Review of Janet O. Dallett's The Not-Yet-Transformed God.

Review of Janet O. Dallett's The Not-Yet-Transformed God. 

Nicolas-Hays, Inc. 1998. 

146 pages. 

By Stephen Morrissey

After hearing Janet Dallett speak before an audience of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal last November 2001, I knew that this was an author and lecturer whose books would be important for me. Dallett's The Not-Yet-Transformed God is both engaging and moving. Indeed, as with the work of some other Jungian writers, the experience of reading Dallett's work is that it becomes a part of the reader's personal meditation, a part of the reader's life. Written from the urgency of personal insight and experience, Janet Dallett's The Not-Yet-Transformed God offers a perceptive insight into "depth psychology and the religious experience," which is the sub-title of her book.

Dallett begins with C.G. Jung's observation that "every patient over the age of 35 who had come to him for help during the preceding thirty years was suffering from a religious problem." Framing the psychological need for help as a religious problem immediately changes it; we are not then dealing with pathology but with the need for a religious perception that may transform the individual. Dallett suggests that we begin by examining what we find "numinous." Indeed, what we find numinous is an opening or a gateway into the psyche and self-understanding. She writes, "If you want to know what is numinous to you, consider what you find fascinating, compelling, thrilling, mysterious, horrifying, gripping, tremendous, terrifying, dreadful, or awesome. Think about the things with which you are preoccupied in spite of yourself."

An example of numinosity Dallett refers to is the death of Princess Diana. Many of us who previously had no interest in Princess Diana were so deeply moved by her death and funeral that we wept as though a much loved friend or family member had died. The extent of our grief suggests that something more was happening than the death of a priveleged young woman thousands of miles away. Dallett writes, "As I see it, the former princess was destroyed by the dark side of the spirit, which she let out of the bottle by leaving the royal family and setting out to live an individual life." Dallett offers a fascinating discussion of the phenomenon of Princess Diana, but since the writing of Dallett's book the horrendous events of September 11th must also be included, not only as a tragedy but also as a significant numinious experience for many people. Dallett writes that "the energy of divinity is rarely where we expect it to be." We are like Jacob in Gauguin's painting "The Vision after the Sermon" reproduced on the cover of Dallett's book. We struggle in darkness with events that seem to overwhelm us, but like Jacob, when we finally become more conscious, we discover that it is the angel or the numinous with which we are wrestling.

What is 'the not-yet-transformed God'? Dallett writes, "When he (Jung) refers to God...he means the image of God in the psyche, which at other times he calls the Self." She explains the Self more fully; Jung, she writes, "speaks of it paradoxically as both the center and the circumference of the total personality, including both conscious and unconscious aspects. The Self is an archetype that carries the numinosity of the image of God. It is often used as a synonym for the God within." When Dallett writes about God, she is always, "strictly speaking, referring to the image of God in the psyche" and "does not in any way preclude the existence of a God outside the psyche."

At some point in our lives many of us are called to reflect on the inner life, to begin the process of individuation. Dallett writes, "the instinct to individuate often appears first in a negative form: life-threatening illness, severe depression, an extramarital affair, a psychotic episode." Individuation is not only self-transformation, it is also the transformation of our concept and experience of the divine. Dallett discusses Jung's "description of historical changes in the Western God-image", moving from how "Yahweh displaced the ancient nature gods and goddesses" and later the God-image changed again by incarnating in Christ. Dallett writes, "Today, says Jung, the incarnation wants to take place in many people through the process of individuation."

In the final chapters of The Not-Yet-Transformed God Dallett gives the reader some insight into how the process of individuation takes place. She writes, "the process of individuation entails the gradual discovery, through trial and error, of exactly how much and what kind of power rightfully belongs to a particular individual, in the course of which the unconscious God-image inside becomes conscious and is tempered until it can be lived in a mature and responsible way." Helping the individual with the "gradual discovery" of the Self are Jung's important concepts of the Shadow, the complementarity of opposites, and so on. These concepts form the foundation of Dallett's discussion of individuation and it is always rewarding to hear Jung's key concepts discussed from a different author's perspective.

Janet Dallett's The Not-Yet-Transformed God is a significant book. In light of the events of September 11 we ask: How are we to live? What are we to do? Many of us can still turn for comfort to the old image of the divine, but we know that we must also look within ourselves, that we can change in a fundamental way, that we can become conscious individuals. The alternative is that "everything suppressed, repressed, denied, or simply unseen in a person will eventually come out." Dallett writes: "By carrying my portion of untransformed God-energy consciously, I believe that I remove it from the general supply, thereby reducing the collective pressure toward war, terrorism, mass murder and other out-of-control forms of violence." Every age is important, but each age feels that the urgency of change is now more pressing than any preceding it. We feel traumatized since September 11, and it is the duty of all people of good will to begin or continue the important work of individuation. The alternative, unfortunately, is a future of conflict, turmoil, and suffering.

Published: The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, March 2002.

Review of The Archetypal Imagination by James Hollis

This review was originally published in The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, February 2017.

The Archetypal Imagination

James Hollis

Texas A&M University Press, 2000

By Stephen Morrissey

             If you have time to read only one of James Hollis's books, The Archetypal Imagination is the book to read. Published in 2000 by Texas A&M University as part of the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology, the book is a part of Hollis's mission to explain Jungian psychology to a contemporary audience, often referring to literature and the arts in this endeavour. Hollis's erudite discussion of the archetypal imagination is brilliant; he writes, "It is the archetypal imagination which, through the agencies of symbol and metaphor and in its constitutive power of imaging, not only creates the world and renders it meaningful but may also be a paradigm of the work of divinity." (p. 7) Each chapter of Hollis's book begins with the same statement: What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies beyond our grasp. But what is it that we wish to know, what is it that we most desire, and why is it out of our grasp? There is a possible answer, it is found in the archetypal imagination.

            Hollis states that the archetypal imagination is similar to the Romantic poets' concept of the imagination. For the Romantic poets the "imagination is our highest faculty, not our reason, which is delimited by its own structure." (p. 7) There is a place for the intellect and rational thought in understanding the unconscious mind, it is to lay a foundation of learning and knowledge about the way our psychology works. The archetypal imagination has a different place in understanding the complexity of the unconscious mind; Hollis writes, "What Coleridge called the secondary imagination was what Jung means by the archetypal power; the capacity to echo, perhaps to replicate, the original creation through the regenerative power of an image... " (p. 6) Coleridge posited and differentiated between a primary and secondary imagination; both concepts elaborated by Coleridge are more complex than Wordsworth's idea of the imagination but the essential idea of the Romantic imagination remains similar in both poets. The English Romantic poets found ultimate meaning not in reason—consider William Blake's criticism of those proponents of rationalism, Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau—but in the imagination; for the Romantics "the imagination was the door to divinity." (p. 7)

            The feeling that life is meaningless is one of the existential dilemmas that many people experience at some point in their life; meaninglessness carries with it despair, hopelessness, alienation from the community, and anxiety. We question the purpose and value of our existence when our traditional supports, whether religious, social, or economic, are no longer present. Hollis writes, "The recovery of meaning not only relocates a person in a larger order of things but also supports a sense of personal identity and directs energies in life-serving ways." (p. 16) How do we discover a meaningful existence, how do we reconcile the conflict between the inner and outer world? Indeed, how is the wounded psyche or soul healed (for "neurosis is suffering without meaning and the flight from authentic being." (p. 16)? Jung maintains that there is no individuation without meaning or intentionality and meaning can be discovered in the archetypal imagination. Hollis writes,

            ... perhaps life is meaningless, but we are meaning-seeking creatures who are driven to understand it. Failing that, we attempt to form some meaningful relationship to life. We learn from archetypal psychology, from the core of primal religious experiences, from quantum physics, and from the artist's eye that all is energy. Matter is a dynamic, temporary arrangement of energy. Apparently, a religious symbol or a prayer, a work of art, or an expressive practice can so act on our psyche as to move that energy when it has been blocked, deadened, or split off. (p. 10)

            The answer to how meaning is discovered is the crux of Hollis's book; he quotes Jung, writing in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections: "'Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything... For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.'" (p.15) The archetypal imagination is a part of the transcendent function; in the imagination we discover aspects of the soul, of our psychology, and thus one sees the importance of active imagination, sand play, drawing mandalas, or other creative activities like writing poetry or painting pictures. Hollis quotes Jung again, "'Meaning only comes when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, the producing of children, all are maya [illusion] compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.'" (p.18)

            Of course, the purpose of all of C.G. Jung's life work is individuation, it is to help people live an authentic and meaningful life and to discover a greater consciousness and understanding of who and what we are. Hollis writes, "Consciousness is transformed by the encounter with mystery as invested in images theretofore foreign to it." (11) Individuation is the visionary transformation of consciousness, it is the discovery of a meaningful existence; whether in the paintings of Rene Magritte or the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, all art is vision in its transformation of the complexity and depth of the unconscious mind into art.

            So, what do we now make of Hollis's statement that What we wish most to know, most desire, remains unknowable and lies beyond our grasp? Money won't buy happiness and you can't live forever. We ask: what is meaningful in life, can we find individuation? We err if we think that an individuated existence is an intellectual construct or a theoretical destination at which one might arrive in the future. Individuation is not that distant place on the horizon that is impossible to reach; in the archetypal imagination we find a greater consciousness of the conflict between our inner and outer life and the discovery and realization of this can lead to a meaningful individuated existence, one that is authentic to psyche. This also helps us to discover that which we wish most to know, most desire.  

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Review of Sylvia Brinton Perera's Queen Maeve and Her Lovers: A Celtic Archetype of Ecstasy, Addiction, and Healing.

Review of Sylvia Brinton Perera's Queen Maeve and Her 

Lovers: A Celtic Archetype of Ecstasy, Addiction, and 

Healing. Carrowmare Books, New York, 1999, 490 pages. 

By Stephen Morrissey

Before reading Sylvia Brinton Perera's Queen Maeve and Her Lovers, I thought religiosity in my family was mainly found in three prominent and well known priests who were part of my Montreal-Irish family. My great-great-uncle, Father Martin Callaghan, was the first Montreal-born pastor of St. Patrick's Basilica, serving there from 1875 to 1908. His younger brother, Father Luke Callaghan, was the pastor at St. Michael's Church, which was built in the Byzantine style, after Hagia Sophia. Father Luke was largely responsible for raising the funding and overseeing the construction of this church. Their other brother, Father James Callaghan, served at several Montreal churches as well as being the pastor at Hotel Dieu Hospital and The Royal Victoria Hospital. All three of these priests came from a humble immigrant background, were educated at the College de Montreal, and served the community with distinction. Surely they are the kind of men who are models for the spiritual life. But there was also a darker side to my family tree, including some relatives who were alcoholics.

With this background I found Sylvia Brinton Perera's Queen Maeve and her Lovers insightful and provocative. In this book, Perera's thesis is "that modern addictions represent debased forms of ancient rituals." Of course, she is not the first writer to make the connection between alcoholism and a Dionysian-like spirituality. C.G. Jung was influential in helping the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous formulate a spiritual approach to addiction. In a letter to Bill Wilson, AA's co-founder, Jung pointed out that "alcohol in Latin is spiritus, the same word [used] for the highest religious experience." For Perera, addiction is a corrupted manifestation of the old divine energy that was, in its original form, ecstatic and life-affirming. But we have little place for the old gods, such as Queen Maeve, whom Perera refers to as "one of the grandest figures in Celtic lore." Maeve represents the life-energy, the multiplicity and abundance of life, the sacred force lying behind growth, fertility, and abundance.

It is not possible to return to the ancient gods, even if we wanted to. Maeve represents, for Perera, the psychological and spiritual need for wholeness and oneness with the divine, or with what Jung called the Self. For some people, this is a part of the process of individuation. Addiction, in its many forms, is only a shadow of a spiritual experience. Intoxication in itself is not a spiritual experience, it is merely being intoxicated. Within the context of Celtic society, Queen Maeve and other Celtic deities and the myths about them, provided a very deep sense of spirituality that permeated every aspect of Irish life. Perera writes,

The spirits of the dead revisited the homes of the living after dark and on the festivals marking the open cracks in the agricultural year, especially at Samhain and Beltane when the new winter and summer cycles beganŠcaves, mounds, trees and water [were] places where the veil between this world and the next [were] felt to be easily permeable.

This expression of numinosity in daily Irish life was eventually lost. Perera writes, "As the old ways trickled down through the millennia, they became secularized: rites became revels, gods became 'little people', and sacred wine became intoxicating booze. A similar fate happens to the old gods in each of us."

Perera describes the archetype of Queen Maeve, how Maeve provided a way to experience religious ecstasy that had a socially acceptable place in society. This was a part of the process of individuation for certain people at that time. Perera describes the Tara tests that were administered by the druids to the high king, and some of the points raised by this test are still of value to us today. Perera tells us "they describe what happens to confirm us when we are on our destined path." Although in today's society, we aren't high kings and we aren't druids, the tests are and can still be of value to us. Four points are made: We might ask ourselves if we are "traveling towards a goal that the Self supports?" Is there "a fit between the purposes of ego and Self or destiny?" Can we identify a "primeval unity" existing behind apparent opposites, a kind of yin and yang of daily life? The final test is whether one has entered a stage of authority in one's life. If one has, then "it conveys the deep sense of entitlement and charisma that others intuit and cooperate to support."

So far, I have dealt with Perera's description of the positive experience suggested by a belief in Queen Maeve and I have only touched on the negative consequences. Many people who know intoxication do not experience individuation. The book' discussion and description of the psychology of addiction is disturbing. Perera, who is a New York-trained Jungian psychoanalyst, has worked with many addicts and has an intimate knowledge of the psychology of addiction. Anyone wanting to know more about addiction, the behaviour and psychology of addicts, whether it is to alcohol, drugs, sex, or gambling, should read what Perera has to say. However, this is distressing material, as Perera describes manipulative behaviour and a psychology that is probably beyond the ability to be dealt with by anyone but a specialist.

This is an over-long book that would have been well served by the work of an editor. Perhaps there are two shorter books here, one on Queen Maeve as a Celtic archetype with some importance for people today; and a second book on addiction. The book grew out of Perera's insight that "the archetypal form patterns supporting the myths still resonate in deep and embodied layers of the human psyche and affect our modern response." With this in mind we see expressions of spirituality, whether truncated by addiction or in those who have done the work of individuation, all around us. This book helps us to understand more deeply this important aspect of life today; as well as what our ancestors might have experienced; and of the life of some of those we love, who struggle with addiction.

Published: The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, August 2002.

Review of The Irish Bull God by Sylvia Brinton Perera

The Irish Bull God: Image of Multiform and Integral Masculinity
Sylvia Brinton Perera, Inner City Books, Toronto, 2004, 155 pages
ISBN 1-894574-08-7

Review by Stephen Morrissey

The Irish Bull God is Sylvia Brinton Perera’s most recent book exploring Irish mythology. Perera is a pre-eminent Jungian thinker on this subject. In a previous book, on Queen Maeve, and now in this book, on the Dagda, she has helped bring attention to the relationship of ancient Irish mythological figures to our contemporary society. While her work on the Celtic Queen Maeve dealt with the problem of addiction, The Irish Bull God deals with defining a more balanced, whole, and sophisticated concept of the masculine.
     Perera’s book evolves from a period of her life in which she dealt with personal crisis, “the deaths of my brother, father, former analyst, and life partner.” At a less personal level, and as a resident of New York City, Perera also struggled with the “massacres of 9/11”. What helped her during this period of her life was the image of the Dagda, a male figure from ancient Irish mythology. Perera writes from her “personal sense of loss as well as my Western culture’s dishonoring and dismemberment of much that the Dagda represents.” This book, then, is Perera’s endeavour to restore the Dagda, or “the Good God”, the “Great Father”, the “Father of All”, and what he represents as an archetypal masculine figure, to public awareness.
     It is too complicated to recount the many stories that make up the legend of the Dagda, but the general theme has to do with his exuberant appetite for food, sexuality, and life. The Dagda is the High King of the Tuatha de Dannan, the fairy folk and supernatural beings who inhabited Ireland before the arrival of the Celts. His famous harp is made of oak, a magical tree for the Celts, that when played puts the seasons in their proper order. He is a figure of immense power who has a magic club with which he is able to kill nine men with a single blow, as well as return them to life if he desires. His cauldron is capable of feeding innumerable numbers of people. He is a protector of his tribe and his family, a father figure, but a figure who is large enough, and comfortable enough in his masculinity, that he is able to embrace equally the feminine. Placed in the context of contemporary American society, it is no wonder Perera finds solace in the Dagda; America has been attacked by terrorists from outside of the country and the masculine archetype is being redefined, and not necessarily for the better, by people inside the country. Placed in the context of her personal life, Perera has suffered the loss of the male presence that was so important for her. The urgency of her message is that we need a renewed image of the masculine and to this end she suggests that the Dagda provides such an image.
     For Jungians, one of the central qualities of the Dagda is that he unifies opposites. Perera writes,

[The Dagda] embodies a primal wholeness that vividly encompasses some of the mutually dependent polarities that humans are consciously struggling with today: life and death, nurturance and war, containment and rejection, creativity and destruction, ugliness and beauty, chaos and order, wisdom and ineptitude, male and female, receptivity and aggression, grief and comedy, refined sensitivity and lusty coarseness, ruling and submitting, abundance and deprivation spiritual enlightenment and chthonic power. (143)

     Perhaps the Dagda is a kind of ideal archetypal figure. He is neither a puer
aeternus nor a Senex in his archetypal role. In some ways he is a trickster, but if he is a
trickster then it is the kind of amorality suggested by the trickster who ends up revealing
a deeper message or lesson for the one on whom the trick was played. The Dagda’s
lesson is one that unifies opposites and suggests a subtlety to our awareness of truth.
Honour is the Dagda’s morality, and maintaining his honour in the collective
consciousness is important to him. But he is not solely an avatar of power and
destruction; he can restore life to those he has defeated, and he does this. This dual role of
masculine energy, creative and protective, is missing in geo-political conflict today.
     The Dagda is, of course, an idealized representation of the masculine archetype. If
one accepts archetypes as a template or pattern for the unfolding and realization of the
dynamics of life—something basic, essential, and preconscious—then the Dagda
provides a very powerful and authoritative ideal of the masculine. The Dagda’s authority
is not restricted to the mundane but encompasses the cosmic. Perera writes, “The Dagda
is master of all the arts that made up druid lore—the technical and magical control of
natural forces, music, poetic incantations, healing and prophecy.” (126)
     Perera assumes in her book that the reader has some familiarity with Irish
mythology. Of course, this is not usually the case, and perhaps Perera could have given
more back ground information on the Dagda. Some readers will have to do additional
research to get the full meaning of Perera’s book; however, this research is well worth the
time it takes. An objection to the book might be that the Dagda is really an old fashioned
father figure, albeit an ideal one. I don’t think this is the case at all; Perera writes,

The grandeur of the Dagda offers us a perspective to refocus and enlarge our sense of what masculinity could be. We can see that his attunement with relational, flowing process has a very different quality than it holds in patrifocal models. (141)

     In mythological figures such as the Dagda we find a life affirming and dynamic
vision of what it means to be truly masculine. It is through Perera’s work—by returning
the Dagda to consciousness—that she restores the masculine to its archetypal definition,
one that contains opposites, nurtures, protects, creates, and recognizes without fear an
equal partnership with women.
 
                                                                          St. Patrick’s Day, 2004

2004

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, 2004.

Review of James Hollis's "Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives"

James Hollis and Stephen Morrissey, April 2013, in Montreal

James Hollis

Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives
Chiron Publications, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-888602-62-3

By

Stephen Morrissey

             When I was six years old my father died. Several months after his death I saw my father's ghost, luminous and bright, at the top of the basement stairs. No one spoke of my father for many years after his death so that his absence became an even greater haunting than seeing his ghost. This new book by James Hollis, Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives, spoke to me personally as I have been haunted by the loss and grief I felt over my father's passing. For Hollis, there are several ways in which we may be haunted and none of them are supernatural. These include dysfunctional parental relationships, complexes, guilt, betrayal, the shadow, and even a calling to an authentic life becomes a haunting when it is ignored. These ghosts that haunt us are the conflicted parts of our own inner being and they are able to destroy relationships and happiness and make life feel that it is not worth living.

            To be called to an activity is not something only for great artists or thinkers. Each of us has a calling to some activity, but this calling is also to psychological wholeness, what C.G. Jung called individuation. We reject this calling at our own peril because it leads to an inauthentic life. Hollis admits that it was with reluctance that he began writing this book. He was called,  however, by a dream about the American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and by synchronistic experiences that he describes in the Introduction. Hollis also states this writing was a "summons and an obligation," for a calling is sometimes not to an activity that we may desire, but one that we are compelled to carry out.

            We can also be haunted by a complex. Hollis quotes Jung in describing a complex as "the state of being seized or possessed" by the past.  A complex is driven by the fear, sometimes by the terror, of not behaving in accordance with the unresolved demands of an experience in our life. A mother complex is one that some people are possessed by, but many other complexes also exist. Those people haunted by complexes readily find excuses to perpetuate them. There is a lot at risk in understanding the psychology behind a complex, the foremost might be to lose a connection to the past to which one is attached.  Hollis writes, "wheresoever ready rationalizations exist, thereunto a complex is being protected." (42)

            One of the most fascinating discoveries of C.G. Jung is the shadow aspect of the psyche.  The keeping of secrets is an important way the psyche maintains the existence of the shadow. When we project what we don't like about ourselves onto other people we are being haunted by the shadow but we are also in thrall to the secret that is protected by the shadow. What we are afraid of or reject in ourselves is what we project onto other people. The history of the world is full of examples of such shadow hauntings. Evidence of the shadow can be seen when people make generalizations, usually condemnatory, about other people, often people who can't defend themselves from these unfair projections. These secrets haunt us and corrupt our present-day life. At its worst the haunting by the shadow can lead to genocide and racial hatred, or the failed relationships of people who are unaware of their own shadow. In either case, this haunting results in the diminution and denial of life, not the expansion and affirmation of life.

            Hollis's book is accessible and is a continuation of his previous books. It is Hollis's mission to help the reader understand his or her life more fully, often by taking an original approach to difficult psychological problems, or different stages of life. Being haunted undermines our ability to live fully the life that we have. Hollis returns again, in this book, to the topic of living the unlived life of the parent. He feels an urgency to communicate and explain this idea. Can we ever exorcize our parents who both blessed us with life and cursed us with their unlived lives? It seems to me that this can be taken two ways: the first is the obvious working at a career that is not appropriate for us or otherwise living according to the unfulfilled experiences that our parents wanted for themselves. It seems to me that there is another, less literal, example of "living the unlived life of the parent" that is to attempt the individuation, or self-understanding, the parent never considered important or was afraid to attempt. If our parents have not lived in a way that is authentic to their inner being, then this work becomes the inheritance of their children. The alternative is a multi-generational continuation of dysfunctional relationships, this is the haunting of families that can last for many years.  Hollis writes,

Of all of these hauntings, the greatest is the one we alone produce: the unlived  life. None of us will find the courage, or the will, or the capacity to completely fulfill the  possibility invested in us by the gods. But we are accountable for what we do not attempt.  To what degree does our pusillanimity beget replicative haunting in our children, our families, our communities, our nations? (144)

            As we get older, or face old age and death, we know that this life is a journey from birth to death. We have happiness and regret, success and failure, but the worst thing is the discovery that one's life has not been authentic to oneself. This journey demands of us inner work that is psychological but it is also spiritual and this spiritual aspect is ignored in our increasingly secular society. For many of us, part of the beauty of Jung's approach to psychology lies in its assertion that individuation is "synonymous with, or analogous to, what our ancestors called a divine vocation: answering the summons of God." (141)

            Hauntings, Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives is the culmination of James Hollis's years of communicating to his readers the urgency of knowing ourselves and resolving our inner conflicts. Most of us will be able to resonate to the thesis of this book, that what haunts us is the residue of our own unexamined life. This beautifully written book, a book of wisdom and intelligence, can help the reader exorcize the spectral presences that prevent us from living a more meaningful and authentic existence.  

This review was published in the winter 2014 issue of the "Newsletter of the CG Jung Society of Montreal".     

                                         

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Review of James Hollis's Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path

"Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path". 

Review of James Hollis' Creating a Life, 

Toronto: Inner City Books, 2001. 159 pages. 

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis' latest book, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path , gives the reader the wonderful experience of sitting with an intelligent and articulate person, and listening to their reflections on the meaning and value of life. This is Hollis' sixth publication for Inner City Books. Like the other books he has written, this one 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 the reader to the increasing number of contradictions we are faced with as we get older, and the confusion that is caused by our inability to resolve them. Hollis uses Greek drama to describe experiences that seem to be common to many people. Hollis 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 goes on to say 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." Hollis 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 by which we describe the human condition, but human experience, in essence, is the same now as it was in classical Greek times 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 re-enacted by each of us in our equally tragic and wounded lives.

In this, as in his other books, Hollis refers to C.G. Jung's suggestion that "the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parents." This refers to the parents' unexamined life and subsequent psychological projections onto their children. The child is left responsible for doing the emotional and psychological work the parents didn't do. In turn, this becomes a part of the core complex through which our perceptions of the world around us are filtered. In some ways, this parental burden forms the basis of our shadow work, and while it 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 the faint of heart, 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. It is here that Hollis makes his "modest claim", and this is the basis on which the book's thesis is developed.

The thesis of Creating a Life is that to create a life one must examine one's life, and out of 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 that 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 maturer 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." Thus, the examined life is the more interesting life, and 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 also ask ourselves what is the myth that best represents our life journey? What is the myth that best explains our existence to us? Hollis writes that myth "as it is used here, 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?

By now most readers must be aware that we are not dealing with the activities of the first half of life. 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' book is addressed to those people 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: amor fati, the necessity to accept and love one's fate; that the examined life is one of healing; that the examined life is also healing for our ancestors; and so on. Some readers may feel overwhelmed by Hollis' listing and brief explication of these necessary "attitudes and practices." However, he is reassuring and directing 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 of Creating a Life brings to a conclusion James Hollis' meditation on how to approach the second half of life. Certainly, 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. Hollis refers to the myth of Oedipus that is suggestive of our own human condition.

How did Oedipus live out the second half of his life? We may each have our own personal myth to discover, a myth with which we identify and which gives our life substance, meaning, and depth. Oedipus, however, 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. It is the journey of individuation, 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 that we look inward.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, March 2001. 

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Review of Robert Johnson's Balancing Heaven and Earth

Review of Balancing Heaven and Earth 

by Robert Johnson, with Jerry M. Ruhl. 

1998: Harper Collins, New York. 307 pages

By Stephen Morrissey

Robert Johnson's Balancing Heaven and Earth is a memoir and celebration of the inner life, the world of dreams, active imagination, and mystical vision. Johnson writes, "I sometimes wonder if all suffering is a vision of God too great to bear." It is suffering that led Johnson to the inner life. As a result of a car accident at age eleven Johnson's leg had to be amputated below the knee. The injury was further complicated with gangrene and a second operation; this health crisis resulted in a near-death experience in which Johnson had a "vision of the glory of paradise." A second mystical experience at age sixteen, returned Johnson to what he called the "Golden World." These early mystical experiences brought Johnson to the dilemma that has preoccupied much of his life and is the concern of this memoir: Johnson asks, "How does one continue to live on the face of the earth when he or she is blinded and spoiled for anything else?"

Johnson quotes C.G. Jung who wrote that "the earthly world and the Golden World are two faces of one reality." For most people the first half of life demands making one's way in the world, finding a career, having a relationship, building a family. However, as a young man, Johnson's concern was only partly in that direction. At that time Johnson found mentors who contributed to his inner growth. He also found the world-renowned spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti. Johnson moved to Ojai, California which was for many years Krishnamurti's base in the United States. But eventually it became clear to Johnson that Krishnamurti was not the spiritual teacher he needed. Krishnamurti further awakened the "alchemical gold", the soul, in Johnson, but he did not offer any guidance as to how to reclaim the inner gold.

While the universe may appear to be random and meaningless, for Johnson it is held together by a superior intelligence. For Robert Johnson there are "golden threads", a kind of connective tissue linking one experience to the next; indeed, "golden threads" may be perceived as synchronistic events. Another way alchemical gold can be experienced is through dream analysis and active imagination. Johnson writes that dreams have an intelligence and wisdom that awaits discovery:

...dreams are the speech of God and that to refuse them is to refuse God... Dreams are highly curative and affirming... you can dialogue (with dreams) and use them to inform your life.

At a time of inner turmoil a dream informed Johnson that he needed something other than what Krishnamurti could offer. He then entered analysis in Los Angeles. By coincidence the analyst Johnson found to be his therapist had been a student of Carl Jung. "How do you learn psychology?" Johnson once asked his analyst, Dr. Kunkel. Johnson says that he provided a wonderful answer:

...dreams are the speech of God and that to refuse them is to refuse God... Dreams are highly curative and affirming... you can dialogue (with dreams) and use them to inform your life.

There are three ways: one way is o read all the ancient Greek mythology, because it is all right there. A second way is to read the collected works of Carl Jung. And the third way is to wait and watch-that is really the best way.

Despite Johnson's later training as a Jungian analyst, the third way of waiting and watching most closely approximates how Johnson learned psychology, illuminating for Johnson that psychology deals with the human soul.

By the fall of 1948 Johnson, while a tourist in Europe, decided to enroll at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich in order to study to become an analyst. It would be splendid if life were a straight line of conscious rational decisions resulting in our arrival at a certain preconceived destination. "But the truth is," Johnson writes, "that a slender thread, not any rational plan, led me to Jung's door...About the only virtue I can claim is that I didn't get in the way when destiny called."

During this time of study, Johnson had a life-changing meeting with the great Dr. Jung himself, when Jung analysed one of Johnson's dreams. The dream and Jung's interpretation are recounted in Johnson's memoir, but Carl Jung's advice (although it was presented more as a command!) was essentially that Johnson should not join organizations and that he should respect the solitude he required for individuation. Again, this is the dilemma around which Johnson centres his memoir: to be in the world, but not feeling fully of the world. He writes,

I speak and write of two worlds, when in fact the two are one. To everyday consciousness, however, there is a veil between the Golden World and the earthly world.

And later,

I now understand that the most profound religious life is found by being in the world yet in each moment doing our best to align ourselves with heaven, with the will of God.

Many of us have read Johnson's other books, including He: Understanding Masculine Psychology; She: Understanding Feminine Psychology; and We: Understanding the Psychology of Romanic Love. They are short, insightful works exploring the nature of being a man, woman, or a couple, using Jungian terminology, archetypes, and mythology. Johnson's memoir doesn't explain the writing of these books, but he does say that the income from them has allowed him to visit India many times. His visits to India have been profound and highly significant for him. It was on his first visit to India that he experienced a third mystical experience, a joyous experience of transformation.

It was only after living in India during my fifties and being among others of a similar temperament that I gained insight and courage enough so that I could come back to America and live an introverted, feeling life without continually bearing a sense of inadequacy.

India, writes Johnson, was a "feast of feeling and relatedness." The western world's emphasis on thinking and sensation has resulted in great scientific advances, but at the price of feeling and intuition. Johnson writes, "America is, collectively speaking, an extroverted culture that prizes rational thought above all else and values people accordingly." Only in India could there be the custom of approaching a stranger and asking that person to be "the incarnation of God," as Johnson did while visiting Calcutta (Kali's city).

Johnson describes being overwhelmed by the poverty and suffering he found in this city, and falling into a profound depression. After pouring out his heart to a complete stranger, an Indian gentleman who accepted to perform the role of being an "incarnation of God" for Johnson, Johnson discovered that he had spoken to a man who was also one of the few Roman Catholic priests in Calcutta. This is a synchronistic experience, a golden thread imbuing life with meaning and epiphany.

As one would expect, there are many anecdotes in this memoir, always with the effect of returning us to the importance of the inner world. The resolution of life's contradictions lies in becoming more conscious, and this sometimes requires the ritualization of the mundane; Johnson describes how a broken clock that was unceremoniously discarded was later retrieved from the garbage. Alone, he made a ceremony of burying the clock, a ritual during which he remembered with fondness the many events the lock awoke him for, including leaving for Europe, visiting Dr. Jung at him home, and so on.

Balancing Heaven and Earth is a highly readable and inspiring book. Robert Johnson is a man of depth and profound insight and the reader cannot help but be rewarded by reading his memoir. Indeed, this important book has the effect of helping to remind the reader of the alchemical gold residing in each of us. Johnson is man of spirituality, who uses Jungian terminology for its convenience and accuracy at describing the inner world, while in fact being himself a mystic.

This book belongs beside C.G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections ; it will greatly reward the reader with its inspiration, instruction, and insight.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal

Love Partners, lecture by Guy Corneau

LOVE PARTNERS: IS THERE REALLY A CHOICE?

Lecture by Guy Corneau before The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, fall 1999

Review by Stephen Morrissey, The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, February 2000

A lecture by Guy Corneau is a special event, as those in attendance at Corneau's lecture on "Love Partners: Is there really a choice" recently experienced. Corneau manages to make a room overflowing with strangers a place of intimacy and warmth, a place where it is safe to look deeply inside of oneself. Romantic love, the subject of Corneau's lecture, is a transformative experience, springing from a longing for a deep communion with another person. When we are "in love" there is a feeling of wholeness, of being united with the world, and not at odds with it. We forget that for many people the experience of romantic love is their only experience of identifying with the Self and the universal.

But Corneau goes beyond this view of love, his aim is "to look into the hidden intelligence of what you are." When we fall in love we embrace the perfection the other person sees in us. Love, then, is a mirror of oneself; unfortunately, if love is a mirror of oneself, we may have the other person before us, but all we really want is the mirror. If we are aware of this projection we may also see that this can be a key into who we really are, for many aspects of ourselves are revealed to us. In this way, love is a tool of self-revelation; we see the higher parts but also the shadow aspects of ourselves. As Corneau said, "You may not find a perfect partner, but you may find a perfect attitude to yourself and someone else."

The key to keeping romantic love alive is to become more conscious of ourselves. Couples may separate because they become tired of on-going conflict, finding it too difficult to integrate shadow material. This shadow, of course, is also a replay of childhood experiences; we hang on to what we know, even though it may be painful and manifest in not being able to maintain relationships, but the known is felt to be safer than risking the unknown.

Corneau's advice is to accept your shadow side, become most fully what you already are, which is a self that is plainly human. The universe gives us experiences so that we will learn things about ourselves; we need to love ourselves, to feel compassion for ourselves, without judgement, and without expectations, but just to be with what is there. Indeed, Corneau suggests we consider the effort and energy it takes to avoid opening up to love. The real problem is our attachment to pain, our need to hang on to suffering because our suffering is what is most familiar to us. Life seems to be easier when it doesn't go well because we can hold on to what we know, we can repeat experience that reinforces our entrenched concept of ourselves, rather than risk the new.

True love, Corneau said, is when one comes to have confidence and deep intimacy with one's own self. Love gives you a place where you choose to change. Love partners give us a mirror of who we are; in this we can find love for oneself and completion, but not perfection. We may want to be perfect, but personality involves limitations. Some psychological and emotional wounds cannot be resolved but can only be lived with. For Corneau, love is a context for your own evolution. If we accept Corneau's definition of romantic love, we will have less expectations that the other person will resolve the dilemmas of our life for us; then the possibility of romantic love lasting increases. Romantic love may not be the path for everyone, but for many people it is the most immediate way to becoming more conscious of ourselves, and in this there is the possibility of transformation.

Published: Review by Stephen Morrissey, The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, February 2000

Review of James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World

Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World
James Hollis
Toronto, Inner City Books, 2004
158 pages
ISBN 1-894574-10-9

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World continues the author's exploration of the importance of mythology begun in his 1995 Inner City Book, Tracking the Gods. Myth, for Hollis, "is perhaps the most important psychological and cultural construct of our time." Mythologems is a term that might be familiar to some Jungians but not found in my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary or Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary. Hollis defines a mythologem as "a single, fundamental element, or motif, of any myth. The motifs of ascent or descent are mythologems. The hero's quest embodies two such mythologems: the hero and the quest, each of which has a discernible lineage and separable meaning, and yet synergistically enlarge each other." Mythologems are therefore specific motifs found in mythology.

We find in the invisible world the content of both our inner conflict and our psychopathology. Psychopathology is defined by Hollis as "the expression of the soul's suffering". Surely this description is part of the beauty and attractiveness of a Jungian approach to inner work: it turns away from a solely clinical and reductionist description of psychology and restores the numinous, the spiritual, and the epiphanous to the description of the complexity of the psyche.

This approach to psychology is not a flight from science (as it is found in what Hollis refers to as the therapeutic bible, the DSM-IV) or a rejection of the modern but rather it is a continuation of mankind's ancient journey to wholeness and completion. Hollis writes, "To map the psychological terrain of a person is to engage in mythographology, to depict the various scripts which each fragment of the whole embodies... The manifold forms of the child, of father, of mother, and also our relationships to them, play out in the schemes and fantasies of everyday life."

For Hollis, who acknowledges he is only one along with many other writers, it seems "there is a malaise in the soul of modern man" that can only be brought to consciousness by reflection on the inner life. The archetype of the child has been lived out by all of us: Hollis discusses "the child as original form", "the lost child", and "the child god". Parents have an obvious archetypal function in the psychology of their children. It should be noted that others, who are not biological parents, can assume the parental role in people's daily life, for instance anyone in authority, such as a teacher or landlord or police officer, can assume some aspect of the parental archetype.

We know that the father imago is a source of empowerment for the young and when absent can result in disempowerment. Hollis writes, "... whenever we are dealing with our own capacity or impotence, whenever we are serving the imago Dei or questioning its relevance to our actual life, we are dealing with the father archetype in all its many forms." Part of the empowering role of the father is that the child will seek to overthrow whatever symbol of authority is necessary for the child to achieve an authentic life of his or her own.

The mother archetype is, as Hollis writes, "both the source of life and of death." There are positive and negative expressions of the feminine; some mothers nurture their children while others actively discourage the child's individuation. Hollis discusses "the son's enmeshment with the mother"; he writes, "The power of the mother complex to affect the archetypal ground of the son cannot be overemphasized." Men who have been enmeshed with the mother's negative feminine can remain adolescent—what C.G. Jung called the puer aeternus—or express in their personal life destructive "Don Juan" behaviour. Meanwhile, there is also "the daughter's enmeshment with the mother" and Hollis describes the different scenarios women experience from inadequate or destructive mothering.

Another mythologem of importance for us is the "Hero's Task" which includes the work of individuation. The "Hero's Task" requires that we "align our conscious choices with our individuation agenda." There are two other mythologems that should be noted: Catabasis refers to stories of descent to the underworld while spiritual rebirth, ascent, or Anabasis, is "a going up in order to bring the gift to consciousness." It would not be an exaggeration or untruth to say that many of us have experienced both descent and ascent in our life's journey.

The concept of the Divine, as a mythologem, also interests Hollis. He writes, "Looked at archetypally, a god is an image which arises out of a depth experience, an encounter with mystery." According to Hollis, God is not a fixed entity but "always renewing itself". Further, Hollis elaborates,

Gods ignored, which is to say, primal energies repressed, split off, projected, today show up as neuroses. They are the animating wounds manifest in history, acted out in families, public forums or the sundry deformations of the private soul.

Still discussing the mythologem of the Divine, Hollis quotes Canadian archetypal psychologist Ginette Paris: "An ancient Greek whose destiny was going badly would ask which divinity he or she had offended. This questioning was part of what we would call therapy." With regard to the Divine, Hollis concludes, "The gods have hardly departed; they have simply gone underground and reappear as wounds, as inflations, as pathologies..." Finally, Hollis is critical of both science that is divorced from the human soul and fundamentalist religion with its dogmatic emphasis on what is perceived as God's "word". While science and religion are traditionally mutually exclusive, they have something in common when they reduce experience to a rigid set of rules and perceptions.

Contemporary American society appears to have forsaken the invisible world and has become, to use Hollis's word, "sterile". It is a society that can seem hostile to the multiplicity, variety, and complexity of the invisible world. Nevertheless, Hollis states that it is not too late to recover, by examining myth and its disparate mythologems that reveal the mystery and depth of the unconscious mind. Hollis writes, "The archives of our tribe are not so far gone that we do not remember a time when they were connected directly to the gods." Responsibility for our psychology rests inescapably with each one of us, but Hollis's book—written with intelligence and compassion—can help make the inner journey that much more accessible.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, November 2004

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.