vocatus atque non vocatus, deus aderit. (Called or not called, the god will be present.)

Many fascinating insights can be gleaned from an interview with Matthew Quick on the podcast “This Jungian Life.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHryeiANB1M

Quick expresses his deep debt to a Jungian analyst whose influence inspired him to write this “epistolary” novel. He thanks the trio who host the podcast as well for their support. He describes the evolution of his This timely work of fiction addresses one of America’s more troubling complexes—gun violence. And one of its founding constitutional pillars—the right to bear arms.

It also presents the increasingly vital role of the therapist during a mental health crisis.

It also addresses the religious function that Jung always insisted upon, a motif that has little traction in an increasingly secular society. One that has drawn a stark, seemingly irreconcilable divide between opposing worlds.

Quick is cautious about admitting that the book is about a religious experience. With an angel hovering, sanctified spaces created, people redeemed, and light emerging from terrible darkness, it can hardly be denied. Perhaps it is his anxiety about being classified as a “religious’ writer.

He does acknowledge that his writing process requires that he surrender to something larger than himself.

The interview also reveals that Quick has had a life-long attraction to movies. He says that they became the church for him and his wife! Collective dreams are shared in a common space.

Provocative perhaps then that he sets this story in a movie theatre: collective nightmare becomes finally collective healing.

He also talks about masculinity, both toxic and healthy. He laments that American culture, in his own youth and at present, Iacks positive male role models. So he has created a central character who embodies just that: vulnerability, compassion, engagement.

About thirty years ago James Hillman wrote that We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. (1993) In another work, Healing Fiction (1983), he might have been proposing a resolution. Might this kind of book illustrate how the arts provide a way to mediate between disastrous cultural disorders and a sane personal response through engagement with sympathetic fictional characters?

This book also raises many other psychological issues such as the initiation of men; and the epidemic of fatherless sons. Something that Québecers were familiar with in the days of Guy Corneau.

And wounded healers; and men loving other men.

This book boldly illustrates some dark American cultural complexes, a theme that Thomas Singer will likely address in his talk on January 20.

Lisa Marchiano suggests to the author that “writing a novel may be like active imagination.”

Is it idle fantasy to imagine that works of art, such as this book, can bring to light our dark natures and help transmute us? Or is gun violence too fraught a subject and this too fraught a time to look deeply at the wounds that we transmit across generations?

–Murray Shugar

The Cultural Complex:

Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society

Edited by Thomas Singer and Samuel Kimbles

New York: Brunner-Routledge (2004) 279 pps.

The issue of culture in Jungian studies, so long neglected for the sake of individuation, has now gained the spotlight. The editors of this ground-breaking book claim that C. G. Jung’s “complex theory” was his “first original contribution to the young science of psychoanalysis.” This theory never found a broader application to the life of groups because of Jung’s own inclination towards the individual and antipathy to the collective and his followers’ wariness about group psychology after Jung’s perilous brush with Nazi ideology in the 1930’s.

Jung described the complex as a repetitive, autonomous pattern of behaviour that resists consciousness. The editors have extended that notion to the collective sphere, arguing that such an intense collective emotion—the cultural complex—is equally present in group experience where “collecting experience that confirms a historical point of view” can lead to dangerous outcomes.

Incorporating John Weir Perry’s idea of the personal “bipolar complex” into the collective sphere, the authors assert that a group will often take a highly charged emotion and split its contents. The positive side is integrated into the ego/group identity while the negative traits are projected outwards onto an “other.” The resulting scapegoating often leads to the treacherous “good and evil” paradigm that drives the political and religious agendas of our day.

Thomas Singer opens the book with a dazzling essay. “The cultural complex and archetypal defense of the group spirit: Baby Zeus, Elian Gonzalez, Constantine’s Sword and other Holy Wars” is an extensive analysis of the cultural complex at work. Singer has borrowed a theory proposed by Donald Kalsched concerning personal archetypal defenses of the spirit. Kalsched claims that an individual, once a victim of oppression, violence or trauma, unconsciously creates “daimones” or defenders, which serve to protect him.

The long-term consequence, however, is that the defences often stifle development and perversely perpetuate the cycle of suffering. Singer notes that splitting and the projection of “good and evil,” as well as the defence of the group spirit, can be seen in the history of Christianity since the time of Constantine, as well as in America’s war on terror.

Several essays follow which elucidate the effects of the cultural complex on the psyche of the group. Jacqueline Gerson and Luigi Zoja both address the traumatic effects of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Gerson describes “malinchismo,” a syndrome of betrayal and inferiority inherent in the Mexican psyche. Malinche was an Indian princess whose collaboration with Cortés may have averted the wholesale slaughter of her people. Her betrayal has been internalized by the Mexican people to such an extent that they continue to devalue their own culture by overestimating the “other.”

Zoja argues that the Aztec empire may have collapsed so quickly because its cyclical concept of time may have confused the expected return of their god Quezalcoatl with the conquistador Cortés. They offered no resistance. The wound inflicted by this abrupt defeat still shapes the Mexican identity as a cultural complex. “The cyclical experience of time is actually the container in which we seek refuge after suffering unbearable trauma.”

In “A long weekend: Alice Springs, Central Australia,” Craig San Roque observes Aborigine squatters in his backyard while considering the great rupture that Europeans brought to their way of life. In a sad account of forsaken souls, the traditional Dream Time appears tragically ghost-like in modern Australia.

“When a religious archetype becomes a cultural complex: Puritanism in America” was written by Manisha Roy in the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Roy suggests that America has incorporated the perfectionist fantasy inherent in the Judeo-Christian myth. In so doing, an unconscious bipolar complex drives the culture to project shadow elements onto its enemy while cleaving to its own alleged goodness and perfection.

In “What does it mean to be in ‘The West’?: Psychotherapy as a cultural complex—‘foreign’ insights into ‘domestic’ healing practices,” Andrew Samuels suggests that race and ethnicity can offer important new insights to the rather homogenous field of psychotherapy. Samuels’s cross-cultural perspective, from the margins, is a pluralist post-modern vision.

Addressing cultural complexes in the psyche of the group and the individual, Eli and Esti Galili-Weisstub’s essay on “Collective trauma and cultural complexes” describes their experience as analysts practicing in Israel. There, individual trauma is inseparable from collective trauma. Both Israeli and Palestinian children see themselves as victims of violence even in their dreams. Defending the group spirit leaves no room for defeat, depression or the ability to mourn. Cultural woundedness is at the heart of conflict. Only when and if the wounds can be “acknowledged, related to and attended to” will the violent repetitions cease and the wounds heal.

Thomas B. Kirsch examines the cultural complexes behind Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis. Jung and Freud both brought significant cultural and religious baggage to their encounter. Contrary to the long-held belief that Jung held anti-Semitic attitudes, Kirsch reports that his Jewish parents both did analysis with Jung in the 1930’s and never witnessed this animus in him. He concludes that memory, history and meaning are distorted through the prism of cultural complexes.

There follows a section offering clinical examples of the cultural complex in the psyche of the individual. In “A cultural complex operating in the overlap of clinical and cultural space,” Samuel Kimbles describes an analytic encounter between a black analyst and his white patient. “In the intersubjective matrix created by personal and cultural complexes, larger cultural moral dilemmas and issues can get personified by differences and the kinship feelings created by similarities can render the group level of the psyche invisible.”

In “Exploring racism: A clinical example of a cultural complex,” Helen Morgan mirrors Kimbles’s American study in a British setting. Morgan is a white Jungian analyst whose work with a black client also exposes racial undercurrents. She notes an unadmitted “Eurocentric white supremacy” in the psychoanalytic field. Jung was not exempt from this prejudice. Morgan argues that outdated categories of black and white are no longer relevant in our multicultural societies.

The final section of the book describes the cultural complex and individuation of the group. Astrid Berg elucidates the South African concept of Ubuntu—“a spirit of fellowship, humanity and compassion” which transcends family and ethnic identity. In African societies “community confers personhood.” Berg suggests that the dyadic principle that applies in therapy between self and other could do better by adopting the African principle of self and others.

Finally Murray Stein addresses the two Americas and their mutual collective projections. He suggests that anxieties about invasion reflect fears from both sides: the southern Latino brother fears globalization while the northern Anglo brother dreads an unbridled Dionysian migration. Using Grimm’s fairytale “The spirit in the bottle,” Stein concludes that the spirit Mercurius can help us recognize that multiculturalism brings not a curse but blessings of healing and prosperity.

If the world is getting worse despite one hundred years of psychotherapy, perhaps the next century could do better by applying the insights gained from private practice to the public sphere. This book goes a long way to understanding the unconscious forces that blind us and may help raise our collective consciousness.

—Murray Shugar

This review has been abridged from an earlier edition of our Newsletter: Vol. 31, No. 2, October 2005.

Newsletter #2– November 2023

The Psychological Effects of Immigrating:

A Depth Psychology Perspective on Relocating to a New Place

Robert Tyminski

New York, NY; Routledge; (2023) 239 pps.

“… migration is a never ending piece of human history. It will always be with us ...” (p.30)

This thoughtful, well-researched book by San Francisco Jungian analyst Robert Tyminski about the psychological effects of immigration is extremely informative and touching. It won the Kristine Mann Award in Research in Analytical Psychology.

The book covers several topics regarding immigration including its archetypal facets as well as psychoanalytical theories. Tyminski enlivens and elucidates these ideas from his perspective as a child of immigrants, with descriptions of his clinical cases and especially in his work with Syrian and Afghani refugees in Berlin.

Tyminski begins the book with some statistics about immigration in the US as well as comments about the recent draconian and xenophobic measures brought forth by the Trump administration. Here in Canada eight million of us are immigrants; currently about 500,000 newcomers come to Canada annually, most recently from China and India. Having immigrated to Canada when I was an infant the book brought tears to my eyes as I deeply reflected upon the difficulties that my family had experienced in coming to and adapting to their new country. As well, it brought back memories of childhood experiences.

In his work with refugee youths Tyminski reveals his sensitivity and compassion with these displaced children. He listens to the stories of their traumatic passage to Europe. Their parents had sent them off to safety, far from their war-torn countries, but along the way some died in the boats. Afterwards they “walked at night, always in the dark, no lights.” (p. 29) Even if fatigued they could not stop because if they did they would be lost or in danger.

No longer in peril in Berlin at the facility which provided housing and psychosocial services, the boys remained lost in how to manage the vicissitudes of their new country. Most did not have papers, such as passports, which hindered them from becoming “legal.” Tyminski speaks throughout the book about “perimeters”—concrete boundaries, familial, cultural, and legal—regarding how one is seen and categorized by others. These perimeters ”flatten” an individual’s identity, erasing one’s uniqueness.

The boys were distrustful of the counselors, viewing them as possible government agents, but Tyminski slowly gained their confidence by bringing the relationship outside the consulting room, for example by cooking together in preparation for the Ramadan breaking of the fast. In doing so a kind of loving father-son relationship emerged.

The theme of fatherhood and fatherland appears throughout the book. The author refers to The Aeneid, where Aeneas escapes Troy with his father, Anchises, and his son, Aescanius, and several other survivors. Before his journey Aeneas’s late wife appears to him as a ghost predicting “on land hard labours and a length of sea.” (p. 50) The band of Trojans is derailed to other countries several times along their journey. Eventually while they are in Sicily Anchises dies and Aeneas takes over carrying the “penates,” the sacred relics of the Trojan gods. Aeneas is a father himself to Aescanius and later to Turnus whom he adopts. After many battles and long journeys Aeneas arrives in Latium where he is not welcomed but finally can settle, but only if he gives up his traditions and assimilates. Tyminski offers several insights into this ancient myth as metaphors for the stories of present-day immigrants.

Another reference to the theme of fatherhood is described through an example of an analysand, Adam. Adam is a British man who was living in San Francisco. Not a war refugee, he moved to the U.S. in search of economic advance. Analysis offered Adam an opportunity to explore his difficult relationship with his father who was aloof and more interested in his career than his son. Eventually Adam realized he was actually becoming like his father, working extremely hard to get ahead and probably trying to beat his father at his own game.

A strong father transference emerged in the analysis which Tyminski described as “a curiosity, almost an ache, coupled with a persistent fear about what kind of man I was and what kind of father I would have been.” (p.183) Synchronistically Tyminski’s own father passed away during the analysis. When Adam pointed out that he appeared more distant, Tyminski admitted he had suffered a loss of someone he loved deeply, bringing tears to both Tyminski’s and Adam’s eyes and strengthening the bonds between them. In describing several of his cases Tyminski brings the reader right into the consulting room with him, presenting verbatim dialogues between himself and his patient as well as the thoughts and feelings he is having while doing the work. The descriptions never feel dry as so many descriptions of clinical cases often do.

Tyminski states that immigrants often experience the uncanny which is defined as “having a supernatural basis; mysterious; arousing superstitious fear or dread.” (p. 216) The uncanny can arise as a synchronistic experience and also when a long-held secret alien to one’s identity is revealed. Immigrants may hide secrets when coming to their new homeland. This is the case of an analysand, Arturo, who asked his mother to sign the permission for him to go on a school field trip across the border. He could not understand why his mother refused; eventually she revealed to him that she was not a legal immigrant and neither was he. Tyminski himself experienced this kind of “twilight zone” feeling when he discovered that one of his grandfathers had come to the U.S. using a neighbour’s name. The neighbour could not travel due to family obligations. As well, his great-grandfather apparently was an Irish Protestant who had married a Catholic, which was verboten in those times.

These secrets shift our perspective of who we thought we were. It brings up the question of our identity. Tyminski devotes a chapter to this topic entitled “Is Identity a Fiction?” Are we the perimeters as described above, the labels we or others describe ourselves by? Are we just a collection of preferences or habits? Or are we much more? This chapter alone is worth the price of the book in its exploration of these fundamental questions.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. I read most of it while staying at a spa for a few days as part of a self-indulgent vacation. I sometimes found myself foregoing the hot and cold baths so I could sneak off to my room and read. It will appeal to any of you who are immigrants or related to immigrants as well as to clinicians working with them in some capacity. I highly recommend it.

—Mary Harsany

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Jung's Early Psychiatric Writing:

The Emergence of a Psychopoetics

Patricia Berry

Spring Publications; (2023); 173 pps.

Upon opening the book on this fascinating analysis of Jung’s early professional, psychiatric career, one might well consider the author.

Pat Berry returned to America with James Hillman in the 1970’s with some notoriety. The American iconoclast Hillman had been Director of Studies at the Jung Institute in Zürich but had departed under unpleasant circumstances. Read more about this in Volume 2 of Dick Russell’s biography of Hillman. (Reviewed in the last newsletter.)

Hillman and Berry had begun publishing works in the new field of archetypal psychology in Europe where they established Spring Publications, a publishing house that, decades later, has recently seen a revival.

When Berry wrote her Ph.D dissertation at the University of Dallas in the department of the philosophy of psychology in 1982, she was still championing the cause. For decades to come, Dallas would be the home for the new field and for its publishing arm, Spring Journal and Books.

From this base, archetypal roots were planted on American soil.

Her thesis was on the early psychiatric writings of Carl Gustav Jung. Berry makes her case with a critical analysis of many of Jung’s lacunae during those early years, from 1900-1910. These were the years before his terrible but fruitful confrontation with his unconscious and “finding his soul.”

In these professionally formative years, he would write two foundational works: On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena (1902) and The Word Association Test (1910). “Test” garnered considerable international attention.

Both Freud and Jung were making a radical departure from the scientific models of mental illness in the first decade of the 20th century. While physiological disturbances were considered the chief cause, the new paradigm shift would attribute a more subjective perspective, a more hidden (occult) root.

Berry explores the context of the “Phenomena” experiment that Jung “conducted” with/on his maternal cousin Helene (Helly) Preiswerk.

While Jung emphasizes the subjective perspective, the psychic reality of the patient, Berry accuses Jung of an objective bias.

Jung was fascinated while observing Helly in trances at her séances. His fascination with her talents led him to buy her a book for her fifteenth birthday by a popular psychic of the time. Jung’s mother’s family and Helly shared a bloodline that was prone to strong psychic leanings. Berry notes that Jung’s mother had to stand behind her father as he wrote his sermons to prevent “evil spirits” from disturbing him!

And yet he did not reveal her identity as a family member in his study. His professional intentions were to elevate the so-called pathologies from sub-normal to para-normal status. Revealing a personal connection of this nature might have diminished his professional reputation.

Berry’s argument here and throughout the book is that Jung was always conflicted between two positions: that of a scientist and that of a phenomenologist.

He would persistently observe the particularities of phenomena and yet put them into categories.

Jung’s well-known enthusiasm for mandalas is explained away as a defense mechanism. Berry explores one of these images from the Red Book—a fortress with a break in one of its walls.

Jung treats the image that he created to an interpretation that Berry calls to task. Like many other images, especially during the crisis years after his falling out with Freud, Jung desperately sought a healing sense, a unitary wholeness, to which he subjugated the fragmented expressions of his distress.

The rupture in the wall could rather have been seen as psyche’s ever-disrupting nature, loath to be contained.

Berry’s argument—a central core of Archetypal Psychology—is that psyche is a disparate assemblage of multiple aspects with little inherent coherence. Image far outweighs concept. In exchanging psyche’s movements for a consolidating image of wholeness; “system encapsulates unique event; the rational co-opts the irrational.” (p. 87)

Berry observes that Jung selected the most visionary of his experiences for his attention, leaving the more banal ones aside. So it was that Jung, in his underworld dialogues, spoke to the numinous Biblical figures Elijah, Salomé and Philemon while relegating the lesser characters to oblivion.

Among these was the voice of a woman who told Jung that he was an artist. His response is legend. From his suspicion and rejection of the “aesthetic lady,” the author concludes that “Jung’s psychology never developed aesthetically.” (p. 24) Much of her animus is directed at Jung’s troubles with anima. Perhaps that is one good reason why “Esse in Anima” is the mantra of this book. What this is exactly is quite unclear.

The issue of Aesthetic appears in the very first chapter of the book, “The Problem: The Aesthetic Anima,” Berry presents a disruptive dream Jung had in the early years of his confrontation with the unconscious featuring a dove girl. This fantasy dove-girl elicited a response that led Jung to revisit a passion of his childhood: building. And so, through action rather than meaning, he began to let his imagination/psyche express itself. Berry calls this making through the senses, poesis.

From another source, Jung has been identified as a craftsman. His lifetime working in stone, the elaborations of his visions in his Liber Novus, are expressions of a procedural knowledge, making sense of an otherwise unfathomable experience.

“Psychopoetics” plays a pivotal role in Berry’s critical reevaluation of Jung’s work. The reader is reminded of Hillman’s “poetic basis of mind,” a trademark of his divergent approach. Like Jung, he prioritized the image but Berry seems to think that Jung fell short.

And yet she has sub-titled this book The Emergence of a Psychopoetics!

For Jung and for “archetypalists” alike, psychopathology is a way forward and not a dead end. The issue is to see the bigger picture, the end to which psyche is pointing, even through a symptom. This is Jung’s telos—the prospective aspect of psyche. Neither reductive nor literal. What psyche makes, dreams enhance, and the dreamer can further work upon.

This “making” is elaborated upon in chapters on case studies and interpretation.

There is a section of this book where Berry proposes using contrasts instead of oppositions. Her charges against Jung of binary thinking are somewhat softened with this paradoxical move.

Perhaps the break in the fortress wall is both a break and an opening; Philemon and the dove girl are both essential elements in Jung’s psyche; Jung the scientist and Jung the imaginal psychologist are one and the same; Pat Berry, James Hillman and C. G. Jung all carry the same torch into the darkness.

Patricia Berry is still a sought-after speaker in places like the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California.

—Murray Shugar

Newsletter #1– September 2023

Dream Guidance:

Connecting to the Soul Through Dream Incubation

Machiel Klerk

Hay House; (2022); 184 pps.

In 2009 Machiel Klerk had a momentous vocational dream. He found himself floating over Lake Zürich visualizing Carl Jung working on a platform next to his dock. The power of Klerk’s dream spurred him to dive into the icy waters of academia amidst a prestigious procession of Jungian analysts. Its power spurred Klerk to create a platform of his own by opening the Jung Society of Utah.

This blossomed to the point that he was able to start a world-wide initiative entitled the Jung Platform, an online educational forum with novel capabilities that continue to morph and inspire multitudes. In his enactment Klerk has unleashed visions inspired by collaborative creativity enthusiastically embarked upon by a variety of cross-disciplinary players. Do collaborations of this kind (like the embodied dream incubation with Robert Bosnak) stir the creative juices of contributors to heights exponentially greater by the cross-fertilization of specialists of many backgrounds?

Last year, Klerk published Dream Guidance: Connecting to the Soul Through Dream Incubation. He extensively reviews pertinent literature historically and geographically. After all the ancients extolled the virtues of dream incubation—even “idea” incubations. Jung himself refers to those dreamt in the temples of Aesculapius in contrast to those of modern people. The Greek protocol for healing was an elaborate lengthy process that facilitated healing in a spiritual environment. The eminent James Hollis, who is a regular feature of the Jung Platform, describes Michiel’s tome as “a rich collection of ideas, tools, and examples showing how to open a dialogue within and be guided by that source which knows us better than we know ourselves.”

The primary portion of Klerk’s Dream Guidance offers practical advice and multiple steps to conducting successful dream incubations. Formulation of the dream incubation question is critical. After all, interrogating the unconscious is a different kettle of fish from generating authentic questions that simply “occur” in group learning discussion groups (see The Question as Commitment; Thomas More Institute Papers; 1977) Closed questions, leading, or either-or ones should be avoided. Even the precise wording of a question can be mind-altering! (Klerk cites a 1986 British Gallup poll on how possessing nuclear weapons made people feel. The pollster changed the wording slightly from ‘safe’ to ‘safer’.) The results expressed in percentage from 36-50% were reversed. (I wonder how present-day Britons would feel about nuclear arms given the threat of a maniacal Putin’s dreams of empire) Klerk suggests asking only one question at a time and splitting big questions into smaller ones.

Confessions of a dream alcoholic

During the past year I have been reading Klerk’s manual and toying with a variety of formulations and ritual approaches. It was only recently that I was able to ask what appeared to be a fruitful dream guidance question. The unexpected dream reply was based on feelings and images. It became abundantly clear to me that the dream had a powerful and insightful message to convey. Upon further pondering I clesrly realized that it was mobilizing my resources, propelling my life quest towards a life-giving new direction. I reflect that dreams that unlock creativity through images are well-known in the generation of powerful scientific insights such as Kekule’s serpent benzene ring, Margaret Mead’s blue jelly, Mendeleyev’s solitaire cards as patterned elements of the periodic table and a host more.

For most of my life I have been fascinated by the Jungian perspective. Having compiled and recorded hundreds of crazy dreams, I am continually stupefied by an incredible array of nighttime narratives that I, as a story-telling animal, fabricate (see Informed Dialogue; Thomas More Institute Papers; 2004).

Over many years of keeping dream journals I have been extremely frustrated: I don’t seem to entertain any archetypal, provocative material with colourful mandalas. Reading C. G. Jung’s own Dreams (1974) finally reassured me that my own individuation process was a personal “self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious” even though it encapsulated preoccupations on a deeper level of the collective unconscious:

Our imagos are constituents of our minds, and if our dreams reproduce certain ideas these ideas are primarily our ideas ... The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. (p. 52)

I am left with the burning question of why, from an evolutionary standpoint, we homo sapiens (are we in present danger of losing this exalted position?) expend so much creativity and emotional energy in our nocturnal adventures? Jung would remind us that “We still know too little about the nature of the unconscious psyche.” As his career exemplifies, we gradually approach “nearer to the truth”... A la prochaine!

—Heather Stephens

Heather Stephens was trained as a scientist and has been a long-time friend of the Thomas More Institute of Montreal, an educational centre whose mandate for decades has been to encourage curiosity at the centre of one’s life.

The Life and Ideas of James Hillman

Volume II: Re-Visioning Psychology

Dick Russell

New York, N.Y.; Skyhorse Publishing; (2023); 550 pps

The 550 pages of Volume II of the biography of James Hillman by Dick Russell form a masterpiece. The amount of research, interviews and organization of such an incredible mass of information is awe-inspiring, demonstrating Russell’s genius as a writer and fairness as a biographer. He worked with Hillman while writing but always retained his freedom of judgment.

There is more: in reading this biography, we discover that everything James Hillman wrote was put to the test in his own life, up to a point where most people would just give up. Sometimes the ideas were written first as intellectual intuitions, and then life would present him with a situation in which those very ideas were indeed tested, literally. It is a rare thing when an author of a work of psychology injects his spirit into the matter of everyday life. It is Hillmanian alchemy in its most useful form.

James Hillman knew his mind, knew his heart, and listened to what both heart and mind had to say about the survival of the soul, be it the personal soul or the soul of the world. Russell shows how Hillman had many dark nights of the soul himself, sometimes betrayed, sometimes ignored, yet he faithfully followed his sense that psychic pain can be, as he wrote, the eye in the wound. We read how the hardness and cruelty of life, as well as the successes, the admiration, and the honours, all contribute to soul-making, a model for the reader to follow in times of distress. Rich ideas, we learn, can save you from despair.

The honour of receiving the keys to the city of Florence was of course a wonderful boost to both soul and ego, a true recognition of Hillman’s contribution. But being brutally dismissed from the faculty at the University of Dallas in 1980 because of his radical anti-religious and anti-clinical stance would also become, for Hillman, the occasion for psychic growth. Russell writes “It was, in fact, part of a recurring pattern of his life, the mysterious eruptions that destroyed the existing structures.’’ (p. 310) Indeed, every painful destruction of the structures of Hillman’s life led to an appreciation of how the psyche works. His was difficult, his spirit was a warrior and his soul was a lover of life.

Dick Russell muses: “That summer of 1976, Hillman would focus his annual lecture at Eranos on the question of whether psychology has been caught in introversion. Could there be a depth psychology of extraversion? His work, as often happened, was a step ahead of his life. Dallas would become, as he later reflected, the actual laboratory of that.” (p. 263) It is fascinating how he could change psychic pain into something interesting.

His Re-Visioning Psychology in 1973 elucidated the multiple ways by which clinical psychology separates us from life; it offers psychological concepts instead of images. For example, if I say: I am depressed I remain caught in this abstraction. But if I say that I went for a dip in the Styx, or I took a plunge in the underworld, or I am Penelope unraveling my tapestry every night, the personal situation becomes an archetypal voyage, an odyssey, something that has life in it because I am now somewhere instead of being nowhere. The opening of the imagination changes the psychic landscape. Something rich appears under a bleak clinical cover-up.

Hillman summarized his life’s goal: “The aim of therapy … is the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities, and the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.” (p. 236)

That is, in a nutshell, what I got from years of reading, re-reading, and teaching Hillman’s ideas. Reading Dick Russell's biography this summer confirmed that those ideas were those of a man who lived them. Islamic scholar Henri Corbin once presented Hillman as a person “who was what he talked about.”

Hillman gave all to his opus. To me, he still embodies the value of good thinking to live a good life.

—Ginette Paris

Ginette Paris is the author of Wisdom of the Psyche: Beyond Neuroscience; Routledge (2007) http://www.ginetteparis.com

James Hillman Memorial

Pacifica Graduate Institute, March 2-4, 2012

LASTING, LEAVING, LEFT: ARS MORIENDI

–Ginette Paris

"Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right philosophy, are directly, and of their own accord, preparing themselves for dying and death. If this is true, and they have actually been looking forward to death all their lives, it would of course be absurd to be troubled when the thing comes, for which they have so long been preparing and looking forward."

These words were supposedly spoken by Socrates, who held that philosophy is "the practice of dying." At the hour of his death, Socrates was still teaching, explaining the soul's journey to his student Crito, as the hemlock was killing him.

I know of only one other person who was capable, like Socrates, of discussing ideas until the poison of cancer took his last breath.

James Hillman died on October 27. A month or so before, on September 21, he sent the following email to concerned family and friends:

“We are following a middle road, neither upbeat nor downbeat. And I am more and more convinced that upbeat tends to constellate its counter, so before wishing for recovery in the old sense, one should think twice. It's what's going on now and not what the imagination conjures regarding a so-called future. I am dying, yet, in fact, I could not be more engaged in living. One thing I'm learning is how impossible it is to lay out a border between so-called "living" and "dying."

All his life he fought against the technicalities of a psychology that ignores the tragic emotions of pity, bereavement, despair. When his time came to die, he faced those emotions bluntly, directly. All his life he pointed at the problem of our culture's emphasis on youth, control, success, and the obsession of getting above it all, an obsession that makes us think of dying as only a medical failure. Contrary to this fantasy of success, he taught us how the soul sends roots down, just as much as it grows branches and expands upward. He called that “growing down” and gave a most moving demonstration of this “growing down” in the way he died.

To use D. H. Lawrence’s expression, James built a magnificent “ship of death.”* Not everyone wants to die the way he did, working on new ideas, revising manuscripts, up to the very last moment. The art of dying, “Ars Moriendi,” implies that we each build a different ship, finding our own style of dying. As Hillman wrote:

“Rise and fall. It is one of the archetypal patterns of life, and one of its most ancient, cosmic lessons. But how one falls, the style of coming down, remains the interesting part”.

(The Soul’s Code. Random House, New York 1996.)

To die “in character” takes some force of character, and James undoubtedly had plenty of that.

*"So build your ship of death, and let the soul drift to dark oblivion."

The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Wordsworth Editions, first published London, 1994.

Newsletters 2022-2023

Newsletter #5– April 2023

Creating a Life:

Finding Your Individual Path

James Hollis

Toronto: Inner City Books, 2001. 159 pages

James Hollis’ latest book, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, gives the reader the wonderful experience of sitting with an intelligent, articulate person, and listening to their reflections on the meaning and value of life. This is Hollis’s sixth publication for Inner City Books. Once more, he helps the reader grapple with his or her own meditation on life, as well as initiate new areas of thought.

In the first section of Creating a Life, Hollis refers to the increasing number of contradictions we face as we get older, and the confusion caused by our inability to resolve them. Hollis uses Greek drama to describe experiences that seem to be common to many people. He says that our lives are circumscribed first of all by “Fate, or moira, [which] embodies the world of givens, the world of limitations, the world of cause and effect. Our genetics, our family of origin, our Zeitgeist, the interplay of intergenerational influences—each is part of our fate.” He says we also complicate and make worse our lives with hubris, “which means arrogance at times, a character flaw at others, or sometimes simply the limitation of possible knowledge.” A third aspect of the human condition is hamartia or “the tragic flaw,” what Hollis calls “the wounded vision.” He writes, “Each protagonist believed that he or she understood enough to make proper choices, yet their vision was distorted by personal, familial and cultural history, dynamically at work in what we later called the unconscious.”

Psychology has added to and changed the names of the terms we use to describe the human condition, but human experience, in essence, is the same now as in classical Greece and before. Today we speak of psychological complexes that “lie at the core of who we think we are.” Hollis writes that the reader “will have to deal with this core issue the rest of your life, and at best you will manage to win a few skirmishes in your long uncivil war with yourself.” Indeed, it seems to be fate that the tragic vision of the Greeks is reenacted by each of us in our equally tragic and wounded lives.

Hollis refers to Jung’s suggestion that “the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.” The child is left responsible for doing the emotional and psychological work the parents didn’t do. This becomes a part of the core complex through which our perceptions of the world are filtered. In some ways, this parental burden forms the basis of our shadow work; while this complex is painful when left unconscious, it can lead to an exhilarating awareness for the participant in a more examined life.

This is not a book for those who desire an intellectual quick-fix for what ails them, or for the individual who believes that a guru, a romantic partner, or anyone else will come along and save them. Hollis discounts the cure-all approach of both New-Age adherents and fundamentalists of all religious persuasions.

To create a life one must examine one’s life. From this examination comes an awareness of the true nature of one’s soul. Our psychological foundation is made up of many things, including core complexes we wish we could eliminate altogether, but that cannot be easily dealt with. Indeed therapy can’t eliminate them either. According to Hollis, what therapy can do is help you observe the core complex. This, in turn, will help the individual become a more conscious person with a more mature vision of life. Hollis writes: “Therapy will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting.” The corollary that follows from this is that “Consciousness is the gift and that is the best it gets.

If the result of our choices or unreflected actions are akin to Greek tragedy or drama, then we might ask ourselves what is the myth that best represents our life journey? Hollis writes that myth “refers to those affectively charged images (imagos) which serve to activate the psyche and to channel libido in service to some value.” Are we living second-hand lives, the unresolved cast-offs of our parents’ experience? Are we living reflectively or are we living reactively?

This text is not about ambition, career, or even traditional domesticity. It isn’t Hollis’ project to tell the reader what kind of life to create—his purpose is simply to define the foundation of understanding necessary to create an authentic life. An examined life best expresses the soul’s purpose. Hollis addresses those who have entered the second half of life, who have survived what Hollis calls the “gigantic, unavoidable mistake” of the first half of life. For Hollis, “The larger life is the soul’s agenda, not that of our parents or our culture, or even of our conscious will.”

This book is a meditation on the life journey of individuation. Jung’s concept of individuation “has to do with becoming, as nearly as one can manage, the being that was set in motion by the gods.” This, then, at a practical level is a process of psychological and spiritual maturity. A test for this maturity lies in one’s capacity to deal with anxiety, ambiguity, and ambivalence. Hollis writes, “The more mature psyche is able to sustain the tension of opposites and contain conflict longer, thereby allowing the developmental and revelatory potential of the issue to emerge.”

Part Two of Creating a Life is comprised of twenty short chapters dealing with “attitudes and practices for the second half of life.” These include, for example, amor fati, the necessity to accept and love one’s fate. Some readers may feel overwhelmed by Hollis’ listing and brief explication of these necessary “attitudes and practices.” However, he is reassuring and directs the reader to observe his or her own unconscious as the primary authority in one’s life. Individuation lies, in part, in the process of reflecting upon the processes of the unconscious mind.

Part Three brings to a conclusion James Hollis’ meditation. Above all else we need to be grateful for being alive at this most liberal and tolerant of times and places in the history of humanity. For Hollis the myth of Oedipus is suggestive of our own human condition.

How did Oedipus live out the second half of his life? While we each have our own personal myth to discover, Oedipus is an archetype representing Everyman in his flight from the darkness of his core complex to his discovery of soul and meaning, Hollis writes. After Thebes, after the stunning humiliation of midlife, Oedipus spends his final years in humble wandering, wondering what it is that the gods wish him to know.

He learns, he absorbs, he winds his weary exile to Colonus, where he is blessed by the gods for the sincerity of his journey. It was not so much that he created his life, as that he allowed at last that life might create him, as the gods had intended. The price of this gift, both precious and perilous, was exile and suffering; the price of not finding his calling was ignorance, pettiness and annihilation of the soul.

James Hollis reminds the reader of what a profound and exciting journey we have been invited to undertake. The journey of individuation is sometimes frightening, never exempt from the many experiences and emotions that are part of the human condition, and always demanding we extend ourselves beyond what we thought possible. We continue to create our lives because, simply put, it is all we can do, if we have the gift of consciousness and are sensitive to the soul’s command to look inward.

—©Stephen Morrissey

This review first appeared in our Jung Society Newsletter in March 2001, Volume XXIV, Number 6.

The Broken Mirror:

Refracted Visions of Ourselves

James Hollis, Ph.D.

Asheville, NC; Chiron Publications, 2022; 208 pps.

With his eighteenth book, veteran Jungian analyst James Hollis, now in his 82nd year, has once more asserted his faith in the quickened spirit that dwells within us all.

This is not a light and easy read. As he is wont to do, he makes it darker while revealing guiding principles that might lead us into the depths of our psyche.

Identifying some of the obstacles in our way—fear, lassitude, skepticism—as always he urges his readers to move from diminishment to enlargement.

He delivers a strong message about the importance of our sufferings in recovering an inner life: “who would ever have imagined that we might actually be led to consider psychopathology a friend of ours, the warning bell that tells us we are violating the soul’s imperative … Now warned, now alerted, the ego has a summons to accountability to the soul’s agenda.” (p. 22)

Hollis concludes the opening chapter of this book with the following poetic flourish:

Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, we carry the same genetic code that drove that ancient salt-soaked, surf-wracked mariner, and carried his “grey spirit yearning in desire/to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” His mission took him all the way home. Such missions, and such Ithakas, wait for all of us, daring us to show up as best we can, and some day find our way back home to ourselves. (pp. 22-23)

He follows this magnificent appeal with a chapter called The Zen Paradox: What You Have Become Is Now Your Chief Problem. This is the subject that he will be addressing when he visits us on Saturday, May 6.

He returns to themes he has explored in earlier books such as overwhelmment and abandonment. And the adaptations we must make to these early conditions of life over which we have little control. Our compliances and dependencies, our insufficiencies ... turn into rigid patterns that become our ruling “shadow governments.”

After all these observations of how our behaviour is shaped, he declares a psychological imperative: we must take responsibility for our lives. Mature spirituality requires growing up.

To that end, he urges the reader to make a schema of our Existential Adaptive Patterns to scrutinize daily!

In classic Hollis mode, he offers numerous lists: 6 of this and 4 of that.

Nevertheless, for all his pedagogical skills and acumen, the author shines with an eloquent poetic spirit.

A most poignant chapter is an homage that Hollis writes for his life-long friend, the poet Stephen Dunn. The two shared an office when Hollis was teaching literature in an earlier life. Their friendship lasted for almost fifty years until Dunn died in 2021 on his 82nd birthday.

In “Invisible Means of Support: The Theogonies of Stephen Dunn,” Hollis offers insights gleaned from the poet’s keen sensibilities. Since the ancient cosmogonies, with their implicate order, have dissolved, we have been cast into a chaotic and often incoherent world … (to) suffer from a terrible sense of spiritual ambiguity. We are left with an existential absurdity and dread and the “ambiguous task of living in a soul-haunted, soul-abandoned world.” (p. 159) He identifies some of the perils of our current popular culture … its distractions … and its failed fetishes.

Dunn’s achievement is “a lens through which we see ourselves, in which the absurdities and opacities of our moment are briefly illumined, and, in which—through the connective tendrils of art—we resonate with what hums beneath the surface. Dunn’s poems are a tacit petition to mystery, and a deep confession that even we may, from time to time, experience invisible means of support.”

(p. 165)

In Hollis’s frequent use of the motif “Living between worlds,” he might be borrowing from a kindred spirit, his confrère Dunn, who wrote:

Between angels, on this earth

absurdly between angels, I

try to navigate

in the bluesy middle ground …

(“Between Angels”)

Among Hollis’s concluding wishes is that a CD of the blues, a true artifact of our humanity, be placed in a space capsule!

This austere-looking gentleman recommends a 2012 Kennedy Center Honours tribute to bluesman Buddy Guy. (With Jeff Beck and Beth Hart.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fALdOkf_eCM

Although we have come to admire the erudition of this venerable Jungian author and analyst, it is also clear that his life has been touched by the blues.

His immigrant Swedish grandfather died suddenly in a coal mine accident, leaving his family impoverished and bereft. The shame would leave an implicit trace down the generations.

A darkened spirit—a haunted house perhaps—led young James to readily absorb the pains and griefs of the war years. He was born in Lincoln’s birthplace, Springfield, Illinois in 1940, and notwithstanding some derring-do as a youngster, he was aware of the dark history of that place. A murderous race riot had taken place there in 1907. An uncle returned from war a broken man. Hollis knew that this was an unsafe world.

A deep curiosity about history—an internal fire—led him to take his family to the horrific ruins of Europe in the post-war years, including the death camps.

Perhaps it is a deep-seated Viking heritage that leads Hollis to identify shipwrecks as a key leitmotif in our lives. Failures are inevitable. However “What we do after the shipwreck is what ultimately defines our lives.” (p. 90)

Although the author devotes two long chapters of the book to the limits and gifts and the difficulties in therapy, Hollis’s saga is not tragic after all.

In an early chapter, “Down and Out in Zürich: For Those Who Think That Becoming a Jungian Analyst is a Cool Thing,” he describes the six years he spent doing analysis and struggling to get by. Disclosing “the rest of the story,” he also provides a very happy ending. “With a surrender to the absolute mystery of things,” a final dream came to him to offset an initial troubled dream; under an archway to Elvis’s Graceland, a goddess offered him a handful of rose petals!

A few days later he would meet Jill, an American woman who was working in the Bibliothek of the Jung Institute, and would marry her soon after. His trip to Hades had been worth it.

Forty years later, her paintings have adorned the last three of Hollis’s books, two with impish presences peering around a corner.

Telling the stories of our lives so eloquently, this Springfield bard has trusted the wellsprings from within, entering life again and again with his endless musings on our fated lives.

Even his afflictions, his bone disorders of an earlier time, have turned into blessings. His attention to the matter of soul has led him to an affirmation of life … and gratitude.

—Murray Shugar

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Newsletter #4 – March 2023

The Heroine with 1001 Faces

Maria Tatar

New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co. (2021); 329 pp.

In this book Maria Tatar, folklorist and research professor at Harvard University, explores the question of what is a heroine. Eschewing Joseph Campbell’s theory of a hero monomyth, Tatar explores the many faces of the heroine over centuries in myth, folklore and modern media. Tatar takes the title of this book from One Thousand and One Nights, the story of Scheherazade who escaped beheading by her husband through the nightly telling of tales. Tatar proposes that there is something of the teller of stories, the keeper of tales, that depicts the heroine.

Tatar was spurred on to write this book by the #MeToo movement. She relates that when she was a young graduate student, one of her professors made a sexual advance at her, which she rejected. This same professor later punished her by making her oral dissertation exam difficult. Afterwards her advisor asked if there had been some personal connection between this professor and her. Tatar denied everything for fear of reprisals to her future career. Tatar focuses a great deal in this book on how women have been subjugated and abused by men throughout the ages.

Joseph Campbell claimed that all mythologies have been presented from the male point of view. He did not find a place for women in hero myths. He stated that women are the totality to be known which the hero comes to know. Tatar suggests that the hero goes to battle for fame and self-aggrandizement whereas the female hero may have a sense of altruism in her quest. Heroic stories depict shining examples of the feats of men but there are shameful examples as well. The tales of men are of battle, conquest, and bravery with little thought to women as other than chattel or concubines. Recently writers such as Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison and Angela Carter have rewritten the stories from the Iliad or the Odyssey from the female perspective.

Referring to Ovid’s savage story of Philomela, princess of Athens, Tatar points out that women have been silenced over the years. After being raped by her brother-in-law, Philomela vows to publicly denounce her assailant. He responds by cutting out her tongue. In turn she weaves a tapestry whereon she depicts the story of her rape. Women have often turned to the crafts of weaving and tapestry to tell their tales. Despite efforts at silencing women, they continue to tell their stories; Tatar views this as a heroic enterprise.

Often women’s stories are not taken seriously. Women’s wisdom tales have been told in domestic circles as women did crafts (spinning, knitting) or other domestic chores. Over time these stories coalesced into fairy tales, which then were denounced as old wives’ tales. When the Grimm Brothers’ collection of fairy tales was published, they were discredited for not demarcating the eloquence of men’s writings from the “useless chatter” of women. Fairy tales were eventually relegated to the nursery, where they lost much of their bite and subversive energy, well before Disney sanitized them.

Gossip is another way to impart knowledge. However, it is has been maligned as trivial and viewed as the pastime of women. When men gossip it is seen as light-hearted, rather than the character assassination that women are thought to engage in. Why is gossip so threatening? Tatar wonders if it promotes women creating networks outside of patriarchal control.

Another attribute of women that has also been denigrated is curiosity. After all it is Eve’s curiosity that barred us from Eden and Pandora’s that unleashed all the evils onto the world. Female curiosity was often associated with sexual curiosity, but earlier definitions of curiosity were linked to care and concern. Curiosity is an important quality of a sleuth in detective novels, many of whom have been women, e.g. Miss Marple in Agatha Christie’s work. A woman, especially an older woman like Marple, can be seen as unthreatening and often disregarded while she collects facts. A woman may glean information from other women who may notice small details overlooked by others.

In reviewing modern examples of stories about women, Tatar mentions Wonder Woman, an Amazon figure with superhero attributes but who also has compassion and searches for justice. Dr. William Moulton Marston, the author of Wonder Woman, believed that women would eventually dominate humanity and create a more compassionate world.

More recent depictions of the female hero do not bear this out. Several films (Tatar believes that films are present-day folktales) show heroines as modern-day tricksters who are amoral, violent and revenge seeking. One example is Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, who exacts revenge for herself and other women who have been victimized by rape. Like most tricksters, she has a ravenous appetite for food and sex. Often on the wrong side of the law, she is on the right side of justice.

Aside from ruthless tricksters, women today are depicted as warriors, e.g. Arya in Game of Thrones, Elsa in Frozen I and II, or Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. Tatar asks whether our recent female heroes are just like their male counterparts or if there is something different about the feminine hero, something that involves compassion. What about nurses such as Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War or Clara Barton in the American Civil War? Like men they risked their lives on or near the battlefield, not fighting but tending to wounded soldiers. What about examples of heroes of the recent pandemic? What are their names? How have we celebrated them besides clanging on pots for a while? Clearly we may not be quite ready for Marston’s futuristic vision of women as “love educators”, creating a civilization based on care. He did state that this may take a thousand years, especially since the prevailing stories of our culture are of the hero with the gun or sword.

Tatar has written a book that contains far more than this review can summarize. It is an excellent read which will have you pondering upon the stories of our culture for a long time and perhaps help you gather the courage to write some of your own.

—Mary Harsany

The Collected Writings of Murray Stein: (Volume 4)

The Practice of Jungian Psychoanalysis

General Editors; Steven Buser and Leonard Cruz

Asheville, NC.: Chiron Publications, (2022); 462 pps.

Born in Saskatchewan about eighty years ago, Murray Stein began his studies at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich in 1969. The Institute had been set up in 1948, the first in the world to train Jungian analysts in a (relatively) organized way.

Today there are about twenty-five training institutes in about twenty countries. The International Association for Analytical Psychology, of which he was president between 2001 and 2004, recently estimated there are about 3,500 accredited Jungian analysts in the world.

This book is a rich harvest of Stein’s writings since the 1980s, covering many topics and often reflecting his career at the heart of this growth and “the faith of an analyst,” in the words of one chapter heading.

I could not hope to summarize it. I heartily recommend it.

However, parts of this book worried me. At one point Stein asks whether the whole enterprise of Jungian analysis might be crumbling.

In an interview transcribed in 2009, he says it seems him that “most people don’t want to slow down their busy, stressed lives and take time to reflect on who they are, what they are doing, who it is in them that is anxious, depressed and why feelings of emptiness haunt them.” (p 213)

He mentions overmedication, pressures from pharmaceutical and insurance companies and the popularity of short -term therapies, including the currently popular approach known as cognitive behavioural therapy or CBT.

In a 2020 lecture to Jungian psychoanalysts, he returns to these themes and contemplates a grim possibility.

Short-term psychotherapy has largely replaced long-term psychoanalysis because it is more efficient and less costly. Who has time to sleep and dream? … The insurance industry favours Cognitive Behavioural Therapy because it delivers results at less cost. Patients seek it out because it promises a quick fix for symptoms that interfere with work and social activities.

We might fear that the postmodern world has been infected with the virus of superficiality to such an extent that our profession is merely a curiosity that is lingering on the fringes of society because a stubborn few analysts are too old to learn new methods and adjust to postmodern practices … In this climate, does it make any sense to continue training people for a profession that may have no future? (p. 317)

The changing profile of candidates in training institutes poses another challenge.

Stein recalls that when he was a student at the Jung Institute, the training was open and creative and suited for the significant portion of candidates who, like him, came without a degree in clinical psychology.

In his view, most candidates today still want to become analysts, typically in private practice, but many if not most, have already been trained in psychotherapy and are licensed professionals.

(He does not spell out the reason for this, but it seems probable that this stems largely from requirements imposed by organizations with government mandates to supervise psychologists and other psychotherapists. Examples of such organizations in my part of the world are l'Ordre des psychologues du Québec and the Ontario College of Psychologists.)

The training of Jungian psychoanalysts therefore takes on the quality of specialization in the more general field of psychotherapy. And the training institutes are therefore obliged to offer something different, something uniquely ‘Jungian,’ in their clinical trainings. What is this? What can they offer that general programs in psychotherapy training as offered in universities these days do not offer? I would suggest it is “psychological depth.” (p. 322)

Drawing on the experience of the International School for Analytical Psychology in Zürich where he was president from 2008 to 2012, he suggests that training “has had to adjust to the spirit of the times” but “perhaps now it is time to listen to the spirit of the depths more closely.” (p. 319)

The final four chapters of the volume (also published by Chiron as a separate book) represent a bold attempt to do this. He wants to recognize “four pillars of Jungian analysis.”

In themselves these pillars are nothing new but already “constitute the uniqueness of Jungian psychoanalysis and set it apart from all other forms of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.” (p. 321)

I think they might indeed help achieve more clarity in a world where differences between psychological brands are becoming more confused, as are lines of authority.

I hope we hear more of the four pillars.

Stein offers valuable elaboration about all of them. Here are a few comments of my own, but I really, really urge people to get his texts.

Here are the pillars:

1. Individuation. Stein does a wonderful job of sorting out this often-misunderstood process of developing a unique self, which he sees as a lifetime process, and therefore outside of Jungian analysis for the most part. Analysis may help make later stages more conscious.

2. The Analytic Relationship. Stein brings clarity and nuance to the complex and sometimes controversial issues of what are known as transference and countertransference, emotional and largely unconscious relations between analyst and patient. His explanations are worth the price of the book. An essay, reprinted in the main section of Volume 4, called “In Field of Sleep,” based on an analysis in which he and his client had difficulty staying awake during the sessions, includes a brilliant exposition of transference/countertransference. It has been one of my favourite pieces of Jungian literature for years. Also worth the price of the book. So you get a real bargain.

3. Dreams as the Way to Wholeness. Superlative advice on how to analyze dreams.

4. Active Imagination as Agent of Transformation. Stein outlines how it originated in Jung’s life including the experiences reported in the Red Book.

Despite his misgivings, Stein ended his 2020 lecture to psychoanalysts on a note of faith:

Our roots as Jungian psychoanalysts extend not only to what Jung wrote and said and to the culture in which he lived, which is what is called “modernity.” They reach much deeper down, into what he represented, namely a tradition that touches the sources of human culture—to the Greeks and the Hebrews and across cultures to the myths and symbols of all cultures, East and West. This is a deep taproot and the source of all visionary experience and the numinous among people of all times and places.

When the waters of these times subside and history moves on to the next stages of the evolution of consciousness, the vision that Jung expressed in his works and that we share in ours, and that the next generation of Jungians will express in theirs, will continue to sustain the enterprise that we, by some mysterious chance of fate and destiny, have found … (p. 338)

—Harvey Shepherd

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Newsletter #3 – January 2023

The Creation Tapestry of Gerona Spain from around 1100:

When Paganism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam were united

Hansueli F. Etter

Asheville, NC: Chiron Publications (2020); 137 pp.

Also consulted:

A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain

Chris Lowney

New York, Oxford University Press (2006); 320 pp.

The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain

María Rosa Monecal

New York, Back Bay/Little Brown (2002); 315 pp.

Andalusia!

I don’t speak Spanish and have never visited Spain or its beautiful southern region of that name, but the name has haunted me for years. It kept cropping up in all sorts of mysterious contexts to do with gastronomy, music, mysticism, Judaism and Islam, to name a few.

More recently, I became convinced that the name Andalusia was connected to something momentous that took place in medieval times in what are now Spain and Portugal and that I should learn more about it, especially at this time of tension between Islam and the West.

So I volunteered to write a review for this newsletter of a monograph written by Hansueli F. Etter, a Jungian analyst in Switzerland, and published by Chiron Publications in 2020 about a mysterious “tapestry” (a hanging of some sort)–dating from about 1100 and in the museum of the Catholic cathedral in Gerona. Gerona (Girona in Catalan) is a city of about 100,000 and a tourist attraction that still has its medieval walls about 100 kilometers from Barcelona in the northeastern corner of Catalonia, and therefore of Spain.

The “tapestry” was probably about five metres square originally; parts are now missing. At its centre is a sort of embroidered icon depicting a young man in the classic iconic pose known as Christ Pantocrator, but beardless, surrounded by Latin Bible texts from the Creation story and pictures arranged in mandala patterns (as Etter keeps reminding us) depicting daily life, the created world and some other Christian lore. (A Web search for “Tapestry of Creation” will generate some information and reproductions.)

Etter first saw the tapestry when he visited the cathedral in 1982 as a tourist and began a series of visits to try to understand why the tapestry fascinates him and tens of thousands of annual visitors.

My mind boggled at the challenge of reviewing the book. I thought some supplementary reading might help and I found the two remarkable volumes listed above: A Vanished World by Lowney and The Ornament of the World by Monecal.

What a story they tell!

In about 711, scarcely a century after Muhammad began receiving revelations from God, around 10,000 Muslims crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and rapidly conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula, making short work of the feckless Visigoth monarchs. The Muslims referred to their new dominions as al-Andalus.

Chris Lowney, a former Jesuit and a businessman and scholar with a deep love of Spain, writes:

Medieval Spain’s Muslims, Christians and Jews embraced and rejected each other’s faith traditions and customs, fought alongside each other and against each other, occasionally tolerated their neighbours and somehow forged a golden age for each faith. They allow us some glimpse of what a common society might look like. Their glory was their joint accomplishments; their tragedy was that they could not see and preserve what made these accomplishments possible. They haltingly blazed humanity’s trail towards tolerance and mutual respect before finally veering into an overgrown thicket of religious enmity and intolerance. Humanity has never completely found the way back. Medieval Spain might help us find the way. (p. 14)

María Rosa Menocal, a Cuban-born scholar of medieval culture and literature and a professor of humanities at Yale University (who died in 2012), argues that the history of al-Andalus should persuade the West to “begin telling at least this part of our own story from an Andalusian perspective.” (p. 11) It was in al-Andalus that Arabized Jews rediscovered and reinvented Hebrew; that Christians embraced Arabic styles of philosophy and architecture even after regaining political control from Arabs; and it was in al-Andalus that men of deep faith like the Jewish teacher Maimonides and the Muslim scholar Averroes saw no contradiction in pursuing the truth, whether philosophical or scientific or religious, across confessional lines. Menocal writes:

This vision of a culture of tolerance recognized that incongruity in the shaping of individuals as well as their cultures was enriching and productive. It was an approach to life and its artistic and intellectual and even religious pursuits that was contested by many—as it is today—and violently so at times—as it is today—and yet powerful and shaping nevertheless, for hundreds of years. (pps. 11-12)

As Lowney and Menocal acknowledge in considerable detail, the seven centuries when Muslims, Christians and Jews shared the Iberian Peninsula saw plenty of bloody conflict between religious and political groups, sometimes in combinations that might seem surprising.

Gerona changed hands repeatedly between 715, when the Muslims (or “Moors”) first took over, and 1015, when they were finally ousted (in time for the nuns to work on the tapestry, I guess. This was perhaps to mark some internal event in the Catholic church, somewhere in the latter half of the 11th century.) That Catholics were back in charge may account for the fact Etter never refers to “Andalusia.”

But the return of Catholic rule locally did not mean the end of flourishing Muslim and, particularly, Jewish communities in Gerona. Far from it. The celebrated rabbi and scholar Moses ben Nachman, also known as Nachmanides or Ramban, was born and lived much of his life in Gerona and an Arab bathhouse dating from around the same time is in good shape to this day.

Lowney reports (on page 201) that when French armies attacked Gerona in the late 1280s, hundreds of Muslim archers and lancers converged from nearby communities to assist the besieged Christian and Muslim defenders.

The whole history of al-Andalus, of course, ended in catastrophe. A Catholic Reconquista gradually and unevenly worked its way south through the Iberian Peninsula conquering Muslim strongholds until the last Muslims and Jews were required to leave Spain or convert on pain of death in 1492.

Etter is to be thanked for bringing this history to more attention in the Jungian community and I am personally grateful that he stimulated some other reading on my part.

I’m afraid I don’t have much to say about his specific contribution as a Jungian in elucidating the “age-old images of the Tapestry” that in his perception “express an eternal reality.” (p. 4) He introduced me to a new meaning for the word “romanesque,” restates some views on the need to reaffirm the feminine that he shares with the late Marie-Louise von Franz, who was something of a mentor to him, and invents a new technical term, “protoarchetype” (Don’t ask). Generally, his arguments are so abstruse and badly organized that I would find it hard to even organize a rebuttal.

Etter acknowledges a debt to Marie-Louise von Franz, with whom he discussed this project before her death in 1998. His book ends with an idea he shares with her: the need to change the patriarchal image of God into a feminine/masculine totality.

Is the Pantocrator at the centre of the tapestry a hermaphrodite?

—Harvey Shepherd

From Newsletter; October 2011

At Home in the World:

Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging

John Hill

New Orleans, LA: Spring Books; (2010) 288 pp.

John Hill has been researching and working on the topic of home for over twenty years and the fruits of his labours have produced a rich tapestry of thought-provoking essays on the topic. The book is beautifully written, and especially poetic in the introductory chapters where Hill writes quite personally about his early experiences. He appears attached to his home in Ireland, even though he has spent most of his adult life in self-imposed exile in Zürich. Home is linked with attachment figures and Hill suffered several losses, including the death of his father when he was only eleven years old, as well as time spent away from home in a TB hospital and at boarding school.

Hill refers us to the diverse concepts and symbols of home. Home relates to place, to belonging, as well as to culture and nation. It is connected to our basic animal instinct of marking territory and to our identity. Hill reminds us of Jung’s famous dream of the house where he found himself living in a multi-storied building; its top floor was in the nineteenth century, its ground floor in the sixteenth and deep layers of the basement rested on Roman foundations. If house is a symbol for our psyche, we may be aware of the upper stories, but what lies beneath the earth’s surface is deep in the unconscious.

Hill suggests that in order to be at home in the world, we need to first look at it. At several points in the book he laments our loss of connectedness with nature as most of us live in urban areas cemented over the earth. With our disconnection from nature comes a loss of sacred space where we can encounter the gods, the television in the living room now replacing the home altar. Our attachments have become more virtual as we interact globally through the Internet, rather than to any particular person. All this causes us to suffer dissociation from our emotions and body.

Hill urges us to see the world through the eyes of the child with mind, heart and body, and through mythic imagination (which he calls the mother tongue), while not losing our rational perspective (our father tongue). He argues that we have become too reliant on our father tongue which has provided the enormous advances of modern science, but has caused us to become disconnected from our roots and our affinity with the unconscious, the subjective, and the biographical. The symbol-creating mind, nurtured from the child/parent relationship, tends to be more inclusive and incorporates an appreciation of the emotional and physical body. On the other hand, too much reliance on the mother tongue may constellate cultural complexes in the unconscious.

The author warns us that we can become trapped in either one of these languages; he brilliantly offers an example of how a nation can become overwhelmed by the mother tongue. His birthplace, Ireland, is a country still attached to its mythic imagination. Hill relates a twelfth-century tale, with roots in Celtic lore, of a dying king who sends his sons to look for the water of life. After four sons refuse to lie with the old hag who offers them this boon, the youngest finally does, and in fairy tale fashion, the hag transforms into a beautiful maiden. The king and the maiden/goddess are joined and the land is renewed, the land symbolizing not just vegetative fertility, but a connection to all the “ancestors and psychic inheritance embedded in the land.” (p. 192) This tale inspired the Irish people and eventually became a political instrument, a call to sovereignty, which culminated in decades of intransigent violence.

Throughout the book Hill urges us to balance our two languages or perspectives (mother and father, heart and head) with their conflicting interpretations of reality. To accomplish this balance we need to invoke the transcendent function:

The transcendent function does not give us a home to live in; it is not the kind of method that provides neat answers for regaining home and a sense of belonging ... (Its) goal is union between the unconscious and consciousness so that a new attitude is achieved. (p. 150)

This book is full of treasures: a chapter on homecoming as a metaphor for therapy; a discussion of homesickness (a topic prevalent in the songs of the nineteenth century and apparently very popular among the Swiss); an exploration of attachment and abandonment issues; an exposition on the responsibilities of citizenship.

Hill is most brilliant when he expounds on our modern times. He devotes the last few sections of the book to homelessness and the cultural shifts of our era. He distinguishes homesickness from homelessness, referring to those who have had to move for work, refugees forced to leave their homeland because of a natural disaster or war, seasonal workers, adopted children, even sex slaves. To deal with our rapidly changing, culturally diverse societies, Hill recommends that we consider Jung’s notion of multiple identities. Just as we need to encounter the stranger within, and explore the disparate aspects of our unconscious, we should also work on accepting the stranger without.

Contemporary societies should make every effort to support communication that is critical, open-ended, and inclusive, perhaps to rediscover one day the gift of hospitality, the art of greeting the stranger, which has always been an intrinsic part of civilization. (p. 227)

Acculturation—adapting to a new culture or shifting to accept the new cultures that enrich us—may take generations and can cause conflict. Hill warns that “an approach to conflict resolution that is based solely on economic or political interests can be ineffectual in the face of older narratives, (p. 247)” and so should always include them.

This book offers us a gift, an opportunity to contemplate our rich associations to home, a topic so unique and personal, yet archetypal in its scope. John Hill is our master storyteller and our guide.

—Mary Harsany

Newsletter #2 – October 2022

Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality:

The Hidden Power of Darkness on the Path

Connie Zweig

Bloomington, IN; iUniverse: (2017) 202 pp.

Connie Zweig begins her book by allowing us to meet her youthful, spiritually-aspiring self and describes her ten-year loving involvement with a spiritual community oriented towards meditation practice. She describes the events that eventually lead her through the fires of doubt on an inner journey of psychological growth and awareness of shadow that finally builds a bridge between her emotional and spiritual lives and eventually even enriches her creative life.

In this book which picks up a thread which was established in her previous, more general book Meeting the Shadow, Zweig sets out to explore spirituality from a depth psychological perspective, which includes, but is not limited to, observations on the influence of our early personal histories and unmet emotional needs on our spiritual lives.

She does not critically examine the content of particular theological or philosophical beliefs. Instead she uses Jungian psychology as a lens through which to examine the inner worlds of those who feel what she calls “a holy longing” and a desire for contact with a greater mystery which links them to a more universal spiritual experience.

She observes, however, that this natural “holy longing” is often overlaid on our romantic relationships or may be projected onto spiritual or secular teachers, especially when there is a subtle match between our inner image and the outer person of a teacher which permits them to embody our image of the ideal other. We are comforted when we can see our romantic beloved or our spiritual guide as a numinous hero or saviour who will rescue us from our limitations. They become an “Imago Amore,” which provides the desired connection to something greater in a way that may help us repair certain early wounds, or help us separate from our imperfect “real” parents. But she warns that if we are too “ideal hungry” we may become trapped in positions of submission, stop thinking for ourselves or acting from our own agency.

There are risks as well for those who receive the projection. They may feel the pressure to live out the projected ideal rather than their own authentic lives. They may become inflated through contact with the archetype, creating an unhealthy spiritual alliance where both participants evade their emotional issues to fulfil their roles.

These challenges and frailties cross all denominations, and as with the romantically idealized beloved, if the teacher or priest fails to successfully carry the imago, either through human limitation or self-indulgent acting out of shadow, the student may lose the soothing relationship without internalizing their own self-worth or personal authority and they may leave the relationship with angry, negative feelings to begin their search for the next great figure.

In her discussion of the individual qualities of spiritual leaders, Zweig offers an interesting observation drawn from the psychology of “multiple intelligences” that cognitive, emotional, and spiritual intelligences grow in independent ways and that while an idealized leader may have “high development along the spiritual line including deity mysticism or union with spirit,” they may have only low growth along the moral line. (p. 108)

Shadow transgressions within a group can break a member’s capacity for trust to the point where the meaning that bound their lives together is lost. The loss of purpose or direction may plunge them suddenly into shadow: confusion, fear, guilt or fears of retaliation from the group.

She offers as a poignant example her own experience of questioning her relationship to the Buddhist concept of “non-attachment” and how she came to recognize that it psychologically masked her personal fears of intimacy and death. She describes how disillusionment pierced her spiritual persona and forced her to face all she had sought to avoid, and how she came to recognize the healing power of this “downward” movement into the darkness of stillness and loss, and to accept it as a natural part of being human.

She suggests that retaining the capacity to question and doubt requires a high level of psychological and spiritual development because it demands that we face the complexity, idiosyncrasy and individuality of human experience; she argues that mature spirituality is capable of holding, in Jungian terms, “the tension of the opposites,” accepting both the light and the shadow of experience and personality.

Zweig reflects on how spiritual work is so often experienced as an “upward” striving, but her arguments guide us into a realization that the work of healing also goes “down” into awareness of our own shadow and the needs and fears of embodied human life.

In terms of the shadow of spirituality, this means making conscious the spiritual unconscious so that we can reclaim our own authority, define our own values and compose our own lives by repatriating the qualities of power, wisdom and compassion which we may have projected onto an idealized teacher, beloved, or spiritual practice.

As befits her title, Zweig focuses mostly on the dangers of shadow inherent in too bright and idealized a spirituality which only looks “up” towards purity of belief and practice and away from the “down” of individual trauma, compensation and the human frailty of religious guides.

She suggests that spiritual disillusionment, though often heartbreaking in the moment, may have the effect of moving the spiritual practitioner towards the completion of a personal psychological journey and that once the purpose of the idealization has been fulfilled, it can fade out in a health-promoting way.

While she validates the Via Positiva, the way of light and blessing, she asks us also to consider the role of the Via Negativa, the way of darkness and shadow in our experience of holy longing since we need both the sacred and the profane, the spiritual and the embodied life, to reach our full human creative potential.

Zweig proposes that “a spiritually authentic life is an on-going creative act, in which the creature and the creator long to be united. If we choose to live it within an existing tradition, a finished work of art, we can decorate it with our own detail. If we choose to live it outside of tradition, we can design it with images from our own soul.” (p. 169)

—Susan Meindl

A revised and updated edition of this book will be published in May, 2023, by Inner Traditions Books.

The Inner Work of Age:

Shifting from Role to Soul

Connie Zweig, Ph.D.

Rochester, Vermont; Park Street Press: (2021) 393 pps.

When I have spoken to people about Connie Zweig’s book, The Inner Work of Age, the response of many was frequently one of doom and gloom. The prospect of aging, and the dread of a decrepit decline with worse to come, elicited only pessimism.

And so the optimistic tone and the upbeat contents of this book might come as a shock to readers who were not aware that the human potential movement has continued to thrive.

Connie Zweig has been at the forefront of this movement since the 1960’s when she was an activist in the civil rights struggles against racial, social and gender injustice. Over this time, she also established a strong spiritual practice, which included meditation; Vedanta philosophy and depth psychology were also crucial to her development.

She was associated with Marilyn Ferguson, the author of the 1981 best-seller The Aquarian Conspiracy, and was the editor of Tarcher Publishing, a major resource in the Human Development Movement, during the 1980’s.

She practiced as a psychotherapist for decades, retiring in her late 60’s to make the shift from role to soul. Her forceful advocacy for Elderhood then should perhaps not come as a surprise. After all, she has “come into age” like most Boomers, including members of our Jung society and kindred associations.

How our society propagates ageism and how we internalize it is the problem Zweig addresses. With vigour. The “inner age-ist” is a major obstacle in the way of attaining a better late life.

She challenges ageism’s pernicious assumptions with numerous counter-narratives. Many contemporary studies illustrate the vital importance of a positive attitude to aging. Benefits range from better health outcomes to greater longevity.

But Zweig’s focus is less on the external cultural and medical factors than on the inner work we are called upon to do. Doing things from the inside out, as she puts it. As a psychological and spiritual guidebook, the author’s passion and the book’s intention are to increase the consciousness and awareness of a society at large and especially a large demographic group to which many readers of this newsletter belong.

Identifying the obstacles in the way is part of shadow work. Foremost in this effort is the identification of the shadow character. She proposes that we “romance the shadow.” She demonstrates with a dramatic incident from her own life.

Once, while sitting in her neighborhood coffee shop, she was filled with disgust at a woman she would later call her “bag lady.” When she caught herself projecting her negative animus onto this pathetic stranger, she began the arduous process of self-reflection on the complex dark attitudes that inhabit us all.

Such shadow work exercises proliferate in this book. After every chapter there is a spiritual lesson to accompany the painful realizations.

She names three disturbing, but often revelatory passages in every life; she calls them divine messengers. They are illness, retirement, and death. She elaborates on each one at length. Although each brings suffering and loss, she argues that they also bring potential gain. Each can be an initiation, a sacred wound.

Each is a portal to greater awareness; to shadow awareness, mortality awareness and pure awareness.

She maintains the importance of creating rites of passage to mark critical stages of our lives. As she did at crucial junctures, at liminal moments, in her own life. And perhaps most importantly, as we near the final frontier: death.

Among the several insightful sections of the book, Zweig suggests that a life review can offer a 360° perspective. Seeing the bigger picture, we can understand better the context of earlier traumatic moments, repairing emotional damage done to us or by us in earlier times.

She cites Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s work on grief as being central to deeply accepting our losses. Discovering the gains that came out of our losses shows that we are called upon not by fateful circumstances alone nor merely by our ego’s desires but by our soul’s insistence.

She also addresses the harm done to our spiritual inclinations and ways to reclaim them. Many have been disillusioned by the faith of their forebears. Others followed gurus and other spiritual masters and found themselves betrayed by a misplaced trust in humans whom they adored like gods. Some “experienced betrayal as an initiation … (from innocence) toward spiritual maturity.” (p. 225)

Another mode of repair is through creative activity. Among her many arguments for the creative urge to shine through the latter stages of life, Zweig cites several geniuses whose work began only after the age of 65, often notwithstanding great physical restrictions: e. g. Grandma Moses and Monet.

She advises us to find our own light and reclaim the faith and the god images from within. In her lived experience of five decades of spiritual practice, meditation is always the best approach.

Her view is reiterated by those she has chosen to interview, many over the age of 80, who testify to great vitality in their late lives. Among these are monks and religious practitioners of all faiths. There are leading cultural figures of the 1960’s: Ram Dass, Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Deena Metzger, and Ken Wilber, as well as Jungian analysts: James Hollis, James Hillman, and Lionel Corbett. They confirm Zweig’s view that decline is an opportunity to find soul and gain wisdom—an invitation to a sacred initiation that accompanies the aging process.

There is a core of transcendent belief in this book: in the evolution of consciousness; an increase in compassion; an awareness of our common humanity.

The second half of this book takes on a more political, even activist tone. As the era of the 1960’s was a struggle against injustice, now Zweig’s battle is against ageism. The age-ing Boomer generation once again has attitude!

In a chapter entitled Elder with a Thousand Faces (borrowed from Joseph Campbell’s well-known title), Zweig regards the myriad ways that elders embody wisdom. Among her interviewees are Michael Meade, Marion Woodman, and Deena Metzger. They have taken the hard-won lessons learned from their lives and gifted the following generations as their legacy.

At a training retreat with Zalman Schacter-Shalomi on “sage-ing,” Zweig found a wise old guide–an inner elder–that was summoned from within. A sage inner elder rather than an inner age-ist!

She has broadened such personal experience to summon a generation of contemporary Elders to join in serving their community and the wider world.

Ken Wilber promotes an evolutionary model that urges us away from a narrow ego and culturally focused view toward a world and cosmological perspective. Service to an ever-greater good would be the mantra. Very simply put: from “I” to “us” to “all of us.” A global warming crisis lies at the heart of Zweig’s urgent call to take note and to take action.

When Zweig makes a subtle shift from Elders to Spiritual Elders, and from relative wisdom to absolute wisdom, the reader might become uneasy. Her many references to the mystical traditions may leave the everyday reader behind.

This very rich and inspirational book is leavened with parables, contemporary scientific studies on the age-ing process, personal stories, and broad cultural and historical references. It is also a manual on how to attain a golden late life.

If the tone often borders on the utopian, it may be to offset our generally dark view of decline and death. Perhaps a taboo is being shattered.

–Murray Shugar

From Newsletter #1 – September 2022

Jung and the New Age

David Tacey

Philadelphia; Brunner-Routledge; (2001); 218 pps.

It was while on a pilgrimage to the Boston Jung Institute that I first heard of David Tacey. When the librarian heard that I was Australian, she produced an article by Tacey on the Australian psyche. For me, a long-time expatriate and Jungian, it was manna!

David Tacey is Associate Professor in Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe University and is known to spiritual and religious groups in his native Australia for his writings on culture and spirituality. Internationally, he is known as a Jungian. He teaches at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich and his books are cited on American Jungian web sites.

Tacey describes his main interest as the recovery of meaning in the contemporary world. He is a creative thinker and an observer—“tracking the sacred in secular society.” His most recently published book, Jung and the New Age, is a natural progression in his thought from his previous books, Edge of the Sacred; Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change; and ReEnchantment: the New Australian Spirituality. In these works, he calls upon Australians to awaken from their spiritual torpor, to reconnect body and spirit via soul, to awaken to an identity that incorporates concern for community and respect for the environment and aboriginal culture. Little notice has been taken of these books in the popular press, probably proving Tacey’s observation that non-aboriginal Australians are embarrassed by spirituality and in general defend themselves from the unconscious by clinging to the tangible, just as they cling to the coastal fringes of this continent, leaving its vast internal areas unexplored.

Thus aboriginal Australians, who are part of that vast Centre, fall into the collective shadow of non-aboriginal Australians.

In ReEnchantment, Tacey explains what he means by spirituality: it is a desire for connectedness, an entirely natural mode of being in the world if only we would open ourselves to it, a feeling of being connected to a greater or larger whole, relating our lives to the greater mystery in meaningful and transformative ways. He sees spirituality as being increasingly separated from religion and regarded as a reality in its own right.

Tacey’s reflections have inevitably led him to brush up against the phenomenon of the New Age. In Jung and the New Age, we follow him as he wrestles with the state of consciousness of New Age culture and its place in a paradigm of spirituality. The New Age, says Tacey, cannot be ignored because “although its expressions may be crude and untutored, it is able to tell us much about the spirit of the time, about what is being left out of Western consciousness.” In a materialist society, the New Age compensates for the repression of “powerful longings of the human spirit,” as well as for those elements ignored or repressed by established religion—“the sacred feminine … the body, nature, instincts, ecstasy and mysticism.”

However, says Tacey, although the New Age was born in response to these lacks, it is only a parody of the authentic spiritual life. It simply turns it into a commodity, creating spiritual consumerism, offering only fast food that cannot truly nourish.

C. G. Jung has been called the father of the New Age and Tacey points out that much of what the general public knows about Jung has come via simplistic and distorted New Age representations of him. Those, like Richard Noll, who wish to belittle and ridicule Jung, do so by identifying him with what the New Age has made of him. Tacey says that it is time this conspiracy was brought to light and his aim in this book is to redeem Jung.

The book is a richly woven exploration of the place of religion and spirituality in our society in relation to the ideas of Jung. Tacey sees Jung’s psychology as being a psychology of religious experience, and Jung’s spiritual intention as “not to bolster the status of mortal man but to challenge man to acquire a deeper and more abiding humility.” While Jung believed that the human ego must serve and attend a larger religious mystery, the New Age promotes the belief that the spiritual mystery must serve and attend the needs of the ego.

Tacey is not afraid to be controversial, giving no quarter when attacking what he terms the appalling state of archetypal theory (he is highly critical of post-Jungian archetypal psychology), Jungian fundamentalism, and the dangerous return to the masculine myth (Bly, Corneau) when we have hardly begun to open ourselves to the feminine. While exposing the phenomenon of best-selling books that exploit Jung’s insights for the inflationary purposes of advancing power and commercial success, he names a number of well-known Jungian analysts whom he believes have distorted Jung’s subtlety and complexity by attempting to popularize him, including the later works of his own analyst, James Hillman.

Although Tacey’s criticism of the New Age is rigorous, he by no means dismisses it. He ends the book with a reflection on the archetype of the child. While the child sees religious products as objects for its own pleasure, to be sucked and spat out, the child also has importance for its prophetic role—what it will become.

The New Age is prophetic, Tacey offers, of an authentic new age, which is a guiding myth and symbol of hope for human transcendence. It is the religious impulse learning again how to walk.

Jung societies everywhere make an important and serious contribution to the cultural life of their communities.

Tacey’s message is of tremendous interest in suggesting how we, as members of our respective Jung societies, could carry out our mission of making Jung’s ideas known and understood by the general public, presenting his work authentically, without treating it as a spiritual or psychological commodity, disentangling it from the “false Jungian.” Tacey casts his light to show us the quicksands and the snares. It is up to us to find the path through them.

—Anne Di Lauro

Anne di Lauro served on the planning committees of both le Cercle C. G. Jung and the Montreal Jung Society in the 1990’s and the early 2000’s.

She currently lives in Brisbane, Australia.

This review appeared in the October 2002 edition of the Montreal Jung Society Newsletter.

Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing

David Tacey

New York, NY: Routledge; (2013); 264 pps.

Deep, intriguing, thoughtful, and wonderfully complex is my initial reaction to Gods and Diseases: Making Sense of Our Physical and Mental Wellbeing, written by Australian professor David Tacey. As I contemplate this book, I ruminate on his initial, albeit complex, premise. I cannot summarize it as eloquently as he articulates it, and I’m probably warping some of his finer points, but basically, he posits that although one may not be consciously religious or spiritual, his or her unconscious remains drawn to the symbols associated with religion and spirituality and what they may represent. As such, the use of symbols, rituals, initiations, and a sense of mystery are needed during rites of passage and other developmental processes to transcend the ordinary in order to facilitate psychological health and growth.

Borrowing heavily from Jung, Freud, and others, Tacey takes readers on a psychospiritual foray into the unconscious and the soul. His interesting psychoanalytic argument suggests that archetypal forces exist innately within us, which, if not given form, metaphor, or expression that we can objectively interact (sic) separately from our ego, then these forces will invade our consciousness in other ways such as illness, neurosis, psychosis, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, incest, self-harm, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation. The point is that these forces need chances to live and be integrated in a healthy manner rather than being suppressed.

For example, the death instinct for self-harm (e.g. violence, alcoholism, suicide), especially during adolescence when emotions and forces are particularly strong, can be transformed with the use of religious rituals, especially those that occur as rites of passage. However, if the community’s culture and spiritual tradition have been assaulted, those symbols may not be available or have lost their meaning or power to transform the individual and the community. Tacey emphasizes this point by referring to detribalization witnessed by Australian aboriginals that may have resulted in the loss of their religious and spiritual roots and corresponding symbolic rituals. He asserts that the predilection for such self-harm behaviors observed in some victimized aboriginal cultures, who were forced to abandon their beliefs and even language, left them vulnerable by not having their inherit(ed) archetypal medicine available to help adolescents and adults develop healthy ways to deal with such forces.

Thus, the goal is not to subdue or abate these forces by medicating or simply treating the symptoms. Rather, we must understand such forces and incorporate them to support positive change in our lives to promote personal growth, healthy development, and even wisdom. As Tacey poignantly describes this process:

The task of therapy is not to get rid of neurosis, which is what conventional medicine seeks to achieve. Rather, psychotherapy asks the neurosis what it wants. It seeks to transform the neurosis by understanding why it arose in the first place and what it wants to accomplish. The unlived life must be given a chance to express itself and it can only do this if the ego is displaced. (p. 89)

To highlight this further, Tacey provides an interpretation of the “midlife crisis,” when psychic energy accumulates over opportunities denied and paths not taken, resulting in a flurry of aberrant behaviors and illnesses if not handled well.

He goes on to say, “The unlived life accumulates in the unconscious and this situation is tolerated for a time, until the psyche can stand it no more. [In fact] (t)he appearance of a neurosis is a sign that the psyche is on the side of life.” (p. 90)

With this argument, Tacey asserts that in some ways, such mental illnesses are healthy expressions for the need to change; in fact, “suffering continues to be the royal road to the sacred” (p. 190) and in the end, may result in a more fully developed human being.

Tacey continues, “We regain control of our emotions if we objectify the impulse that wants to harm us [with an image or metaphor that can help one understand it]. In the context of the suicide epidemic, the symbolic approach would put it this way, ‘Don’t be surprised if you feel called to die, for something within you needs to die so that something else can live.’” (James Hillman, Suicide and the Soul; p. 165) Tacey recounts how religion, spirituality, and archetypal references have the “capacity to provide a creative channel for the chaotic spirit.” (p. 143). In doing so, he expertly weaves scriptures, legends, fairytales, contemplative works, and faith traditions into this book to explain a range of psychosocial phenomena including the rise of Nazi Germany, which to me was a fascinating explanation of this historical event.

I highly recommend this book to my friends and colleagues versed in psychology, psychotherapy, or religious studies; however, I think the average reader who may not have such a background may struggle with some of the key concepts from psychoanalytic theory and spiritual/religious references. Nevertheless, the writing style is crisp with his arguments flowing logically from one point to another. I’ve read many psychospiritual texts, but never one with such an insightful integration of archetypal medicine, depth psychology, spirituality, religion, and philosophy. Even though the ideas presented here may not easily lend themselves to empirical study and validation (e.g., how does one even quantify ego strength or unconscious intentions?), from a psychological perspective, they are worth contemplating. I plan to read this book again and again because I expect to find new insights each time.

—David E. Vance, PhD, MGS

School of Nursing

University of Alabama at Birmingham

This review first appeared in the Journal of Religion, Spirituality and Aging. (2014)