Some Notes on Poetry and Soul (edited and revised)

Many of C.G. Jung’s psychological concepts and related interests—for instance, shadow, archetype, symbolism, alchemy, animus and anima, mythology, the collective unconscious, and so on—are also interests of many poets. The major difference between poetry and psychology is that poetry is the voice of the human soul, while Jungian psychology tries to explain how the soul works; most other schools of psychology don't acknowledge the existence of the soul.

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Poetry and psychology are two very different disciplines. The Irish poet, Patrick Kavanaugh, writes in one of his poems, “He knew that posterity has no use/ For anything but the soul…” Kavanaugh’s poems resonate for us because we recognize in them, as we do in all great poetry and poets, someone who speaks to our inner being. We can tell if a poet is genuine or not, inflated or not, and if the poet’s work is an authentic expression of the soul. We resonate to the authentic expression of the inner being of a fellow human being. Great poetry is an expression of “where psyche is leading one.” This phrase, from one of James Hollis’s books, that we need to find “where psyche leads us,” is the quest for an authentic life, an expression of where soul will lead us if only we follow.

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C.G. Jung’s comments on the relationship of the collective unconscious and poetry in Modern Man in Search of a Soul are worth referring to in relation to poetry, they also help explain something of the importance of Patrick Kavanaugh’s poetry.

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Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living at that age. A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men. 
                                                                                           --C.G. Jung
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James Hillman’s “idea of psychopoesis” is also important; Hillman suggests that a poem is always at the heart of things. Depth psychology is referred to as soul making; however, poetry doesn't "make" the soul, it reveals the soul. One of the concerns of both poetry and depth psychology is the human soul: the intention of depth psychology is to unfold the complexity of a person’s life so that it can be better understood, and perhaps placed in a mythopoetic context; the poet’s intention, also to do with the soul, is to write poetry that is authentic to his or her soulful vision.

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Some poets are wounded healers; however, these wounds may also be the source of the poet’s creativity and, as such, something that he or she may not want to give up. Poetry isn’t therapy— poetry is a form of art—but as anyone who reads literature knows, poetry can have a healing and transformative quality.

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The intention of poet and psychologist is substantially different; the difference is that while poetry is an expression of the soul, psychology speaks about the soul if it mentions the soul at all. The two disciplines should not be conflated or confused; we need to remember that poetry is the oldest art form while psychology is about a hundred years old and, in some ways, it is still in its infancy. With this perspective in mind, we need to re-evaluate the importance of poetry and remember its relationship to soul.

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                                                          Edited and revised on 23 March 2018

                                                          Stephen Morrissey

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 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.

Some notes on poetry and soul

Many of C.G. Jung’s psychological concepts and related interests—for instance, shadow, archetype, symbolism, alchemy, animus and anima, mythology, the collective unconscious, and so on—are the natural interests of many poets. The major difference between poetry and psychology is that poetry is the voice of the human soul, while Jungian psychology tries to explain how the soul works. They are two very different disciplines. The Irish poet, Patrick Kavanaugh, writes in one of his poems, “He knew that posterity has no use/ For anything but the soul…” Kavanaugh’s poems resonate for us because we recognize in them, as we do in all good poets, someone who speaks to our inner being. We can tell if a poet is genuine or not, inflated or not, and if the poet’s work is an authentic expression of the soul. We resonate to the authentic expression of the inner being of a fellow human being. Great poetry is an expression of “where psyche is leading one.” This phrase, from one of James Hollis’s books, that we need to find “where psyche leads us,” is the quest for an authentic life, an expression of where soul will lead us if only we follow.

C.G. Jung’s comments on the relationship of the collective unconscious and poetry in Modern Man in Search of a Soul are worth referring to here in relation to poetry and as they help explain something of the importance of Kavanaugh’s poetry:

"Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors. Whenever the collective unconscious becomes a living experience and is brought upon the conscious outlook of an age, this event is a creative act which is of importance to everyone living at that age. A work of art is produced that contains what may truthfully be called a message to generations of men."

James Hillman’s “idea of psychopoesis” is also important, Hillman suggests that a poem is always at the heart of things. Depth psychology is referred to as soul making; however, poetry doesn't "make" the soul, it reveals the soul. One of the concerns of both poetry and depth psychology is the human soul: the intention of depth psychology is to unfold the complexity of a person’s life so that it can be better understood, and perhaps placed in a mythopoetic context; the poet’s intention, also to do with the soul, is to write poetry that is authentic to his or her soulful vision.

Some poets are wounded healers; however, these wounds may also be the source of the poet’s creativity and, as such, something that he or she may not want to give up. Poetry isn’t therapy -- poetry is a form of art -- but as anyone who reads literature knows, poetry can have a healing and transformative quality. The intention of poet and psychologist is substantially different; the difference is that while poetry is an expression of the soul, psychology speaks about the soul. The two disciplines should not be conflated; we need to remember that poetry is the oldest art form, thousands of years old, while psychology is about a hundred years old and still in its infancy. With this perspective in mind, we need to re-evaluate the importance of poetry and remember its relationship to soul.

------

These are excerpts taken from rough drafts of a review on Patrick Kavanaugh's poetry and Jungian psychology. SM

Review of James Hollis's On this Journey ...

On This Journey We Call Our Life: Living the Questions, 

Review by Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's latest Inner City book, On This Journey We Call Our Life, is directed to those of us in the second half of life. On the surface, the inner journey is from psychic fragmentation to psychic wholeness, but is it really? Hollis presents the question, "What does the soul ask of me?" The inquiry into psyche's purpose, Hollis believes, is essential if we are to live sane, whole, and complete lives. For Hollis, our life journey is not how to find happiness; rather it is to respond to the demands of the inner life. Listening to soul will not lead to happiness, but there will be personal insight and growth.

The ten chapters that comprise Hollis's book deal succinctly with topics such as the shadow; finding one's personal myth; vocation; and death: all examined from a Jungian perspective. Hollis's references are to C.G. Jung whose "mission had been to convince people that a broad spirituality courses within each of us... [and that] those who no longer feel at home in any institutional confession, can also gain access to the life of the spirit through a personal encounter with the spontaneously generated symbols which rise from the soul." The aim of On This Journey We Call Our Life is to help the reader gain "access to the life of the spirit". The emphasis underlying this is on psyche.

It is only towards the end of On This Journey We Call Our Life that the discussion turns explicitly to the question of psyche about which Hollis provides a fascinating discussion. But what is "psyche"? Hollis writes,

Other than saying that psyche is the totality of who we are—blood, brain, viscera, history, spirit and soul—we cannot limit its meaning. Note that psyche comes from two etymological roots: that of breathing, suggestive of the invisible life force which enters at birth and departs at death; and that of the butterfly, suggesting a teleologically driven process of evolution and transformation, which in the end is both beautiful and elusive... While we may be tempted to romanticize psyche as the place of sweet dreams, it is also the source of devouring energies, self-destruction and demonic drives.

Indeed, the last two chapters contain the essential core of Hollis's thought and I will concentrate on these two chapters in this review. Our daily activities are given a noumenal importance when considered from the perspective of psyche. This discussion is not new to Hollis's work, in one of his lectures many years ago, given to the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, he asked the audience to consider the question, "Where is psyche leading me?"

Most of us begin to examine life out of varying degrees of necessity caused by not feeling good about something in life. As we get older, this inquiry deepens, and the question possibly turns to our psychology; we then need to "re-member" psyche, which both suggests examining our inner life and finding wholeness in it. Hollis writes, "... feeling good may be a very poor measure of the worth of oneÕs life." Hollis suggests three important things related to "re-membering psyche"; they are: "1) that we recall we are psyche's being; 2) that we seek dialogue with psyche which promotes healing in ourselves and others; and 3) that something wishes to re-member us."

Hollis also reminds us that our life is a manifestation of psyche. We "re-member" psyche in our dreams as well as in "historic patterns made through our choices." In this way, there is an intimation of homecoming. But where is "home" that Hollis refers to in his book? Home, Hollis tells us, is found in psyche. Indeed, there is an archetypal field in which psyche is objective, it is present in one's life in experience and history; it is there to be "re-membered" and returned to.

The journey home, Hollis tells us, requires "courage, strength, humility, and constancy to dialogue with psyche." The alternative to this journey is "the terrible feeling of inauthentic suffering." Indeed, "re-membering psyche is the task of homecoming." One's authentic existence can be found in the soul, in psyche, and the journey home is not only the presence of soul matter in one's life, it is one's spiritual base, one's true home.

But how is one to journey home? Hollis suggests that four approaches consciously manifest psyche in one's life. His first suggestion is to "read" the world with the informing presence of psyche. In the first half of life, we acquire wealth, position, and family. That is fine for then, but it is not a life fully aware of psyche. In the second half of life, many of us find a deeper fulfillment in the soul than we do in material objects.

Hollis's second "attitude or practice" for being aware of psyche easily follows the awareness that material things no longer truly fulfill us in later life. Hollis advises the reader to "do our private work of personal growth." Our years of life are not an end in themselves; they are a process of deepening awareness. Hollis writes, "life is not a place but a journey." The journey is not to a place, it is both the journey and the destination.

Finally, the corollary of a growing awareness of one's inner being is to bless life, to be grateful for the life we have. What is of importance to psyche? Hollis suggests that what matters is "compassion and imagination." Indeed, our individual life is a short journey when seen in the light of eternity. Compassion and imagination "extend us outwards into psyche in the world around us."

For Hollis, "the journey itself is our only home and our only hope for renewal." Hollis quotes from a poem by American poet Stanley Kunitz in which we are reminded of the tendency of "the ego toward superficiality." Kunitz's poem "invites transcendence through a life-long encounter with fractured depths and frangible possibilities." This Journey We Call Our Life is an invitation both to journey and to our spiritual home, to "re-membering" psyche, and necessarily to acceptance of paradox and ambiguity. "No matter where I live, my journey is my home," Hollis writes. More than truth, which is often subjective, it is compassion and imagination that move us beyond the personal and isolated manifestation of ego, to psyche and communion with the world around us.

Published: Review by Stephen Morrissey of On This Journey We Call Our Life by James Hollis, Inner City Books, Toronto, 2003. Published in The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, January 2004

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

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.

Review of two books by James Hollis

View from Pointe Calliere Museum in Old Montreal after a Jung Society 
of Montreal end of year luncheon.

My review (below) of two new books by James Hollis, was published in the spring 2009 issue of the Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal. _________________________________________________ 

Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves 

James Hollis New York: Gotham Books, 2007, 272 pps. 

What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life James Hollis New York: Gotham Books, 2009, 288 pps. 

The older we get the more life seems a journey. An excellent guide on this journey is Jungian analyst James Hollis, who is the author of two new books, Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves and What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life. Both of these books will reward the reader with many insights into life’s journey; both are an invitation to psychological and spiritual wholeness. Hollis asks, “Why do good people do bad things?” To answer this question he turns to C. G. Jung¹s archetype of the Shadow, which he defines as being “composed of all those aspects of ourselves that have a tendency to make us uncomfortable with ourselves, it is what discomforts the sense of self we wish to have.” Hollis points out that “Of the many concepts Jung articulated, few if any are richer than his idea of the Shadow.” 

For Hollis, and other Jungians, an understanding and awareness of the Shadow part of the human psyche is one of the roads to wholeness and individuation. This is especially important for those of us in the second half of life; it is a time in which, as Hollis writes, “The critical summons is to recover a personal sense of authority, explore, thoughtfully express the personal Shadow, and risk living faithfully the soul’s agenda.” Of course, few people willingly examine their Shadow; it is usually kept hidden, avoided, or even denied. Some of us prefer to live in a cocoon of infantile expectations; others are complacent; and still others prefer to avoid doing the very work that will bring us depth and an insightful life. But this life, this journey, demands that we live intelligently and authentically, that we live a life of emotional and psychological maturity. Indeed, while working with Shadow material is difficult, there is a reward: this lies in the release in our lives of a reservoir of creative energy of which we had not previously been aware. 

This Shadow energy can find its expression in creative work, but is also shown in a renewed sense of who we are and a commitment to living a life aligned to our values and the “soul’s agenda.” James Hollis’s most recent book, What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life, will reward the reader many times over. I think it is one of Hollis’s best books for readers at any stage in life, at any place in the journey of life. Hollis begins by admitting that the book is an “eccentric compilation,” and it is! He writes, “We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being.” This is a wonderful invitation to be who and what we are. The book, then, is made up of individual chapters that can be read solely or consecutively. They are discussions of Hollis’s considered opinion and observation of life’s meaning and “what matters most” in life. 

A selection of some of the chapters’ titles will give an idea, a sampling, of what Hollis considers important in life’s journey: That Life Not Be Governed By Fear That We Consider Feeding The Soul That We Respect The Power Of Eros That We Step Into Largeness That We Risk Growth Over Security That We Find And Follow The Path Of Creativity That We Encourage Spiritual Crises That We Write Our Story, Lest Someone Else Write It For Us Each of these chapters can be read separately; each is a thoughtful discussion and elaboration on a specific aspect of “what matters most.” They are diverse subjects, held together by Hollis’s intelligence and insight, and sometimes explained more fully with literary references. The emphasis in the book is not to find happiness, it is to find wholeness and to live a conscious life that is in agreement with the soul’s needs and requirements. For at least the last forty years an interest in mythology (and the belief by many in the absence of a cohesive mythology in our society) has taken hold of the popular imagination. Hollis reminds us of Jung’s “myth for our time” which he says is individuation. Hollis then writes: “In fact it is a summons to service, of ego submission to values larger than those previously embraced.” Thus, our journey is one of individuation, of inner discovery and self-knowledge. This journey is the central myth or adventure of our time. 

Since I first began reading James Hollis’s books, in the early 1990s, and heard Hollis speak to the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal (he is a gifted and riveting public speaker) I have always found him to be one step ahead of my own thinking, one step ahead of me in my life’s journey. He has always been an astute thinker and a most welcome guide in these matters. If you want to begin reading Hollis, or if you have read several of his books, I highly recommend What Matters Most: Living A More Considered Life. James Hollis concludes the book by suggesting the following, 

This search for God, this longing for meaning and understanding, while often frustrating, has given me my journey, and my journey has given me greater acquaintance with many gods along the way , all, especially the dark ones, worthy of and demanding respect and many good and many bad people, but always an interesting life. In the end, having a more interesting life, a life that disturbs complacency, a life that pulls us out of the comfortable and thereby demands a larger spiritual engagement than we planned or that feels comfortable, is what matters most. (p. 256) 

Stephen Morrissey

winter 2009

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

Review of James Hollis's Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up
James Hollis, Ph.D.
Gotham Books, New York
276 pages, ISBN 1-592-40207-0


Review by Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's new book, Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up, begins with the premise that while the first half of life is outer directed, such as to building a family life, or owning property, or being employed, the second half is more inner or spiritually directed. As we age, if we have not done the important work of examining our life, we may one day find ourselves in the "swampland" of life's second half. At that time there is an urgency to deal with our psychology, as confused, alienated, and fragmented as it may be.

Hollis asks, in a series of spiritually and psychologically probing questions that open the book, "Why is the life you are living too small for the soul's desire?" Hollis writes: "As Jung once put it humorously, we all walk in shoes too small for us. Living within a constricted view of our journey, and identifying with old defensive strategies, we unwittingly become the enemies of our own growth, our own largeness of soul, through our repetitive history-bound choices."

Why do we keep wearing shoes that are too small? One reason lies in our belief in "the false self" which encompasses "the values and strategies we have derived from internalizing the dynamics of our family and our culture." Our too small shoes keep us from stepping "into the largeness that the soul expects and demands." We know the signs of the soul being denied. There may be a depression, often treated relatively inexpensively by medication, but not treated deeply or thoroughly. There may be a problem with addiction, or an awareness of psychological complexes.

In the chapter on "The Dynamics of Intimate Relationship" Hollis discusses romantic love and marriage. It is a fairly bleak discussion of something that is supposed to bring us great happiness and fulfillment but is all too often filled with fantasy, complexes, transference, projection, and the desire to find the "magical other" or the person "who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, and ... spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our own needs."

We live in a world that idealizes romantic love; indeed, we believe it can fulfill many of our needs, especially those in life's first half when it is only natural to want to have a partner and family, to fulfill ourselves in our careers, and to work for something greater than our individual selves. However, Hollis contends that we place a greater emphasis on the importance of the romantic relationship than it can fulfill. Central to his thinking is an emphasis on living as authentically as possible to the soul's purpose; unfortunately, romantic love may not be the fulfillment of this purpose, and Hollis seems to contend that it may also be the negation of it. The important thing, for Hollis, is not romantic involvement, which sometimes ends up as simply being an expression of co-dependence and a fear of being alone. Hollis suggests that we continue on our journey of self-understanding, and then, possibly, we will find that we are more tolerant and loving of others. "It is love not only of the other, but love of this life, this journey, and love of this task of soul." It is difficult to disagree with Hollis without appearing naïve, but I am not totally convinced by Hollis's argument which seems overly pessimistic. Sometimes even a bad romantic relationship can be a vehicle for waking up to the psychological complexity of life, and when better to wake up than the first half of life?

Our experience of family changes after mid-life. Some marriages collapse after the children have left home. They may have been a diversion or buffer, allowing the parents to continue to co-habit but also a means for couples to avoid relating to each other. A pathology in the family that Jung identified, and which Hollis discusses in this book and in his previous books, exists in the relationship of some parents and their children. It is the important observation that some children are burdened with "the unlived life of the parents." This refers to the parents' failure to reflect on their own life, to "finally, really grow up." Inevitably, the children will have to do the inner work that the parents never dealt with. Subsequently, Hollis writes, because "The parent has stopped growing, is intimidated by fear, is unable to risk, that model, that constriction, that denial of soul will be internalized by the child."

In the last chapter of this book, "The Healing of the Soul," Hollis answers the series of questions he presented at the very beginning of the book. Healing the soul can be the work of psychology, as Hollis feels it must be, for the etymology of "psychology" refers to "psyche" or the soul. The soul is a subject that religion has traditionally dealt with and psychology has avoided as unscientific or in the jurisdiction of organized religion. There is, Hollis writes, "A mystery so profound that none of us really seems to grasp it until it has indisputably grasped us..." This mystery is "that some force transcendent to ordinary consciousness is at work within us to bring about our ego's overthrow... That force...is the Self, the architect of wholeness, which operates from a perspective larger than conventional consciousness." The Self is a spiritual aspect to our totality as human beings; the Self seeks wholeness and life affirmation despite the psychic fragmentation we experience. A dream, and the understanding of the dream, that leads to a greater understanding of some aspect of our life is an expression of the Self.

James Hollis's book, intended for a mass market, is an introduction to only some aspects of C.G. Jung's work; for instance, there is little or no mention of the shadow, anima and animus, or other discoveries that Jung made in his long career. Nevertheless, for many people, James Hollis's Finding Meaning in The Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up is an excellent place to begin this important journey into the second half of life.

Published: The C.G. Jung Society of Montreal Newsletter, November 2006

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